Blood Orange

by Troy Blacklaws

  I put up my hand, as if I am still in Paarl Boys’ High, asking Baldhead Bosman a biology question.

  – Sir, if you don’t mind I’d rather not shoot a gun.

  I stop short of saying that, if it is all the same to everyone, I’d also rather not be shot.

  All the rigours of crawling through the Angolan bundu in search of Cubans have not equipped the man for such betrayal from his own ranks. His fiery eyes twitch. I have the feeling that he would rip my head off with his bare hands if we were out in the bush. The other recruits shuffle their feet in the dust, as if they are about to witness a hanging.

  – Boy, if you ever call me sir again, I keel you dead. You call me sarmajoor. You hear?

  – Yes sir sarmajoor, I say.

  Venom glints in his eyes. He makes me stand alone in the middle of the sun. Through the cursing of the corporals, who fuss around the sergeant major like pilot fish around a shark, I make out the distant jingle of a lollyboy’s bell beyond the barbed wire. In the distance, stone mountains fall away in paling shades of grey.

  Then we are all jackbooted to the barber to be shaved. I have to wait until the others emerge like a colony of skinhead Krishnas, then the sarmajoor makes me sweep all the hair into a corner before it is my turn. My hair feathers to the floor. I almost cry when the barber winks at me. On his radio Cat Stevens sings: oh baby, baby it’s a wild world, it’s hard to get by just upon a smile, girl.

  I stand in my underpants in a warehouse as a man called Staff takes my yellow scubabag with my civvy clothes inside, tags it, and trades it for a brown overall, boots and tin hat. My bag is tossed onto a heap that reminds me of photographed pyramids of gutted Jewish suitcases on railway platforms.

  I do not sleep in the long cement barracks but alone in an empty DB cell as if I have yellow fever. I rub my shaven head as I stare at the shadow of the bars cast by the moon. A soldierboy before me has scratched the word Marie into the wall. I wonder if his Marie waited the two years for him and if they got married, maybe live on a farm somewhere with dogs and kids and a bakkie.

  The days are an endless barrage of barked commands and boots hammering into the earth. You breathe and taste dust. Grains of dust scrape under your eyelids and grind between your teeth. While others do gun drill, I scrub out the toilets, pick up cigarette stubs flicked through the windows of the officers’ canteen, or march with bricks in my hands instead of a gun.

  Today, the sarmajoor ordered me to march past a row of chairs and salute each chair as if it were an officer. It is a change from toilet scrubbing and stub collecting, but after two hours of saluting unfeeling chairs under the sun, I begin chancing it and salute every other chair. The chairs do not mind and I fall into the rhythm:

  Officer chair coming up: turn my head and touch the brim of my beret.

  NCO chair coming up: point thumbs down at boots.

  Officer chair coming up: turn head and touch brim of beret.

  NCO chair: Thumbs down.

  Officer chair: Salute.

  So it goes.

  Then comes the sound that makes my heart skip a beat: the vroom vroom of the sarmajoor’s Suzuki. Damn. I flamboyantly salute the next chair, even though it is NCO, but the vulture-eyed sarmajoor has seen my gyppoing.

  Still on his Suzuki, over the rumble of the motor, he spits out his words:

  – Are you crazy in the head or what?

  I halt, stamping my feet down into the dust in the hope he will forgive me if I pull off a tidy halt.

  The Suzuki motor dies. Behind him, Corporal Boyd runs up.

  The sarmajoor’s face is two inches from mine.

  – I told you to salute every blerrie chair.

  – But sir, I mean sarmajoor, I thought the bentwood chairs might be corporals, and I knew you would not think it right if I saluted them.

  Again the beetroot red floods his face and his eyelids flip up and down.

  Boyd offers him his water bottle, but the sarmajoor smacks it out of his hands. The water is blotted up so fast, it is as if it falls through the earth.

  – Corporal, march this rooinek communist to the DB.

  In his rage the sarmajoor forgets that I, rooinek communist, sleep in the DB cells anyway, so it is hardly a punishment to be locked up in there with Marie on the wall.

  Today it is my job to water the flowerbeds in front of the HQ. Every now and again the sarmajoor abandons the other platoons to their neverending gun drill and rides over to HQ on his Suzuki to check up on me.

  I am watering the colonel’s red and yellow cannas, the only patch of colour besides the oranje blanje blou in this Karoo outpost, when I hear the growl of the Suzuki again. Just as he Suzukies up to me, the water in my hosepipe peters out. The tap is far away, around the corner. Perhaps someone turned it off, or parked a jeep on the pipe, pinching it shut. I shake out the last sad drops over the thirsty earth while the sarmajoor just shakes his head at this final proof of my worth to the South African Army. I will not shoot a gun at the enemy and I cannot even handle a hosepipe for southafricadearland.

  My bed in the DB cell has steel springs that twang and bend. The mattress sags incurably, but the sarmajoor expects it to be as flat as a runover rabbit for inspection each morning.

  I prop the bed up with wooden pegs squeezed between the mattress and the springs, some sideways and some straight up. I iron the sheets and bite their edges until all is flat and square. I scrub the floor and iron my browns until they hang stiff in the steel cupboard. I rub my boots with Kiwi and spit until they glint. The spit is a trick of my father’s from his boarding-school days.

  I lie down under the bed on the cold cement to sleep, hoping to dream of Zelda.

  Instead images float up from the dark pool of my mind:

  The sheep’s head in the Zulu firepot.

  The bones of Box down the dry well.

  The crab cracking against the tar.

  And Bulldog’s crazed eyes.

  At sunrise Corporal Boyd bangs on the door.

  – Staaaaaaaaaaaaaaanop, he yells.

  I jump to my feet and stand stiff as the sarmajoor comes in. He runs his finger along the top of the steel cupboard but does not find any dust there. Then he gazes up at the light bulb to see if perhaps a smudge of subversive dirt lurks there. He bears a smug grin as if he has caught out many a green recruit in this way before. To finger the light bulb for evidence, he steps onto the bed. Pegs shoot out in every direction. The sarmajoor lunges for the hanging bulb, as you would reach for the leather noose dangling from a hand rail in a tilting bus. The bulb pops in his hands but the cable holds his bulk as he swings out. Then it rips out of the roof and he falls to the cement floor.

  He lies there among shards of broken glass and scattered pegs and bleeding hands. He has survived Russian Migs and Cuban soldiers and all the hazards of bush war to be undone by a bed.

  From the floor he barks at me:

  – Vandag is opfok dag.

  The sarmajoor stands in the shade of a plane tree while he keeps an eye on the opfok drill: me marching on the double, jigging up and down as if the strings of a puppeteer in the sky tug at my knees. But above there is no puppeteer or god, only swifts dipping and gliding in the glare. Beads of sweat pool with the tears in my eyes, so that the sarmajoor is just a hazy form. When I blink away the film of bitter water, I see him clearly, for a while. Thumbs hooked through his belt loops. Sun glinting off his 32 Battalion buffalohead belt. Then the outlines smudge again.

  And whenever the puppet strings go slack and I tumble to the hot earth and bark the dog, Corporal Boyd splashes water in my face to revive me. Then my knees jerk up again to the beat of Boyd’s relentless voice:

  – Lik lak lik lak lik lak laaaaai lik lak lik lak lik lak laaaaaaaaai.

  On and on and on until the sky tilts again. A doctor stands there too, in the planetree shade, and sometimes comes over with the sarmajoor to see if I am truly fainting or just acting half-dead. He looks ashamed of his part in it and I want to tell him I u
nderstand but no words come out. The sarmajoor smirks at the sight of a communist gasping like a gaffed fish.

  In the end, when I spit blood, the doctor says they will kill me if this goes on.

  – Hou op, the sarmajoor orders Boyd.

  A lik catches in Boyd’s gullet.

  The sarmajoor stalks away across the drillyard with Boyd at his heels.

  nirvana

  I DROP TO THE other side of the wire and freeze, waiting for the night to flare and a bullet to bite. But the darkness does not stir, so I cross the tar. I find a lumberjack shirt pegged on a line. I trade the overalls for the shirt, which comes down to my knees. Leaving my army duds hanging on the line like a shed skin, I run along the tarred, lamplit streets of Oudtshoorn, with just my passport in a pocket and my yearning for freedom.

  In army tackies the colour of shit and a lumberjack shirt as long as a dress, I head south, towards Wilderness and the sea. I hope the sarmajoor will look for me on the westbound Calitzdorp road to Cape Town. I run hard until the road begins to slant up into the Outeniqua Mountains. At the flicker of headlamps I drop into a ditch like a hunted jackal. I wait until the red eyes of the motorcar fade before I begin to run again.

  All fagged out, I creep into a stormwater culvert and lay my head on the dry river sand. I fall into a fitful sleep, dreaming of the sarmajoor and Boyd coming after me in a tank and of stray ostriches reaching their long, snaky necks deep into the culvert to peck my eyes out.

  The morning lies cold on my face and my heart beats into the sand as a lone motorcar whines up the mountain pass. In the daylight I cannot believe I am a deserter to be hunted down like a dog, but jumping the wire I can never undo, never rewind.

  I hear another motorcar in the distance and peek out to see a yellow bakkie pulling into the curves. I stay down, for there is just a chance it could be the police or the army. I am not sure who comes to look for you if you run away from the army but I imagine the rabid sarmajoor at the wheel, baying for blood.

  The yellow bakkie goes by with a black man on the back, and dogs barking madly at the wind. It reminds me of my father driving Nero and Fango up to the dam in the evenings. By running away I have cut myself off from my mother and my father and Zane and the valley. I want to cry, but I spy a white VW Beetle with surfboards on the roof. I instinctively jump out of the culvert and wave, as if it might be Lars come to rescue me.

  The Beetle chugs to a halt. Behind the wheel is a guy with straggling surfblond hair and those sunglasses with bits of leather on the sides, like the blinkers on a donkey. He checks out my lumberjack dress and army tackies.

  – Cool gear. Where ya heading? he tunes.

  – As far as you go.

  He, still eyeing me over:

  – I’m heading for Nahoon, East London. Cool surf. Maybe you heard of it?

  – Sorry.

  He nods as if it confirms some theory of his. I wonder if I will be stranded forever in the desert because I am not tuned into the surfing scene.

  – Jump in, he says.

  A last glance down the windy road at the distant haze that is Oudtshoorn, then I jump in.

  – By the way, I’m Peejay.

  – I’m Gecko.

  – Far out, he laughs.

  The Beetle is jam-packed with bags and books and a guitar. I have to put my feet up on a black box, an amp or something, so that I look at the road through my knees. There is no place to duck out of sight. I am as exposed as a dog on the beach.

  – So, where’d you pick up the army tackies?

  – Greenmarket Square, I fib.

  – Check out this theory: you find a jack half-naked in the desert with army tackies on his feet and his hair shaven like a fucking sheep, chances are you’ve found a deserter. Just chuck the shoes out the window before we hit civilisation.

  So I chuck the tackies and watch them dance on the tar in the rearview mirror. Then I put on some old sandals he gives me.

  My eyelids droop.

  I dream a black man is waving at me. He is so close I can see the pores in his skin. He flashes friendly teeth at me.

  Then I cotton on: he is not waving, but wiping. I am not dreaming. Framed between the sandals with my sore feet inside, he is wiping the windshield free of grasshopper and butterfly flecks. We have stopped at a garage.

  I look around for Peejay. There he is. He has dropped his head into a deep icebox. His jeans pull taut across his ass so that I make out strawberry-patterned boxers through a frayed rent. How Visoog Vorster would have loved to swing his cane down on that sassy ass. Peejay comes over with two cans of Coca-Cola and smiles to see me awake.

  – Hey, sexy, wanna Coke?

  He is still amused by my running wild in the desert in my lumberjack dress. I giggle, but then recall that I am a deserter.

  Peejay senses my fear.

  – Be cool, dude. We’ve made good time. Besides, they’ll look south.

  My legs hurt from the opvok drill and the run up into the mountains. I get out of the crammed Beetle to free my legs and keel over onto the oil-dappled cement. Peejay and the petrol jockey pick me up and sit me on the running board.

  The petroljockey’s pink-skin boss squints at us and picks his teeth in front of his pin-ups. I sit half in shade and half in the burning sun and hold the cold Coca-Cola can against my forehead. It is so still without the gunshots and barked commands: just the now-and-then drone of motorcars, and the creak of a windmill. I almost dare to feel free but the pigman’s squint rattles me.

  Peejay tips the petroljockey.

  – Go well, calls the petroljockey after us.

  On the way out of town, we pick up soggy chips and chicken pies at a café. There is a blue-painted bar across the street, the only colour in the drab, dry town. A faded red sign reads: Oasis Bar and Grill. The sun has peeled her blue dress and kissed the gloss off her red sign.

  Paul Simon sings Gumboots and the sun dances on the VW hood.

  – We’ll be in Jay Bay by noon, says Peejay, drumming his fingers against the wheel. They must have buggered you around in Oudtshoorn, hey?

  – Yesterday they drilled me so long and hard I had blood in my mouth.

  – I heard they give you a baby monkey or cat or something and you feed it and all until it’s attached to you and then you have to kill it with your bare hands.

  – I never had to kill a monkey.

  – Dude, I tell you, when they come for me I’m gonna go down under. Just ass around on the Reef, you know.

  – Australia sounds good to me. You would still have the sun and the blue skies and the sea.

  – And the girls, tunes Peejay.

  – And the girls, I echo, wondering if Zelda dreams of me.

  We coast into Jay Bay under a burning, zenith sun. Two girls in bikini tops and frayed denim skirts balance sixpacks of beer on their heads, the way Xhosa women on country roads carry suitcases or firewood. Peejay whistles at the girls and they laugh.

  – This is Jay Bay, surfers’ nirvana. Kiffest waves on the planet, Peejay tells me.

  Peejay parks on the fringe of the beach, where the grass gives way to the sand. Surfers languidly wax boards with Mr Zog’s Sexwax and dangle rubber Reef arms from their hips, like penguin wings. Their movements are so liquid after the jerky marching of soldiers across the dust plains. Peejay clasps hands with old chinas who flick tangled hair out of their eyes.

  I stand there, forgotten, shaven and uncool. I feel whittled down by the army.

  After some time, I kick off Peejay’s sandals and wander alone down to the sea. I dig my toes into the cold wet sand and feel the backwash tug at my heels and the sun burn my skin. I breathe in the salt mist and think of Hout Bay and Groot Drakenstein. I cry for the lost magic of Zelda’s breasts and for my mother’s smell.

  A hand rubs my shaven head. It is Peejay and a dragon spitting flames across his Billabong surfboard.

  – Hey, dude. Those army fuckers can’t swim. If they come after you, you just dive in and drift until some
Brazilian baby with big coconuts tugs you out of the sea and gives you the kiss of life.

  He rubs my head again and his smile blurs through my tears. Then he runs and dives, dipping his surfboard under the waves and surfacing beyond. He paddles out with deep, swift strokes. When he is through the breakers he turns to wave at me. I wave back, thinking he is so cool the way he duckdives through the waves.

  I too want to be out there, beyond the reach of the sarmajoor. I drop the lumberjack shirt onto dry sand and wade out. I dive through a wave and then freestyle out to the surfers. Seagulls skim along the edge of the waves as swiftly as a spinner’s hand across the weave. The salt stings my eyes.

  The surfers in their black sealskins float on the water and wait solemnly for the high waves after the lull. Bobbing monks waiting for illumination. Waiting until, by some accident of tide and sand, the big wave with the long slow break is formed. Then the sudden spin and paddle until the world drops away and they stand to glide.

  Sometimes I duck to avoid being cut by a surfboard fin and I peer down into the deep shadowy blue for the fin I most fear: a shark’s.

  We camp in the lee of the motorcars just as the Voortrekkers did in the shelter of oxwagons in the old days. We sit around a fire drinking cans of Castle while boerewors sizzles over the flame. The surfers all have stories to tell of wild surf in Durban and Nahoon. Some have been overseas to surf Uluwatu and Oahu. But still, they say, Jay Bay is the ultimate long ride.

  No one thinks to ask me about the army and perhaps that is a good thing for there is nothing cool about saluting chairs and gathering cigarette stubs. The telling of it would sour the chill vibe. Swirling the bitter beer in my mouth, I think of how Karoo dust has been my beach sand and the canvas browns my Gotcha gear. Peejay has given me a pair of threadbare cords, patched at the knees, and they feel light and cottony on my skin after the heavy browns.

  The denim girls from earlier are there, by the fire, and wear twin yellow jerseys. A vivid yellow to be tasted in your mouth. So alluring after the shit-brown overalls and hay-brown dust.

  Mesmerised, I watch one of the yellow girls roll a jay. Her fingers pinch and rub and scatter tobacco and grass into the paper furrow. Then she licks the paper, rolls it, and twists one end.