The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (10 page)

Intrigued, Arm started down the street. At the end, a man slept on a chair with a leash looped around his wrist. On a table next to him squatted a blue monkey. It watched the detectives with bright, unkind eyes. Others might think it was cute. Arm knew differently.

"Don't," he began, but it was too late. Ear tried to pat the monkey. It sprang and buried its teeth in the detective's ear.

"Help!" Ear screamed. Eye tried to pry the animal's jaws open, but it was much stronger than it looked. Arm circled its neck with his long fingers and squeezed. The monkey opened its mouth and shrieked, causing both detectives to loosen their hold. It sprang to the other end of the table and danced back and forth with its fur erect. The owner hunched in his chair, pretending not to notice.

"He ought to be in a cage!" shouted Arm, stanching the blood on Ear's ear with a handkerchief.

"Yaa! Push off, rope arms!" screamed the monkey.

"It talks!" the detective said in surprise.

"Of course I talk, you booboo brain. Hey, elephant ears! What cesspool did you crawl out of? Can you beat time with those?"

"Shut up! You hurt him badly!"

"Ask me if I care," said the monkey, presenting its backside insultingly.

"Shall I grab him?" Eye said.

"He'll only bite you." Arm held up the now fainting Ear.

"I've tasted better things," the Blue Monkey jeered. "I bit a kid this morning who tasted like strawberries compared to him!"

"Kid? What kid?" Arm said.

"Shut up," hissed the owner, pulling the animal's tail.

"Do that again and I'll turn your mouth inside out," the monkey snarled. "There were three of them. Ugly, like all humans. The She Elephant got them. Ow!" The Blue Monkey and its owner fell to the ground in a furious fight.

Arm was seriously worried by Ear, who had passed out cold. "Call a paramedic," he whispered to Eye. "Then contact General Matsika."

He thought his voice was too low to be overheard, but the Blue Monkey raised its head in midsnap and shrieked, "Matsika! Cops! Run for it!" Instantly, the street emptied. The animal sellers disappeared into the shadows. The monkey and its owner made up their quarrel at once and streaked off into the night.

"My big mouth," groaned Arm. He dragged Ear to a table and laid him out. The wound wasn't bad, but Ear was more sensitive than most people. He was falling into a state of shock. Eye returned with a paramedic and a squad of policemen. The latter fanned through the market, searching for the Blue Monkey. The paramedic disinfected Ear's wound and fed plasma into his arm to counteract the shock.

"I ruined things," said Ear after Arm and Eye had settled him on the office sofa. "I should never have patted a wild animal. Was it my imagination, or did it talk?"

"It talked," said Arm, who had received a report from General Matsika. "Blue monkeys are genetically engineered creatures — someone's Ph.D. project. They have a basic monkey structure with genes spliced from pit bulls and humans. They were supposed to be the ideal guard dog, but you can see why they didn't work out."

"Tell me, is there — is there permanent damage?"

"You'll be good as new in a day or two."

Ear sighed with relief.

"They can't find anything specific on the She Elephant," said Eye, looking over the police records the General had sent. "Ten million people live in Harare, and 'She Elephant' is a more common nickname than you might think."

"It was one of the titles of the ancient Swazi queens," Arm said. "She's probably a small-time crook, because there isn't a record on her."

Arm looked out the window of the office. It was three in the morning, but that was the middle of the working day in the Cow's Guts. Behind the big front windows of the dance halls, people gyrated to pounding music as though they were struck with some serious disease. The double-glass windows of the office kept out most of the noise. At Mr. Thirsty's across the way, a bouncer dragged a patron to a Dumpster and fed him in. In the alleys, a few beggars sat around a fire and listened to a man without arms or legs tell a story.

"What could the She Elephant want with General Matsika's children?" Arm wondered aloud.

Ten

Tendai wondered about the same thing, but he thought about it less as the weeks went by. Once, soon after arriving, he tried to escape. By that time, it seemed the She Elephant and her cronies did not intend to harm them. If I can make it to those lights, he thought at night as he watched the nearest suburb five miles away, I can call the police. They'll rescue Rita and Kuda.

When he was unchained in the morning, he bolted past Fist. The man didn't even attempt to follow him. That's strange, Tendai thought, but he soon found out why. The She Elephant's deep voice boomed out from under the hills. The
vlei
people roused themselves and overwhelmed him before he got half a mile.

Later, he was shown a large round chamber at the hub of a network of tunnels. Battery-operated cables ran from a loudspeaker at the center. "I call in here, see," said the She Elephant. "It goes all over the
vlei,
so you can forget about running away. Save your breath for digging."

Tendai also saw, in the larger tunnels, a system of rails going off into the dark. An ancient handcar allowed Fist and Knife to move quickly through the system. Clearly, Dead Man's Vlei had been inhabited a long time. He considered using the car to escape but decided he knew too little about the system. There must be
miles
of tunnels down there, he thought with a thrill of fear.

It occurred to him that if he did — by some miracle — manage to escape, the She Elephant could hide Rita and Kuda so deeply no one would ever find them.

Slowly, insidiously, he fell into the routine of life on the
vlei.
He awoke before dawn with the cold dew soaking his blanket. He toiled in the mines, with occasional tea breaks in the fresh air. At night, he ate ravenously and slept as though drugged.

Sometimes he woke at night with a longing so sharp, it felt like a knife. He missed Mother and Father, and the Mellower, too. But as time went on, his memories of Mazoe became less distinct, and this frightened him most of all. Kuda was worse.

Rita conducted memory drills. "You have to remember home," she told the little boy. "Mother often wore a hand-dyed caftan — brown and blue — and her hair was braided with ribbons. Father had a uniform with medals and jingled when he walked."

"I know," said Kuda. Tendai suspected he said this to shut Rita up. He himself was finding it difficult to put faces with the caftan and uniform. But Rita didn't give up on the drills, and she didn't give up needling the She Elephant.

Her ability to
shooper
was great. Often the She Elephant picked fights with Fist and Knife without knowing the cause of her irritation. The only person Rita got along with was Granny.

Granny sat in her rocking chair day after day, seething with resentment. "If my family could see me now, they'd shoot me. Yes, they would. They were decent people. Except my grandson, God rot his bones."

Tendai thought her life wasn't that bad. Knife waited on her slavishly. He brought her treats, read her stories and listened to her monotonous complaints. "She's used to better things. She's a real lady," he explained to Tendai.

Tendai didn't think so. She reminded him of a snake coiled up with no one to bite. She and Knife were members of the Portuguese tribe, who once ruled Mozambique and Angola. Granny never stopped reminding Knife of this: "They were aristocrats who would rather cut their throats than
   
consort
   
with
   
criminals.
   
You're merely spoiled goods."

"She's right, I am a crook," Knife said. Tendai was disgusted by his lack of pride.

But Rita liked the old woman, and Granny, grudgingly, accepted her. It was partly because Rita had a Portuguese name and partly because the two of them could be so much more insulting when they worked together.

"Look at the She Elephant," sneered Granny. "Drunk as a civet cat."

"Her mouth's open. She's
drooling"
said Rita, pointing at the big woman who sprawled in an easy chair.

"She stinks like a goat!"

"She eats like a hog!"

"She laughs like a hyena!"

None of this was true, except the drunk part. The She Elephant had a large underground brewery, where she made pineapple wine, millet beer and a fiery alcoholic drink called
kachasu.
Some of this was sold to beer halls in the Cow's Guts, and some was given to the
vlei
people, many of whom were untreated alcoholics.

Every afternoon at about three, the She Elephant and the others took a siesta. They lounged in the sun like so many lizards. Granny dozed in her chair, and Rita curled up on the ground beside her. Tendai saw, with growing concern, that Rita was beginning to blend in with her surroundings.

During the siesta, Tendai and Kuda worked in the vegetable gardens spread higgledy-piggledy among the trash hills. Tendai wasn't chained for this, but Fist accompanied them. The man hadn't forgotten his humiliation when Tendai cut through his belt. He didn't relax for a second.

They removed insects from the tomatoes, mealies, squash and pumpkins and fed them to bantam chickens penned at the mouths of the tunnels. Tendai liked this part of the day. If Fist could have been persuaded to nap, he would have liked it even more.

One morning something unusual happened. Tendai, Rita and Kuda were seated on a hill, drinking tea with milk and sugar. It was the first break of the day, and the camp was bustling.
Vlei
people carried buckets of water. Knife and Fist peeled potatoes. Granny worried a plug of tobacco with her gums. The She Elephant chopped the heads off chickens and doused them in boiling water to loosen the feathers.

It was because of this last activity that the children were on top of a hill, facing the other way. They were enjoying the morning breeze when they heard an odd noise.

First it was a humming, then a muttered conversation as though several people were talking at once. They heard a cackle of laughter and a fragment of song. Along the trail at the bottom of the hill came a man.

He was dressed in an old grain bag, and his feet were bare. He could have been one of the
vlei
people except there was nothing tired or defeated about him. He was about twenty years old. As he walked, he carried on a conversation with someone Tendai couldn't see.

The talking sounded like words but wasn't. It reminded Tendai of a parakeet they once had. When it was alone, the bird would try to imitate the things it had heard. It could do men's, women's and children's voices, yet nothing was clear enough to understand. That was how this man sounded.

He climbed the hill and sat down. He pointed to the cup Rita had, and she gave it to him without hesitation. This was very surprising because Rita hated to let anyone drink out of her cup. The man gulped down the tea and babbled at them.

"He says he's on his way to lunch," Kuda translated.

"You can't understand that," said Tendai.

"I can so." Kuda held out his arms, and the man picked him up. Man and boy smiled at each other. "He says the sun is shining," said Kuda after the man spoke again.

"You're making it up," Rita said scornfully.

"I am not. Bye-bye." The man put Kuda down and walked off without looking back. He went down to one of the trestle tables. The She Elephant grunted and swept aside a heap of chicken heads to make room for him. Fist gave him a raw potato, which he crunched up with strong white teeth. Even Granny stopped gumming her tobacco and looked interested.

Intrigued, the children climbed down the hill. "Who's that?" asked Tendai, trying not to notice the chicken heads.

"Trashman," the She Elephant said. "He's strong as an ox, but he has the mind of a four-year-old. He can't remember anything for more than a minute." She ladled out a bowl of stew Tendai knew she had planned for her midmorning snack and gave it to Trashman. He ate it noisily and patted his stomach. Knife gave him one of the chocolates he was saving for Granny.

Granny smiled benevolently, an expression almost as repellent as her usual scowl.