The Power of One (34 page)

But I was wrong. Perhaps it was because I was the first human clay Geel Piet had been responsible for shaping into a boxer, but it was more likely pride; he was a purist, and he knew the corruption that turns a boxer into a fighter and a fighter into a street brawler.

“Small
baas
, if I teach you these things a street fighter knows, you will lose your speed and you will lose your caution, and when you lose your caution you will lose your skill.” His face split into a grotesque smile. “It will take longer to win as a boxer, but you will stay pretty.”

I was disappointed. Being tough was one of the ambitions I had set for myself. Being pretty certainly wasn't on my list of priorities! How could you be tough if you had to bob in and out like a blowfly? “Please, Geel Piet,” I begged, “just teach me one really rotten dirty trick.” After some days of nagging he agreed.

“If I teach you one, then you must promise not to ask again, you hear?”

“It's got to be a proper one, the worst in the book, you've got to promise that too?”

“Okay, man, I will teach you the Sailor's Salute. It is the best dirty trick there is. But you got to know timing also to get it right. A boxer can know this trick and still be a boxer.”

“Promise it's the worst one of all?”

“Ja,
man, I'm telling you for sure. It is so rotten the police use it all the time so they can say in the charge book they never laid hands on you. Its other name besides the Sailor's Salute is the Liverpool Kiss.” He held the flat of his hand three inches from his brow and with a short, lightning-fast jerk of his head, his forehead smacked loudly into the hand. “Only you do this against the other person's head, like so.” He drew me toward him and in slow motion demonstrated the head-to-head blow. Even in slow motion he nearly took my head off and my eyes filled with tears. It was the head butt Jackhammer Smit had used to floor Hoppie, and now I knew why Hoppie had gone down so suddenly.

“Do it to me, also,” Geel Piet said, patting his forehead with the butt of his hand. I did so and received a second severe blow to the head. I was beginning to have misgivings about street fighting. It sure wasn't like fighting a punching bag.

But over the next few weeks I perfected the Liverpool Kiss. The quick grab of the punching bag and a lightning butt to the imagined head of an opponent. Every now and again Geel Piet allowed me to practice on him, and he grinned when I got it right. “Once you got it, you got it for life. But only use it quick and as a surprise. If you get it right, you kiss your opponent to sleep with just one little tap, no problems, man.”

School had one disadvantage. I was two classes higher than my age group, and so friends were hard to make. The kids of my own age thought of me as a sort of freak and in fact, with my early school background and now my prison experience, I was a lot tougher than any of them. Doc and the jaw incident had made me somewhat of a celebrity, but I kept mostly to myself, being a shy kid and the smallest in my class. I acquired a reputation for superiority without having to earn it and so was left pretty much alone. I wasn't aggressive, and when a challenge came from a boy called John Hopkins and his partner, Geoffrey Scruby, supposedly the two toughest kids in my class, I tried to avoid the fight they demanded, mostly because I was arrogant enough to believe that my status as future world welterweight champion made it inappropriate for me to be a street fighter. The Judge and even the jury had been so much tougher than these two that it never occurred to me to be actually frightened of them. The English-speaking kids at school had no idea of my boxing or prison background, as the small contingent of Afrikaans kids in the school seldom mixed with the English and almost never spoke with them, other than to challenge them to fight. The two ten-year-olds badgered me for some days, and so I took the problem to Geel Piet, who immediately understood my dilemma.

“Small
baas
, it is always like this. This is what you must do. You must make them feel you are scared. Tell them, no way, man. Tell them you don't want to fight. Let them get more and more cheeky, more and more brave. Even let them push you around. But always make sure this happens when everyone is watching. Then after a few days they will demand to fight you and they will name a time and a place. Try to look scared when you agree. You understand?” Geel Piet held me by the shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes. “More fights are lost by underestimating your opponent than by any other way. Always remember, small
baas
, surprise is everything.”

It happened just as he said, a constant badgering during break, then a few pushes in front of everyone. Protests from me that I didn't want to fight. Finally a demand that I be behind the bioscope after school, where I could choose either of them to fight.

When I got to the small yard behind the town cinema where all the official school fights took place, it was packed, with at least fifty kids crowded around John Hopkins and Geoffrey Scruby. All of them were English-speaking, with the exception of Snotnose Bronkhorst, who had somehow got wind of the fight. To my surprise, he stepped up to me and said in Afrikaans, “I'm here to be your second. These are all
rooineks,
you can never tell what they'll do.”

I looked at him in surprise. “I'm also a
rooinek”

“Yes, I know, man, but you're a Boer
rooinek
that's different.”

I elected to fight Hopkins, who seemed delighted as he was the bigger of my two tormentors and had not expected to be chosen.

The kids formed a ring and Snotnose, who didn't know a lot of English, simply said “Okay! Make quiet! Fight!”

Hopkins threw a haymaker at me and missed by miles and I landed a hard blow to his ribs. He looked surprised, shook his head, and came rushing in again swinging at my head. I ducked in under his punch and caught him hard on the nose. He stopped dead in his tracks and brought his hand up to his face. I hit him with a left and then a right to the solar plexus, and to my astonishment he started to cry.

“All over!” Snotnose held up my hand as Hopkins, sniffing and thoroughly humbled, walked back into the crowd. I pointed to Geoffrey Scruby. “Your turn now, Scruby,” I said, feeling a rush of adrenaline as I saw his fear.

“I'm sorry, Peekay,” he said softly. I had won. Just as Geel Piet said. Suddenly the crowd loved me. And I liked the feeling a lot. Then Snotnose stepped up.

“Does any of you blery
rooineks
want to fight him?” he asked. There was complete silence and nobody stirred, not even the bigger kids. “You're all yellow, you hear?” he snarled. Then he turned slowly and looked at me with a grin on his face. I grinned back. He seemed an unlikely ally, but he had stood by me. “Okay, then, I will,” he said. A murmur of apprehension ran through the crowd. They were clearly shocked at the idea. I must say, I was pretty shocked myself.

“It's not fair. You're much bigger than him,” Geoffrey Scruby said. “And older,” someone else shouted.

“Shurrup, man, or I fight you.” Snotnose walked up to Scruby and stabbed him in the chest with his forefinger. Then he turned and squared up to me.

It had been four months since we'd first met in the ring, and he'd learned a fair bit about boxing in the meantime. I tried to stay out of his way, dancing around him, making him miss. But he hit me a couple of times and it hurt like blazes. I was connecting more often than he was, aiming my blows carefully, but I knew it was only a matter of time.
First with your head, then with your heart, first with your head, then with your heart,
Hoppie's words drummed through my brain as I tried to stay alive. Snotnose tried to come in close on one or two occasions but soon learned that this evened things up. At close range I was much the better boxer. So he stood his distance and picked his shots, knowing that a big punch had to get through sooner or later. All I could do was to try to make him miss. The kids, now on my side, were yelling their heads off, trying to reach me with their encouragement. But I think they all knew the Boer was too tough and that the outcome was inevitable.

“Come closer, Boer bastard. Are you scared or something?” I taunted. Snotnose stopped in his tracks, and his eyes grew wide. With a roar of indignation he bore down on me. I stepped aside at the last second and he missed knocking me over. As he turned to come back at me, his head was lowered so it was on a level with mine. He had his back to the bioscope wall and I had mine to the crowd. I stepped in and, using both hands, grabbed him by the shirtfront and gave him a perfectly timed Liverpool Kiss. The blow was so perfect I felt nothing. Snotnose simply sat on his bum, completely dazed. He just sat there in the dirt, quite unable to comprehend what had happened. The crowd hadn't seen it either. They were behind me, and my hands flying up to grab his shirtfront must have looked like a two-fisted attack. Forever afterward it was retold that way: “Then Peekay said, ‘Come closer, you Boer bastard,' and with two dazzling punches to the jaw he knocked Snotnose Bronkhorst out.”

To my surprise Snotnose started to sniff and then got up unsteadily and made his way through the crowd and down the side of the building. He stopped halfway down the alley and shouted in Afrikaans, “I'll get you back for this, you
rooinek
bastard!” The English kids jeered as he walked away, but I knew better. One doesn't make a Boer lose face and expect to get away with it. Though to my amazement, even Snotnose came to believe that he had been punched.

After the fight with Hopkins and Snotnose Bronkhorst my status at school improved immeasurably. While there were no more than sixty Afrikaans pupils, the sons and daughters of Noordkaap miners, farmers, men who worked in the saw mills at Frantzinos Rust, and the warders' kids, they tended to be bigger than the English kids and much more aggressive. Most of the English boys had, at some time or another, suffered at the hands of one of the Boers. I was seen as being the one kid who had successfully fought back and won. A single victorious ship on an ocean of defeat.

Occasionally a Boer boy of roughly my size would cross the lines to challenge me, and after school the back of the bioscope building would be packed with kids, the Boer kids on one side and the English on the other with my opponent and myself sandwiched in between. The prison guys formed a clique of their own, not sure where they belonged but seemingly glad when I won. Geel Piet was a good coach, and as I was never matched with one of the prison kids, my superior boxing skill allowed me to win. Whereupon a bigger Boer kid would challenge one of the English boys of roughly the same size and usually manage to beat him, which restored the racial status quo.

The prison kids explained that it was acceptable to be beaten by me as I was a sort of honorary Boer who spoke the
taal
and was also one of them. That came first. Even Snotnose left me alone unless we were sparring in the gym, when he would go all out to try to hurt me.

This position of semineutrality had a great many advantages. In times of war there always has to be a go-between, someone whom both sides are prepared to trust. I was accepted by everyone as a brain, and so I ended up doing the negotiation between the Boers and the English, often sorting out differences, arranging sides for rugby or
kleilat,
marble contests, and
bok-bok,
an exceedingly rough game based on strength and endurance which the Boers, despite having fewer boys to choose from, usually won.

With some forty kids of my own age I was now undisputed leader, a situation I must confess I found to my liking. Being somebody after being nobody for so long was a heady experience, but I also found it, on occasion, a bit onerous. Fights had to be settled, bullying stopped, and the small kids set straight when they did things wrong. And then there was the tobacco crisis.

The tobacco crop on Marie's farm failed. This left a period of three months when the curing shed was empty. Marie kept apologizing for this, as though it was somehow her fault; the more my granpa protested that he didn't mind, the more guilty she seemed to become. By this time Geel Piet had become undisputed quartermaster for the prison. To tobacco we had added sugar, salt, and a letter-writing business that was getting news in and out of the prison to and from all over South Africa. Postal orders would come in from outside contacts. Prisoners would order sugar, salt, and tobacco and Geel Piet would add thirty percent to the groceries and charge threepence a cigarette. Tobacco was by far the greatest luxury because it was rationed owing to the war. It was unavailable to the casual purchaser and impossible for an eight-year-old to buy under any circumstances. The little I brought in in leaf form was carefully rolled into slim cigarettes. A single cigarette in a week of hard labor was a luxury beyond the imagination of the average prisoner. Somehow I understood how such a small thing as a cigarette, a tablespoon of sugar, or a teaspoon of salt made the difference between hope and despair. A prisoner with a cigarette safely stashed in a used .303 cartridge case up his anus considered himself rich. These cartridge cases were highly prized; they were, after all, in conjunction with his anus, the only private storage space a prisoner had. We kids gathered them from the rifle range at the army camp, and they were the only item Geel Piet actually gave away; as the prisoner's pantry they were essential to his business.