Dust Devils (13 page)

The yard was lit by the cooking fires and the electric bulb that drew pirate power from a cable patched into the nearby utility pole. A shiny new TV sat on top of a ten gallon drum, blaring out a soccer match. Drunken men crowded around it, hurling abuse at another bad South African team performance.

Inja watched as a crone slid the sheep's head from the fence pole and threw it onto an open fire. She stabbed another head, already cooked, with a sharpened spike and lifted it out of the flames. Split it down the middle with an axe. She dumped one half of the head onto a tin plate and brought it across to Inja. He gave her money, which she tucked into her bra and went back to the fires.

Now that Inja had the food before him, his appetite evaporated and he felt nausea grip his innards and squeeze them hard. He put the plate down beside him and forced back the scalding bile that filled his mouth. Washed it down with a slug of his drink. It was back again, the thing in his blood that wanted to kill him.

It had started when he was shot three months before. One of his rivals had ambushed Inja's car on the winding pass down to Bhambatha's Rock. Thrown a tree trunk across the road and riddled the car with AK-47 fire when Inja's driver slowed. The driver died, his brains flung onto the windshield, and Inja had been shot in the leg.

The man with the AK-47 had fled. But not before Inja saw his face. After he was discharged from hospital Inja went to his enemy's house with an axe and took his head, like one of these sheep. Stuck it on a pole in the village and posted armed guards under it. Forced the people in the village to watch as the birds picked out the eyes and tongue and the flesh rotted and blackened over the next week. A message.

When Inja returned to the hospital to have the sutures removed from his leg, a young white doctor came to speak to him. A woman with yellow hair and a foreign voice that he struggled to understand. The doctor told him it was routine to test the blood of people admitted to the hospital for HIV, here where the incidence was the highest in the world. Told Inja that the virus was eating him, that he had what was called
full-blown AIDS
. That he needed to go on medication called antiretrovirals. Inja had refused and left the hospital.

He didn't believe in this white man's nonsense and he was in good company. A previous president of South Africa hadn't believed HIV caused AIDS. The health minister had said you could cure it by eating beetroot and garlic. The new president, a Zulu, said you didn't need to wear a plastic when you fucked, all you needed to do was shower afterwards.

And the men in Inja's area said if you got this thing it was easy to cure if you had sex with a virgin girl. The only way to be sure of their maidenhood was to get them very young. Inja had abducted a toddler child playing in the dirt near a hut of one of his enemies. Raped it and killed it and shoved it halfway down a pit latrine. Waited to be cured.

But he had still felt the weakness. So he had gone to his traditional doctor, his
sangoma,
told him what he had done. The witch doctor said he had brought disgrace upon his ancestors by raping and murdering a child. That the only way he could properly purge himself of this curse was to marry a virgin in the traditional way.

Inja had known immediately who to choose to save his life, and now he had the proof that she was intact. Come the weekend, he would be cured. The thought of this relaxed the knot in his stomach and he lifted the jawbone of the sheep, the teeth grinning at him, and he gnawed at the flesh, feeling the juices flow down his face and onto his shirt.

Inja's work here was done. He'd dumped the Boer's Benz in the shackland. It would be stripped by morning. In an hour he would fly home and report back to his chief, the minister of justice. Tell him there were no mouths left to speak to his enemies.

Then Inja saw that the soccer game had given way to a news broadcast. Saw a face on the screen that he recognized. Inja stood, still holding the jawbone of the sheep in his hand. He shouted for quiet. Shouted so loud and with such authority that the drunken men fell silent.

Inja stared at the photograph of the white man on the TV. The half-breed's cuckold of a husband. The one who had survived the car accident and had now escaped from prison. Inja dropped the sheep's jaw onto the dirt, grabbed his bag and walked toward the street. He would find this white man and kill him himself.

Dell, head again covered by the blanket, let his father lead him from the farmhouse across an expanse of gravel. Heard a door squeal open and shut. Felt concrete beneath his feet. Shrugged off the blanket and found himself in a cramped room that looked as if it had once been a garage. Unpainted plaster walls. Silver sheet iron supported by bare roof beams. A metal door, bolted, still painted primer red. One small window, covered by frayed yellow curtains. A bed. A sofa. The medicinal smell that clung to his father was thick in the air of the room.

Goodbread sat down on the sagging sofa positioned with its back to the door. An electric bulb dangled from the roof, hard shadows hiding his eyes and pooling beneath his sunken cheekbones. His hands, a mottled landscape of veins, rested on the knees of his khaki pants.

A half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's stood beside his work boots on the cement floor. No sign of a glass. Dell sat on the narrow bed. Pillow and blankets squared away like in the military. Or prison.

He stared at the old stranger. "Who killed my family?"

Goodbread fired up a cigarette, waving the match dead. "As I hear it told, the man driving the truck goes by the name of Moses Mazibuko. Better known as Inja. Means dog up in Zululand." Sucked smoke. Coughed. "Takes his orders from the minister of justice. Now, if that isn't a fucking joke, kindly tell me when one comes along."

"Why did he want to kill us?"

"He was after your wife. Rest of you were collateral damage." Pulling hard on the cigarette, the end glowing red. Holding the smoke in his lungs, eyes closed. Then exhaling.

Dell shook his head. "Bullshit. Nobody had reason to murder Rosie."

"But they had a few million reasons to kill Ben Baker." Goodbread looked at Dell out of the shadows. "You know about her and Baker?"

"Yes."

"I suspect she was with him the night he was hit. Saw who did it. Got away somehow, but this Inja tracked her down and . . ." Shrugging his bony shoulders. "Guess I don't need to sing you the rest of that sad song."

Dell saw Rosie's face the morning after Baker's murder. Her eyes empty. In emotional lockdown. He watched the old man smoke. "Where are we?"

"An hour and some north of Cape Town. That's all you need to know. For the protection of the people over yonder." Waving his cigarette toward the farmhouse.

"And what happens now?"

"You sleep. You look like ten thousand miles of bad road."

"Don't fuck with me. You've got a plan. Talk."

Goodbread paused with the cigarette halfway to his lips. Held up a hand for silence. Dell heard the low rumble of an engine, the crunch of tires on gravel. Moving fast for an old man, Goodbread dropped the cigarette to the floor, crossed to the wall switch and killed the light.

"Hunker yourself down behind the sofa, where you can't be seen from the window. And stay there. Don't move one goddam muscle. Got me?"

Dell obeyed, squatting down on the cement floor. A flare of headlamps lit the drapes, throwing a sick yellow light into the room. Goodbread stood with his back flat to the wall between the door and the window. He took a pistol from under his baggy shirt. Cocked it. The headlamps slid away from the window and Dell heard the moan of brakes as the vehicle stopped, engine idling.

Heard footsteps on the gravel and then a fist hammering at the door, a voice saying in thick English: "Police. Open up."

Goodbread stood holding the pistol. Ready. More knocking. Somebody tried the handle of the locked door. He heard the woman's voice coming from outside, speaking in Afrikaans. "That room is empty."

A man's voice in reply, "Then unlock it and let us see, Mrs. Vorster."

"I can't. My son has the keys. He's in town. At church."

"Who lives in here?"

"I told you. Nobody. A foreman used to but he's gone now, to Walvis Bay."

Heard another voice, a man with a colored accent, "Lady, if you seen this Goodbread or his son, better you tell us now, otherwise you gonna be in big trouble."

"I'm telling you, I haven't seen these people. Where do you come on this?"

Goodbread was about to risk a glance out the gap in the drapes when a flashlight beam sliced through the darkness, the cop outside standing so close that Goodbread could hear him breathing as he peered into the room.

Dell watched the disc of light skim across the wall and the floor and land on the back of the sofa. For a moment he nearly stood up with his hands in the air. Ready to surrender. Get them to call his lawyer – the senior one – and bring him up from Cape Town to straighten out this mess. Then he saw Theron in the courtroom, laughing with the black man who looked like a pimp. Saw the bodies of his family in the morgue.

Dell stayed down.

Goodbread felt the trigger of the 9mm beneath his fingertips, ready to bring the gun up in an arc and shoot the cop through the glass. Then the beam sucked itself back into blackness and was gone.

The white cop spoke as he walked away from the window, "I'll leave my card with you, Mrs. Vorster. If you hear anything you call me. It would be better for you."

Doors slapped closed and the vehicle reversed, headlamps raked the drapes again, floating a yellow rectangle of light across the room, then the driver shifted gear and the vehicle crunched across the gravel and the room went dark.

Goodbread heard the truck bump down the track to the main house where it stopped. Heard a snatch of conversation in Afrikaans, Althea Vorster and the cops talking. A car door slammed and the cop truck took off, motor fading into the night.

Goodbread stayed still, waiting. Listening. Till all he heard was the wheeze of his breath and the ticking of the tin roof as it cooled. He engaged the safety on the pistol and laid the gun on the counter beside the sink. Switched on the light bulb.