by Roger Smith
She couldn’t remember the man’s name but she did remember that he was the pro at the local golf course and—once he’d berated her for wearing a T-shirt glorifying a “communist coon”—had plied her with gin and bragged that he’d helped her father overcome his slice, whatever that meant, and (with sudden, almost forensic clarity) she remembered sliding unsteadily off her bar stool and following him through a swinging door after he’d told her he needed to use the “loo.”
Following him into a gloomy corridor, tart pine disinfectant not quite masking the stink of stale urine and human dung, the big man’s cloying aftershave and meaty body odor adding further noxious layers to the fetid air of the corridor as he’d closed in on her.
She’d ducked his kiss—beer and tobacco and poor dental hygiene—kneeled and unbuckled his belt, his paunch sagging as she unzipped him and pulled his khaki shorts to his knees, revealing a pair of white underpants that were ludicrously boyish.
Feeling laughter bubbling in her throat she’d reached into his skivvies and freed his cock, a blunt, fleshy thing that rose from a thicket of blondish pubes and taken it into her mouth, using it to cork her hilarity.
He’d gasped and flailed at her hair, his prick hardening against her palate.
For a moment she’d fancied that if she bit into this veiny plug of skin and gristle he would deflate like a punctured blimp, disappearing with a flatulent hiss.
The door had creaked and, as she’d tongued and slurped, she’d looked up and seen another man standing in the doorway watching, quite motionless.
The golf pro had seen him too and the stranger’s appearance, coupled with her ministrations, had brought forth a groaning, glottal climax, jism filling her mouth like watery dollops of albumen from a botched poached egg.
She’d spat out the man’s twitching dick and with it his semen—gobs landing on his pants and dappling the tiled floor—and stood, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.
Her memory dimmed again and she had no recollection of leaving the bar, but as she moved in the seat of the Mercedes, her bare, sweaty butt cheeks squealing on the leather, an ache radiated outward from her cunt (which felt like a recently tenderized chunk of raw meat) into the rest of her body, and the T-shirt rubbed painfully across her nipples that itched and burned from beard rash.
The muscles and tendons of her legs and back throbbed from the unaccustomed positions the randy golf pro had ragdolled her into on the rear seat of the car, and she saw his jowly face made silver by moonlight as he had her straddle and ride him to some invisible finish line, which he’d reached with loud grunts and oaths—and even something that could have been a snatch of a drinking song.
As she searched for her jeans and panties Tanya caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview: her black hair (worn long in those days) was the nest of a mad bird and lipstick and rouge were smeared across her face, lending her the appearance of a depraved mime.
She found her jeans and her other sandal but her panties were gone. As she cracked the car door a child’s action figure tumbled out onto the red earth of the road and lay looking up at her accusingly.
Tanya almost sobbed with relief when she saw the roof of the shiny little white Volkswagen her parents had bought her three months ago for her eighteenth birthday gleaming across the cane.
The short walk to her car had her sweating in the February heat and heavy humidity and her mouth was dry and bitter.
She slid in behind the wheel of the Volkswagen and cranked the engine. Hot air blew out of the vents and the plastic bottle of water she found on the floor beneath yesterday’s Mercury (the front page trumpeting the imminent release of Nelson Mandela) was as warm as piss.
She drank it, anyway, as she rattled down the gravel track and found the coast highway that wound through the blinding green landscape until she swung off onto another unpaved farm road that led her to the house she’d grown up in, a white double story that looked as if it had become unmoored from English Home Counties suburbia only to run aground in this sea of sugarcane on the tip of Africa.
She parked between her father’s Land Rover and her mother’s sensible Toyota and let herself into the silent house, the grandfather clock in the hallway bonging once at the bottom of the hour: seven thirty.
It was Sunday, the only day of the week when the uniformed houseboys and girls (Zulu men and women in their forties and fifties) were permitted to stay late in their cramped quarters—hidden from the house by a froth of purple bougainvillea—and were expected in the kitchen only at nine a.m. to prepare the brunch that her parents took on the patio, her mother gabbling inanely, her father, hidden behind the Sunday Tribune, grunting with the perfect timing of the long-married man.
Feeling edgy and hungover Tanya went through to the kitchen and found a can of Coke in the refrigerator. She washed down a couple of aspirins with the treacly soda, splashed her face at the sink and dried herself on a kitchen towel.
She had no desire to climb the stairs to the bedroom of her childhood and early pubescence—still frozen in time from when she’d gone to boarding school in Durban at thirteen—in case she encountered one of her parents and was subjected to the inevitable interrogation about why she hadn’t come home last night, so she went into the living room.
Crossing to the window seat—a favorite haunt of hers as a child—she saw the 1960s Anne Sexton anthology, Live or Die, lying on the cushions. It was dog-eared and a couple of pages had come adrift of the spine through the years of mother immersing herself in these tormented, confessional poems.
She found the silence of the house oppressive and went to the stereo perched beneath shelves of long playing records—her father scorning cassettes and CDs. A recording of the Ray Conniff Singers lay on the turntable, visible through its closed plastic lid.
As a child she’d been forbidden to touch the stereo on pain of death, and she presumed the ban was still in place, which didn’t bother her as, on the infrequent weekends when she came home, she spent her time listening to reggae on the Walkman that lay upstairs in her bedroom.
She lifted the lid and sheathed the disc in its sleeve that she returned to the shelf and spent a moment pondering her father’s record collection before she withdrew another LP—Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies”, surely an unwanted gift—and settled it on the turntable.
She made sure that the headphones, enormous puffy things with a coiled black cable, were plugged in and slipped them over her ears.
A slim burnished metal rectangle beside the turntable sported a couple of buttons and dials and she jabbed at what she assumed was the power switch, triggering a low and somehow ominous hum. A green light bloomed and the needle of one of the dials twitched.
So far so good.
When she lifted the curved tone arm from its little cradle the record started to rotate slowly.
Holding her breath—still fearful of her cold, controlling father—she gently lowered the stylus onto the grooved vinyl.
There was a sucking hiss, like distant surf breaking, before the sweet, dissonant piano filled the air. Tanya settled into the armchair reserved for her father’s hours of solitary music appreciation and closed her eyes. The melancholy beauty of the Satie, in combination with the night of debauch and vague depression from the hangover sent her to sleep.
She woke as the record ended and, with a series of delicate clucks, the turntable arm lifted and settled itself back in its cradle, the ticking of the clock almost menacing when she removed the headphones
As Tanya rose from the chair the semen of the nameless man dripped from her. She turned off the stereo and stowed the headphones, surprised that her father hadn’t already come down and caught her in the act.
She was desperate for a shower and there was nothing for it but to climb the stairs, her limbs aching and her lower regions sending out distress signals as her jeans chafed at them.
She had to pass her parents’ bedroom en route to hers and was about to creep past the door that stood ajar when s
omething gave her pause. The porcelain figurine of a Victorian shepherdess that had forever adorned her mother’s vanity table lay on the wooden floor of the landing, the bonneted head severed from the body and the arm carrying the crook lying in pieces nearby.
A low hum reached Tanya’s ears and when a meat fly landed on her bare arm she realized what she was hearing was the insistent moan of scores of those insects. She stepped toward the door, the bed invisible from where she stood, a shaft of hard sunlight striking a pale oyster wall hung with three antique Chinese brushpaintings of mist-clad mountains, rivers and waterfalls.
Something, some kind of decoration, was draped atop the paintings and Tanya wondered what had inspired her mother to this atypical frivolity.
Her mind, still fogged by booze, was slow to process that what she was seeing was no decoration: it was a length of human intestine.
This realization struck her when she nudged open the door revealing the charnel house within.
Her parents, in their night clothes, lay side by side on the double bed with its ornate brass head and footboards. Their bodies and the bed, floor and walls were awash with their blood, and the room seethed with a black shroud of meat flies.
Her mother and father had been hacked to death and the hacking had not stopped until limbs had been nearly severed and bone and viscera exposed.
The killer had then removed her father’s intestines and draped them on the picture frames, letting them dangle down to the black lacquer wood vanity where a bottle of her mother’s Arpège lay shattered, the cloying perfume mixing with the ripe stench of blood and shit.
Tanya, vomit spewing from her mouth and landing on the face of Robert Mugabe, retreated from the room and half fell down the stairs, screaming, the Zulu servants in their crisp white uniforms who’d just entered the kitchen staring at her in horror.
The police—blond, shovel-faced Afrikaners and their stolid black underlings—arrived and within an hour a Zulu laborer surrendered himself and the bloody cane cutting panga he’d used to slaughter her parents.
The police explained that her father had fired the man the day before and the worker had poured a bottle of homebrewed rotgut alcohol down his throat and smoked enough Durban Poison—the hallucinogenic cannabis grown in these parts—to send an impi of Zulu warriors into battle and had entered the house after midnight and done what he’d done.
If Tanya hadn’t been rattling the springs of the golf pro’s Mercedes-Benz she would have been hacked to pieces, too.
For a while she had felt numb.
Then she’d felt terror and an all-encompassing dread had invaded her at a cellular level and changed forever the way she viewed the world and lived her life.
She’d buried her parents and bolted to Johannesburg, her inheritance guaranteeing her financial if not psychological well-being, and used anger to mask her fear, over the years hardening and souring, shielding herself from the world with a rage that was all-consuming, and when she became known as a ballbreaking cunt she’d worn that handle with pride.
Anything but a fucking victim.
But she’d awakened each day waiting for the bloodshed to come.
And ten years ago in Johannesburg, when she’d stared down the muzzle of a carjacker’s pistol in her driveway, she’d been convinced it was there.
But the carjackers had fled and so had she: escaping the madness of Africa for this country that she detested.
But it had come now and, as Tanya lay on the floor of the house in Arizona, watching through slit eyes as the masked men moved around her living room, hearing the low rumble of their voices, she tried to fight her way to consciousness, knowing she had to face down this terror to free herself, but a riptide took her and swept her back into the darkness.
6
When Turner, his eyes still on his unconscious wife and his mind in freefall, failed to realize that Bone, standing in the doorway near the corpse, had addressed him, the thickset man stepped forward and slapped him through the face to get his attention.
“Hey, fucker.”
Turner gaped at him, lifting a hand to his stinging cheek.
Bone pointed at Peter.
“Get this sack of shit into the house.”
Turner didn’t move and Bone slapped him again, hard enough to make him stagger.
“You hearin me?”
Turner nodded and, choking back his fear and distaste, kneeled, grabbing the body by the ankles. Peter wore tennis socks under wine-colored Dockers that were buffed to a neurotic sheen.
Turner dragged Peter into the house, the wound in his neck gaping on veins and vertebra as his head bounced when it crossed the threshold, a thick crimson swathe of blood following in his wake.
Lucy, glimpsing the dead man for the first time, screamed and twisted her way out of Bekker’s grip, running toward the front door.
She slipped in the blood and plunged to the wooden floor, panting in terror.
Bone, the knife still in his hand, bent at the waist and grabbed her, the blade sweeping toward the girl’s throat.
Turner launched himself at Bone, hitting him hard enough in the chest to get him to drop the child and the knife and tumble toward the floor.
Bone threw out an arm to break his fall and used it as a piston to drive his body upward, gaining his feet in a surprisingly athletic bound resembling a street dance move.
As he stood he drew his automatic and pointed it at Turner, who crouched, winded, keeping himself between the gunman and his child.
Bone’s finger tightened on the trigger.
“Wait,” Bekker said, seizing Lucy again, dragging her away from the door. “He’s the only one who knows the combination to the safe.”
For a few long seconds the pistol didn’t waver, then Bone lowered it.
“Later,” he said to Turner.
Lucy squirmed in Bekker’s arms and he said, “I wish to Christ the females in this goddam house would learn to behave.”
He squeezed the girl tight enough to make her gasp and she stared at Turner as her eyes teared up and he wondered if, finally, he had been presented with the tab for a very old debt.
7
“Where the fuck did Jo’burg go, anyway?”
Turner, sipping at a dainty little silkworm of a spliff to soothe his nerves, his soiled Chuck Taylors up on the dash of the Toyota HiAce, gazed through the open side window as tracts of identical condos fortified with spike-topped walls and humming electric fences, gave way to an endless tumble of tin shacks sprouting from the sour veld like a fungus.
“It went to Africa, my friend, while we were looking the other fuckin way,” Bekker said, driving the van hard, throwing it at gaps in the rush hour traffic, his Ray-Bans reflecting twin sagging suns. “And it’s time for us to get our skinny white asses out of this fuckin country.”
The cop was wired, chain smoking and road raging since Turner had left his bike parked in the shadow of a puke-yellow McDonald’s arch at the bottom of Beyers Naudé Drive and climbed aboard the dented white van, the provenance of which had neither been questioned nor explained.
Turner sucked the last life from the joint, the hot ash at its end burning his lips and fingers and flicked it through the window, holding the smoke in his lungs until he coughed explosively, longing for something more powerful, longing to surrender himself to a riptide of chemicals that would degauss his memory, leaving him free, for a few hours at least, of the image of Mr. Paul’s hammer reducing the skull of the naked white man to something soggy and wet.
But he’d sworn to Bekker that he was going to get his shit together and had, by and large, succeeded.
A few joints and a belt or two of whiskey each day could be forgiven as a necessary palliative, the only workable alternative to the bucket full of snot he would have become if he’d gone cold turkey.
“You know when I made up my mind that I was gonna leave all this behind and get the fuck out?” Bekker said, the van shaking and rattling as he overtook a waddling mini-bus taxi sw
ollen with black commuters.
“When?”
“When I watched my father spit a kudu turd fifty feet.”
Turner squinted at Bekker.
“You ever hear of dung spitting?” the cop asked. “The sport of my noble fuckin ancestors?”
Turner nodded.
“I saw it once on TV. Some fat Afrikaner guys in shorts spitting little black turds to see who could go the furthest.”
“That’s it. My miserable excuse for a father was a regional champion. Even had trophies in the living room. He used to train every evening in the backyard, my mutant mother shouting encouragement so loud her fuckin dentures would fly out.”
“Beautiful memories.”
“Kodachrome moments, my buddy.”
Bekker lifted a soft pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. Texan plain, the red star logo encircled by lasso rope. He drew a smoke out with his teeth and set fire to it with the van lighter.
“When I’d just turned eighteen I went to watch my father compete, him and a bunch of drunken in-bred trash getting wasted on peach brandy and spitting fuckin turds and, bam!, something changed for me, just like that. I knew that not a fuck was I going to end up like him.”
“The buck shit stopped with you?”
Bekker laughed smoke.
“Next day I joined the cops. A month into training I snuck out of the academy one night and held up a darkie shebeen with my service pistol. Snuck back in and nobody was any the fuckin wiser. That’s how it’s been for me ever since. Used the badge. Used the gun. And I’ve done okay. But it’s getting tighter, Englishman. This is no country for a white man. I need a score like this. A major motherfucking score that’ll get my ass over to the States.”
“You’re seriously going to America?”
“Hell, yeah. Home of the brave, Englishman, land of the free.”
“Or maybe just a supersized goatfuck?”
“Sure it is. A nation of greedy, fat overconsumers ripe for the taking. Boo-fuckin-ya.”
