The Death of Rex Nhongo

by C. B. George

  “I’m sorry, little bird. You wanna fly?”

  Thas when I hear my dad callin from in the house. He callin, “Rosie? Rosie?” An I hear Gladys too, her voice tight like a washing-line, “Rosie?”

  “Daddy?” I call back. “Up here. Come an see.”

  He go, “Rosie?”

  An I go, “Up here!”

  I gonna remember this place. Next time I play hide and seek, this is where I gonna hide and iss gonna be real hard to find me. Real hard. Only trouble is, Daddy now come back out on the path an I go, “Here I am!” an he look up, so now there one person who know my hidin place. His face look like he seen a ghost an he say a bad word.

  Daddy use to say bad words all the time, but he stop when Momma got sick. Mebbe iss cos Mom not here any more an stayin with Gogo and Kulu. One time, while Daddy makin eggs the way I like em, I go, “How come you cookin?”

  An he go, “While your mom’s not here, I’m going to be, like, both Mom and Dad.”

  So mebbe thas why he don hardly curse no more.

  While he stand over the pan, he look at me and go, “When Mom gets better, how would it be if we had two homes, like Dad’s house and Mom’s house? And sometimes you stay with me and sometimes you stay with Mom. That’d be fun, right?”

  An I shake my head an I say, “No.” Then I go, “Don you love Momma no more?”

  He stare at those eggs like they givin him a problem an his face say a whole lotta things I don unnerstan. Then he say, “Of course I do. But just because you love someone, you don’t have to live together. Like, you love Gogo, right? But you don’t live with her.”

  I don say nuthin, but I still don unnerstan an I feel like I might start cryin. Daddy go, “Your mom and I still love each other. We just don’t love each other like that.”

  “Like what?”

  Daddy sigh like he don wanna conversate no more. He go, “Like we want to live in the same house.” Then, “Don’t cry, little bird. It’s OK.”

  I try to stop cryin, but iss hard cos I feel real sad. Daddy leave the eggs an he give me a big hug. He go, “Your mom an I both love you, little bird. We will both always love you.” But I still feel real sad, cos he don say they always gonna love me like that. An I don wanna live in a house on my own cos I jus a little girl.

  60

  Jerry drinks four or five beers before moving on to Scotch. He doesn’t even like Scotch. He has bought a packet of cigarettes and smoked one. He doesn’t like smoking.

  He is feeling numb and curiously detached and it isn’t just the alcohol. Rather, he has the sense that his life has always been moving towards this point and, now that he can chart the inevit­ability, there seems little reason to be surprised, angry or upset. He can picture April fucking the American and those images certainly cause a pang of distress. But he also seems quite able to choose not to think about it.

  Surely, he thinks, it is the cuckold’s lot to consider his wife having better sex with a better man and to feel the hot knife of emasculation. But Jerry feels too old or just too jaded for such livid sensitivity.

  Jerry knows himself as a simple, emotionally clumsy person, but he is empathetic and he understands April’s behavior at least as well as his own. He thinks without judgment that people do what they do in response to stimuli. When Theo is hungry, he screams. As you get older, the deterministic equation becomes longer, but no more complex. April was hungry, so she screamed too.

  Jerry understands his wife’s infidelity, but he can’t live with it. He has to leave. But where will he go? He wants to go home, but he has no home, neither in Zimbabwe nor the UK.

  He considers divorce. Presumably, as the primary breadwinner, April will have to provide him with some kind of stipend. His humiliation will be financially compensated. He considers leaving this country, leaving his son. He considers a small flat and a job at a UK hospital. He considers watching a band with Ant, the Swiss PA / graphic novelist and, perhaps, one of her girlfriends. His imagination twists with horror. He pictures the noise, the excitement, the youth. How strange, how human, that what looked so enticing just this morning now appears like some kind of nightmare. Worst of all, he pictures a young woman regarding him with an approximation of hope. He cannot deal with hope. He believes he is hard-wired to disappoint.

  Opposite him, Patson is sipping a second beer. They have barely exchanged a word. Jerry has tried to initiate a conversation about football, the global language. But it turns out neither of them has much interest in football. They are two different species contemplating one another uncomfortably across a dirty watering hole—a hippo and an antelope, a crocodile and a painted dog, a mosquito and an elephant. If he were with a fellow Brit—any Brit, of any proximity—they would each know what to do: How are you doing? / Tough day. / Tough day? / My wife’s fucking around. / Fuck! / Fuck is right. / Sorry, mate, man, dude, bruv. / No, I’m sorry. / You want a drink? / Sure. / You want to talk about it? / No, I don’t want to talk about it. And then he’d talk about it. But Patson? What would he think? What would he say?

  Actually, what would he say?

  Jerry sips his Scotch. “Tough day,” he says, and Patson looks up. “My wife: she’s been fucking around.”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle?”

  “My wife. She’s been seeing another man. Unfaithful.”

  Patson regards him steadily. Jerry assumes he’s made him feel uncomfortable, but he doesn’t look uncomfortable. He says, “I’m sorry, Uncle.”

  “‘I’m sorry, Uncle’—is that all you can say? Is that all you’ve got to say?”

  Patson sits back in his chair. “Have you spoken to the father? Someone must talk to her. You need to speak to the family.”

  “Right,” Jerry says, and he starts laughing. His laughter is cut short when he belches up a mouthful of bile. He collars a passing waitress. He says, “Two more.” He lights another cigarette and immediately stubs it. He is beginning to feel a little nauseous.

  A woman approaches the table. She says, “Buy a beer for me and my friend?” She gestures airily behind her.

  Jerry looks at her. She is wearing a short skirt and implausible heels that take her all the way to five foot four. She is somewhere between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. She looks a bit like a model and a bit like a boxer. Jerry shrugs. He says, “Sure.”

  The woman goes to round up her friend. The drinks arrive. Jerry sips more Scotch. He is now definitely feeling sick. Patson is watching him. Jerry says, “What?”

  Patson nods across the room. He says, “You don’t want this woman. There are plenty of nice women. This one? She is a prostitute.”

  “I know she’s a prostitute,” Jerry says. “So?”

  “Let me take you home, Uncle.”

  Jerry stares at the taxi driver. His defiance quickly melts and he blinks his gratitude. He says, “OK.”

  He leaves a fifty on the table. The prostitute returns with her prostitute friend. She says, “Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  The prostitute addresses Patson in Shona—a stream of incomprehensible invective. Clearly she holds him responsible for the murungu’s departure. Patson responds in kind and ushers Jerry towards the door. The prostitute tries to grab Jerry’s arm, but the taxi driver pushes her away. So this is what it looks like to desire me, Jerry thinks.

  In the car, Jerry takes the front seat for the first time in some peculiar nod to a newfound camaraderie. But they don’t speak. Jerry is drunker than he’d realized—you don’t get this drunk unless you’re drunker than you’d realized. His stomach is churning and he begins to lurch in and out of consciousness. He wishes Patson would drive a bit slower. The nausea opens his eyes. The cab is climbing the hill to the junction of Enterprise Road and Glenara Avenue. He says, “Stop the car!”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle?”

  “Stop the car!”

  Patson pulls in on Enterprise Road, two wheels on the grass verge. Jerry falls out of the passenger door. Cars are streaming past. He feels
a drunken need for dignity, so stumbles a few steps into the undergrowth. He hears Patson’s voice behind him, but he doesn’t hear the words. He is extensively sick. Even as he vomits, he thinks this is probably for the best: the alcohol has barely rested inside him, he’ll be OK in a minute. He is bent double, hands resting on his knees. His eyes are streaming and he’s spitting bile.

  Suddenly, he is aware of a man next to him. He assumes it’s Patson. It isn’t Patson. He is cracked over the head by what later turns out to be a Coke bottle. He crumples face-first into his own vomit. He is still conscious. He feels several hands going through his pockets.

  In the taxi, Patson sees the shadowy figures approach. He shouts out of the open door at the murungu, but he’s in no state to listen. He slides out of the car and from the roadside screams abuse at the men. One of them turns to look at him. Patson can’t see his face, but he sees the smile. And he sees the bottle brought up and brought down and the murungu collapse.

  He has no time to think. He dives back into the taxi and reaches under the passenger seat for the small drawer where he keeps the wheel spanner. His hand settles instead on the gun in the place where, unknown to him, Gilbert has left it. He has no time to think. He emerges from the car with the gun raised. He shouts a warning. Only one of the robbers looks up. Patson pulls the trigger and hits the man clean in the chest. He falls dead. The noise is surprising, both deafening and curiously contained. The dead man’s partners flee.

  Jerry gets to his knees. He’s spitting blood. He rests a hand on something and checks for his wallet and his phone. They are both there. The robbers got nothing. He comprehends that he is levering himself up on a corpse. He looks back to where Patson is still holding the gun, raised and shaking. Where the hell did the taxi driver get a gun? He says, “Fuck.”

  The first person to stop is a white Zimbabwean in a HiLux. Jerry watches him usher Patson to sit in the back seat of the taxi. He then talks to Jerry. Presumably, he’s speaking English, but Jerry can’t understand a word of it. Others stop too: two young men in a brand new Mercedes, an older man in an older Mercedes, an ET spewing fascinated onlookers. All these people appear to be arguing with each other. About what, Jerry has no idea.

  The police are on the scene remarkably quickly. How quickly, Jerry couldn’t say. It might be three minutes, it might be twenty, but it strikes him as remarkable. There are so many police. Did they all come in one car? It doesn’t seem possible. They are solicitous towards Jerry, three of them, standing around him, the most senior repeating, “Don’t say anything. We must get you to a doctor. Don’t say anything.”

  Four more have dragged Patson from the taxi. They have him in cuffs. One slaps him violently and for no apparent reason across the face. “Fuck!” Jerry says. “Hold on.” He stumbles over. He is aware for the first time that he is covered in puke. He stands face to face with Patson. He says, “Don’t worry. I know what to do,” before Patson is bundled into the back of the police car.

  Jerry takes out his phone. He frantically scrolls his address book. He finds the number and makes the call. He doesn’t know whether he is drunk or concussed, but he struggles to be understood. He is finally understood and feels a surge of relief. He turns to Patson, looking at him through the window of the police car. He gives him a reassuring nod—Don’t worry.

  In the back of the police car, Patson’s racing heart gradually slows and he has time to think. He thinks about killing a man, about whether he regrets it. He doesn’t. He thinks about Fadzai, the kids, his unborn child, and finds himself considering hopes he never knew he had. Now he regrets what he has done. In the wing mirror, he sees another car pull in. He watches the murungu talking to the driver through the window. Mr. Jones told him not to worry. He wants to believe him. The driver gets out and Patson immediately recognizes the CIO, Mandiveyi. He thinks that he may die tonight.

  61

  Shawn is driving too fast. He is tired and on edge. He needs a shower. The last few days have been tough: sleeping in the pick-up, dealing with the panners, scrambling to find the last two hundred grams he needs to make his first kilo for the Israelis.

  The makorokoza in Murehwa have wised up and, without Nyengedza at his side, they drove a hard bargain. He paid way over what he expected and again at the mill where the Rhodie owner sensed his desperation and demanded a bigger kickback. Shawn knows he needs to develop some new areas, some new relationships, perhaps even take on someone else to share the burden and maximize profits. It would have to be another foreigner. He considers Jerry Jones—April’s husband seems competent and unambitious. Shawn is so wrapped up in his scheming that he sees nothing untoward in approaching the husband of the woman he’s fucking. Neither does he consider for one moment that anybody could be put off by the illegitimacy and immorality of his actions (or, in fact, that his actions are illegitimate and immoral). Surely they will, like him, just think of the money. Think of the money!

  Shawn knows his feelings of urgency have no real grounds. It’s not as if the Israelis gave him a deadline for an initial sale. But he believes he needs to hook it up quickly to show that he’s for real. And, besides, the sooner he starts to make serious paper, the sooner he can get out of this shithole.

  Shawn is running math in his head—income and timeframes. He’s thinking one year, eighteen months max. He will not skulk back to New York with his tail between his legs. He plans to return a man of means. He will buy a place uptown. He will start some kind of consultancy, drawing on his African experi­ence. He will send Rosie to the best private school. Without even thinking about it, Shawn has already written his wife out of his and his daughter’s future. He will do as he pleases. Kuda has fucked up. Kuda is fucked up. She has his sympathy, but his sympathy is cursory.

  He is stopped at a police roadblock on the Mazowe road just outside town. He has five rough taels of gold bullion in the backpack behind the passenger seat. He has his buyer’s license and can justify his cargo if not its destination, but he would rather not have the conversation.

  The cop inspects the truck before leering goofily at the window. He speaks in rapid Shona. Shawn slowly turns his head. He says, “I don’t speak Shona, bruh.”

  The cop considers him warily. He says, “Where are you from?”

  “The States.”

  “You are an American?”

  “Yeah. I’m an American.”

  The cop considers this worthy of a handshake, then tells Shawn that the dates on his insurance sticker, written in ballpoint pen, are unreadable and he is to pay a twenty-dollar fine.

  Shawn struggles to keep his temper. He says, “You going to write me a ticket for that shit?”

  The cop smiles, toothy and obsequious. He shrugs, as if to say, “We don’t have to go there.” Shawn slips him a five and says, “So go buy yourself a Coke or something.”

  Shawn pulls away. It’s the toadying he can’t handle, the Uncle Tom shit. This fucking place. These fucking people.

  He’s back at the house by nine thirty. As he walks inside, he thinks he hears his daughter’s voice—“Daddy!” His mind is playing tricks on him.

  He heads straight for the study. Turning on a corridor light, he’s confronted by the damp stain on the ceiling and walls, and the stepladder set up beneath the hatch to the roof. He says, “What the fuck?” He ducks into the study and locks the gold in the small safe.

  He finds Gladys in the living room, rising groggily from beneath a thick blanket. She says, “Good evening, sir.”

  He says, “What the fuck, Gladys? The corridor?”

  “It is a leak from the geyser, sir. We turned it off. We left the ladder in case you want to see for yourself.”

  He stares at the maid. What the hell’s he going to see for himself at this time of night? How the fuck’s he going to take a shower? Gladys averts her eyes. He knows that she’s scared of him, tentative around his flashing temper, which she doesn’t understand. He shakes his head. He’s too tired for this shit. He says, “Rosie? Mrs. Jone
s drop her off?”

  “She is sleeping, sir.”

  He nods. He tells Gladys she can go. She gathers her blanket. He pokes his head into his daughter’s room. He is thinking about tomorrow. He will call Feinstein first thing. He doesn’t want the gold in the house longer than absolutely necessary. He is looking at Rosie’s bed. He is momentarily confused. He turns on the light. His heart freezes, crashes, reboots. He catches Gladys at the back door. He says, “Where’s Rosie?” The confusion and terror in her face only amplifies his own.

  They stalk through the house, room to room, shouting his daughter’s name, until they are halted by her voice from somewhere distant and above them—“Daddy! Up here! Come an see!” Shawn’s eyes climb the stepladder to the dark open hatch, but the voice comes from further away than that. He runs into the garden.

  Shawn sees her standing on the sloping roof above the front door. She has climbed out through a small gap where the gardener has removed three tiles, presumably to let in some light while he switched off the geyser. Shawn says, “Jesus fuck!”

  Rosie hears the horror in his voice and sees it in his face and her smile evaporates. She says, “Wossa matter?”

  Shawn is running math in his head—the height of the roof, the time it will take him to get to her. Gladys is standing next to him. She screams and cries. It doesn’t help. He says, “Shut up.” Then, to Rosie, “Stay there, little bird. Don’t move.”

  But his daughter is now terrified and her eyes are wide. She turns and attempts to climb back inside. She loses her footing and slips down across the tiles. She makes a small sound of surprise: “Oh!”

  Shawn jumps forward as she falls. He hasn’t time to position himself. One foot catches him in the chin, but he somehow manages to extend an arm across Rosie’s midriff and take her full weight on his chest. He collapses into a jarring sitting pos­ition and lets out a horrible sound of pained exhalation as his lung collapses beneath his ribcage. He can’t stop his backwards momentum and his head cracks the ground with enough force to snap his neck. Rosie says, “Daddy? Daddy?” Gladys screams. The gardener comes running.