Dust Devils

by Roger Smith

  Zondi shook his head, staring down the street, watching a minibus taxi take on passengers. "No. Maybe I'll bump into him while I'm down here."

  "He's away, I hear. Out of town." Chewing. "You know, we three are the last from those old days. I buried Mussolini, Dudu and Solly myself. Gunshot. AIDS. AIDS." Swallowing and fighting for breath. Chasing the food with Coke from the liter bottle. Gas escaped from him, like from a punctured blimp. "Inja has done well for himself. The chief has rewarded him, made him an induna." Waving a greasy hand toward the man on the election poster. Feeding again. "And you know Inja's got a badge, now?" Zondi turned to look at the undertaker, playing dumb. "Ja, the chief has appointed him a special agent in that police unit of his. A powerful man now, is Inja."

  Of course, Inja the dog ran with the minister's new pack – a Tonton Macoute of licensed killers, ready to do their master's dirty work. Zondi's boss had been vocal in his opposition to the special unit. Left him dead and buried.

  "You know he's taking a fourth bride this weekend? Inja?" Zondi lied with a shake of his head. Giraffe sat back and sighed. "Poor child. She's a replacement, I suppose, for the wife I buried last month." Zondi stared at him. Said nothing. "So small and skinny, that one, I could have fitted her into a tomato box."

  The big man had ingested all the food. He shot a cuff and looked at the gold watch recessed into the fat of his wrist. "I must go. An appointment with the recently bereaved."

  Giraffe reached out a limp hand, sticky now. Reluctantly, Zondi shook it.

  "Pop in for a visit before you leave. I'll show you my place."

  Zondi nodded and watched the fat man roll out, halting a taxi in its tracks as he held up a hand and crossed the road toward his funeral parlor. The undertaker stopped before the picture window, lifted an arm and wiped at a spot on the glass with the sleeve of his suit jacket. Turned, paused for a moment, then walked away, as padded as the insides of the coffins on display behind him.

  Dell, still with the blanket over his head, was led from the car. He heard the sound of chickens and a sheep's low moan in the distance. No city buzz. The smell of the country in his nostrils. Rich soil and animal shit. He could see part of his one flip-flop past the drape of the blanket, crunching on dark gravel. Night had fallen. Dell stumbled, sent out his cuffed hands and felt the shape of a doorframe.

  "Easy," his father said. Guiding him up a step.

  "Where the fuck am I?" Dell asked.

  "Watch your tongue, boy. There are children present."

  Dell heard the unmistakable patter of kids running on wooden floors. Light drumming, almost animal-like. The sound the twins had made on the floors back home.

  The pain of memory sharpened when he was led past a TV warbling out the intro to a program that had been one of Rosie's lowbrow pleasures. An Afrikaans quiz show, where contestants listened to snatches of music and had to identify the tunes. Dell heard the greetings of the show's host, a man with the smile of a pedophile. He saw Rosie curled up on their sofa, eating popcorn, laughing, singing along with the mindless songs of her childhood.

  A door closed, muting the music. Dell shuffled on, his father's hand on his arm. He heard a young man's voice, a low mumble. Another door closed. The fingers released him and bedsprings creaked as somebody sat down.

  "Okay, you can lose the blanket," his father said.

  Dell lifted his hands and pulled the blanket from his head, blinking in the sudden light. He saw an old man sitting on the bed, in the glare of a lamp. Looked around for Bobby Goodbread.

  "It's me, you dumb bastard." The old man spoke in his father's voice.

  Goodbread was hollowed out. Emaciated. His frame stripped of flesh and muscle. Skin gray as dishwater pulled across sunken cheeks. Thick white hair cropped close to his skull. Dark eyes peering out from under heavy lids.

  "What the fuck's going on?" Dell asked.

  "Good question, boy. One I can't give the answer it rightly deserves. Not until we have more time. Let's just say I saved your skinny white butt, and leave it there for now." The Texan accent was as Dell remembered it. Strong and loud. Like a ventriloquist's voice emerging from the wasted body.

  Dell shook his head. Staring at his father. "Get these cuffs off. Get me to a phone."

  Goodbread lit a cigarette, sucking on it like it was an iron lung. "Who you gonna call, boy? The cops?" Coughed. Wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "The people who murdered your kin were fixing to send you to Pollsmoor Prison. Throw you in with the half-breed gangsters who'd kill you for the price of a cigarette. And believe me, nobody would ask no fucking questions."

  "And you know this how?"

  "Same way I knew what had happened to you. Same way I know who drove the big old truck that killed your family. I'm still connected, boy." Drawing long and hard on the cigarette, speaking around smoke. "Lot of seriously disaffected people in this sorry country. Law enforcement. Military. People who look out for one another."

  Dell watched him. Listening for the lies. A knock at the door. Goodbread held up a hand, went to the door, opened it a crack, then stepped out and shut it after him. Dell heard his father's low drawl and a female voice in reply.

  Dell was in a woman's bedroom. A double bed with a floral comforter, hastily pulled straight, two Afrikaans gossip magazines lying beside the single pillow. Durer's praying hands in copper, hanging above the bed. Thick orange drapes across the window. An old-style wooden vanity table, with chipped legs and a mirror gone smoky. A pine closet loomed over the bed, one door open, clothes bulging out. And a smell: cloying perfume and aging woman flesh. Like Dell's grandmother's room, when he'd visited her as a kid.

  The door opened and Goodbread came back in, followed by a blonde woman. At first glance Dell thought she was middle-aged, busty, with a cigarette dangling from her lips. Then he saw she was much older, at least sixty, gray hair dyed straw yellow, thick make-up caking the cracks in her face. She wheeled a plastic basin mounted on a metal frame.

  "This fine lady, who will remain nameless, has kindly agreed to give you a shave and a haircut," Goodbread said.

  The blonde smiled at Dell, painted lips curling back from the cigarette. The smile of a woman who flirted as a reflex.

  Dell didn't smile back. "What the fuck for?"

  Her smile disappeared. "He's got his daddy's mouth, okay." Speaking English with an Afrikaans accent. A low voice, that crawled out from under years of booze and cigarettes. His father's kind of woman.

  Goodbread had an arm around her thick waist, smiling down at her. "Now, that's a lie and you know it." He was screwing her, Dell supposed.

  Goodbread released the woman and crossed to Dell. "Meet the new you."

  He held up a South African driver's license, a laminated plastic rectangle the size of a credit card. Dell saw the face of a man his age, clean shaven, with short, dark hair, gazing blankly at the camera. Caught the name David Stander before Goodbread set the license down on the vanity table and unlocked Dell's handcuffs. Dell flexed his fingers, wrists tingling where the metal had cut into his flesh.

  "We'll talk later, okay?" Goodbread left the room, closing the door after him.

  The woman wheeled the basin up to the vanity. "Come, sit."

  Dell did as she said. The blonde, cigarette still hanging from her lip, unwound the bandage from his head and saw him wince.

  "Shame," she said, parting his hair, squinting through the smoke. "It's okay, just a few cuts. But I'm sorry, this is going to sting you a bit."

  She stubbed out the cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and pulled the basin closer. It was filled with warm water and she had him sit with his head hanging back over the rim as she shampooed his hair. It stung. Then she rolled the basin away and laid a towel across his shoulders, turning him so that he faced the mirror.

  "Where am I?" he asked.

  "You better wait and ask your dad." Scratching for a pair of a scissors and a comb in the vanity drawer, squinting down at the photograph on the driver's license.
r />   "Just tell me," he said.

  "I don't want no trouble."

  He looked up at her. "Lady, you've already got trouble. You know who I am?"

  She took his head in her hands and turned it to face forward again. "You his son. That's all I need to know."

  The blonde lit another cigarette, left it pressed between her wrinkled lips as if it would keep her secrets safe. Then she started cutting Dell's hair. She was good, her hands moving in a practiced blur, his salt-and-pepper curls falling to his shoulders and onto the floor.

  He hadn't had short hair in nearly thirty years, since he'd finished his compulsory stint in South Africa's apartheid army. Went into basic training as a conscientious objector. A pacifist. Marched with a broomstick instead of an R1 rifle. The Afrikaners he was with had called him a faggot. A commie. Beaten the shit out of him for sport. He'd ended up as a medic on a Pretoria infantry base, consuming all the chemicals he could lay his hands on, two years passing in a fucked-up smear.

  The woman left him with a fringe and sideburns. Looking like somebody he'd avoid on the street. Then she slipped on rubber gloves and mixed up a thick paste in a plastic bowl. Massaged the paste into his hair, dying it dark. Got busy with a hair dryer that screamed in his ears and burned the cuts in his scalp. She trimmed his beard with the scissors. Lathered his face with foam and shaved him with a straight razor. Did it expertly.

  Goodbread was back in the room. "Well, I'll be dipped in shit," he said, checking out Dell's reflection.

  The woman laughed through phlegm. "Ja. He's almost as handsome as his dad."

  Dell stared into the mirror. The man looking back at him was a dead-ringer for the one who'd kicked the Cuban out of the chopper twenty-five years ago.

  The boy lifted a sheep's head from the bucket and stuck it on the fence pole, under the yellow light of a naked light bulb. Then he fired up the blowtorch that snaked away from a rusted red gas cylinder and applied the blue flame to the head, until the wool burned away and the eyes popped and bubbled.

  Inja sat on an old car seat, drinking a brandy and Coke, letting the smell of burning flesh fill his nostrils. He was in the shackland that spread like a disease beside the freeway between Cape Town and the airport. Sitting in the yard of a house thrown together from pieces of rusted corrugated iron and bits of wood. A one room hovel identical to the others that sprawled out into the darkness.

  The yard was lit by the cooking fires and the electric bulb that drew pirate power from a cable patched into the nearby utility pole. A shiny new TV sat on top of a ten gallon drum, blaring out a soccer match. Drunken men crowded around it, hurling abuse at another bad South African team performance.

  Inja watched as a crone slid the sheep's head from the fence pole and threw it onto an open fire. She stabbed another head, already cooked, with a sharpened spike and lifted it out of the flames. Split it down the middle with an axe. She dumped one half of the head onto a tin plate and brought it across to Inja. He gave her money, which she tucked into her bra and went back to the fires.

  Now that Inja had the food before him, his appetite evaporated and he felt nausea grip his innards and squeeze them hard. He put the plate down beside him and forced back the scalding bile that filled his mouth. Washed it down with a slug of his drink. It was back again, the thing in his blood that wanted to kill him.

  It had started when he was shot three months before. One of his rivals had ambushed Inja's car on the winding pass down to Bhambatha's Rock. Thrown a tree trunk across the road and riddled the car with AK-47 fire when Inja's driver slowed. The driver died, his brains flung onto the windshield, and Inja had been shot in the leg.

  The man with the AK-47 had fled. But not before Inja saw his face. After he was discharged from hospital Inja went to his enemy's house with an axe and took his head, like one of these sheep. Stuck it on a pole in the village and posted armed guards under it. Forced the people in the village to watch as the birds picked out the eyes and tongue and the flesh rotted and blackened over the next week. A message.

  When Inja returned to the hospital to have the sutures removed from his leg, a young white doctor came to speak to him. A woman with yellow hair and a foreign voice that he struggled to understand. The doctor told him it was routine to test the blood of people admitted to the hospital for HIV, here where the incidence was the highest in the world. Told Inja that the virus was eating him, that he had what was called full-blown AIDS. That he needed to go on medication called antiretrovirals. Inja had refused and left the hospital.

  He didn't believe in this white man's nonsense and he was in good company. A previous president of South Africa hadn't believed HIV caused AIDS. The health minister had said you could cure it by eating beetroot and garlic. The new president, a Zulu, said you didn't need to wear a plastic when you fucked, all you needed to do was shower afterwards.

  And the men in Inja's area said if you got this thing it was easy to cure if you had sex with a virgin girl. The only way to be sure of their maidenhood was to get them very young. Inja had abducted a toddler child playing in the dirt near a hut of one of his enemies. Raped it and killed it and shoved it halfway down a pit latrine. Waited to be cured.

  But he had still felt the weakness. So he had gone to his traditional doctor, his sangoma, told him what he had done. The witch doctor said he had brought disgrace upon his ancestors by raping and murdering a child. That the only way he could properly purge himself of this curse was to marry a virgin in the traditional way.

  Inja had known immediately who to choose to save his life, and now he had the proof that she was intact. Come the weekend, he would be cured. The thought of this relaxed the knot in his stomach and he lifted the jawbone of the sheep, the teeth grinning at him, and he gnawed at the flesh, feeling the juices flow down his face and onto his shirt.

  Inja's work here was done. He'd dumped the Boer's Benz in the shackland. It would be stripped by morning. In an hour he would fly home and report back to his chief, the minister of justice. Tell him there were no mouths left to speak to his enemies.

  Then Inja saw that the soccer game had given way to a news broadcast. Saw a face on the screen that he recognized. Inja stood, still holding the jawbone of the sheep in his hand. He shouted for quiet. Shouted so loud and with such authority that the drunken men fell silent.

  Inja stared at the photograph of the white man on the TV. The half-breed's cuckold of a husband. The one who had survived the car accident and had now escaped from prison. Inja dropped the sheep's jaw onto the dirt, grabbed his bag and walked toward the street. He would find this white man and kill him himself.

  Dell, head again covered by the blanket, let his father lead him from the farmhouse across an expanse of gravel. Heard a door squeal open and shut. Felt concrete beneath his feet. Shrugged off the blanket and found himself in a cramped room that looked as if it had once been a garage. Unpainted plaster walls. Silver sheet iron supported by bare roof beams. A metal door, bolted, still painted primer red. One small window, covered by frayed yellow curtains. A bed. A sofa. The medicinal smell that clung to his father was thick in the air of the room.

  Goodbread sat down on the sagging sofa positioned with its back to the door. An electric bulb dangled from the roof, hard shadows hiding his eyes and pooling beneath his sunken cheekbones. His hands, a mottled landscape of veins, rested on the knees of his khaki pants.

  A half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's stood beside his work boots on the cement floor. No sign of a glass. Dell sat on the narrow bed. Pillow and blankets squared away like in the military. Or prison.

  He stared at the old stranger. "Who killed my family?"

  Goodbread fired up a cigarette, waving the match dead. "As I hear it told, the man driving the truck goes by the name of Moses Mazibuko. Better known as Inja. Means dog up in Zululand." Sucked smoke. Coughed. "Takes his orders from the minister of justice. Now, if that isn't a fucking joke, kindly tell me when one comes along."

  "Why did he want to kill us?"
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  "He was after your wife. Rest of you were collateral damage." Pulling hard on the cigarette, the end glowing red. Holding the smoke in his lungs, eyes closed. Then exhaling.

  Dell shook his head. "Bullshit. Nobody had reason to murder Rosie."

  "But they had a few million reasons to kill Ben Baker." Goodbread looked at Dell out of the shadows. "You know about her and Baker?"

  "Yes."

  "I suspect she was with him the night he was hit. Saw who did it. Got away somehow, but this Inja tracked her down and . . ." Shrugging his bony shoulders. "Guess I don't need to sing you the rest of that sad song."

  Dell saw Rosie's face the morning after Baker's murder. Her eyes empty. In emotional lockdown. He watched the old man smoke. "Where are we?"

  "An hour and some north of Cape Town. That's all you need to know. For the protection of the people over yonder." Waving his cigarette toward the farmhouse.

  "And what happens now?"

  "You sleep. You look like ten thousand miles of bad road."

  "Don't fuck with me. You've got a plan. Talk."

  Goodbread paused with the cigarette halfway to his lips. Held up a hand for silence. Dell heard the low rumble of an engine, the crunch of tires on gravel. Moving fast for an old man, Goodbread dropped the cigarette to the floor, crossed to the wall switch and killed the light.

  "Hunker yourself down behind the sofa, where you can't be seen from the window. And stay there. Don't move one goddam muscle. Got me?"

  Dell obeyed, squatting down on the cement floor. A flare of headlamps lit the drapes, throwing a sick yellow light into the room. Goodbread stood with his back flat to the wall between the door and the window. He took a pistol from under his baggy shirt. Cocked it. The headlamps slid away from the window and Dell heard the moan of brakes as the vehicle stopped, engine idling.