Cruel Crazy Beautiful World (8 page)

A shot zings over the roof of the Pajero.

Jabulani instinctively ducks. He senses this isn’t the moment to tell her he hasn’t yet been unfaithful to Thokozile.

– Tell me your name.

– Call me Nina, for now. Yours?

– Freedom.

He always tells white folk his white name. They want a pithy Western handle to call you by, rather than your African name.

– Freedom? Cool! So you and me, Freedom, we find a motel, yeah?

In the rearview Jabulani sees the gun spark just before the rear window implodes.

– Yeah?

– Yeah.

She foots the gas hard and the Pajero shoots ahead. Zoned on marijuana and the thrill of outfooting the hunter, she yips at the gecko moon.

The beams of the Pajero fall south like dying shooting stars.

At dawn they are far south of Johannesburg, that hard, hazardous city of gold-seekers that they’d skirted in the dark. And now the N1 cuts an unflinching blue line down to Cape Town.

A lone woman carting boxes and a pot on top of her turban surfaces out of the dancing haze on the tar. She dangles a live chicken swinging beak-down from her hand.

And further on a cart made from the plundered corpse of an old pickup follows on the heels of a sagging, dusty donkey.

And yet further still an old rag-and-bone woman hawks sunflowers from under a faded beach umbrella.

A boy flutters his hands as if swimming in the liquid mirage. His hands draw their eyes to his windmills crafted from wire, cans and dead time.

Jabulani recalls his boyhood of fishing in the river and killing birds and lizards and sucking udder-hot milk out of his hands and learning the art of stick fighting. He recalls walking for miles down a dust track to a tar road where he hawked giraffes he’d carved from
mukwa
to tourists from South Africa. South African money put him through high school in the town at the end of the tar road. And when the manila envelope came from the university, his father went out and killed that lazy, lagging old ox. And then there was whistling teeth and the music of the
mbira
and ululating tongues and jouncing bones and sour beer.

Now Nina halts to buy a pineapple from an old woman who knifes off the spiky skin for them.

They ride on again, sucking at the yellow pulp and tuning into the wry, haunting twanging of Ry Cooder’s guitar.

– It’s a mystery. This isn’t pineapple country. Only thing yellow you tend to find here is sunflowers, or the yellow sign of a Shell garage. Just the other day I heard a hadeda ibis calling in my yard in Cape Town. It’s as if the compass in their head’s fucked. There didn’t used to be hadedas so far south.

She lifts the hem of her shirt to mop juice from her chin. Her low-slung jeans let out a rumour of hair.

His cock unfurls as he gazes out the window at the flat, stark land where opal-toned bones blink in the sun and lone birds ride the wires.

His forehead drums against the window as she swings the Pajero off the tar.

He winds down the window to gasp for air.

She kills Cooder.

For a moment the world’s violently still. Then he hears the wind hum along the telegraph wires. And then he hears her husky breath in his ear.

She slides his pineapple-sticky hand under her panties. She’s humid after the coolness of the pineapple.

He’s perky as a meerkat now.

She unzips him and slides her lips over him. A bus blares its horn at them. The Pajero shudders in the gusty wake of the bus.

She licks her lips and pops another half-moon of pineapple into her mouth.

Then the Pajero’s gunning south again.

He smells her on his fingers.

She’s humming along to an Eels song.

He flicks through the sun-warped novel by Coetzee she has bird-winged on the dash. Yet Thokozile’s eyes come between him and the out-of-focus words on the paper. He flicks to the cover and studies the image of a raw-boned fugitive dog on a dirt road.
I am that lost dog
, he thinks.

H
ERMANUS. NOON.

I stand before the house of the glass-eyed priest Zero said would hand his Vespa over to me. The sign on the gate tells me to
BEWARE OF THE DOG
. I can hear Chopin played poorly on the piano. I call
hello
. A butcherbird flies from the gutter.

No hiatus in the playing. And no sign of the dog. A rusty hand mower is islanded in long grass. An old black bicycle with a basket up front leans against the wall.

The gate whines like an old man’s bones. I go along crazy paving through the high grass to the door. There’s a pane of opaque glass in the door. I ring the doorbell. The piano fades out. A warped shadow ghosts towards me.

The priest in a frayed dog collar and long, colonial khaki shorts. I can’t tell which eye is glass.

– I’m Jerusalem. I’ve come for the Vespa. My old man called you up from Cape Town.

– Aha. Cupido? The Vespa’s in the garage.

– Where’s your dog?

– Out in the backyard. He’s old and stone deaf. He used to love Chopin. Now he can’t tell Mozart from Masekela.

We go round to the back of the house. The priest has a faintly fascist way of throwing his feet out ahead of him.

On seeing a stranger, the dog jerks to his feet and barks a frenzied, gut-swinging, ball-jiggling volley. The priest puts out his hand to calm his old yellow lab.

– Don’t mind him. It’s just an act.

The dog follows us to the garage, snuffing at my heels.

A butcherbird is a peg on the clothes line.

A rat runs along the rim of the zinc backyard fence.

The dog goes after the rat and clangs his feet against the zinc. The butcherbird flies away.

– I hate that bird, says the priest. He dives and pecks at all the other birds.

In the garage there’s an old
MG
and the Vespa. The Vespa is a perky red.

– She’s beautiful, isn’t she? I take her out for a run every now and then, but I’m losing feeling under my feet. It’s a mystery ... and they haven’t found a cure. The doctor forbade me to ride.

He runs his fingers around the chrome rim of the headlight.

– I had hoped my son would want her, but he’s not coming home.

– Where’s he?

– London. He’s a money man. Thinks this country has gone to the dogs.

Then, sensing how racist this sounds:

– Oh, I’m sorry. That’s not how I see things. Yet I do fear for the future. So far the Xhosas have outwitted the Zulus. Mandela and Mbeki were wily. But I prophesy the Zulus won’t bow to the Xhosas forever. Historically they are the warrior tribe. And now Zuma is jousting the Zulu spear at the sky.

– He’s a clown.

– But he can dance a Zulu war dance and sing a song calling for his gun. And he has a grassroots following. And Africa has a habit of shooting herself in the foot. My son begs me to go to London. He’d put me up in his attic in Camden. I’d have no dog, no yard, no freedom to follow a road along the lagoon on a whim or walk along the beach for miles. London’s no life for me. All the wan faces on the tube, sandwiched like grey ham between pages of the newspaper.

– I spent my young boyhood in Amsterdam. I remember the cold gnawing at my ears and toes. I remember the empty playgrounds in winter. I remember the steep stairs and how my socks never dried.

And I remember how folk never smiled in the winter. I remember a Moroccan whore in a pink-lit fish tank whom Zero paid to show me her buoyant tits. I was just eleven. He was worried I’d turn out gay.

– That’s the other thing. Stairs. I have not told my son I have to focus just to walk along a flat path.

I hand over Zero’s wad of rubber-banded rands to him. He pockets the money without thumbing through it.

– If you’re ever lonely, come over for tea. I vow not to lure you into my church.

I hop onto the Vespa.

– She’s been a good girl. You keep an eye on her. The roads are hazardous with all the jaywalking dogs and the crazy taxivans.

His eyes glisten as he bids his Vespa farewell. His dog, sensing his master’s maudlin mood, licks his scabby shins.

S
OMEWHERE SOUTH OF BLOEMFONTEIN.

The Pajero sharks on along the N1 through the Karoo. An arid land of lone windmills flashing steel petals to draw sheep to water tapped from dark, unseen rivers.

Now and then a deserted road dusts away from the highway.

The tarmac ahead is quicksilvery under the sun. That’s perhaps why Nina doesn’t see the karakul sheep in time to dodge it. Or perhaps it’s the marijuana in her blood that blurs her senses. Either way, the Pajero’s front fender flips the sheep high into the sky.

Jabulani and Nina tilt their heads in sync to follow the fight of the sheep till it vanishes overhead. Then they swivel their heads to see it land on the tarmac behind them.

Nina swings the Pajero hard off the tar. It spurts up dust. The motor stalls.

– Fuck, tunes Nina. I never saw it.

All you hear is the silver-winged tones of R.E.M. gliding out over bleak veld, over distant, earthed sheep.

They climb out and walk up to the sheep. It is still breathing, in jerky gasps. Its feet are folded up neatly under it. Its wool has no hint of blood in it. The only sign that it has just flown over a Pajero is a stoned look in eyes curiously free of accusation.

Nina tips up her shades to stare deep into its glassy eyeballs.

– We can’t just ride on. It’s got to be bleeding inside.

– You think so? It looks unscratched.

– It’s in pain. I can tell from the eyes. We have to put it down.

– Kill it?

– A mercy killing.

– How do you intend to kill it?

– I’ve never killed a thing in my life. Other than ants and mosquitoes. You’ll have to kill it.

– Me?

–
Ja
. You’re from Zim.

– So?

– You had to fight for freedom. And now Mugabe’s gone apeshit. You’re used to violence.

– But I’m a teacher. I’m against violence.

Jabulani thinks:
Well, I have killed half-dead rats that the cat left bleeding in the yard. And I have twisted the head off a bird or two that few into the windscreen of my old Datsun. But this is killing on another scale. Just look at the size of its head.

– This animal’s in pain, man.

– Why me?

– I beg you to. Kill it for me.

Jabulani thinks:
If not for her I’d be dead.

– Okay. I’ll do it. For you.

Jabulani walks along the roadside till he finds a big stone. He lugs it over to the sheep. The stone has the heft of a medicine ball.

He stands over the sheep, focusing on his target: that flat hard plane between its eyes. He wonders how thick the skull is, and if it will crack in one go.

He thinks to himself:
Just half a year ago I stood in front of a class with a book in hand, teaching poetry. I taught my students how a line can see-saw on a comma and how words at the end of a line want to fall. I told them words have memory, music ... and weight.

The sheep’s eyes glaze over now with a saintly pity for the lot of a teacher who must put poetry into the heads of schoolboys. It is a harder task, perhaps, than caving in a skull bone with a stone.

He lifts the stone.

Nina plugs her ears with her fingers and squinches her eyes shut.

After a time, she squints to see if the sheep’s dead yet.

Jabulani’s still holding the stone in his hands. And the sheep’s not dead.

– I’m sorry. Its eyes spook me out.

– Don’t be a pussy.

– Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll run it over. Then I don’t have to look it in the eyes as it dies.

– That’s genius.

– But you have to direct me. I want to hit its head just one time.

– Got it.

Jabulani gets in behind the wheel. He mutes R.E.M. Another volatile silence.

Overhead a vulture loops lazily.

The Pajero catches. He turns his head to get his bearings. Nina’s a few yards beyond the sheep, hands poised in the air. He shifts the Pajero into reverse and its tyres kick up dust till they find tar. Now he’s barrelling along. He focuses on Nina’s waving hands rather than on the sheep. He flinches, gearing himself for the jolt of rubber against head, for a bang against the axle if his aim is marginally off.

Nina hops clear as he shoots by. She’s yelling her head off.

He feels no jarring.

And yet the sheep’s gone.

Jabulani thinks:
Perhaps the rear fender swept it up, like a cowcatcher. But I’d have felt it, wouldn’t I? A sheep’s not all wool.

Then he sees it a few yards away, a bit bemused by the antics of men.

So it was just winded, after all.

Nina is keeling over, hooting with laughter.

Jabulani finds it less funny.

At a Shell garage a man in red overalls lures the Pajero to a diesel pump.

The name on his overalls is Othello. Jabulani wonders how a man in this random backwater came by such a name.

While Othello checks the oil and water, Jabulani goes to piss.

He is staring at a black target fly painted on the white china when he hears a shot. He swings on his heels and pees on his All Stars. He falls to the floor and peers out under the door.

Othello’s down. A shot to the head. Nina runs towards the kiosk. Another shot spins and flips her like a rag doll.

Jabulani sucks a dry gasp down.

Ghost Cowboy hovers over her as he reloads. He lets the shot shells fall.

Then he stalks the kiosk, his gun levelled at the man behind the till. The man holds his hands up high.

Jabulani hops up on a toilet lid and climbs out the window. The window is the size of an A3 paper and he has to tilt his collarbones towards the corners. Somehow he wiggles through, but his left All Star catches on the window hook and peels off his foot. He wavers, hoping to fish it out, until he hears another shot. He hops and weaves over abandoned car skeletons and spirals of rusty wire. Stones and glass and iron bolts jab at the sole of his left foot. At the far end of the junkyard he vaults a zinc wall and slides down a slope to the dry floor of a river. On this sand he can run freely.