The Top Prisoner of C-Max

by Wessel Ebersohn

The members of the family that occupied the cottage – a man, woman and four children, all older than him – had always shown him that he was there on sufferance. What had happened to his own mother and how he had come to be living under these conditions had never been explained to him. All he knew was that he had duties to perform that took most of each day and that he received two bowls of mealie pap and his accommodation, such as it was, in payment. Clothing consisted of the well-worn rags discarded by the family’s children. If he did not do the cleaning and washing that was expected of him, he was beaten by the woman or one of the bigger boys. They used a one-by-two plank for the purpose.

  By the age of ten, he was beginning to resist successfully and the man took over his punishment. Now failure to do his housework resulted in beatings with the fists of the man or one of the bigger boys. The beatings often ended with him vulnerable to the man’s boots as he lay on the floor of the kitchen, their chosen place of punishment. Elia knew that if he had been more pliable, only approaching family members with downcast eyes, never disagreeing and always being careful to do as he was told, things may have been easier. But that degree of subservience had never been possible. His challenging eyes and hard-lipped mouth only increased the severity of his punishments. School had never been a feature in his upbringing. No one in officialdom was interested in, or even knew about, a black boy living alone in a township lean-to.

  Long before his tenth birthday, the young Elia learnt that, if he wanted to eat more than the small helpings of the tasteless porridge the woman gave him, he would have to steal. He also learnt that he had to steal further afield than neighbourhood hawkers and spazas. No matter how skilful the theft, after the third or fourth visit without his buying anything, the proprietor would be on the lookout. So his afternoon sorties ranged wider and wider across Soweto. He found himself always on the lookout for virgin territory.

  It was at the age of thirteen on one of his trips, a successful one during which he had profited by an apple and a small packet of cheap marshmal-lows, that the incident occurred that accelerated the direction his life was taking. The oldest boy of the family he lived with saw him leave the shop, at that time the township’s only supermarket. On a few earlier occasions, he had noticed that Elia had something good to eat. He caught up with Elia a block from the supermarket. ‘I saw what you did,’ he said. ‘You steal from the businesses. When we get home I’m going to tell my father. And he’s going to fuck you up good.’

  It had been a rash thing to say and the boy was soon to pay for it. On the way home, they had to cross a stretch of open ground that bordered a small, reed-fringed wetland. Elia had allowed the other boy to walk ahead. It was there that he made his move. The other boy was nineteen to Elia’s thirteen, but the dual advantages of a body made strong by years of physical labour and a surprise attack from behind were enough. A rock he found at the side of the path cracked the older boy’s skull with the first blow. After that, Elia used the rock to destroy his tormentor’s larynx and suffocate him. He dragged the body into the reeds and left it there. At no time in his life had he ever done anything as satisfying.

  Going back to the house where he had lived was out of the question. He fled north-east towards the city on foot, through mine properties that were already falling into disuse. On one of them he found a shed that was no worse than his usual accommodation. There was even a tap that worked. He used the shed as a base from which to venture out to steal food. This time, he also stole clothing and for a few days he was better dressed than he had ever been.

  The distance he had travelled seemed a long way to him, but not to the police, who tracked him down to the shed two days after the body was found. The dead boy’s parents had immediately known who the culprit was and told the police what they believed.

  After two hours of being beaten by two black constables under the supervision of a white one, Elia confessed. He tried to complain to the court the way his confession had been coerced, but the judge either did not believe him or decided that he was obviously guilty, and how he was made to confess made no difference. What surprised Elia and everyone in the court was that some of the evidence alerted the judge to the circumstances of Elia’s life. The judge’s own line of questioning eventually resulted in his finding that there were mitigating circumstances. Instead of being sent to the gallows, which were in their last years of operation, he had been sentenced to only ten years, the first five to be spent in a reformatory for boys.

  During his first week in Tokai reformatory, he was abused by a clique of older boys who were always on the lookout for a new victim. Instead of reporting the matter to the warders and earning the reputation of being a piemp, he dealt with it himself. One of his tormentors had an arm broken. Another was bitten so badly in the genital area that for a while there was a real possibility he might lose part of it. A third suffered a spinal injury he would carry with him for five years before he died in a shower of police gunfire. Abiding by the same code, his prison victims never told anyone who their assailant was. After that a gang of boys, both younger and older than Dlomo, gathered round him for protection and no one in Tokai, not even the warders, ever bothered any of them again.

  In the mythology of the prisons, Tokai was harder to survive in and a more productive breeding ground for criminals than any prison in the country. It deserved its reputation. Before he was moved to an adult facility, the anger that had been growing in him all his life had hardened into a rage that would never leave him.

  It was in Pollsmoor a few years later that he met Samson Khumalo, some five years his elder and in for armed robbery. Samson became the boy’s protector and this time he was not expected to pay. He, in turn, did his best to protect Samson. On Elia’s discharge, Samson put him in contact with Reverend Khumalo, his father. To Elia’s great surprise, he was accepted into the Khumalo family as if he had been a son. The reverend farmed a smallholding of vegetables, pigs and goats in the KwaZulu homeland, high in the foothills of the Drakensberg. For half a year, Elia worked on the farm, along with one of Samson’s brothers, but this time he slept inside the house in a bed with sheets and ate with the family. For Elia, this would probably have been enough, but at the end of every month there was also a modest pay packet. For a while, the rage within him subsided. It would never leave him entirely, but now it was controllable. ‘You’re a good man,’ the reverend told him more than once. ‘A man shouldn’t have to pay all his life for a mistake he made when he was a boy. In any case, the one you hurt deserved it.’ He rarely referred to Elia’s crime, but when he did he always spoke about Elia having hurt his victim. He seemed not to acknowledge that anyone had died.

  Later events were to change the reverend’s opinion. Some six months after Elia had been welcomed into the family, Ruth Khumalo, nineteen years old and in her second year in teacher’s training college, came home for the Christmas holidays. Elia’s only experience of women before that time was the beatings he had received in childhood. He had never felt the touch of a woman except in punishment. His own hands had never known the softness of a woman’s skin. The physical love of a woman had been beyond all possibility of contemplation.

  On seeing Ruth, he knew immediately that he loved her and had no doubt that she must also love him. Every night in bed he masturbated while he held her image in his mind.

  Ruth was a sturdy Zulu girl, broad in the hips and big-bosomed. She wanted to become a teacher to help spread education and the gospel among her people. In Elia she saw a lost soul. It was her duty to help him towards the light. During her holidays, she taught him the rudiments of arithmetic and speaking and reading English, activities that her father found praiseworthy.

  When Dlomo asked her to accompany him on a walk through the hills, she agreed readily. She was the perfect woman in every way, virtuous, hardworking and with a body that could drive a man crazy. Out of sight of the village, while they rested on a grassy hillside, Elia had reached for her, trying to take her breasts in his hands. She had pushed him away
. ‘No,’ she had shouted. ‘What are you doing? You can’t do that. Stop that.’

  But stopping had been impossible. This was the woman he had never had, these were the breasts he had never touched, this was the skin he had never stroked. He tore the dress away easily, but the screaming, the screaming was too loud, the screaming was keeping him from all that he wanted so badly, and the screaming made him realise, through the waves of his rage, that he would never again be returning to the Khumalo home. Despite the screaming, Ruth Khumalo may have survived, but her attempt to flee destroyed her. He caught her in a few strides. The rock that came to hand was comfortingly familiar, very much like the one he had used next to the wetland eleven years before.

  Elia Dlomo fled across the Drakensberg foothills, running by day and sleeping in sheltered places by night. In the weeks that followed, he eluded capture and was never arrested or tried for killing Ruth. By the time he was next taken into custody two years later, it was for the armed robbery of a Johannesburg supermarket. At his trial, official incompetence saw him sentenced as a first offender.

  In four years, he was free again. This time he built up a team of former convicts, as desperate as himself. He soon realised that the usual pair of security guards on a cash-in-transit armoured car were no match for a team of ten men, armed with AK-47 repeating rifles and grenade launchers. At the end of the liberation struggle, both items were freely available on the black market.

  The gang struck ten armoured cars in the next twelve months, making off with more money in each raid than the combined take of all the supermarkets Dlomo had ever robbed. Arrests and convictions for armed robbery followed. The last conviction included the murder of two security guards. All five who had been arrested were found guilty of the murders under the doctrine of common purpose. This time the prosecution was aware of his earlier crimes and he was sentenced to life in prison.

  Of his life after the Khumalos, Dlomo remembered only one aspect with any warmth. He and his gang had robbed an armoured, cash-in-transit car of the weekly wages of the workers at a Kimberley factory. Their tip-off had placed the armoured car in exactly the right place on a stretch of quiet road on the edge of the city. The RPG rocket launcher had brought the truck to a halt, the projectile killing the driver. The remaining guard, stunned and disoriented, had stepped away from the vehicle as he tried to return fire. His first three shots flew wild, but the third struck Dlomo’s driver in the heart. Before he could take aim at a second target, Dlomo killed him with a single shot from his AK.

  That would have been the extent of the damage except that, while leaving the scene, a bystander had decided to risk his life in the cause of law and order. His shot had passed through Dlomo’s loin area just above the pelvis and out the back without striking anything indispensable. He stopped on the outskirts of town and did his best to plug the wound, then started back on the five-hundred-kilometre drive to Johannesburg.

  It was after dark when he reached the dusty roadside town of Warrenton, only a quarter of the way to Johannesburg. His rough bandaging had only been a partial success. Much of his shirt and pants were soaked with blood. There was also blood damming up on the seat of the car. By the time he reached the town, the pain and the loss of blood were affecting his ability to keep the car on the road.

  Through the haze of pain he saw the town on the left of the road and the township on the right. The town would be a hostile place, so he took the feeder road into the township. It was bigger than he expected, scattering ahead of him in a maze of side streets and sub-economic cottages. Some of the cottages showed signs of improvement – a coat of paint, a garden wall or a couple of fruit trees giving them some individuality. There would be families inside them, but who knew what sort of reception there would be? People who owned something were too afraid of losing it to be involved with a man bleeding from a gunshot wound.

  For the residents of Warrenton township, the day was not yet over. Dlomo slowed to little more than jogging speed. To hit a child, an adult or even a dog would not help his cause.

  Without warning, it seemed, he was up against the end of the street. He turned the car into a dirt side street, little more than a track and stopped against the fence of the last cottage in the row. This one was unpainted; weeds were growing in the yard. It was not too different from the one where, as a child, he had slept in his lean-to.

  He knew that he should have closed the car door behind him, but the cottage and the township itself were spinning round him. He reached the door and tried to knock, but his hand seemed to slide down the smooth surface.

  The next day, he found himself in bed, covered only by a rough, woollen blanket. Protruding strands of coir from the mattress scratched him if he moved. But his wound had been bound and cleaned. The flow of blood had stopped. A glass of milk and a sandwich, spread with margarine and sugar, were on the floor next to the bed. From the window he saw that the car door had been closed and it looked like the blood on the backrest had been cleaned.

  That evening Jenny Pregnalato, the thirty-five-year-old offspring of an Italian sailor and a township prostitute, came home from her work cleaning and washing dishes in one of the town’s takeaways. She had been married once long before, but had been living alone for ten years on the night when she heard a scratching sound on her front door. The bloodied and unconscious man she found there was someone she had never seen before.

  Dlomo stayed with Jenny in her little cottage for three months. The neighbours all knew about the man who had come unexpectedly into Jenny’s life, but no word of it ever reached the authorities. For the first time in her life, Jenny had extra money. Dlomo gave her more than she dared use. She was fully aware that too much spending would draw attention to him and to herself. She never asked him about the wound, but usually someone was looking for a man who carried a bullet wound. So she bought her extra groceries carefully, from three different stores and went to work every day, as she always did. In the evenings she and Dlomo sat together, enjoying the food she cooked and making love.

  She was happy, but Dlomo knew that sooner or later they were bound to run out of luck. Some kid was going to say something in the wrong company. The township was too small and the people too interested in him.

  At the end of the three months, he left while she was at work one day. Since then, whenever he was out of prison, he sent Jenny money and visited her when he could. If Elia Dlomo ever loved another human being with anything approaching a mature love, Jenny Pregnalato was the one.

  Dlomo was already in prison serving a life sentence when he heard of the boy who had been born to her. He had never seen the child.

  Sleeping only intermittently in his cell, Dlomo knew what he had to do if he were to survive the years ahead and ever see Jenny again, and the boy for the first time. If Oliver Hall was allowed to do what he was planning, and if they brought him back to this place, he would be the man and there would be no doubt about that. And Dlomo himself would suffer the worst of his vengeance. Dlomo knew exactly what he had to do, but doing it was close to impossible.

  SIXTEEN

  TIME in the exercise hall was prescribed. Every prisoner had to get his time and he had to get it every day. The prisoners had the use of a gym and a small pool table. But because of the number of prisoners and because of the need to keep warring factions apart, time spent in the hall was staggered and most never got a chance at the pool table. The exercise complement changed every two hours.

  When Dlomo entered the hall, Kruger had already been there for an hour. He was leaning against the west wall, surrounded by a gang of Twenty-Eights, as always. Dlomo’s own body guard, made up entirely of Twenty-Sixes, was almost as big. ‘Stay here, but watch and come if I need you,’ he told them.

  Approaching Kruger and his men, Dlomo walked slowly. It was important that they should have plenty of time to see that he was alone. He held his hands at his sides, but spread his fingers to show that he was holding nothing. From the time Dlomo started towards them, Kruger and his
men were watching him closely. This was clearly a surprise. You did not try to kill one of them on one day, then approach peacefully with open hands on the next.

  Dlomo stopped close enough for Kruger to be able to hear him, but far enough that if he had to retreat his men would be able to reach him in time. Kruger limped slowly through the encircling protection of his men till there was open space between them. He was the first to speak. ‘And this? Now you want to talk.’

  ‘With you. You talk, I talk.’

  ‘And where’s the kana-kana now, inside your pants, up your poke?’ A few of Kruger’s men laughed. Not all though. Dlomo, as an enemy, was no joking matter. Angering him made no sense.

  ‘There no kana-kana now.’

  Kruger looked straight into the eyes of his enemy. He was an altogether dishonest human being, adept at hiding the truth. And he thought he knew the other man. Dlomo was as bad a liar as Kruger was accomplished. Kruger thought of him as a fool. He was a wild man, who only had his anger and physical strength in his favour. It surprised Kruger that, after all these years, Dlomo was still alive. Looking at him across the intervening space, Kruger knew that this time he posed no danger. ‘It’s all right,’ he grunted to his closest guards. ‘It’s all right. He just wants to talk.’

  ‘Boss?’ The question had come from Oliver Hall. It carried the implication of considerable doubt.

  ‘Wait here. I want to know what this man got to say.’

  Kruger approached Dlomo slowly and watchfully. He was breathing heavily and dragging one leg slightly. He was no physical match for Dlomo, or any other inmate. He stopped close enough to be able to reach out and touch Dlomo. ‘And now?’

  ‘I want peace.’ Dlomo’s eyes were hard with hostility.

  ‘Peace? You try to kill one of my men yesterday, now you want peace?’

  ‘Hall is a mad bastard.’

  ‘Hall is my man. You touch Hall, you touch me.’