Cruel Crazy Beautiful World

by Troy Blacklaws

  And I wonder about this yellow lab. I wonder why they sacrificed that young harbour dog, the Rhodesian, and left this dud old dog on death row. Perhaps that dog was friskier bait and they had to lure a shark for Leonardo DiCaprio. Maybe they fear sharks would spit him out as he’s all hide and sinew. Or perhaps the priest can work some kind of voodoo too. I hope his prayers keep the lab afloat in a fourteen-degree sea so cold it knifes to the bone.

  Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub. And who do you think they be? The zen-darter, the floozy-killer and me, all floating in a Zodiac.

  Curious seals glide under the Zodiac or bark at us from their island.

  Through binoculars I see their Zodiac come into focus. Two men and the dog. The dog puts his head into the wind and his ears flap flippantly as if he’s just going for a ride. He can’t bite at the wind as dogs do, for they have bound a bandana around his snout to muzzle him.

  They cut the motor. I fear they’ll see us peering over rocks painted white by seagull guano, but they are too focused on fiddling with the dog. They tie a ball of sardine chum to a float and then tie the float to the end of his tail. They undo the bandana just as they sling him overboard. The dog goes under, then bobs up: chin jutting out, front feet all a-frenzy, eyes glassy with fear. He paws at the Zodiac but they jab at him with an oar as if dipping a sheep. Each jab draws a yelp before he goes under. Each time I hold my breath until his head buoys up again.

  Now he doggy-paddles in circles, his feet sending telltale volts through the sea. He trolls the bobbing chum from his tail, and the chum unspools a thread of blood that a shark can smell a quarter of a mile away.

  – Lucky they didn’t cut him, chirps Dove Bait.

  Somehow lucky is hardly the word to describe a dog about to be gobbled up by a shark.

  Again the dog swims for the Zodiac. They listlessly row away from him, hands shading their eyes from the low sun.

  Phoenix is panning his camera to and fro.

  Now I see him through my binoculars: his fin slitting seamlessly through the blue.

  – Shaaark! I cry.

  Phoenix focuses his lens.

  The sea’s so limpid you can see his outline: a long, lucid, silver-skinned torpedo.

  I shiver in horror.

  – Let’s go, I beg.

  – Not yet.

  He has to catch fin and dog in the same frame.

  – Forget proof. This is crazy!

  Another few toe-pinching seconds go by.

  Now Phoenix signals a thumbs up and Dove Bait fires up the Yamaha. We gun in from due east, the bow of the Zodiac jousting high over the sea. The shark’s due west.

  The guys on the other Zodiac head out, spooked by this unforeseen twist. In the distance we see the tourist speedboat on the horizon. Today the Great White, tomorrow the Big Five. Or a tour of Soweto.

  We converge from polar points. The distance between dog and shark is now maybe a javelin throw. This shark’s a demon. He does not circle as they do in films. He zeroes in on the chum and the furry of the flapping-footed dog. Phoenix judges we won’t get to the dog in time. He fires a shot at the fin, hardly the measure of a matchbox from this angle.

  The guys in the fleeing Zodiac duck as the shot rings out.

  The bullet’s nicked a chink out of his fin, yet the shark’s unfazed. Its conical head shoots out of the water. His jaws flash a riot of jagged, jumbled teeth. He snatches the chum and shakes his head, flicking the dog to and fro as frivolously as a high sea plays with a surfboard on a leash. Another shot puts a hole through the fin. Now the shark keels to flash his white belly at the sky. Now he dives, yanking the dog down after him.

  We fly over the blood-tinted wake of the chum. I see the shark spearing down deep under us. Phoenix fires yet another shot.

  Dove Bait spins the Zodiac on the blood-tinted surface.

  Phoenix’s bald head looks sallow as a ghoul. He pockets his gun.

  – He was a good nineteen foot, Dove Bait tunes. A fucking Zeppelin!

  The float surfaces.

  I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes. I feel Phoenix mussing my hair. Then I hear Dove Bait whoop.

  The dog’s come up! His tail’s bleeding an absurdly vivid magenta. The shark’s teeth cut it down to a stump. I gaff him by his collar and yank him on board. He stands on shaky feet, then shudders the sea from his sorry hide. I go down on my knees to hug him: deaf, docked, old dog. He sneezes in my face and wags his raw stump.

  There’s no sign of the tourist boat or the Zodiac.

  In the distance, another shark hits a rogue seal. He shoots all the way out of the sea. In the sky he twists his head to gulp the squalling seal.

  I recall fishing from the harbour wall in Kalk Bay at sundown with old Zero. It was 1994. I was fourteen. We’d been in the Cape again for two years. The mood was festive. Mandela was out. Hope was kiting high. I hand-lined into the harbour and Zero cast a line out to sea. The fish I’d hooked floated among beers in the cooler box. Zero was shooting the breeze with the other coloured fisherman. Then my line sung out. The gut cut into my palm. I let go and sucked at my hand. The shark surfaced, flipped, and then he was gone. I yelled Shaaark at all the fisherman gazing out to sea. They dropped their rods to come and stare into the flat, oily green water. I measured it out in footsteps to prove it to them. Eleven feet. Heel to toe. They shook their heads and giggled toothlessly as they drifted away. Zero mussed my hair and said it was a seal that took my line. Or it got hooked in the propeller of that trawler just heading out into open sea. Afterwards my mother and sister joined us for lemon tart at the Olympia Café. My mother winked at me as if to say my wistful dreamer, my floating poet. I so wished I’d had it on film. Just the rubbing of the sole of my sister’s foot against the arc of mine saved me from crying at the injustice of it. I smiled at her and that was the last time I can recall looking into her eyes.

  Now I see another two fins gliding towards us. The clan has arrived.

  I remember Zero telling us then in that café the story of a shark landing in a boat called Lucky Jim and his flipping one of the crew into the sea.

  Suddenly the Zodiac feels far too flimsy under us.

  42

  A FARM AN HOUR out of Cape Town. Afternoon.

  Phoenix and Jabulani look down from the slopes of the Simonsberg on the mosaic of vineyards and dams below. This is the valley Cecil John Rhodes called his. He spent money he made from diamonds dug out of the hole in Kimberley on Dutch farms until all you see below you was in his hands. From here he would gaze out over Africa and remember the dry stone towers of a medieval city far to the north called Great Zimbabwe. He’d think of the birds carved out of stone that he filched from the ruins and wonder at the mystery of how empires always fall. It would have been hard for him, then, to imagine the fall of yet another empire so vast the sun never set on it ... the empire he was a lord of.

  Jabulani thinks of how he spent his youth in a country called Rhodesia, named after this same Rhodes. And how some of the whites who ruled it then had scorned the theory that Great Zimbabwe was the handiwork of native Zimbabweans. So deep did their racism go. He recalls a journey to the ruins and squinting through the glare of the sun to make out in a boulder the form of the Zimbabwean bird. This was (he had told Panganai and Tendai) the distant land of Ophir that Solomon got his cargo gold from. This was the El Dorado of Africa. He’d had a way then of spinning out a yarn: And not just gold ... but ivory and gems and monkeys and peacocks. So great was Zimbabwe. And now his country had become the joke of the world.

  And Ophir was perhaps never in Africa after all, but in India or beyond.

  Phoenix puts up a row of empty beer cans on the banks of the Good Hope dam.

  He measures out a distance along the dam wall akin to the gap between wickets in cricket. He hands Jabulani a .38 revolver.

  – I told you, I am not a cowboy. I am a teacher.

  – This is not about splitting infinitives, teacherman. If your bullet doesn’t split this Ghost Cow
boy’s skull one time, you are smoked. Capito? History.

  Jabulani squints at the beer cans. They warp in the mirage shimmering up from the sand. The gun feels cool against his scar. He fires. Sand spurts up between the cans. He glances timidly at Phoenix.

  But Phoenix just stares at the cans.

  Jabulani fires another shot. This time a can tilts as dirt flicks up. Yet the can doesn’t fall.

  Phoenix nods.

  – That girl at the Shell. Focus on her.

  Jabulani sees Ghost Cowboy’s shotgun twirl her so flippantly. The film in his head spools out at just a few frames per second. He sees how her bare feet dance a spinning tarantella. He sees the blood seep through her shirt like a blooming of red flowers. Her one hand flings out so flamboyantly you’d be forgiven for thinking Ghost Cowboy just let her go at the end of a tango. That he’ll maybe catch her flying hand and pluck her towards him again. The other hand goes to her gut as if to pick her red flowers.

  This time a can skips into the sky. Then another. And Phoenix is smiling.

  – So you can teach an old dog new tricks. You have a good eye. All you needed was to focus.

  Jabulani smiles like a schoolboy who scored well on a paper.

  Phoenix picks a peach and skins it in one skilled spiral.

  – This is the valley where I spent my boyhood. My pa picked this kind of peach. Yellow cling, they call it. So sugar-sweet and sappy, man.

  His lips slit into a rueful smile.

  – I thought this was a Cape thing: this peach. As Cape as Cape gooseberry and hanepoot. Now books tell me peaches come all the way from China and gooseberry’s South American as tango. And that the Egyptians made wine from this same hanepoot grape. Fucking Cleopatra had hanepoot. I tell you, everything you’d put your head on the block for as hard-core fact, every benchmark you think is fixed, turns out to be an illusion. Take light. You’d think it’s just waves, hey?

  Jabulani nods.

  – Whereas, in fact ...

  Phoenix lets this thought drift out of focus.

  – One fact I was taught as a schoolboy on this farm was that all the beautiful things in this world belonged to the white man: the peaches, the wine, the gold, the diamonds, the beaches. And even as a boy I thought: No. My pa planted the trees, my pa slaves on this farm under a bastard sun. I’ll pick the fruit if I want to. And then one day the white farmer zoomed up in his Isuzu pickup. I had no hope of outrunning his pickup, so I flung the yellow clings away. I hoped he’d just zoom by, but he halted. He found the peaches in the sand. They might have been windfall peaches if not for telltale tooth marks.

  Phoenix laughs a curbed, bitter laugh at his folly.

  He yelled at me to jump onto his pickup. I howled and begged but he felt no pity. I saw his son in the front of the pickup. A boy who went to a fancy school for white boys in town where they had an athletics track and a swimming pool. A boy heading for university. A boy who had his fruit cut and peeled for him by a coloured maid.

  Phoenix spits out the pip of his peach.

  – The police took me into the courtyard and gave me a hiding with a cane and then let me go. Two cuts. That was it. They said they had no time to go to court with me. They said I was lucky I’d got off lightly. The thing that stung for years was not the caning ... but that the white boy, a boy just like me who dreamed girls and blew Chappies bubbles and played football barefoot, did not glance at me on that trip to the police station. He held his stare ahead. All the way I thought: If he just looks into my eyes, just once, he’ll see himself in me and beg his father to let me go.

  Phoenix shakes his head and whistles through his teeth.

  – My father was gutted. After all the years of picking peaches, he felt he could never look the farmer in his eyes again. It was beyond him to doubt the white man’s wisdom. He said I had dirtied his name. Not long afterwards I dropped out of school and went to Cape Town. I hid in the hulls of boats in the dry docks and dreamed of sweet, forbidden peaches while hunger taunted me.

  – But how’d you get a foot in the door?

  – I did things. Cruel things. Crazy things.

  There’s a long, laden lull punctuated by the electric clicks of grasshoppers.

  – Hey Phoenix, how come Zero risks his life again and again to fight this war of his?

  – It was the year of freedom and Zero was on a high. I was not in the picture then, but this is how the story goes. His daughter took the train to Muizenberg to go swim in the sea. Miriam was always wary of her travelling alone but Zero laughed at her fears. Somewhere between Muizenberg station and the sea, maybe somewhere along the Zandvlei lagoon, a man jumped her. They found her in the dunes beyond Khayelitsha. She was bare. She had scratches on her face that looked like the claw marks of a leopard. And her hands were marred.

  Jabulani pictures Tendai so innocently hula-hooping in a world riddled with evils she can’t yet imagine.

  – The police did not find the killer. Years later, this was while I was hiding in Zero’s attic, there was a report in the paper about a young girl killed in Langa. Again they found leopard marks on her. There was a lot in the papers about the Leopard Killer striking again. Some folk thought that he literally morphed into a leopard at night. This time he was sloppy and did not see the old tramp lying zonked out in the shadows on cheap shebeen beer. He was too shit scared to come forward, this old tramp, fearing the police would put the blame on him. But I found him, and a bottle of White Horse was all it took to get the low-down on the killer: his lagging left foot, the moonlit diamond in his tooth. It took half a year to track him down. In all this time the police had no luck. Maybe they saw it as just another murder docket in this land plagued by murder.

  Jabulani looks down on the vineyards and china-blue dams below and thinks: How ironic that a land so beautiful can be so bloodthirsty.

  – But let me tell you, Jabulani, I have never seen a man beg like he did to be put out of his pain.

  He puts his hand into a pocket and pulls out a bit of paper. He gingerly unfolds it. Then Jabulani sees the sun glint in a diamond pinched between his fingertips.

  43

  CHRISTMAS EVE, 2004. HERMANUS new harbour. After dusk.

  Lotte comes in to Quayside Cabin with Al Pike and Zippo Dude.

  My heart pummels against my ribs.

  Al shoots a smile my way. To the other guys I am just a live jukebox.

  Lotte’s eyes flicker over me (the soles of my feet tingle), then she turns her gaze to the harbour where Buyu is hand-lining with the bus boys in the paling light (my feet go dead).

  I play fervidly for her and yet she never tunes in. Her eyes shift from one to another without ever falling on me. At the end of a song her fingers flutter flippantly over her palm.

  The skin of her thigh ripples like seersucker where it catches on the bench and her white dress rides high. She loves me.

  She winds a rogue thread from the hem of her dress round a finger and snaps it. She loves me not.

  She tips a pinch of salt onto the foot of the glass and dabs at it with a licked fingertip. She loves me.

  She holds a cool wine glass to her forehead. She loves me not.

  She sucks a mussel out of its black shell. She stabs at a whitebait with her fork and pops it, head, gut and fin, into her mouth. She loves me.

  She studies the tacky flotsam hanging from the roof, her eyes lingering on a red Dali crayfish. She loves me not.

  I envy that damn crayfish that catches her eye.

  I play Coldplay blind. In my mind’s eye I see the lazy sway of her hips before me, a Savanna bottle dangling from her fingers. Folk go on swigging beer and chattering. I alone see her concertina her dress in her free hand until it reveals her unfussy cowrie cleft. I alone see the fabric draw up higher still to free her nipples, sushi-salmon pink. I alone see her slide a sliver of lime subtly over her shell and shiver at the sting of it.

  And then the song’s over and she’s thumbing a lime down into her Savanna.

 
Out on the dark harbour Buyu and the others have abandoned their fishing to play a game with bottle tops. I see a tourist taking photos of the boys. A cormorant dives from the mast of a fishing boat and surfaces with a fish sparking silver in the flashlight of a camera.

  I wish I was free to just dive for the thing I yearn for.

  A waiter puts a cold beer down on my amp.

  – Cheers, I say.

  – Sent over by the man in the far corner.

  I lift the bottle of Windhoek and look into Al’s eyes. He nods. A hint of a sly smile lurks in his lips. The way he holds my gaze, I’d swear he feels it in his bones: that I have fucked his girl. Perhaps he pities me for being so madly hooked, for he does not kiss her in front of me like a dog marking out his hood. I wish he was an asshole, so I’d feel no guilt as he and I enact a mock clinking of glass against glass in the air and then each swig a gulp in sync.

  Lotte’s cheeks hollow as she sucks a cocktail of ice cream and Kahlúa through a straw.

  Zippo Dude lights a glass of sambuca and swigs it down as it flames.

  Al foots the bill.

  As they go I see her scribble something on a coaster with the bill biro.

  I abandon my playing midflow to save the coaster before a waiter can whisk it away.

  I gaze over the wall into her yard. I see static shadow figures behind the curtains. I see her form drifting to and fro. Then she’s on the veranda, sliding her feet into sandals, fluttering over the grass.

  – A film. Pulp Fiction. Al’s a Tarantino aficionado. They’re killing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I’ve maybe a quarter of an hour before Al figures out I’m gone.

  I follow her down a rogue path to rocks by the sea.

  – Surfers cut through and jump from the rocks at high tide.

  Waves fling their moon-lust at the rocks. Junk (beer bottles, Bic lighters, shotgun hulls, Red Bull shots, a jilted flip-flop, a tangle of fishing gut) is caught in the rock cracks.

  She yanks down my Bermudas, bids me lie down on a flat rock. She ties my hands over my head with the fishing gut. I feel the balmy breath from her mouth on my lips. I feel the rock scratch my spine and the gut cut into my skin. She unzips me and I am in her mouth and I’m floating ... until I see a rat just a yard from my left foot. I am in a catch-22. I sense I’m just a few notches away from nirvanic abandon and that the slightest shift in vibe will put her dream tempo out of kilter. All I need to do is stay cool and focused, shut out the rat’s quivering whiskers and beady eyes. I pinch my toes against the inevitable jab of pain as its incisors punch into my skin. In the end raw fear overrides lust and she feels me go slack.