Dust Devils (19 page)

As she left the loom and walked toward the ceremonial hut, she felt the man's eyes on her. But when she turned he looked away, the sun dancing like fire on the frame of his sunglasses.

Zondi looked at the girl serving beer to the tourists and saw her mother. After killing Jola and fleeing to Johannesburg, Zondi had purged himself of his longing for Thandi, his first and only love. A kind of emotional cold turkey. Stumbling through drunken nights with fast Soweto girls in backrooms stinking of unwashed bodies and Vaseline and beer. There were times where he'd nearly weakened, jumped on a bus back to this valley where he would have been put to death.

Four years later, when he took his life in his hands and came home to bury his mother, he had seen Thandi. She lived in a hut on a hill, married to a man who spent most of the year in Durban, polishing white women's stone floors to a mirror. She told Zondi she was childless.
A barren woman,
she said. A disappointment to her husband.

Of course Zondi slept with her. In her mud hut, on a blanket on the dung floor. Thandi passive and silent after the Jo'burg girls, who had shouted their lust at the ceilings. The deeper Zondi pushed himself into her, the farther away he slid. He had won a bursary to study politics in Johannesburg. Ran with a crowd of intellectuals and radicals, many of them blonde and hungry. Thandi had stayed marooned in a valley unchanged in hundreds of years. Jets rumbled overhead but the people in their shadows lived the same way their great-grandparents had lived.

Zondi went back to Johannesburg without saying goodbye to her and never returned. He'd heard, five or six years later, that she and her husband had been murdered, part of one of the ongoing clan feuds in the area. Heard that Thandi hadn't been barren, after all.

Her daughter came to him and knelt, extended a clay gourd for him to drink from. He almost spoke to her. Stopped himself. This wasn't the time. He took a sip of the sour sorghum beer. A taste that reminded him of the poverty of his childhood, his tongue attuned to single malt now.

He handed the gourd back and she looked up at him from under her eyebrows, muttered
thank you
in Zulu and darted away. Zondi's head throbbed. He felt breathless. Claustrophobic. Crouched and ducked through the low doorway of the hut, standing up into the dry heat that slapped him dizzy.

"Why did you have to kill him?"

His son's voice woke Goodbread and when he coughed his eyes open, he was back in the distant dust of his childhood, in the high desert of West Texas, the land burned bare by the drought that had come in the wake of World War II. Took a moment to understand this was a different dry landscape blurring by through the windshield of the truck.

"What you say, boy?"

"You heard me," Dell said.

Goodbread cleared his throat, battled to give voice to the dusty words. "Reckon he left me no choice. He could identify us."

"The kid will tell them, anyway."

"Tell them what? He was maybe eight years old, what's he going to say more than we're two men in a white pickup truck?"

"And that cop in the town saw us."

"I'll wager he was dreaming of his girl's lunch meat. Couldn't give a description worth a sack of shit." Goodbread hadn't spoken in hours and the talking pained his throat. He drank some water and fired up a cigarette. Sucked smoke.

"Has it always come so fucking easy to you?" His son again.

"What in the hell are you talking about now, boy?"

"Killing."

Goodbread didn't reply. Smoked and stared out at the road that stretched straight as a wire to the horizon.

Dell said, "Ah, fuck it," and fiddled with the car radio, searching for a newscast. He'd been listening obsessively for reports of their whereabouts. A voice cut through the static, speaking in that grating, guttural Cape accent. The newsreader talking about yet another farm murder. North of Cape Town.

When Goodbread caught the name
Althea
Vorster
he turned up the volume. The woman, her son, his wife and two children. All dead. And he knew to a bone certainty whose handiwork this was.

A coughing spasm seized Goodbread and he felt blood wet and warm in his mouth and on the palm of the hand he lifted to his face. He turned his head away, stared out over the sand and scrub as he brought his breathing under control. Wiped himself clean on a handkerchief.

Dell stilled the radio, looked at him. "The woman who cut my hair?"

Goodbread nodded. Gasped for air. "Now that shitwad has got me angry."

"You weren't angry before?" his son asked.

The old man shook his head. "No. Before he killed your kin. Now he's killed mine."

Zondi sat in his Beemer in the car park of the Zulu Kingdom, engine running, A/C cranked high, windows shut against the heat and the dust. Sipping water from a plastic bottle. His head hurt like hell, as if his brain itself ached and he felt a weird dissociation, like he was lagging half a step behind himself.

The term
contrecoup injury
came unbidden. Caused, he remembered, by the brain smashing into the bones of the skull. He flashed on images from a crash-test movie he'd caught early one morning on the Discovery Channel, sitting drinking single malt, numb after a night of dislocated sex. Watching cadavers strapped behind the wheels of speeding cars sent into high-speed collisions. Heads exploding through windshields in sprays of glass, hoods of cars crumpling like foil, lovingly rendered in balletic slow-motion. Saw himself flying around in the taxi, his skull connecting with the hard metal surfaces.

He was sleepy, his chin sagging to his chest. He sat up and poured water into the palm of his hand and wiped his face. Felt the A/C chilling his wet skin. Through drops of water he saw the girl walking across the sand toward him, carrying a paper shopping bag with string handles. She was dressed in those shapeless jeans poor people wore, her T-shirt threadbare but desperately clean, with ironed creases so sharp you could cut your hand on them. Zondi opened the door and stepped out into the wall of heat.

When she was almost abreast of Zondi the girl smiled the same smile her mother had used on him twenty years ago. He turned and saw a young guy, maybe eighteen or nineteen, leaning against a small, dented Nissan, smiling back at her. He wore one of those I'M POSITIVE T-shirts AIDS activists sported to proclaim their status. The boy took the bag from the girl and opened the trunk and stowed it. Slammed the lid and the two of them got into the car.

She looked too happy, Zondi decided, for him to intrude now. He slumped down behind the wheel of the Beemer. He'd come back tomorrow. When he was rested. When he felt more in control.

Truth was, he was shit scared. Terrified to open a door he'd bolted when he'd fled this valley long ago. He shut his eyes, sucking up a lung full of refrigerant from the BMW's A/C. Heard the Nissan splutter into life. The old car bumped out of the parking lot, throwing up red sand at the late afternoon sun.

The tour guide watched the car drive away. This was wrong, he knew, the betrothed of
Induna
Mazibuko alone with that little troublemaker from Durban. Richard had chased him away from the cultural village many times before, when he had come with his condoms and his pamphlets and his lies about disease.

Richard had changed out of his skins, wore a pair of sweat pants and a check shirt. Sandals made from old whitewall tires. He reached into the pocket of his sweats and found his cell phone. He had no way of reaching
Induna
Mazibuko directly but he had the number of somebody close to him.

Richard prodded at the keypad with a thick finger as he watched the car disappear through the gates and turn toward the main road. Heard the voice of the
Induna's
sister shout a greeting at a volume that pained his eardrum.

Dell sat alone at a table in the diner, watching the sky darken to the color of congealed blood. His father was in the truck parked across the road. He didn't want food. Said that Dell would be less conspicuous alone. Dell was amazed that he could eat. He'd only picked at the breakfast that morning, the one served to them by the blonde woman, but in the hours that had passed he'd found himself starved.

The colored waitress brought him a greasy steak sandwich and fries and each mouthful seemed to make him hungrier until his plate was empty. He was the only customer in this little Formica time machine that seemed to have survived intact from the early sixties. And the small town outside the window hadn't changed much, either. Across from where he sat Dell could see a dusty park and a public swimming pool, run down and deserted.

Dell called for the check and the waitress went to the cash register to prepare it. Goodbread came in. Didn't look at him as he headed across to the men's room. The woman took Dell's money and went to make change, moving at small-town pace. By the time she returned and Dell pocketed the money, his father hadn't emerged from the bathroom.

Dell needed to take a piss, so he pushed through the swinging door. A porcelain urinal and a stall. The door to the stall was half open. His father lay on the floor. Dell shoved the door and stepped in, saw blood on Goodbread's face and on his shirt. The old man was sucking air, the skin across his sunken cheeks a bruised blue. Dell grabbed him under the arms and lifted him, amazed at how light he was. Sat him on the seat of the toilet. Bent him forward. Heard his breathing ease a little.