Karoo Boy

by Troy Blacklaws

– Ya, a monkey’s wedding, nods Marika.

  – What’s it a sign of?

  – A monkey’s wedding?

  – No, the moon under a blue sky.

  – It is a sign of magic.

  But no moon magic can change things back to the moment before my father bowled the ball, before my life was halved:

  Marsden taps the foot of the bat in the sand. A sand yacht flits by. The fruitsellers call their wares. The sound of the seagulls spears through the hazy hiss of the surf, a sound that ebbs out of mind, and then surges back again. And then, high over the humming bass of motorcars, the ting ting ting of the lollyboy’s bell.

  We cycle past a donkey cart laden high with thorn wood. The donkey hide is raw pink where the ropes have chafed through.

  Further along, a cow skull flowers out of the sand, but Marika hardly gives it a glance. Perhaps cows are not as exotic as lizards.

  As we reach the outskirts of the township, a bus rumbles by. The wind sucks at us and voices fling from the windows. Then it is past and I see heads bob in the back window. I am glad I am not clinging to the roof-rack ladder.

  On the outskirts of the township men play football on a sand pitch while women sway and whistle on the sides. The men have team shirts on, striped yellow and black, like bees. Some wear baggy PT shorts and some wear hacked-off jeans. Football socks of all colours concertina down bare shins. A ball flies into the net. A footballer cartwheels and the women dance and go uluuu uluuu uluuu.

  There is no sign of Joko’s Chicago Bulls cap among the crowd.

  We cycle to the square where the bus stands empty outside the general dealer shop with the BB Tobacco sign on the roof.

  Barefoot boys chase a flat, farting football in the dust. One of the boys is Tomorrow. I call out to him, and he glances my way before darting down an alleyway. I picture Tomorrow sniffing up his mopani snot as he reports to Joko that the white boy is back.

  Again, girls fill jerrycans at the tap, their bare toes sunk deep in mud.

  An old man sits in the sun, flies sipping the liquid in the corner of his eyes.

  Tinny Soweto jazz floats out of the dark of the shop into the afternoon glare, mingles with the Xhosa clicks of the girls and the clowning of the boys.

  – Would you keep an eye on our bikes? I say to the old man.

  He nods his head and the flies scatter like spat pips before zoning in on his eyes again.

  We lean our bikes against the wall of the shop. I hear the ping of pinball and peek into the dark to see if Joko and the boys are hanging out in the shop. My eyes slowly focus: a lone man is pinballing. He lets go the flipper buttons to take a swig from a bottle of Black Label, but his darting eyes still follow the zigzag path of the ball. He clunks the bottle down on to the glass deck just in time to flip the ball with a flick of his hips.

  The shopkeeper is on a ladder, counting cans of tuna and Koo fruit, notching pencil marks on paper. Seeing me, he pockets the paper, fits the pencil stub behind his ear. He comes down the ladder slowly, like a wise old man with the secrets of a myriad lost books in his head.

  – May I help you?

  – I was looking for Joko.

  – It is better you go home. This is no place for white boys.

  – But I know him.

  – Go now, young baas.

  The pinball man, beer bottle in hand, weaves towards me.

  – Hey, you. You hamba home now. Your white skin is a reminder of our shame. When we see you in town, it is another thing. There we bow, we bend, we beg, knowing at the end of the day we can hamba home to our tin and zinc pondoks, drink our beer, hear our fever music and forget. When you come here, you rub the shame in our face, remind us we are cowering dogs. You think you know Joko, but you know shit.

  – Let him go, pleads the shopkeeper. He’s still a boy. The world is not of his making.

  – You know shit, spits the pinballer.

  He sways out into the afternoon glare.

  – It’s Saturday afternoon, says the shopkeeper. The same man, Monday to Friday, is the delivery boy for Smuts, the chemist. You know Smuts?

  I nod, but hear the pinballer’s echo in my head: you know shit.

  Marika follows me into the jigsaw of cluttered shanties. The narrow paths do not have street names, but numbers graffiti the doors.

  Whenever we come to a junction, I choose a path, randomly. Marika follows, unaware that I have lost my bearings. I want to be heroic in her eyes, navigating through the maze of shanties.

  We go past a window in which a pig’s head hangs on a hook. Flies buzz around the gaping mouth. I wonder if Chaka would have ended up hanging from a hook if I had not found him. Blacks love pig head and chicken feet, but maybe it is just the Chinese who chow dog.

  I walk on. After a while I see the fly-hassled, hooked pig’s head again. Fortunately, Marika catches sight of a stray orange cat, like the fat rabbit of a cat on the cover of Teaser and the Firecat, and she does not cotton on that I am lost. I try to fix my bearings by the sun over the flat zinc roofs.

  Then, as if a theatre backdrop is whisked away, Joko and the boys are in front of me.

  – Hi, Douglas, says Joko, reaching out his hand.

  His palm is a flash of yellow ivory.

  – Hi, Joko. This is my friend, Marika.

  Marika looks up from scratching the firecat on its head.

  – Hello, she says.

  She offers Joko the firecat. Joko, puzzled, holds the cat.

  – Come, says Joko, we have something to show you.

  Joko drops the cat. It twists midair and lands on its feet. Unruffled, it begins licking its paws.

  Marika and I follow Joko and the boys deeper into the maze. After a while we come to a clearing where rowdy men cluster like boys around a schoolyard fight. Joko bids us to go down on our knees. We peep through the legs of the men to see a baboon fighting a dog. The dog, a bull terrier, looks like an albino shark. He has the baboon’s leg in his jaw and doggedly clings on as the baboon scratches at his cold, sharky eyes. The baboon’s bone juts through the skin and the men are yelling and the baboon is going chiii chiii chiii and the dog makes a funny deep warbling sound.

  Then the baboon rips the dog’s ear off and blood flicks onto my face and Marika’s dress. Marika cries out and runs.

  The men spin around. Seeing me, big-eyed and blood-specked, they laugh, then swing back to the kill.

  I run after Marika. Joko and the boys run after me. When we reach the square, Marika stops dead in her tracks. The bus is gone. Instead, her father stands there on the running-board of his Studebaker, facing the general dealer, waving his shotgun at the BB Tobacco sign, yelling:

  – Come out, you bloody kaffirboetie. Where is my girl?

  The pinballer is sitting on the veranda, his head lolling. The shopkeeper comes out with his hands up. It is a scene shot in a Mexican border town.

  Through her tears, Marika begs:

  – Douglas, hide. If he sees you he’ll kill you.

  We hide behind the carcass of a burnt-out Volkswagen taxi van. Over the thudding of my heart I hear a surging sound. For a moment I think it is the throbbing of blood in my head, but then I hear voices and my blood runs cold.

  Dancers, spearheading the crowd, come into sight on the right. The drumming feet halt dead at the sight of the white man toting a gun, one foot on the running-board of his Studebaker. Chanting, happy-go-lucky heads shunt up behind the front row of stonewalled dancers. The chanting ebbs and laughter at the sight of the lone boer rivers through the crowd.

  – Bly weg. Stay back, Marika’s father yells, jabbing his gun at them.

  Again there is a scattering of laughter at the man.

  – Bly weg van my, he shrieks.

  His voice frays with fear.

  Marika’s father shoots a cartridge into the sky. The shot bangs in my eardrums, then pinballs among the tin shacks.

  For a moment it is still, and all I hear is the faint Soweto jazz drifting out from under the BB sign,
and the cicada singing of the gunshot in my ears. It is a loaded, strung-out moment, like the freeze at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

  A young man in a football shirt picks up a stone and listlessly lobs it at the Studebaker. The stone clatters on the roof of the motorcar.

  In my head the Muizenberg monkeynut widow yells: Joo got no respect for the neighbourhood.

  The barrel of the shotgun fires and a fat woman flops down. Her black turban flips off and rolls in the dust. It holds the shape of her head, like a memory, until it is stomped underfoot. Yawning mouths bay for blood and fists jut into the pink, cowboy sky.

  Marika’s father jackknives the barrel. The red cartridge in his fumbling fingers will not go down the barrel. A stone lands on his bald head and blood petals away from the wound.

  Marika lunges forward. I dive for her heels. The sand skims the skin off my elbows. I muzzle her mouth with my hand.

  Marika’s father rocks on his feet. The gun drops from his hands. Marika squirms under me, hissing-cat mad.

  Marika’s father flies into the sky, the tossed-up hero of the football game. For a moment, at the pivot of his flight, he floats. His eyes, brimful with fear, zoom into mine, and then the lust of yawning mouths sucks him down.

  He stays down.

  Joko and I drag Marika back behind the taxi van. I feel her heart pump against my ribs. I let her go. Her jaw gapes and out flies a scream that hurls me back to the beach, and my head in the hollow of my mother’s breasts and the stench of burnt meat on Oom Jan’s abandoned braai. Then the township shanties and the chanting fists rush back into focus. There are no beach umbrellas or fruitsellers or any signs of the familiar.

  I clamp my hand hard over her mouth and she bites my finger through to the bone. I whisk my hand away and flick my fingers in a fevered air-guitar riff. Marika gulps down air. I fist her in the face. Blood runs into her mouth.

  The Studebaker goes up in flames. Smoke inks the sky and figures jitterbug around the fire.

  – You hamba out of here now, Joko calls.

  I instinctively follow him, plucking Marika after me. The earth is wavy under my feet and the shanties dance. The din of the mob dims as we dodge through the alleyways, jink through the hazards of rubber tyres and dead bicycles. Marika’s sobs mix with the thup thup thup of her footfalls on the hard earth. Then we reach the tar road.

  – Forget the bicycles and baleka, says Joko.

  The sun arcs low on the horizon. The earth loops round the sun. I have just seen a man murdered, yet the earth loops coolly on. It does not lurch or jolt when you die. It does not skip a beat, whether a cricket ball cracks your skull, or a randomly flung stone fans blood across your forehead.

  My lungs burn. Marika runs behind me. Her sobbing has dried out. I fix my eyes on the yellow line on the tar ahead. I can’t bear to turn and look into her unblinking, accusing eyes. I want to justify my fisting her in the face but the words wing away and I am too numb to catch at them. Words scatter like crow-pecked mossies and all that is left is this thudding of feet, the singing of the telegraph wires in the breeze, and the sickening lilt in the pit of my stomach.

  Marika does not look back as she goes into their yard, and into the house where an unwitting widow waits in the dark.

  I throw my shirt, stained with the blood of Marika and dog, in a dustbin that says: Hou die Kaap Skoon. Keep the Cape in Shape.

  At the rainwater tank, I run my hands and elbows free of blood, hold my throbbing finger under the soothing flow. I climb through my window and pull on my father’s University of Cape Town rugby jersey. I creep along the creaking floorboards to find my mother snoring at the kitchen table, her hand still holding a bottle of London Dry Gin. The red boar’s head snarls his tusks at me.

  Chaka awakes from his farting sleep and wags his stump. I go to my room with him and sit in the dark. Chaka laps the salt from my skin, licks my bleeding finger. My head is as hollow as the inside of Tennessee’s gutted shell. I hear the roar of a Land Rover pulling up across the road. It did not take them long, as only one man drives a Studebaker in Klipdorp. Chaka growls and I tickle his ears to calm him. I gear myself for the scream, but it does not come. After a time, the Land Rover goes again.

  My head flies off the pillow. My heart pounds. My mind ferrets after the sound that woke me, frantic to catch it, defuse its horror by defining it, naming it. But all hint of the sound is gone, skoon out of my head. All I hear is the familiar ragged volley of Chaka’s blunt barks, listlessly echoed by the other dogs of the neighbourhood.

  The floorboards, cool under my bare feet, creak like a yacht mast in the wind. The zebra skin on the wall brushes against my skin. My mother stirs on the orange sofa in the front room. From the lip of a tipped glass, wine seeps into the floorboards. A candle on the window sill has burnt to a stub, oozing wax over the edge. The incense joss has gone out long ago, leaving a trail of fish-shit ash. Yet the smell of jasmine lingers, a wistful afterthought.

  The kitchen door swings in the breeze, the moon glints off the lino. I sense that the sound came from out there, beyond the kitchen steps where Hope sits and peels sweet potatoes into her apron at dusk.

  Hope’s khaya is dark.

  red rabbit

  THE DEATH OF MARIKA’S father is reported on the front page of the Daily Dispatch. The headline, SOWETO HAS COME TO KLIPDORP, is a comment from Mevrou Pienaar, the café tannie at the Sonskyn Kafee.

  The paper rumours that Marika’s father, Willem Vink, may have been involved in illicit shebeen trading in Salem but Sergeant Verster, of the Klipdorp police, defends him: Ou Willem Vink was a deacon in the kerk. There is no way that he would stoop to such shady dealings.

  Sergeant Verster goes on: I give you my word that no stone will be left unturned in our efforts to hunt down his killers.

  My heart skips a beat. I wonder if I can be jailed for watching a murder. O Jesus, don’t let Sergeant Verster find my bicycle and come after me.

  Across the road the curtains stay drawn. I wonder if Marika is sad her father is dead even though he beat her and jerked off over the Scope.

  At school Marika’s desk is empty. Meneer de Beer is writing on the blackboard. There are whispers that her father went to the township to fuck a kaffir girl.

  – If I had a shotgun in Salem, I would shoot my way out, Clint Eastwood style, tunes Joost.

  – We should have shot all the kaffirs long ago, jus’ laaik the ’Mericans shot the Indians to hell ’n’ gone, larks a wiry boy they call Biltong.

  – Then there’d be no Soweto, or Salem, laughs Joost.

  – And no gold, or roads, or Johannesburg, if you think of it, says Meneer de Beer.

  The boys are rattled to find he has heard every word. They shift in their desks, ashamed.

  Meneer de Beer hands out scalpels. We have to slit the foil to free the blades.

  – Jus’ laaik opening a rubber, jokes Joost, recovering his bravado.

  Then Meneer de Beer tells us to pick a rabbit from the box.

  Joost picks white.

  – So the blood stands out, he chirps.

  – Work in twos, commands Meneer de Beer. One to hold the rabbit down and one to slice through the windpipe.

  Rabbits are yanked out of the box by their ears, feet clawing the air.

  I am with a girl called Talia. She too has picked out a white rabbit, with red eyes. When Marsden and I were small, my mother would come into the room on the first of the month, saying: white rabbits, white rabbits. She has not done it for a long time. Not since my father said: you boys are becoming too old to waltz into the bathroom when your mother is naked.

  Talia scratches the rabbit behind its ears.

  – Wonder if he has a name? she says, to herself rather than me.

  I can tell there is no way she is on the verge of slicing him open. So it is up to me, the boy. I have tugged heads off pigeons, seen blood squirt from a man’s head and the bone of my finger peep through my skin. But, at the thought of slitting
through the beautiful white fur, nausea waves through me.

  I put up my hand.

  – Douglas?

  – I’m sorry, sir, but I won’t cut the rabbit.

  – What’s that you said?

  – I can’t kill the rabbit.

  – You can’t kill an animal, yet you eat meat?

  – I’m sorry, sir.

  – Either you kill the rabbit, or you bend.

  I hang my head.

  – Look boy, I’m being cruel to be kind. In South Africa you don’t have the freedom to be a moffie pacifist. Maybe overseas, where they don’t care if you wear an earring or smoke dagga, but this is South Africa and we are at war. If you won’t kill a rabbit at school, how will you kill a Cuban on the border? Hey? And if you don’t pull the trigger, it’s not just your life but the life of your fellow soldiers you risk.

  – Moffie, I hear Joost whisper. You won’t shoot but you’d suck McEwan’s cock?

  How Joost has jumped from rabbits to cock escapes me.

  – Bend then.

  Meneer de Beer swings down his cane.

  – Now, will you kill the rabbit or shall I go on?

  Though I feel sick and know that Marika would be ashamed of me, I pick up the scalpel.

  I tilt the rabbit’s head back by the ears, then slice into his windpipe. Blood seeps through his fur. His eyes glare and his hind legs jigger. I hold him down, until a shudder ripples under his skin and the lustre fades out of his eyes. Then I slit the stomach and the smoking guts slither out.

  In Sea Point, the stitching on my amber-eyed, chewy-eared panda comes undone and the spongy stuffing tumbles out. My mother jams the sponge back in and sews it up again.

  The classroom spins and I hear Talia scream across a misty beach before my head hits the sand.

  Through flickering eyelids I see Meneer de Beer’s eyeballs warping behind the lenses of his glasses. Red deltas in the whites of his eyes.

  – You okay, Douglas?

  I nod. He gives me a notched beaker of cold water.

  After school, I walk along Delarey to the Shell.

  Moses jumps up from his beer crate when he catches sight of me.

  – I am happy to see you, Douglas. Marika’s father was looking for you and there was fire in his eyes. He wanted to know where you had gone with his girl. I would not tell him. He cocked his shotgun. So I told him you had gone to Salem. I have been worried for you.