The Devil's Horn

by David L. Robbins

  “No. I have to be at the park.”

  Khulu waved again, with a wrench in his dark hand. He lowered his head to the motor. Promise did not leave with the dismissal but rounded the large engine to plant a kiss on her grandfather’s ear. He showed white teeth. His almond eyes crinkled in the merry way Promise imagined Khulu’s daughter’s, her own mother, might have done. She left, careful not to track through the grease on the concrete floor.

  In the busy street again, under the climbing heat, Promise turned down an alley. Barefoot children scuffled after a ball, not playing a game but just sharing kicks back and forth. Promise wanted to kick with them, but she was older and wore boots and did not fit in their fun.

  The structures here were huts of scavenged materials, some wood, some plastic corrugation, cinder blocks, salvaged bricks; the roofs were canted to make the rain run off behind them into the ditch where some urinated or shit. Many huts were rickety and leaned against a neighbor. Each was oddly tidy, because the women ran this alley, swept it and ordered the life of it. None of the people who lived in these shelters called them homes.

  Promise stopped outside Gogo’s red door, swung wide open for ventilation. Inside, the rooms were dim, the electricity was spotty on this alley. The blue water cistern beside the door had been filled; the truck came twice weekly. Gogo’s wood-slat walls were not ramshackle but painted, straight, and sound, as were the walls of the shanties to the left and right. Gogo harangued her neighbors to keep their premises up.

  Above the alley, above Gogo’s shanty, on the green hillside overlooking the township, the claps of hammering filtered down to Promise. A concrete truck worked its way up a gravel road to the new development, to pour pads and sidewalks for the first houses going up. The government was doing this for Nyongane. The houses on the hill would be tiny, not much bigger than the huts below, but solid and real. They wouldn’t leak or fall down, they’d catch the breezes and see far beyond the township; they would not shame their occupants. The homes’ first owners would be those township people who could put down a deposit of fifty thousand rand, then pay the rest, almost half a million rand. Only a few in Nyongane could do this, and it would be their life savings. Some families pooled their money with others. They would continue living crowded, but they would live up there.

  Promise stepped inside Gogo’s open door. She did not announce herself but spent a moment without her grandmother knowing she was visiting. Gogo moved about in the second room, humming while changing bedsheets. Promise set the cooler on the floorboards; this floor was one of the prides of the alley. A decade ago, Khulu had scavenged the wood from an abandoned railroad cattle car. He’d planed the boards by hand to remove splinters and painted them dusky rose, then set them on tarred timbers to lift his wife above the dirt.

  Promise tiptoed through the sitting room to the kitchen, the smallest room of the shanty. A kettle simmered, still hot on the gas burner. She poured herself a china cup and dropped in the next-to-last tea bag. Promise eased toward the sounds of Gogo snapping linens and humming in her lovely voice. In nooks and crannies, on the tabletops, stood Gogo’s collection of black glass sculptures, all of African women. Some were bottles, some lamps. Gogo decorated with these figurines and artwork of female warriors, black as the points of their spears, and with photos of her dead children and Promise.

  Promise stepped into the little bedroom. Gogo stopped tucking a pillow into a clean case and put her hands to her tiny hips. She raised an eyebrow to ask, You do not announce yourself in my house? Promise offered her the fresh cup of tea. Gogo reached knobby hands for it and sat on the made bed, patting for Promise to sit with her.

  Gogo’s sandals did not reach the floorboards. She was a short woman, narrow from face to feet, winnowed by a life of labor and loss. She held an energy that seemed to consume her as she aged. Gogo was a black Zulu with nothing brown about her, not even her eyes. Gogo, like Khulu, had all her teeth; her tongue was her strength, the way Khulu’s arms were his.

  When Promise sat next to her grandmother, the mattress was so high that Promise’s own feet barely met the floor. Ever since her own childhood in the township, Gogo had raised her beds on stacks of cinder blocks, to guard against the black ghost, the spirit that seeped out of the ground in the night to take sleepers and not let them wake. Though it was understood long ago that the deaths were from the fumes of tires burned in the camp for warmth, even after the practice was stopped Gogo and the other anties in Nyongane continued to do what their mothers did and raised their beds.

  Gogo blew across the teacup, puffing her black cheeks. When she sipped, her cheeks sank deep. She swallowed and blinked into the cup.

  “Up on the hill, there will be no black ghosts.”

  “No, Gogo. There won’t.”

  “My first night there, I will sleep on the ground. Just to show it.”

  “I want to see that.”

  “I walked up there yesterday by myself. I sat under a tree. You can look a long way. Even with the men working, it felt quiet. Strange.”

  How unlikely that this small woman was huge Juma’s sister. Promise had no siblings; her parents died before that could happen. But if she’d had a brother, he would have been seven feet tall if the difference had stayed the same as it was between Juma and Gogo. Sitting on the bed, just the toes of her boots touching the red floor Khulu had made, Promise took Gogo’s hand. She held it for a long, silent moment before she put the money in it, so Gogo would not have to ask.

  Promise passed the orphanage, named Isipho, for hope. The building was the largest in the township, built of brick, supported by many world charities who put their names on the sign facing Nyongane’s one paved street. The morning was still early, and the children would be making their cots or lining up for breakfast in the courtyard with tin plates in hand and a cook spooning out oatmeal or powdered eggs. The milk, too, was powdered. Promise carried the cooler into the orphanage’s weedy front yard, to the old swing set.

  She set down the cooler before settling into one of the wooden seats. Grabbing the chains, she pushed off. Promise had to lift her legs to fly above the dirt, and in her boots and green uniform, she made the swing set squeak and sway. A white nun she did not know came to ask if Promise could be helped in some way. Promise dragged her feet to stop, but the nun said she could go on, but please be careful. The swings were rusty, there was no money to repair them if something broke. Promise had enough money in her pocket to buy a new playground. She thanked the nun, lifted the cooler, and walked on.

  The busyness of the township had waned. Most of the women stayed inside with their chores, the men at work or indolent on plastic chairs. Promise was one of only a few left in the street. She greeted no one and lengthened her strides to be done and on the bus back to the Kruger.

  The quick walk, the blocked and breezeless air in Nyongane, these made Promise anxious in a way the bush did not. She didn’t pause outside the door to Bongani’s store but rode the momentum of her nerves across his threshold.

  His shop was the third-biggest building in the township, after the orphanage and the school. It was, in fact, several huts fixed together. As Bongani had expanded his spaza, his small convenience store, over the years, he’d swallowed his neighbors. At the scrape of Promise’s heels on the clean concrete floor, Bongani turned from his shelves; from his cans, cheap toys, open bins of beets, potatoes, carrots, and roots; from a barrel of beans, a crate of rice with a scoop in it, an old scale. His dark face was smooth and pleasant, creased beside the eyes. Old Bongani was a shopkeeper, never a man to sling a tool or carry a burden. He’d long been the richest man in the township. He was unmarried, but no one questioned him in this. Before Promise was born, Bongani had killed a man who’d publicly doubted him, or so her grandmother had said.

  “Look who is here. My ranger.”

  “Sawubona, Bongani.”

  “Go outside and come in again.”

  “That’s foolish.”

  “No, I want to see you c
ome into my store.”

  “I’m sorry I haven’t visited.”

  “Then go outside. Come in. I will consider forgiving you the years you have not come.”

  Promise sighed and did as she was asked. Bongani stood tall behind the counter, hands on hips, pleased with her entrance. Promise rested the cooler on the counter between them.

  “Welcome, Nomawethu. You’re grown up.”

  Bongani had barely changed in the five years since Promise had left the township. He looked well kept and pleased, as if he’d just finished a meal. Perhaps Gogo might have looked like this, full and smooth in her gathering years, if Bongani had won her. Bongani did not have Khulu’s muscles, but seemed to have everything else.

  “Thank you.”

  “I must tell you. Those are words I should have heard a while ago. I thought you would have come before now. I see you, you know, when you visit. You walk right past my shop. Like I’ve done nothing. Like you owe nothing.”

  The gentleness of Bongani’s features faded. His wide eyes narrowed, his lips tucked in. Promise had not come to upset him, but with the opposite intent. She didn’t know what she’d done wrong. She tried to keep her voice soft, but she was an orphan and a ranger and could only do so much.

  “What do I owe you?”

  “This is a joke, yes?”

  “No.”

  “Did your Gogo not tell you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I can’t believe I have to tell you. After all these years.”

  “The years are gone, Bongani. I am here. Tell me now.”

  “You owe me that uniform.”

  “That’s . . .” Promise could not complete the sentence, confounded.

  “Of course.” Bongani slapped the countertop, not hard but enough to toll the suddenness of his change in manner. “I know why she kept it from you.”

  “Kept what?”

  “She wanted you to believe it was him.”

  “Bongani.”

  “It was me. I made the call to SANParks. I got you into the game-ranger program. One slot in twenty, that’s what it was. I paid money to get you on the list. I even bought your first bus ticket. He couldn’t do that for you. I did.” Bongani snorted, an ugly spitting noise.

  Promise snatched the cooler off the counter and whirled for the shop door. She halted on the edge of the sunlight, did not step into it. Up on the green hill, trucks and men cobbled together the first new homes, every house to be solid and straight, high above everything that held the township down. In the doorway, Promise turned back to Bongani, who’d said nothing more and would have let her go. Again, she rested the cooler on the counter.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “You did nothing wrong, child. You made me proud, that’s all. I’ll talk with her about this.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “And why should I not? I will tell you this. She asked me to do it. And she turned my kindness into a lie.”

  Promise slid the cooler toward him.

  “This is for you.”

  “For me?”

  Bongani took from one wall a toy, a plastic water pistol. He put it down next to the cooler.

  “A gift for a gift.”

  It was a silly gesture, and Bongani made a forgiving smile. She took the toy off the counter.

  “You have a real gun in the bush?” Bongani asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you shoot people with it? Poachers?”

  “Others have. I haven’t.”

  “Could you?”

  “Yes.”

  Bongani covered his mouth in mock shock. He surveyed the cooler and reached for it.

  “What have you brought me?”

  “Muti.”

  Bongani’s hands stalled on the cooler.

  “That is a powerful gift, Nomawethu.”

  “I know you’re working with the government. For the new houses on the hill.”

  Old Bongani cocked his head. He drew out the word as he replied. “Yes.”

  “You’re in charge of the names and applications from the township.”

  Bongani tapped his fingertips on the cooler. He seemed wary.

  “And I will be the first to move up there. Trust that.”

  Promise touched the back of Bongani’s hand, and with the touch cast to Bongani her hope.

  “Open it.”

  Wide-eyed in wonder, Bongani slid aside the cooler’s top. He tapped on the iced packet Promise had wrapped in foil from the kitchen of her ranger station.

  “What have we here?”

  Bongani laid the crinkled package on the counter. He plucked at the foil to peel it back. When the first black nail emerged, he paused to nod gravely, marveling.

  “A sangoma.”

  Bongani uncovered the rest of the severed front feet of the aardvark. The beast’s cold paws had been neatly cut, bone and meat even. The claws curled as though still digging.

  The old man spread apart all the foil, then flattened his hands on the counter. He spoke without looking up.

  “You are trying to heal.”

  Promise rolled the plastic water gun in her hands. She set it on the countertop to return it, to ask for a far greater gift.

  “Yes.”

  Bongani picked up one of the claws. He scraped the hard, dead tips against his open palm.

  “Forty years.”

  “Gogo has told me.”

  “He took her from me. He lied.”

  “I cannot say, Bongani.”

  “I loved her. She chose me first.”

  “I know. It’s been a very long time.”

  Bongani put down the claw.

  “Has it?”

  From a pocket, Promise pulled the last of Juma’s cash, ten thousand rand rolled in a rubber band. She set this on the opened foil. Louder than the muti, the money spoke out for healing.

  Promise rested a hand on his wrist.

  “Please, Bongani. Let them have a house on the hill. Don’t stop them.”

  Bongani lingered under her hand, moving his eyes between the claws and the bills.

  He straightened. Promise reeled back her touch. Bongani stowed the cash in a drawer. He folded the foil over the claws; he would put them in a mesh cage to keep away the birds and rodents, then hang them on his roof to dry. He might sell them, or he might wear them. A sangoma had power.

  Bongani reached across the counter to caress Promise’s cheek.

  “Did she ask you to do this, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your grandmother.” Bongani blinked at some memory or a tear or both. He lowered his hand. “And if I consider this? Where will they get the money? The mechanic can’t buy her a house.”

  Promise took the toy gun off the counter. She’d give it to a child at the orphanage on her way out of Nyongane. She turned for the shop door and the sun, speaking over her shoulder.

  “I’ll buy it.”

  Chapter 6

  Opu rode in the back of the chopper with the bodies. Both poachers had fouled themselves in their dying, and at sunrise Opu cleaned them as well as he could, using the last of his canteen. The poachers’ blood had dried in the cool night and no longer stank, but even so the pilot and Neels left their window vents open in the copter for the thirty-minute flight to Skukuza.

  A bakkie met them at the airport, come for the bodies. Neels and Opu caught a ride in the pickup bed, along with the corpses, to the main headquarters. There, the poachers were locked in cold storage with a dozen more dead Mozambicans awaiting postmortems and identification. Neels and Opu entered the air-conditioning of the offices with rifles strapped across their backs. They stepped into the intelligence room to make their report.

  Karskie, a young man Neels barely knew, did not stand when he and Opu walked into the drab room, an office made brown by cheap furniture and wood paneling. Karskie faced many computer screens, and when he looked up, his grin was sporty, his hair combed to a centered ridge. Neels ha
d only spoken to Karskie once before; at the golf course a few evenings back, they’d been at the same table with a dozen others from the main office. Karskie was not a ranger but a contractor, a numbers genius brought in by SANParks last month just before he was let go by a Jo’burg university. Neels recalled being satisfied with how the big boy handled his share of the drinking. That evening, a lion had roared out of the darkness from far across the lake, maybe three kilometers away, but the throaty chuffs filled the night, rising above the cicadas and monkey screams. Karskie had left the table alone to go sit beside the lake and listen.

  Neels sat in front of him. Opu remained standing. Karskie pointed.

  “Is that blood on your shoulders?”

  “Someone else’s.”

  “Ah. Well.” The boy lowered plump hands to one of his keyboards. “So you had contact. What happened?”

  Karskie typed at an impressive speed while Neels related how he and Opu had followed a set of tracks east, away from the carcass, and what he’d found in the road at the border. Opu had shot one poacher in the dry ravine, Neels shot another, one got away. Neels made no mention of interrogating the poacher. To do so would be to admit the poacher had been alive. Karskie was new. Neels didn’t know where the boy stood on this.

  Karskie entered data as he asked questions. Where did the poachers cross into the park? Exactly where had they been spotted and engaged? What time? Was there a description of the one who escaped?

  The big boy typed blithely, dispassionate.

  “How many firearms were recovered?”

  “One.”

  Karskie stopped his fingers.

  “One.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Two corpses were brought in.”

  “That’s how many moers we shot.”

  Karskie tucked his tongue behind his lower lip, not disengaging from Neels’s hard gaze.

  “The nature of the contact?”

  Neels had never been asked this, and did not like it. Behind him, Opu shuffled his feet.

  “Beg pardon?” Neels asked.

  “When you encountered the poachers, what transpired?”

  “Transpired.”

  “What did they do? What did you do? What was said?”