Ishmael Toffee

by Roger Smith

  When she came back from the store with milk this morning she had to fight her way through the reporters swarming the driveway, with their cameras flashing at her as she got herself in the gates and closed them, shouting, “Florence! Florence! Look this way, Florence ! Look sad, Florence! Florence, how is John holding up?” like they all of a sudden were best friends of the family.

  The media, Mr. Goddard calls them. Bloody vultures, she calls them, with their “Little Cindy” story all over the papers and the TV.

  Domestic workers (one’s she never bothered to give the time of day to before) crowded around her at the store, clucking like chickens saying, “That poor little child. The Lord only knows what that thing is doing to her. Jail is too good for him, they must give him to us and we’ll fix him good and proper.”

  But under the sympathy is the scratching sound of greed. Greed for that reward. A quarter of a million, more cash than most Cape Flats families will see in a lifetime. Every eye on the streets out there looking for the gangster and the child. Looking to hit the jackpot.

  Florence dumps the booze bottles in the trash in the kitchen and rinses the glass, sticky with red wine like blood, the buzzer shouting at her from the hallway.

  Mr. Goddard comes in looking like hell. Unshaven, something yellow and sick under his tan, his eyes red and his blond hair dark and greasy. He looks like he’s slept in his clothes, and she can smell him, the wine and stale sweat.

  “Have you heard anything?” she asks.

  Mr. Goddard just shakes his head and takes a bottle of spring water from the fridge and drinks deep from it, splashing some down his chin onto his shirt. He screws the cap back onto the bottle and wipes his face with his hand.

  He goes into the hallway and she hears the buzz as he releases the gates and within seconds those media people have run up the driveway, fighting each other to get to the house, shouting questions even as she sees Mr. Goddard step out of the front door and hold his arms wide like he’s Jesus Christ on the cross. Flashbulbs explode burning him paper-white and the reporters push microphones into his face like they’re trying to force-feed him.

  John Goddard just stands there with his arms out and his eyes closed, and amazingly the crowd shuts up. When it’s dead quiet he opens his eyes and speaks, his voice thick and rough.

  “People, thank you for being here. For bringing my daughter’s desperate plight to the attention of the world.”

  He pauses, looks around, and Florence can see how he is the victim, now, in his head. All that he has done to the girly gone and forgotten.

  “We still have no idea where Cindy is, even though the police are working tirelessly around the clock. All I can do is plead with the man who has taken my child to return her to me. We have had a tragic year, with the death of my wife,” he breaks off, fighting away tears and the cameras eat him up, “and this is more than my daughter and I should have to endure.” And tears come now, dribbling down his cheeks, little waterfalls catching the light of the flashbulbs. “I want to announce that I have doubled the reward for Cindy’s safe return. I am now offering a half a million rand. Please, please, bring my Cindy home to me.”

  He turns and walks into the house and the media shout questions at him, but he closes the door. Reporters jump in front of the TV cameras, quickly brushing their hair or pulling their ties straight, and they speak into the lenses, making the people out there even more greedy for all that reward money.

  Florence hears the whoop of a siren and two white cop cars push through the vultures. The big Boer plainclothes from the night before gets out the front car, two colored uniformed cops walking behind him as he crosses to the kitchen door and knocks loud as a debt collector.

  Florence dries her hands on a cloth and unlocks the door. “Mr. Goddard is inside,” she says.

  The Boer says, “It’s you I want to see, Mrs. April.”

  “Ja? Why for?”

  “We want to search your quarters. Please open them for us.”

  “Why you wanna search my room? I done nothing.”

  One of the uniformed cops takes her arm. “Better you just open for us, lady.”

  “Show me your warrant,” Florence says, her voice shaking.

  “They don’t need a warrant,” Mr. Goddard says, entering the kitchen. “You live on my property and I’ve given the police permission. Now I advise you to cooperate with them.”

  The second uniformed cop grabs her other arm and they walk her out the door like she’s a common criminal.

  23

  The taxi drops the woman in front of Ishmael and the kid like she’s a gift from God. As the co-driver slams closed the sliding door, the minibus rattles off trailing exhaust smoke. The woman leaves the sidewalk and picks her way along a footpath curling through a strip of veld that’s flanked on one side by the landfill and on the other by the low houses of Paradise Park.

  The open lot is littered with bags of rubbish and a pile of builder’s rubble. Ishmael and the kid are crouched behind the rubble, invisible to the woman, a nice respectable looking lady hurrying along on her high heels, her big leather bag held tight under her arm like she’s about to start playing the bagpipes.

  Ishmael lifts a half brick from the pile. He sees the girly’s about to speak so he quick-quick puts a finger to her lips, shaking his head so hard it feels like it’s gonna fall off. He motions for her to stay where she is and she nods and makes herself small.

  Ishmael squats, his back to the warm rubble, listening to the woman’s shoes crunching on the gravel. He flashes one more warning look at the kid, then he jumps up and grabs the woman by her arm, bringing the brick up like he’s going to smash her brains in.

  He doesn’t even get a chance to tell her to give him her bag before she winds up and smacks him hard on the nose. He falls on his ass and the woman bolts toward the houses, screaming her head off.

  Ishmael sprints after her, tackles her from behind and they fall to the dirt. He gets the woman under him and tries to pull the bag free from her hands. She bucks and kicks, her dress up around her waist and he can see her thick brown thighs and her pink panties.

  “Rape!” she shouts. “Rape!”

  “Jesus, lady, I don’t want your cunt, I jus’ want your bag!”

  He grabs at the bag and she releases her grip and he pulls it free of her arm. She’s still screaming blue bloody murder as he runs back toward the kid. Two men working on a car outside one of the houses hear the commotion and are heading this way.

  “Bobby! Bobby, come!” Ishmael yells and the girly falls in beside him, and he doesn’t stop, just hangs the bag’s strap from his shoulder, scoops up the kid and runs like hell toward where the dump leaks trash down into the veld.

  24

  Florence unlocks the door to her room and plainclothes cops rush in like a pack of hunting dogs. White cops. Fat bastards with mustaches and pink faces, beer guts hanging over their gun belts, and one young girl who looks like she should still be in school, with a mess of blonde hair like some country singer, the men eyeballing her ass in her tight jeans.

  The little bitch laps it up, hands on her skinny hips, sniffing the air with her button nose, saying, “Stinks like the docks in here.”

  The men laugh as they start tearing up the place, pulling out drawers and tipping over the bed. The blondie yanks open the closet and reaches in, grabs hold of Florence’s under things—her panties and her girdles and her bras, some of them mended ’cause they cost so much these days—and throws them on the floor.

  Florence feels like she’s going to faint and she sinks down on the kitchen chair, her heart beating too fast, sweat running between her breasts. She closes her eyes and fights back tears, doesn’t want to give these Boers the satisfaction of seeing her cry. She hears glass breaking, opening her eyes to see the only photo she has of her dead mother trampled under a boot.

  She sits like this till the cops walk out into the heat, their pale faces melting into the hot white sky.

  Only the big
Boer is left, standing over her. “If you know anything, now is the time to talk. Maybe you can still save that child’s life.”

  Florence shakes her head. “I know nothing. This business has got nothing to do with me.”

  The cop stares at her then he turns and goes outside.

  Florence sinks her head into her hands and cries her eyes out. What else is she to do?

  25

  Ishmael and the girly hide behind a bent tree in a little patch of veld. He’s eyeballing a store, a small white building with more steel on its windows than Pollsmoor Prison and curls of razor wire around the roof. There’s a big yellow bottle painted on one wall, surrounded by a mess of gang tags.

  Ishmael knows he’s taking a chance going in there, but the kid is thirsty and starved. There’s a woman inside, buying bread from the man behind the barred counter. When she leaves, Ishmael tells the kid to stay down and he walks into the store, trying to be all casual but feeling like he’s got gun sights on his back.

  The man behind the bars—fat thing with thick glasses, shirt popping open like tent flaps to show a hairy gut—stares straight through Ishmael when he walks in, not bothering to greet him. Ishmael grabs some drinks from the fridge and carries them over to the counter. There are chips and pink sausages and some apples wrinkled like Ishmael behind the glass counter, and he tells the man what he wants.

  The man takes his time to put it all in a bag and make change and Ishmael wants to tell him to hurry his fat ass up, but he says nothing, just keeps checking back that nobody’s coming in at him through the door.

  At last the fatso, moving like he’s swimming though oil, hands a pink plastic bag through the bars and Ishmael hustles out, whistling for the girly who ducks in next to him and they take off down the road on the border of Paradise Park and Tin Town.

  Ishmael hears a chorus of voices yapping like dogs. First he thinks they’re in his head, but then he and the kid turn a corner and he checks out the mob, ten deep, crowding round a minibus taxi stalled on the road to Tin Town.

  The taxi driver sticks his skinny arm out the window and he’s holding a gun, shining silver in the sun. Before can use the thing the mob is all over him and they drag him out of his seat and he goes under like he’s drowning in this mess of human rubbish.

  The co-driver scrambles out the passenger window—can’t open the door against the bodies—and lands on the mob like he’s stage diving. He crowd surfs and almost makes it to the road before he goes under, too.

  The men, armed with sticks and pipes and bits of sharpened metal, tear open the sliding door of the taxi and pull people out. Ishmael understands what this is all about when he hears them chanting, mad as meth-monsters on a Monday morning: “Little Cindy! Little Cindy!”

  The men haul out a woman who clutches a child to her tits. Small child— girl—with dreadlocks the color of beer.

  “Little Cindy! Little Cindy!” they shout as they drag the child from the woman, thinking they got half a mil in their paws.

  Just when it looks like the kid’s gonna get ripped apart like a chicken take-out, there’s the whoop of a siren. A cop truck bounces up and the men scatter like lice, disappearing into the houses and onto the dump.

  The woman, bleeding from her mouth and knees, grabs for the kid who sits on its ass in the dust and howls seven kinds of hell at the sky. The kid is as colored as Ishmael, just a mixed-race brat whose white daddy got it on with some hot brown meat.

  Ishmael takes the girly’s hand and hurries them down a narrow street, keeps them walking fast, pulling her along when she falls behind, ducking away from people. He needs to get them a place to hide, till it gets dark. He sees white crosses sticking up over a tumbled down wall and hurries the girly on toward the graveyard.

  When Ishmael hears the commotion, people shouting, he’s ready to turn and get them out of there. Then he sees maybe fifty darkies in bright red jumpsuits, with red helmets and black gumboots, pushing people out of the shacks built in the cemetery, pathetic piles of belongings dumped amongst the crosses.

  They call them Red Ants, these darkies, private security guards brought in to throw out squatters. Some of the people from the shacks try to fight back, and the Ants get stuck into them with whips and nightsticks and their boots.

  So Ishmael doesn’t run. Thinks: no wait Ishmael, this here’s a gap you can take. These people are too busy with their problems to be worrying about your stinking ass.

  Ishmael takes the kid’s hand and walks along the graveyard wall and through a hole, into a quiet place where no squatters have built their shacks.

  ●

  They hide behind a scary grave, the stone cracked and leaning like something horrible is pushing it up from under the ground. Cindy didn’t want to come into the graveyard, and the little man had to get down and look into her eyes and tell her, “The dead they only got problems with bad people, hear? They don’t trouble with good people like you.”

  “But I’m not good, Ishmael,” she said, her voice sticking in her throat like food she couldn’t swallow.

  “’Course you are,” he said.

  She shook her head. “My mommy made her dead because of what I did with Daddy.”

  He grabbed her shoulders, so hard it hurt. “Now you listen to me and you listen good. What your daddy done to you is nothing you could stop, hard as you could try. It’s not never your fault. Never. You understanding me, Cindy?”

  “Bobby,” she said, smiling through the tears that came like water down her face.

  “Ja, Bobby,” he said laughing, standing up and taking her hand and she let herself be walked to where they are sitting now, having their picnic: bread and Simba chips and guava juice and apples and Vienna sausages red like lipstick, all greasy but tasting so good because she is very hungry.

  They sit with their backs against the stone and eat their feast, and when her tummy is swollen up Cindy feels her eyes getting heavier and heavier and she lies down on the sand and goes to sleep because she knows that Ishmael is her friend and he is there to watch over her and keep her safe.

  ●

  The girly snores softly and Ishmael lifts the pack of Luckies—red circle like a target on the front—and tears open the silver top. He puts the pack to his nose, catching that nice, rich smell of fresh tobacco. The first proper cigarettes he’s bought in more than twenty years. He’s spoiling himself, but what’s the harm?

  He got himself matches, too. Knows they are Lion matches because they’re yellow and got a drawing of red lion on the box. Ishmael taps out a Lucky and is disappointed to see that it has a filter tip. Can’t buy plains no more. He busts off the tip, chucks it on the ground and puts the cigarette in his mouth, feeling bits of tobacco tickling his tongue like little worms.

  He fires up and takes a long drag, coughing smoke, then shuts up, fast. Doesn’t want to wake the girly. Wants her strong tonight, so they can get their asses gone from here when it’s dark. Not sure where they’re going to go, but wants to put as much distance between them and Tin Town as he can. He found a couple of hundred rand in the lady’s purse—must have been payday for her—and that’ll be enough to get them on a train upcountry, where he’s never in his life been.

  He takes a peep around the side of the tombstone and sees the Red Ants have got all the people out, up there on the airport side of the graveyard. Now they’re smashing down the shacks made of old tin and wood and plastic.

  A woman with a baby tied to her back tries to stop them and an Ant smacks her down with his nightstick. Some other people come and drag the woman away, and Ishmael can see from here that her face is red as the Ant’s uniform.

  Not Ishmael’s problem. Got him plenty of his own. And he don’t like it here fuck-all, in this cemetery. Believes every word of what he told the kid, about the dead not hassling good people. But what about him? He put countless men in their graves. Some women too, truth be told. And for sure, a whole lot of them gonna be planted right here in this graveyard, maybe even under where he’s
sitting his ass.

  Ishmael, even though it’s hotter than hell on a bad day, feels a shiver run up his spine. All of a sudden the smoke tastes sour in his mouth, and—though he reckons it’s not yet noon—he tells the night to get a move on and come.

  26

  His name’s Taswell, but call him that and you’ll see your mother. Angel, that’s his handle. Angel. Proud of his American gang tattoos. Barely out of his teens but he’s on his way up, running drugs and women. Taking what he wants, when he fucken wants it.

  He sits slumped low in the shotgun seat of the Honda Civic, shacks blurring by, looking past the driver, Boston, at a group of men coming on, some of them carrying sticks and metal pipes, and he knows what this is about: street justice, they call it. Say they gonna find the rapist and save the child, but the stink of that reward money is thick in their nostrils.

  And he was so close to that little fucker last night on the dump.

  “That close,” he said to Boston once the chopper clattered away and they made it back to the car. “That fucking close,” holding his thumb and index finger a few millimeters apart.

  That close to the half-mil.

  The mob parts slowly to let them through and just in case these losers get any ideas Angel cocks the .44 as Boston slides the Civic between the men. Angel prefers a knife—likes to do his work up close—but with these bastards on the street a man needs a gun.

  He hears the sounds of sirens heading this way. Too much heat this little Cindy thing is bringing to his turf. Not a good idea to be driving around in this stolen car. Not today.

  “We gotta lose these wheels,” Angel says and Boston shoots the Civic behind a half-demolished store, THINGS GO BETTER WITH COKE still painted in red on the peeling walls.