The river sand flows to a pipe under the highway. He’d tunnel into the dark if his footprints were not a dead giveaway. Instead, he claws his way up to the tar road. He hears the rumble of a diesel motor and instinctively ducks. Yet the thing barrelling towards him is so absurd he has to laugh. He wonders if he’s dreaming. He rubs his eyes, then jives this madman war dance to catch the eye of the psychedelic VW Kombi. A blurred canvas of painted flowers hums by, then farts to a halt further along the road.
Jabulani turns to see Ghost Cowboy down in the riverbed coming after him. He’s lost the shotgun and has a Colt revolver in hand.
Another shot. Pain stings through Jabulani’s left hand.
Jabulani runs for the Kombi. He hears the Kombi catch and chug yet a few yards further. His heart sinks. The bastard’s changed his mind. Then the Kombi door slides open for him. Then he’s running alongside the Kombi. He feels as if he’s acting in a cowboy flick. The guy’s free hand is cajoling crazily. Yet another shot flicks off the wing mirror. Jabulani dives in.
The guy hits the gas.
Jabulani juts his head out the door to see Ghost Cowboy standing on the tar road. Then he slides it shut.
– Fuck, tunes the guy behind the wheel. How’d you piss him off?
– He hunts Zimbos.
– You Zimbabwean?
– I am.
– Zim’s smoked, brother.
Looking out on this bleak, sun-stung land, a dog-tired Jabulani thinks:
And South Africa’s no merry-go-round so far.
He holds his hand high to stay the blood. Still it slurs down his arm. He wonders:
Why this left jinx? Left All Star gone. Left hand shot.
The guy tugs a bandana off his head.
– Name’s Jake. Bind your hand with this till we get to a hospital.
– Freedom, says Jabulani.
– Hey?
– Name’s Freedom. Jabulani Freedom Moyo.
– Freedom? Far out!
Jabulani winds the cloth around his hand and tugs it tight with his teeth.
– That’s a hard-core motherfucker did that to you.
– I just saw him kill a man and a woman in cold blood.
– Where?
– At a Shell, just up the road.
–
Ai!
I was about to pull in to that garage. I’m running low on juice.
Jake taps the glass of the fuel gauge.
– But I thought I’d chance it to the next town. As I went by, a Land Rover painted like a zebra skin caught my eye.
– That’s his.
Jake foots the pedal harder.
In their smoking wake a buzzard drops from the wires to yank at the rotting, flat carcass of an unlucky jackal.
H
ERMANUS. NIGHT.
After a short, hard rain I ride the Vespa on the Maanskyn-baai road out along the Hermanus lagoon. The moon lays down a fish-scale sheen on the slick tarmac. I dodge tyre grooves to avoid aquaplaning. I imagine Lotte riding pillion behind me, her hands on my hips.
At Vogelgat I shoot past a beer truck.
Over the Vespa’s hum and the swish of her tyres I think I hear the piping, penny-whistle cry of a kingfisher. My eyes pan towards the lagoon.
Then there’s a boy just ahead, eyes dazzled by my headlamp.
I veer away yet nick him with the running board, flipping him into a roadside gully.
The Vespa fishtails and I wipe out, careening over tarmac on a film of liquid. Tar peels my palm skin off.
The Vespa yells in a high, butcher-saw key. The headlamp flickers.
The beer truck hoots by.
I hobble to the gully but he’s gone. No sign of him. I wonder if I dreamed him.
The Vespa cuts out. Tilting telegraph poles scratch the sky, screeching like chalk across a blackboard. I fall to my knees and retch into the dirt.
I fetch the Vespa and focus the headlamp on the gully. Then I see vermilion flecks of blood on the road. He’d gone over to the lagoon side. I walk the Vespa over to light up the wire fence. I see a hole in the wire and beyond it the headlamp draws a zigzagging white line. I wonder if buck or jackal wore this outlaw path flat.
I kill the light and abandon the Vespa.
I twist through the hole and follow the sandy, moonlit footway towards a scattering of beggarly gum trees. Their peeling bark bares pale flesh. The gums remind me of a colony of refugees in rags. Through the gums I catch glimpses of the moon dancing on the surface of the lagoon.
I walk in among the ghostly gums and rub my eyes at the surreal sight before me: a run-down, graffitied, double-decker London bus on fat, cracked tyres. Moonlight spiderwebs across stoned windows and tricks a cicada into going
chirr chirr
as if it is noon. A London bus in the
bundu
, a cicada serenading the moon. The world’s gone haywire.
I step up onto the landing (half gearing myself for an Indian man to demand a pound for a ticket to Blackhorse Road). The bus is gutted and zoned off into boxes with cardboard and canvas. I am spooked by the myriad voodoo-vibe things hanging from the surviving roof rail: dolls short of a limb, spinning guineafowl-feather dreamcatchers, a phoenix cut out of a Fanta can, lone flip-flops, strings of
perlemoen
shells and bent driftwood, an enamel teapot, the jaw of a fish.
A boy sifts out of shadow as seamlessly as a chameleon shifting through shades of colour. Then there’s another. Then another. And another. Till half a dozen boys in tatty shorts and dirty T-shirts gawp at me.
– Have you seen a boy who got hurt? I hit him on the road. He must be bleeding.
Their wide eyes are unblinking, wary. I sense they have all been hoodwinked and hurt by men.
– I am not from the police. I won’t tell about the bus.
One of the boys, donning a black Kangol hat, signals with sliding eyes to a far corner of the bus.
The boy is curled up in a corner. His head is bleeding. His shorts are torn and clayey. His shins are skinned pink.
– I’m sorry. I took my eyes off the road.
He just stares at me.
– May I take you to a hospital?
– No doctor. I have no passport.
– Come to my flat then. I’ll nurse you.
– Forget me, master. The pain will go.
– I am not your master. And I can’t forget you. Where are you from?
– I am from Tanzania.
– How did you get here?
– I walked.
Back in my flat I pour hot water into the basin and tip a dose of Dettol in it. Then I wipe the sand out of the boy’s pink-raw wounds with a cloth. Though he finches he does not cry. I dab Mercurochrome on his shins and bind a bandana around his head. His skull feels cool under my hand.
He stares at the weird pencil figures I drew on the wall but offers no verdict.
– What is your name?
– Buyu.
– I am Jerusalem.
– We sang a song called Jerusalem in the mission school in Tanzania. Is it a name for a man?
– For this one.
I laugh and then wince as the Mercurochrome stings my flayed palms and rubbed-up hip.
– How do you survive in Hermanus?
– I find golf balls in the water. Like a flamingo, I seek with my toes in the mud. If I am lucky I find maybe six or seven in one day. Some boys, they are scared of the water. Of snakes and leguaans hiding under water lilies. All I fear is crocodile and here there’s no crocodile. The caddies, they give me one rand for a ball if it has no cut in it. They sell the balls to the fat white men for double. If I sell to the white men myself and the caddies catch me, they will beat me hard.
– Well, from tomorrow you no longer have to find golf balls for fat white men. I have a job for you. You can lend me a hand in the market where I sell wire animals. You’ll earn a third of my takings. And we’ll find you a pair of shorts and a T-shirt or two. For now this will do.
I hand Buyu a faded T-shirt with a lotus flower on it.
– So how come you left Tanzania?
Buyu casts wary eyes at me.
– It is one long story.
– Tell me. I beg you.
– Tomorrow?
– Tomorrow.
A
HOSPITAL SOMEWHERE SOUTH
of Bloemfontein.
Outside: A Karoo roadside
dorp
. One of the far-apart, dud towns that bead the N1.
Inside: White walls. A grey lino floor. A skew crucifix. A dog-eared Bible. A lone gecko. No flowers.
The pain hauls Jabulani out of a morphine haze.
His hand is wound in layers of white cloth. A red poppy stains through.
Out the window of the hospital Jabulani sees jacaranda flowers flicker. A jet stream zips across a blue sky. Swifts sew up the pain of the world with invisible gut.
A white policeman has a curt word with the young black policeman at the door. He shuffles into the room and shuts the door behind him. His faded grey-blue uniform is the sole colour accent in the room, other than Jabulani’s blood. It’s as if he just walked into a black-and-white film.
The name on his uniform:
DE LA REY
.
Jabulani has a hazy memory of learning that a De la Rey was a Boer hero of the war for freedom from the English.
– Doctor tells me a bullet took just a pig-ear chink out of your left hand. Cowboys and Indians, hey?
De la Rey mimics a boy’s way of shooting:
bang bang.
– Hardly chipped a bone. What are the chances of that?
The policeman’s antics draw no smile from Jabulani.
– That V of skin between your thumb and finger is gone ... just where you’d lick the salt off before taking a swig of tequila.
– I’ll have a scar.
– Let me tell you, man. No one rides for free.
De la Rey lifts his shirt to reveal a messy scar in the drum-skin vellum of his beer gut.
– This was a bowie.
Perhaps feeling he’s detoured from duty, De la Rey lets his shirt fall. He takes a notebook out of his pocket and a pencil from behind his ear.
– So, tell me. What kind of gun shot you?
– A revolver of some kind.
– And the guy?
– He has flowing white hair and albino white skin. They call him Ghost Cowboy.
– Where you from?
– Africa.
– Cocky, hey?
– I am from Zimbabwe.
What’s your name?
– Jabulani Freedom Moyo.
He records Jabulani’s name in a plodding, square hand.
– Profession?
– Teacher.
– A teacher, hey?
– English.
– Where’s your passport?
– They took it.
– Who took it?
– Ghost Cowboy and the marijuana men.
De la Rey laughs.
– This is South Africa. Not Colombia.
– This Ghost Cowboy is no phantom. He shotgunned down a beautiful woman who picked me up in her Pajero.
– Beautiful?
– She was. He shot her at a Shell up the road. And he killed a petrol jockey called Othello.
– Othello?
– And now he’s hunting me.
Again the policeman laughs.
– You sound as if you smoked some of that marijuana.
But this time he jots a few words in his notebook.
In a bid to justify Jonas’s faith in him he tells his story, culminating in the Shell killings.
– You a Tarantino flick junkie?
– If you check it out you’ll find her and the petrol jockey shot. And perhaps the man in the kiosk.
– Perhaps?
– I just heard the shot. I never saw him go down.
– I heard on the radio there was a shooting. I’ll check it out. This Pajero chick. You learn anything about her?
About Nina-for-now? That she was a crazy live-wire girl. That she loved Nina Simone. That she smoked grass. That she had me in her mouth and sent me floating.
– Just that she’s from Cape Town. What will happen to me?
– Maybe they deport you. Maybe they jail you. Maybe they put you in the dock as a witness to this shooting. Maybe you lucky again and they hand you asylum papers ... but that’s a long shot.
Just then a blackbird pecks at its refection in the windowpane. The comical futility of this duel has the two men smiling at each other. Again the policeman feels he is letting himself drift into too matey a mode with this outlander. His smile fades out.
– So. Tell me. Why are you in this country?
– I lost my job. Times are hard under Mugabe.
–
Ja
. It’s a pity. It was a paradise. I went fishing in Kariba one time. And I saw the Victoria Falls. Most amazing thing I ever saw.
The smoke that thunders
, you people call it, hey? But can you imagine how Livingstone felt? To be the man who discovered them.
– They’d been found before.
– Fact is, your country’s fucked up now. And you can hardly blame Livingstone for that. Look, I feel for you, man ... but you can’t just waltz across the border.
He swings his hand in the air, as if to draw the borderline with his pencil.
– I was once in your shoes. I went to London when South Africa was still a bastard in the eyes of the world. I was on a tourist visa and forbidden to seek a job. I went from pub to pub ... but they just shunted me on. I tell you, the line between me and the beggars in the Underground became thin as fishing gut.
The policeman pockets his notebook and pencil, abandons his bid to stay focused.
– I was staying with other South Africans, see, so I had a roof over my head and I never starved. But being put down again and again plays havoc with your ego, hey. In the end I boarded a plane home to South Africa. I never told folk this end that I didn’t find a job overseas. I never told them London beat me down till I cracked. I tell my wife and my sons it was the cold and the quirky ways of the English. So I will stay in this town till I die. Here I’m a hero. I draw my gun on whoever holds up the 7-Eleven. I shoot them dead if I have to. Like I did that bastard who stabbed me.
– I am scared of the things ahead.
– But you have something going for you I never had.
– I do?
–
Ja
. You’ve read books. You have studied.
– You never read?
– Not deep books. Just crime. I’m reading a hard-core crime novel now. You find yourself rooting for the killer in a land where justice is a joke. He goes after the kind of men who think fucking a virgin will cure you of The Virus. He’s my hero, that bloke.