Dust Devils (32 page)

He didn't know how long he sat there, in the dark, before he heard the slap of shoes in the corridor. The footsteps stopped at the room next to his and a key scraped in a lock.

Before he could think he crossed the room and stepped out into the corridor, catching the Belgian doctor as her door was closing. She paused, stethoscope gleaming between her breasts, the fluorescent light painting her white coat blue. Nothing was said. Zondi moved back, allowing her to step out, lock her door and follow him into his room.

He sat down on the bed and clicked on the lamp. She reached across him and killed it, a loose strand of her hair brushing his face. They were kissing and he pushed her down onto the bed. Crouched over her. Pulled off her jeans and panties. Leaving her in a T-shirt and white coat that stank of chloroform and human waste and disease and death. He heard a metallic clink as she dropped her stethoscope onto the side table, on top of his gun.

Zondi found a condom in his wallet and she took it from him. Rolling the tube onto his flesh was the only foreplay. She fell back on the bed and pulled him into her. It was fast. Sex as an analgesic.

When it was done they lay side by side and she found her cigarettes in the pocket of her coat. He heard the scrape of a match, caught the sulfur smell and watched her face turn orange as she lit the cigarette. She shook the flame dead and sucked smoke. The long sigh of her exhalation. Louder than her climax.

"So, Disaster Zondi, tell me about your name. It is a . . . nickname?"

"No. It's on my birth certificate."

"Is that what you were, maybe, for your parents? A disaster?"

"They were illiterate Zulus. Knew no English. They thought a disaster was something good."

The Belgian laughed smoke. "Sometimes it is."

She touched him and felt that he was ready again. The next time was slower and she let herself go. Cried out. Then she lifted herself off him and dressed quickly.

"I hope you sleep well," she said as she walked to the door. Like she was leaving a patient's bedside.

Dell sat shivering under the moon that hung pale and ugly over the torn landscape. Not shivering from the cold, because heat still rose from the hard earth and the rocks. He heard the ring of metal against stone and realized that he held the pistol in his trembling hand. He lifted the gun, studied its blue glow in the moonlight.

Dell opened his mouth and swallowed the barrel. Tasted the sharpness of the gun powder, the bitterness of the metal and something almost sweet that must have been gun oil. Felt the arc of the front sight pressing up against his palate. The slight serrations of the trigger under his index finger. Shut his eyes. Increased the pressure on the trigger. Wanting this release.

His finger froze when he saw his family. Not the charred meat in the morgue: his wife and children as he remembered them. Laughing. Happy. Alive.

Rosie. Mary. Tommy.

Dell opened his eyes and slid the barrel from his mouth. His breath ragged and irregular. But he wasn't shaking anymore. Knew whoever he once had been, he was no longer. He wanted to die. But not yet. Not until he had reckoned with Inja Mazibuko.

Dell settled back against a rock. Listened to the night. Cicadas. A bird call. A distant whoop of some animal. He must have fallen asleep, because when he opened his eyes sunrise bled pink into the sky on the horizon. His mouth was dry and he knew there was no water to be had.

Dell stood and started down the slope, toward the torched truck. When he heard a bark unlike a dog's, he stopped. Moved forward cautiously, rounding the blackened hood of the Toyota. A hyena was feeding on his father's entrails. The animal looked up at him, muzzle wet with blood. It bared its teeth.

Dell reached down for a rock and threw it at the scavenger. Hit it up near its ribcage, bones sticking through its dusty skin like corrugated sheet iron. The animal shuffled back a step and growled again. He could see its eyes, close-set, yellow, feral. Wearing its spotted fur like a bad suit. Dell's fingers found another rock and he hurled it, all of his rage and grief focused in the release. Hit the hyena up near its blunt snout and it yelped. Then it turned and slunk away, scrawny assed and knock-kneed, growling over its shoulder before it disappeared into a gulley.

His father lay sprawled on his back in a mess of viscera. A bullet had drilled a neat hole in his temple. His mouth sagged open, tongue showing blue, as if he were licking his lips. Meat flies clustered around the gaping wounds where his eyes had been. Dell looked up at the twists of charred paper floating in the sky. Vultures.

Guess I owe you this much, old man
, he said as he grabbed his father's ankles and dragged him, rolling his body into a ditch, trying not to hear the wet slap of his entrails. Made sure the body fell on its front, so he didn't have to look into the gaping eye sockets.

Then he set to work covering the corpse with rocks. Even this early the day was hot and soon he was sweating. Tongue swollen with thirst. He stepped back. A small mound of red rocks covered the body. He sat a while, catching his breath, thinking about his father, the man he'd always hated. Had anything changed?

No. Nothing had changed.

Dell stood. He needed water. He set off toward a cluster of huts flung up against the slope of a distant hill, iron roofs catching the rising sun.

Sunday lay listening to the deep bass boom of the drum. The drummer stood outside the main house, sending a message out to the valley that this was the day that she was to become
Induna
Mazibuko's fourth wife. Each smack on the cowhide brought her closer to the moment the old dog would take her.

She hadn't slept, lying awake in the hut. Hearing the snores of the fat woman, who had fallen asleep despite her brother's commands. The room stank of the woman's sweat and the slop bucket in the corner. Auntie Mavis had used it to empty her bowels before she slept, a foul and noisy business. Sunday needed to pass urine but there was no way she could go near that bucket.

She closed her eyes and prayed. Praying away the stench and the monotonous pulse of the drum that seemed to mirror her heartbeat. Praying that she would hear her mother's voice. Instead Sunday heard a key in the lock and she sat up, wrapping herself in the blanket as the door opened. Inja Mazibuko stood in the doorway, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. As skinny as a cane rat. A pink Band-Aid on his forehead.

"Sister!" he bellowed in that voice that seemed to come from a bigger man. The fat whale surfaced grunting and moaning from the blankets, blinking her eyes at the light. "Get this girl dressed and ready. The guests will be arriving soon."

The old dog stared down at Sunday. She tried to stare back but she couldn't, and she dropped her gaze. Terrified of the hunger in his eyes.

As Dell neared the huts on the hillside he saw two figures, scratches of black against the red sand. Drawing closer he could see they were a very old man in torn khaki overalls and a boy of maybe eight, wearing grown man's shorts cinched in at the waist, his fleshless torso white with dust. They were dragging the carcass of a sheep toward a makeshift handcart, a wooden box on a pair of bent bicycle wheels, the yoke stuck in the dirt. Two more dead sheep lay on the cracked earth, drawing flies.

The man and the boy strained at the carcass, trying to lift it up onto the cart, but neither was strong enough and the sheep slid back to the sand. The old man squatted beside the sheep, drinking air, staring down at the dust. The boy stood over him, watching Dell approach through ancient eyes.

Dell's tongue was thick in his mouth and he battled to speak the Zulu word that had somehow stuck in his memory from his childhood in Durban:
amanzi
. Water. He mimed drinking from a bottle. The old man looked up at him. Bloodshot eyes a roadmap of suffering.

Dell sank to his knees on the sand. "
Amanzi.
Please." He found a crumpled banknote in his pocket and held it out toward the old man.

The Zulu shook his head, looked up at the boy and spoke. The boy nodded. The child's tight black curls were red-blond at the roots, the sign of kwashiorkor, a protein deficiency caused by malnutrition. The boy jogged off in the direction of the huts, his skinny legs like bell clappers in the frayed shorts.

Dell looked at the old man, who ignored him, staring into the distance, oblivious to the flies that homed in on his eyes and nostrils and crawled over his distended earlobes. Dell stood and crossed to the sheep lying by the cart. It had been shot in the head. Saw the bullet holes in the other two carcasses. Didn't try to understand.

He squatted and got his arms under the dead animal, hot sand burning his skin. The sheep was a bag of bones and stinking, matted fur. He managed to lift it and drop it into the handcart. The weight of the carcass tipped the box back into the dust, leaving the T-shaped yoke silhouetted against the sky.

Dell sweated, amazed that he had enough moisture left in him to produce perspiration. He felt dizzy after the exertion and sat down, his back to the cartwheel, feeling the rim digging into his shoulder. When he got his breath back he crossed to the second sheep. Not sure why he was doing this. Maybe it was his day for carcasses.

The old man watched Dell now, hands dangling between his legs. Dell grabbed the sheep by a hind hoof and hauled it toward the cart. This one was meatier and he was struggling to lift it when he felt the old man beside him, saw the muscles in his arms as stringy as jerky. Between the two of them they heaved the sheep onto the baseboard of the cart. Dell went for the third, dragging it back, and they manhandled it aboard. They both sank to the ground, the old man nodding and muttering thanks.

A shadow touched Dell and he looked up to see the boy standing over him, holding out a plastic Coke bottle filled with water. Dell snatched it from the boy's hands and tipped it to his mouth. The water was warm and brackish but he drank until he'd emptied the bottle, liquid spilling over his chin, running down his neck onto his shirt. When he dropped the bottle to the sand, he felt a sharp cramp in his stomach.

Dell heard metal protesting as the old man and the boy dragged the handcart along the pathway up toward the huts.

The boy had placed a banana – split skin black and oozing – on a rock beside Dell. He lifted the banana and looked at it. And suddenly he was crying. Tears coming from god knew where in his parched body. Strings of snot and spit dangling like bungee cords from his mouth as he bawled.