– Will I go to hell, boy? Ghost Cowboy asks.
– That is for God to judge, Jabulani murmurs.
– God? If I make this girl go down on me now, will God be a hero? Will he shoot me down with a bolt? Or maybe send an angel to kill me dead? Remember how the Nazis turned Jew-skin into lampshades and God did fuckall. If not for the Americans they’d have wiped the Jews off the planet. Now Mugabe fucks you folk over and over again and the Americans look away this time. Then,
wahaaaaaa
, like some crazy jack-in-the-box God pitches up to judge
me
.
Jabulani hangs his head.
– I shot a man yesterday. You saw it, boy. I feel zero regret. No guilt. No fear of God. Check out my hand.
He holds his hand out flat, level with the earth.
– Still as a goddamn cadaver. Hey?
– Still, master.
– Now, tell me, why don’t I shoot you? Just for the hell of it.
He forms a fist.
– I hold your life in my hand, boy.
– I have a wife and children. All I want is a job. I need to send money to them. If you let me go, master, I will walk away and forget I ever saw this place.
He unfurls his fist to wag a finger at Jabulani.
– But the thing is ... the thing is, you can’t forget my face.
The other gunmen laugh jadedly and spit in the dust.
– Tell you what I do. I let you job on this farm. I let you live. I give you beer. So maybe for you there is a God. Now, I think you’ve been rude to this girl. She has beautiful tits and yet you look down at your feet.
Jabulani shuffles his feet.
– Look at her.
Jabulani tilts his head up. He feels his
isinjonjo
go hard and shifts his hands to hide it.
– Your cock can’t lie. You want her. Now I want you to go down on all fours and howl for her. Howl like a dog at the moon.
Jabulani glances at the other Zimbabweans. They all have their eyes on him. Jonas nods at him.
Jabulani goes down and lets out a wavering, wistful yelp.
Scarface kicks him in the ribs.
Now Jabulani, teacher of Orwell and Achebe, howls his pain, his fury, his sorry lust in this godless dust.
H
ERMANUS. DUSK.
I mosey along through the emptying market square. I realise I have not penned a poem in a long time. It’s as if the world, however vivid, swims and sways before me too elusively to pin down on paper: telegraph lines shiver like guitar strings, the sea swings, seagulls hem and haw, the earth quivers all day under the sun. Yet each line I put down feels flat, stale, stalled.
Men of all colours huddle round a motorcar radio to tune in to the cricket. An English wicket falls and they dance and high-five and sing out
HOWZAAAT
!
In this country we rob, shoot and burn each other ... until a cricket ball or rugby ball or football sends us into a shindig of sudden camaraderie and hooting and
vuvuzela
tooting.
After the high of beating the West Indies last Christmas, South Africa has had a jinxed year. We lost to Sri Lanka and India.
I catch sight of her at a pub table on the front deck of the Burgundy. Somehow I sense the guy she’s with is her lover.
The umbrellas flap and jig in the wind as if they too are following the cricket. They feel zero empathy for my sudden sorrow.
I sit at a free table next to theirs. I wonder if she’ll recognise me from the market, but she’s scrutinising the tea bag floating in her china teacup.
HE
: Hey, Lotte. You just happened to be there.
Lo-tte
. A ballooning gasp of longing tied off with the tip of his tongue.
She fishes the tea bag out of her cup and pinches it unflinchingly between two fingers.
SHE
: I felt he wanted to tell me something.
HE
: But that’s absurd.
SHE
: I was the last thing he saw.
She shifts her teacup from palm to palm. Her gaze flickers over me.
HE
: Focus now, Lotte.
He catches her hands in his.
HE
: Come to Jozi with me.
Jozi,
Johannesburg. Jazzy yet risky. A hip war-zone.
SHE
: I won’t be caged behind a razor-wired wall. Besides, I can’t paint in Jozi.
She draws her hands away and
clinks
the teacup down on the saucer.
SHE
: I need the sea.
He farts air through his pressed lips. Evidently he scorns the whims of artists who hang on such ethereal things as muses and vibe.
HE
: Look ... I want you to lie low till the weekend. Till I come again.
SHE
: Lie low?
HE
: Yesterday you had a foreigner’s blood on your feet. Today some psycho fucked with your frangipani. I’m not superstitious ... but perhaps they are signs.
SHE
: I thought it was magic.
I grin like a dork.
HE
:
Magic?
Black magic, maybe. If you stay I forbid you to walk alone along the sea path beyond Kwaaiwater, or to swim in the tidal pool at the crack of dawn.
SHE
: Al, I love that path. I love to walk all the way to the lagoon. And I love the pool then. If you weren’t always so wiped out we’d swim together.
Al.
Maybe she’s drawn to guys with curt names. She’ll be spooked by my litany of vowels.
HE
: It’s not forever. Once I’ve done the paperwork for this Taiwan deal, things will plateau out. I can handle things from this end then. We’ll marry and have a baby ...
Under my feet: pebbles, a wine cork, bottle tops, cigarette ends, an oyster shell.
SHE
: A girl.
HE
: We’ll tie her hair in pigtails.
SHE
: We’ll let her hair fall free.
HE
: We’ll dress her in jeans so she can skip and climb like a boy.
SHE
: She’ll wear a dress she tucks into her panties when she skips. And she won’t care if boys see her panties when she’s climbing. You want to curb her freedom when she’s not even born yet. And you’ll tell me I have to hide my breasts under a cloth if I nurse her in a café. You sound Muslim. Or American.
He just sulks for pity.
Lotte sends me a flicker of a smile, fleeting and ephemeral. Perhaps I imagined it. She spills sugar on the table and draws her finger through it. She frowns to figure out where she’s seen me before.
A cockroach feather-foots over my foot to zero in on the sugar. I shudder.
Twin boys stand in front of the restaurant deck. They bow. One boy plays a tune on a Zulu hosepipe flute, and then words from Papageno’s aria fly from the mouth of the other boy, words like dipping, flitting birds eluding the bird catcher.
Al tosses all the jingling small change from his pockets into their hat.
I fid a coin in my pocket.
They bow again and go into the orange light.
HE
: Come to Jozi with me, Lotte. I beg of you.
I free my guitar and pluck the strings.
Lotte remembers now. She smiles at me and blows the sugar away.
I twang my desire for her.
Al slurps spilt liquid from his saucer.
SHE
(laughing): Remind me why I love you, Al Pike.
HE
: Because you need never be scared when I’m with you. And you’ll never go begging. Besides, I swept you off your feet, didn’t I?
SHE
: You did?
HE
: I did. And I gave you a flashy rock. See it catch the sun.
He holds her hand and swivels her ring so the diamond flashes like a lit fuse.
HE
: You belong to me.
My plucking fades out.
SHE
: Do I?
HE
: You do.
They kiss.
I pinch a ten-rand note under my coffee cup.
A Tuareg four-by-four hoots at me as I jaywalk to the cliff path. I go down the steps to the old harbour. On the way down I pick red canna flowers. I fling the petals into the water of the harbour and see them float to form a question mark.
Is there no cure for this fever in my blood?
I sit on the harbour wall and play my guitar hard. The waves of a listless sea clap dully against the wall.
Seagulls mock me from the rickety salting poles where fishermen hang fish out to dry.
– Isn’t she beautiful? I cry.
Kaaaak kaaaak
is all they reply.
A few moth-eaten, sun-seeking
dassies
blink sorrowful eyes at me from the red zinc roof of the old whaling warehouse.
The professor, shadowed by Moonfleet, drifts down to the slanting slipway where whalers once landed harpooned whales.
Moonfleet skips and barks at my music. Seagulls fly from the salting poles.
Dassies
shy from the hot tin roof.
The professor rolls up his pants and wades barefoot in the shallows. His hands
t’ai chi
at the sky.
Moonfleet, all skipped out, licks the salt off the soles of my feet.
I play my guitar till my fingers bleed and the sun sinks west of the new harbour. And then I play on into the dusk, a fish bone for a fat pick.
A
FARM SOMEWHERE SOUTH
of the Limpopo. After midnight.
Jonas picks Jabulani. There are muted murmurs of an injustice, for Jabulani has not had to endure this hell for long.
– Jabulani is the one who can run like a wild dog. Our forefathers were warriors and knew how to throw a spear, but that skill too is lost. Jabulani is the one who learnt at his university how to throw a javelin far. And if he survives, the police may listen to him, for he is a teacher.
They cast a rope over a beam, then tie it around Jabulani’s hips. They hoist him up to the beam.
He signals for them to let go. He winds up the rope, looping it between thumb and elbow. He slings it over his collarbone.
Now they chuck the long, glowing-tipped stick up to him.
He catches it. Holding the stick ahead of him like a tightrope walker, he foot-foots along the beam, heel to toe, heel to toe.
They gasp and hiss each time he teeters. At the end of the beam he tilts a vent and hauls himself out onto the roof. Through the vent he hears a hum of hope from the condemned men.
He geckos up the roof slope to the zenith. The stars look like holes punched in Jonas’s fire drum. Down below he sees the dogs lying flat, feet flirting with the glowing coals of a dying fire.
He stands and feels the heft of the stick in his hand. His target is over forty yards away. If the stick falls short, they will all suffer. Ghost Cowboy will kill him.
He hurls the stick at the thatched roof of the poolside gazebo. A dog barks at the whistle of this one-eyed sky snake spearing through the dark.
Soon the thatch begins to glow. A flame peels away. Then another. Then the gazebo roof is ablaze.
Now all the dogs go ape.
Jabulani drops flat to the roof.
The gunmen bound out of the farmhouse all bootless and cussing and eyes agog at the sparks shooting high.
A peacock flaps up towards the stars, tail feathers on fire.
The gunmen let the Zimbabweans out of the tobacco barn and yell at them to form a line from the pool to the farmhouse. No chance of saving the gazebo. They focus on dousing the farmhouse thatch before the flying sparks can catch.
Jabulani sees slopping buckets jig from hand to hand. He sees the flaming peacock fall out of the sky: a phoenix scattering firework feathers.
He slides down the far slope of the roof and jumps.
Then he runs hard along the rutted dirt road.
A porcupine darts across his path, rattling his quills like a shaman shaking bones and shells.
After maybe two miles, he comes out onto the tarred road, where he finds south by the stars and runs again.
Lost in this bushman rhythm, he hears the screams of the flaming peacock looping again and again through his head.
He hears the sound of a motor and turns to peer into blinding headlights. He fears it may be from the farm but it is not the low throb of a Landy. Gambling on it being a stranger, he holds out his thumb.
The headlights polaroid the skull of an ox spiked on a pole. He saves this image in his mind.
A woman alone in a Pajero. She winds down the window. Nina Simone’s voice floats out, mingling with smoke from a jay held in peace-sign fingers.
– Where you heading?
– Cape Town.
– You dig Nina?
– Huh?
– Do you love Nina Simone?
– I love her.
– Well, hop in then.
She hands the glowing joint to him.
He sucks deep and long.
– There’s an icebox at your feet.
He cracks a can of Windhoek Lager.
They ride the wake of flaring headlights through an indigo universe. For a long time no words mar the giddy high of escape.
The grass and beer put him in a forward, flirty frame of mind.
– I thought lone white women never pick up black men.
– It’s crazy. I ought to be
manhandled
.
She laughs, winds down the window to fillip out the butt of the jay.
He sees deep down her zaftig bosom.
– But this Marley magic fucks with your head, hey? she shouts over the whine of the wind.
– It does rather.
She winds up the window.
– You from Zim?
– I am.
– I thought so. You looked shit scared. The proverbial rabbit in the headlights.
Now he laughs at this pigeonholing of Zimbabweans. It feels good to laugh. He has not laughed freely since his life began to unravel half a year ago.
Nina’s voice is a viscous, velvety red wine.
– Mates of yours?
Headlights fare in the rearview. He swivels his head and squints into the glare. The safari Land Rover bullets into focus. Ghost Cowboy rides shotgun. His long white hair flames in the wind as he draws a bead on the Pajero with his long gun.
– If we survive, I want you to fuck me. Deal?