On the car radio, Miriam Makeba sings with the Skylarks. Her voice floats over the tin sound of the guitar and the tapping of the drums. And higher still than her voice, the pennywhistle glides like a swift dipping and looping in the sky.
– Miriam is in exile, but they still chance her songs on the radio, Moses tells me.
On Sundays in Muizenberg, Hope sat on the doorstep, clicking a long-toothed comb through her spongy hair while the radio played black jazz. On Sundays we went for long drives in Indlovu, east along the sea-road to Hermanus to screwdriver black mussels from the rocks, or inland to Oom Jan’s farm for a braai and sweet potatoes and a swim in the dam. My father tuned in to Radio 5: Fleetwood Mac or the Eagles or Simon and Garfunkel. Good road music, my father called it. But you never heard black African jazz on Radio 5.
And when my father was in a good mood he would tell us stories as we went along:
There once was a slaveboy called Naartjie, because his face was as sweet as the juice of a naartjie. He was so beautiful that all the slavegirls of the Boland wanted him and would lift up their skirts to show him their legs, strong from tramping grapes barefoot, like the legs of hockey girls.
My father was always teasing my mother about her strong legs from all the years she played hockey. He told Marsden and me that he had to fork out a big lobola for his woman. James, please, my mother would beg. But my father would go on regardless.
But Naartjie, he didn’t flutter an eyelid at their legs, so they lifted their skirts higher.
My father would slide my mother’s skirt up her legs and she would smack his hand away and Marsden and I would giggle in the back. My father was on a roll.
One day Naartjie was walking along the Berg River. The Boland sun beat down on his head, so he knelt to drink from the Blougat pool. As he reached out his hand to scoop up water, he saw a beautiful face in the water, beautiful beyond the magic of words or songs to capture it. Whenever he kissed the waterlips, the face melted. And so Naartjie stayed on the banks of the Berg River, staring into the water, pining away with longing for himself.
Then fishbubbles bubble up through my fingers and I turn to Moses:
– I found it.
He peers into the drum, and smiles:
– Good.
He makes me feel skilled, as if I landed a fish instead of just finding a hole in a tube.
At the crossroads down the street a bakkie revs, and jumps red. Tyres claw for grip as the gas kicks in. The pedal is flat and the bakkie shoots by full tilt, one man up front and two on the back. One of the backriders holds a shotgun high in one hand. Although you sometimes see an army lorry rumble through the streets, with soldier guns cocked at the sky, it is an uncommon thing to see a man out of uniform ride around with a gun.
– They are the boys, Moses says to me, the two on the back.
Further up the road, there is a jamming of rubber as the bakkie U-turns, and heads back. It gears down and skids to a halt in front of the diesel pump.
Moses switches off the radio.
The man behind the wheel has a tattoo in the bare skin of his head. He hoots the horn and calls out:
– Hey, Jimboy. Fill up with arabjuice.
Moses reaches for the hose. The numbers of the pump blink back to zero like the wide eyes of a scared comicbook character.
– Tell them you want your pass, I whisper into Moses’s ear.
– Douglas, they are hard boys.
– Hey, you guys have stolen this man’s pass, I yell at them.
– Well, check this out, old Jimboy found himself an albino monkey, says the shotgun cowboy on the back.
– Leave the boy alone, says Moses, his hand quivering on my head.
– What pass? the tattooed head wants to know.
– Forget it, Pa. This blek is fulla shit.
The other boy on the back, with the baboon-ass ears of a rugby prop, laughs a high-pitched laugh. The sort of laugh that, in a comic, would be written: tee hee hee hee.
Moses shakes his head.
– Baas, the boy is right. They took my jacket with my pass in the pocket.
The shotgun cowboy and the rugby prop jump down from the back, as if on signal.
– You got something to say, old kaffir? demands the shotgun cowboy.
– Ya, you got something to say? goes the rugby prop.
– I want no trouble. I just want my pass.
– Oooh, shame. Old Jimboy lost his dog licence, says the shotgun cowboy to the tattoo-headed father behind the wheel.
– Sad story, tuts the tattooed head. But you are going too far, accusing my boys of stealing your jacket.
– But they did steal it and now the post office will not give him his money, I blurt out.
– Hey, Jimboy, where you find this monkey? jibes the shotgun cowboy.
– He is a good boy, baas.
– Now you be a good boy too, Jim, and make no trouble in this town, or you’ll be sorry, goes the shotgun cowboy as he turns to look down the road.
Then he spins around and stabs Moses in the stomach with the barrel of the gun.
My heart beats wildly and I want to run. Moses holds his stomach, as if to catch his guts.
– What shall I stir up, baas? I just want my papers, Moses mouths under cast-down eyes.
– Well, the truth is, Jim, you bleks hate your pass. So we did you a favour and cut it up.
– That was a cruel thing to do, baas.
The shotgun cowboy yanks his knee up against Moses’s balls. Moses slumps to the tar, with a long low moan, the moan of a shot Christmas cow on Oom Jan’s farm. They tow Moses by his feet, round to the back of the garage. His head jigs on the tar, trailing a spoor of liquid, like snail slime.
– We got nothing against you, boy, but if bleks are free to run around telling stories, this country will go to pot, tunes the shotgun cowboy.
A Volkswagen kombi drives by the garage with a Neil Young tune sailing out of the windows. The man at the wheel is wearing ski shades with leather on the sides like donkey blinkers. He does not see us. I pick up the words: I been to Hollywood, I been to Redwood, I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold. The words fade as the kombi goes.
Moses is down under the beach umbrella that shades the doorstep of his room. The shotgun cowboy is booting him in the ribs.
– Don’t you get white with us, Jimboy.
He kicks again. Moses rolls on the tar. In my head the needle sticks in a groove and all I think is: Please God, don’t let him die. Please God. Please God. Then the needle jumps and I think: They’ll kill me too. I survived sharks and baboons to be skopped to death. My ribs will cave in and then I will sink into the place of shadows and reflections.
I jika on my heels and begin to run.
– You run to the police, the shotgun cowboy barks after me, and we keel the old man.
I falter, sway on my heels. My mind mists.
I hear Neil Young over the deep chugging of a Volkswagen motor: I been a miner for a heart of gold. The kombi has turned around.
Hope sweeps the mist out of my mind.
– Let him go, I yell.
– Kom, julle, calls the father to his sons.
I hear the dull thud of the cowboy’s boots landing in Moses’s stomach, but Moses makes no sound.
Please God, I cry out inside my head.
As they go, I hear the rugby prop:
– Did you kick him dead?
– You crazy. You can’t kick a kaffir dead. You have to pump a bullet in the head.
Behind me, the Isuzu bakkie kicks into life.
I drop to my knees and put my ear to his mouth. Through the chook chook chugging of the Volkswagen and the voice of Neil Young, I can just hear his breath: the sigh of a wind off the vlei. The motor chokes out. Overhead, the tassles of the beach umbrella dance and the strung shells jingle in the breeze. I hear a hoot for petrol. But Moses lies still, with his knees tucked in, like a dog by a fire.
I run around the corner. The man in the ski shad
es is standing by his kombi. I go up to him and grab his hand, wordlessly.
– What the hell? he cries, tipping his shades up onto his forehead.
Maybe it is the horror in my eyes that makes him follow me around to where Moses hugs his knees, a bleeding old-man foetus.
When he sees Moses, the kombi man just goes:
– Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus
He is unaware of the river of words. He runs back for the water-can you use to fill a radiator and pours water over Moses’s head. Moses splutters, then wipes his fingers over his eyes and nose and mouth, the way coloured kids do on Oom Jan’s farm when they come up from under the dam water.
– Are you alright? the kombi man wants to know.
– Ndilungile, baas. This old kaffir, he does not die so fast.
– Some guys in a bakkie beat him up, I chip in.
– We better get the police, says the kombi man.
– Please, no police. I have no pass. The police will send me back to the Transkei.
– But we have to do something.
– There is nothing to do, baas.
The kombi man reaches out his hand to hoist Moses to his feet.
I open the door to Moses’s room and fetch cold tap water in his enamel cup.
– Ndiyabonga, young baas.
He winces when he swallows.
I know it is because there is another white man there that he calls me baas. But I want him to call me Douglas. I want him to hold me and forgive me. But a black man does not hold a white boy.
– Jesus, at times I am ashamed to be white, says the kombi man.
He shakes his head.
– Well, I gotta hit the road. Gotta make Jo’burg tonight. I was running low on petrol, so I turned around. But I’ll go to the BP up the road. You take it easy.
– No, baas. I am the petrolboy. If I am too weak to pour petrol then they must come and shoot me.
He hobbles towards the pumps, dragging one foot and hugging his ribs.
I stand on the bridge, listening for the sound of the diesel motor, but it is hard with the seagulls cawing for bread. But then I hear it. I wait till the sound changes under the bridge and then drop the brick. It falls and I think I have dropped it too soon, but no, the front of the Isuzu shoots into view and the brick floats through the glass. The bakkie swerves and flips. The shotgun cowboy is flung from the back. The bakkie careers into a roadside ditch. The cowboy lies dead in the dust and the crows flock to peck his eyes. I hear the sound of their beaks dipping into the jelly of his eyes. I can hear from so far. I see the beaks dip dip dip and come up red. My eye is a zoom lens.
I scream into my mother’s nightie. She holds me to her breasts, the way she did then, till the screaming fades to a sobbing and the story of Moses and his papers and the Isuzu boys tumbles out.
popping frogs
I CYCLE ALONE OUT of town on the north road, the road to Johannesburg. I am determined to find a skeleton or something for Marika, but all I see are Simba packets hooked on the barbed wire and rusting tins of Coca-Cola and beer, and a red shotgun cartridge faded pink by the sun. It has not rained in two years and the earth is bone dry.
I see a lizard scurry into a Coca-Cola can.
A jacky hangman on the telegraph wires watches me watching it.
Although I am on the other side of the yellow line, riding on the jagged edge of the tar, a bus hoots at me and I feel the tug of wind in the wake of it. A stamp-sized square of paper butterflies up in the wind and settles again. I drop my bicycle to pick it up. Just paper. I flick it over in my fingers and see that it is not just paper, but part of a faded photograph of a black man. An ear, an eye, a cheekbone, a jagged edge where the nose should be. I stare at the photograph while something tickles my mind, a memory of some kind. Then it dawns on me that this could be Moses, younger and faded.
The Kodak photographs from the spool I saved from the baboons lie scattered on the kitchen table. My mother has not shot off another spool since we came to the Karoo. Why she has had them developed now, after so long, is a mystery to me.
The first photograph that catches my eye is of my father braaiing on a vine-stump fire, his lips snarled back to reveal his teeth. He stabs at the lens with the fire tongs as if he is a Zulu warrior with an assegai. There is fire in his eyes. Behind him, on the grid, slit crayfish cook in their shells.
I flick through photographs of the coral tree in bloom.
Then there is one of Marsden, standing beside his surfboard. He has unzipped his Zero wetsuit and the arms dangle like fins from his hips. I feel a pang of regret, for all the times I felt it unfair he should be so damn good at surfing and drawing.
There is a shot of Byron in the yard, his foot resting on the lug of a spade while he rolls a cigarette out of newspaper and Boxer tobacco. In the background Chaka burrows under the hibiscus.
There is a photograph of my mother in black bra and panties. She reaches out to the camera, as if to block the lens, but all she does is obscure her face. I know it is my mother because of the pink delta lines on her stomach from Marsden and me. The flash makes her skin look waxy.
There is one of me on the stoep, rubbing linseed into the Gunn & Moore bat. Though he is not in the photograph, I know that my father is just out of frame, reading the Cape Times, calling out the cricket scores, wondering if he ever told us that he once bowled out Barry Richards.
There is a shot of my father caught unawares at his typewriter. The postcard of the Venus de Milo, tacked to the wall, curls up at the edges. In his eyes there is a guilty, fugitive look. The look I see in Chaka’s eyes when I catch him shitting in the yard.
Then there is an out-of-focus shot of all four of us on the terrace of The Brass Bell, on the edge of the sea. My father has his arm around my mother, but he is not looking at her, or at the camera. He casts his gaze somewhere out to sea. Towards a yacht on the horizon, or Seal Island, or begging seagulls. For the first time, I wonder if my father was still in love with my mother when Marsden died. I imagined that the cricket ball splintered their love, as it did the tomato-box wicket. But what if their love was already falling apart and he longed to sail away from all of us to write his novel? To sail out to sea alone, like old man Santiago, to land the big fish he senses is out there.
Marika dances barefoot on the N1 in her cotton dress and tastes the falling rain with a lolling tongue. Skyfire flickers across a dark sky. For me the rain is not something magic, but Marika is over the moon, dancing, slapping her feet down on the tar.
After the rain the desert floats in a green, fishtank light. A river of frogs hazards the N1. Some make it across. Others pop under the singing wheels of motorcars, pink insides squirting out their mouths. Marika fills buckets of frogs and I cart them across the road and spill them out on the other side. She catches them with her bare hands and laughs at my fear of touching the cold, pulsing things.
As I weave through the flat frogs on the tar, swinging a squirming witchbrew of frogskin, I pray that they will not jump and brush against my hand, or land on my sandaled feet. When I spill them out I stand back, as a frog’s compass may spin haywire and send the frog hopping back towards me, instead of following the eastward drift of the others. They stay in a dazed, blinking-eyed clutch, until Chaka’s sniffing nose spurs them on again. They all head east.
pink poppies
MARIKA TUGS HER DRESS over her head and hangs it in the thorny mimosa. Then she lies down on the sand in her panties, floating flamingo-pink poppy nipples on koppies of unsunned skin. I yearn to lick her poppies.
– I want to feel the sun on my skin before I dive in, she says.
I lie down beside her, just in my underpants. Under my spine the sand burns. I turn my head, shut one eye against the sun and squint through the other at Marika. An ant comes over the horizon of Marika’s hip. Its feelers quiver as it finds its bearings. Then it heads out along the bony curve of her hip. When it reaches the flat of her stomach it zeroes in on her bellybutton. It halts on the rim, feeler
s twitching. I shut both eyes and her poppies spin into swirling colour fans behind my eyelids.
Chaka’s bark jolts me out of my sunflared dream. I squint against the sun and make out the eyes of a twin-barrelled shotgun fixed on me.
– Pa, Marika cries. Don’t shoot him.
Rows of desks like conjugated Latin verbs. Mister McEwan reads the Rime of the Ancient Mariner to us. His reading is lost on me because my mind drifts:
Marika’s father at our frontyard gate, his fingers noosed around Marika’s neck.
– They are still children, Meneer Vink. It does not mean anything, my mother said.
– I am not having my daughter running wild with your boy and turning into a whore girl.
He yanked Marika after him. Her free hand dangled lifelessly, like the hand of a puppet when the string goes slack. He kicked at the door and Marika’s ghost mother drew them into the dark of the house.
Because my head is full of Marika’s pink poppy nipples my mind is not on my schoolwork. Teachers are after me to focus in class. They stab at my foolscap with red pens. Meneer van Taak barks at me to learn my sin, cos and tan. Mister McEwan kills the fly of a comma after the s, when it should come before, as if it is a sin. As if I care.
I have to work out the value of the angle Y in a spiderweb of pencilled lines before the cane comes down on my head.
Y is a fork in a river.
Wye is a river.
Y is a fish tail.
Y is a tale with two endings.
Y is a cattie for potting birds off a wire.
Y is the peace sign my father gives in the photograph where he looks like Cat Stevens on the back cover of Tea for the Tillerman.
Karoo Boy Page 12
