by Tony Park
‘Are we?’ he asked, his finger hooking the sheet, drawing the crisp whiteness down, slowly.
‘What?’
‘Attached?’
Her nipple stiffened at the touch of the sliding cotton. A shiver ran through her body as his skin met hers. ‘I’ve a feeling we’re about to be.’
Shane brooded over a cup of coffee and a cigarette in the operations room. The radio hissed in the background. Caesar was in the kitchen making mealie-meal porridge for breakfast. Wise had hitched a lift with a national parks vehicle to Victoria Falls, taking two days’ leave.
The sky outside was gun-barrel grey and the chilled breeze swayed the long dying grass out past the cottage’s trimmed lawns. There was no game at the lodge’s waterhole. The resident sable herd would be huddled together unseen, taking shelter amongst the trees. It was a good time for predators, when the wind rustling in the bush masked the sound of their movement as they searched for prey.
Charles had not been in his room the night before, when Shane had gone to confront him. Neither had his clothes, his bag, his toiletry gear nor, more ominously, his AK 47, which, according to Caesar, he had that afternoon taken from the safe where the weapons were stored, supposedly to clean it.
On Charles’s bed was a note. Shane had it on the table in front of him now.
Shane. I wish to thank you for the opportunity of employment that you extended to me in a time of great need. I am leaving because I cannot continue to serve you and the others. Please understand that nothing I have done was ever intended to harm you, or Wise or Caesar. I am ashamed that my decision to leave has been brought about by something as petty as money, but that is the way of life – I must think of my wife and children first. My life is near its end, and I must do what I can to protect my family, and to atone for my sins. May God keep you safe. Charles Ndlovu.
Shane ran a finger over his stubbled chin. Normally by this hour of the morning he would have been shaved and dressed in the lodge’s uniform of green bush shirt and khaki trousers. He wore an old army T-shirt and a pair of running shorts. It was cool outside, but inside, out of the wind, it seemed as if the house’s walls had absorbed enough sun during the dry season to keep it warm for months. When Caesar came in he was similarly casual. The younger man looked sullen, and spooned his porridge in silence. Shane knew it was time to show some leadership, or all of them would sink into a morass of inaction and depression over Charles’s apparent defection.
‘Come on, Caesar, it’s time for work. I want you dressed and ready for the firing range in thirty minutes. We’ll have some target practice today and —’
The radio crackled to life. ‘Zero Alpha, this is Niner, over.’
Fletcher, his guide Lloyd and Chuck Hamley had left to go hunting sable early that morning. Shane keyed the handset, ‘Niner, this is Zero Alpha, over.’
‘Zero Alpha, contact! Two shots fired. Wait, out.’ Shane heard the alarm in Fletcher’s voice. After days of inaction, the boss and his client had stumbled into a fire fight. It was a bad time to be short two men.
‘Move!’ Shane barked at Caesar.
By training and habit their packs and webbing were lying waiting to go in the front room of the cottage. Caesar slung the gear into the rear of the Land Rover. Shane snatched up a portable radio and sprinted for the main lodge and the gun room.
Michelle Parker was padding barefoot down the hallway in a sleeveless blouse and incredibly short shorts, a cup and saucer in her hands. ‘Hello. You’re in a rush.’
‘Can’t stop, sorry.’
‘What is it?’
He heard the rising alarm in her voice and debated whether or not to tell her. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
The radio betrayed him. ‘Zero Alpha, one African male adult, automatic weapon – probably an AK. Grid reference follows.’ Shane grabbed a pen off the telephone table and wrote the numbers down on the back of his hand as Fletcher read out his location. ‘Request support. Where are you, Shane?’
Shane heard the crash of china and was vaguely aware of her gasp and a spatter of tea on his bare leg. Then he was gone, without further explanation. When he came back into the hallway he had his SLR in his hand and Caesar’s AK 47 slung over his shoulder.
‘I’m coming too,’ Michelle said.
‘No.’
‘Yes!’
Shane swore. ‘The best thing you can do is wait here. We might need someone to telephone the police.’
‘Bullshit,’ she spat back, hands on her hips. ‘You’ve got a satellite telephone.’
He had neither the time nor the inclination to stand there arguing with her. He jogged out the door as the Land Rover pulled up with a crunch of gravel. Shane hauled his chest webbing out of the rear of the vehicle and buckled it over his T-shirt. He pulled a magazine from one of the camouflaged pouches, fitted it to the rifle and snatched back the cocking lever. It chambered a round with a satisfying snicker as he let it fly forward.
Shane climbed in and slammed the door. ‘Go!’ he commanded Caesar.
‘But, boss . . .’
He looked over his shoulder and saw one long leg hooked over the side wall of the pick-up’s rear tray. He ran a hand through his thick hair. ‘Fuck!’
She glared back at him through the cab’s rear window, blue eyes burning into his. She was fully in the truck now, sitting on Caesar’s pack. He slammed a fist down on the dashboard. ‘Drive!’
It took twenty minutes of breakneck bouncing over potholes and corrugations. Shane had the satisfaction of seeing, in the rear-view mirror, Michelle slide off the pack and land on her butt at least twice. He scanned the bush ahead of him. He hoped the stupid woman didn’t get herself killed. Still, she obviously cared for the old man. Maybe even loved him. None of it was any consolation.
Shane checked the GPS. ‘Slowly now, Caesar. We’re close. Kill the engine and coast down the hill.’
The Land Rover creaked to a halt. Shane leapt out of the cab. ‘Please, Michelle, I’m asking you nicely. Stay here in the back of the truck. Lie down, out of sight. I promise you I’ll come back and tell you what’s happening.’ He grabbed his pack and passed Caesar’s to him.
Michelle started to say something, but a single gunshot cut her off. Her eyes widened in fear. ‘It’s okay,’ Shane said. ‘I’ll come back for you.’
She nodded and did as he ordered, dropping from sight in the back of the truck.
‘Coming in, from the east,’ Shane said without preamble into his radio handset. Fletcher pressed his send button once in acknowledgement. Thank God, Shane said to himself. At least someone was still alive.
Shane took point, scanning the ground until he picked up the spoor of white men in expensive boots.
‘Over here!’ Fletcher called.
Shane hurried ahead, rifle up, just in case.
‘Relax,’ the grey-haired hunter said as Shane and Caesar broke out of a stand of wicked thornbushes. Shane’s exposed arms and legs were tattooed with scratches.
Fletcher and Charles Hamley stood over the face-down body of an African man. Blood welled from a hole the size of Shane’s hand in the left side of the man’s back. It looked, to Shane, as though the poacher had been heart-shot as they were staring down at an exit wound. At least it had been a quick death.
‘Bastard took aim at us as soon as he realised we’d seen him. Look, the tsotsi nearly drilled me,’ Fletcher said, holding up one arm. Shane saw the neat holes in the long sleeve of the shirt, near the bicep.
‘That’s right,’ Chuck said. The words tumbled out of him as he described how the African had fired half-a-dozen or more shots at them. ‘He was holding his ground, not running. Bold as brass!’
The dead man had worn a wide-brimmed green bush hat, which had been fastened with a string chinstrap, so it was still on his head.
‘Caesar,’ Shane ordered, ‘circle the body, look for more spoor. There could be others.’
‘He was alone,’ Fletcher said.
‘How do you know?’
‘They would have backed him up,’ Fletcher said. ‘We heard no other voices, saw no other movement.’
‘Better to be sure.’ Shane nodded to Caesar, who moved off.
Fletcher shrugged. ‘Let’s take a look at this floppy.’
Shane grimaced. Yet another euphemism for a dead body, from the good old days.
Charles Hamley the Third dropped to one knee, removed his hat and looked skywards. ‘Lord, we thank you for your divine intervention today; for guiding the eye and the hands of your servant, Fletcher Reynolds; and for delivering your judgement on this wrongdoer who was taking from your bounteous kingdom that which was not his.’
Shane thought the prayer an insult to the man on the ground. Poor bastard had probably only been trying to feed his family. And Chuck had robbed God’s kingdom of more than his share of its bounty.
A peal of thunder rolled through the grey clouds overhead, echoing across the veld. The hairs stood up on Shane’s arms. He smelled the rain coming on the wind, musty, like wet washing left too long in the laundry.
Fletcher slid a toe under the body and Shane saw how the suede of his veldskoen absorbed some blood. Chuck had stopped praying and was standing, hat clutched in his hand. Fletcher flipped the dead man, like he was a sack of farm produce.
The brim of the bush hat fell back.
The eyes looked to heaven, as Chuck had just done, but they were those of a man who had glimpsed hell.
‘Well, well, I should have guessed,’ Fletcher said.
‘Thou shalt not steal,’ Chuck intoned.
Shane turned away from the body of his friend Charles Ndlovu and started walking back towards the Land Rover.
Michelle pushed branches out of her path and was twisting her torso side on to avoid some thorns when the first fat blotches appeared on her shirt and stung the top of her head.
She looked up and a drop hit her square in the eye. She started and blinked at the wonder of something so everyday in some parts of the world. Here, its return seemed miraculous, like a favourite, half-remembered dream come true.
Shane walked towards her, eyes fixed straight ahead.
‘What happened? Is Fletcher okay? Shane, what’s the matter?’
He was gone, past her without a word, lost in the downpour.
The boy, only fourteen years old, was drenched by the rain in seconds. It was the closest he had come to washing in weeks. In a discarded plastic shopping bag, wrapped tight and folded into his shorts, was his travel identity document, which proclaimed him a citizen of the Republic of Zambia.
Folded inside the creased, stained piece of paper, was a hundred and forty-four American dollars.
He did not cry, for his tears were long exhausted. He smiled, because his luck had finally changed, and he would be able to go home, though to what he had no idea.
He had wept like a baby after the ambush, after the killing spree. He had cowered in the lee of a fallen tree, curled like a picanin, and sobbed for his dead uncle to come back to earth and rescue him. He cried no more now, because he was no longer a child.
To be a man was to look evil in the eye, to survive it, and then take revenge. He had accomplished the first two tasks, and wondered still, after all these weeks, how he would achieve the third.
After the deaths he had walked westwards, numb with shock, uncaring what wild animals he might encounter. Lion, leopard, buffalo and elephant seemed as harmless as the fieldmouse after what he had witnessed.
When he had passed the white-painted cairns, which he knew marked the border with Botswana, he had carried on through the forest lands until he reached the ribbon of wide black tar that shimmered like a basking cobra in the midday heat. He had walked. And walked.
At the tiny border outpost of Pandamatenga he had melted back into the bush and lived, like a pecking crow, off the meagre scraps of that pitiful settlement. Just a filling station, a couple of shops, some wheat silos where the burly white farmers brought their crops, and some houses belonging to the government men and women who manned the crossing point. He had slept under a piece of offcut tin, stolen shorts and a shirt off a washing line, drunk water from the taps at night when people were locked inside watching satellite television behind mud-brick walls. Compared with his native Zambia, Botswana was a prosperous land, where the men and women were fat and the cars were shiny and new. And there were tourists, plenty of them, but few stopped at the out-of-the-way little cluster of bureaucracy that was Pandamatenga.
He had moved on, northwards towards his home, and tried hitchhiking. For days no one stopped, and he had to turn back to the township to steal more scraps from the waste bins, more water from unguarded taps.
Today he had been lucky, though his fortune had brought him close, dangerously close, to another type of evil.
The bakkie was new. A twin-cab Toyota with a canopy on the back and a stowed fold-out rooftop tent. The blue and white registration plates contained the letters GP. It was from South Africa’s Gauteng Province, home of egoli, the City of Gold – Johannesburg. He had another uncle who worked there in the mines and sent money home.
A mzungu, the Swahili word for foreigner, was behind the wheel. Old, with a mane the colour of salt, gold chains tangled with matted hair on his chest. Shorts, sandals and socks. Two things were unusual. Firstly, that the man had stopped, where no one, black or white had stopped for the lone African boy in days; and secondly, that the man was alone. Where was his woman? His children?
In halting English the man had said his name was Herman and he was from Germany. The boy thought Germany might be in Europe, but he was not in school because he was not as smart as the others in his class; he found the books and the pens and the teachers could not hold his attention in the way his uncle Leonard could. He had been eager to be a man, to learn the ways of the hunter, and had seen no use for books and letters and numbers.
Now, however, the boy just wanted to fall asleep in the cool airconditioned interior of the bakkie, which enveloped him like a numbing ice bath after his days and weeks living rough in the bush. The man was talking, but the boy found it hard to keep his eyes open. Soon he was lulled to sleep by the whine of the tyres on the blacktop, the soft music coming from the car radio.
The boy awoke with a feeling half arousing, half terrifying. Something – someone – was touching him. He blinked, then recoiled as he saw the white man reaching across the cab. The boy’s nylon shorts were pulled halfway down, exposing him. His first thought was that the man was trying to rob him, but all he had in his pants was his travel permit. Then he stared, horror dawning, as he saw the zipper on the mzungu’s shorts was undone, and a limp, tiny white penis lay across the man’s thigh. The old man, Herman, moved his hand, with its gold rings, to the boy’s face and cooed something at him. The boy did not understand the words, but he understood the man.
He struck, fast as the mamba, launching himself across the cab and grabbing at the steering wheel. The man shrieked, like a woman, and hauled back on the wheel, overcorrecting the turn that sent the front tyres juddering off the tar and onto the sand at the side of the road.
The boy lashed out with fingernails long and ragged from weeks in the bush, scratching and gouging at eyes and cheeks as the man, his thing bouncing ludicrously against his leg, fought to control the truck. Top-heavy, with its bulky tent, spare jerry cans of fuel and containers of water on the roof, the hired vehicle’s right front and rear wheels left the surface of the highway as the left ones slid off the edge, towards the bush.
One minute they had been careening along the road at a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour, the next they were rolling, over and over, into the mopane sticks and thornbushes.
The boy screamed. The man wailed. When the rolling stopped, all was silent, save for the hiss of steam escaping from the upside-down radiator. The boy lay on the inside of the roof of the bakkie. The old man hung, silent, unconscious, or maybe dead, in his seatbelt.
The boy righted himself in the confines of the
shattered vehicle. His left shoulder was powerfully sore, but his legs seemed to work all right. He felt in his shorts for the travel document, which was safe. His hands roamed over the inert body of the man, in his pockets, and into the money belt that was damp from the sweat of the folds of his belly that hung over the top of his shorts. Careful not to touch the thing, the boy unzipped the hidden compartment and withdrew the money.
A hundred and forty-four American dollars. A fortune.
The boy allowed himself the first smile for weeks as he trudged along the highway through the enveloping rain. The sign said Kazungula 20 km. He was almost at the ferry which would take him from Botswana to his home in Zambia. He had enough money in his pants to eat, buy clothes, and get home. He had survived, and he would tell his story.
He would be a man, a warrior, and he would seek his revenge.
13
Shane, Wise and Caesar stood side by side as the cheap wooden coffin was lowered into the new cemetery outside the town of Victoria Falls.
Wise had been against going, calling Charles a traitor. Shane had convinced him they all needed to say goodbye to their one-time friend and colleague. He didn’t know whether it was the right decision – if it showed weakness on his part in front of his men – but he did know he couldn’t hate the old man, whatever he had done.
They were far from alone in the graveyard. Around them, a dozen other services were going on.
The cemetery reminded Shane of pictures he’d seen of the aftermath of First World War battles – row after row of fresh graves, mounds of red earth, most unmarked by any headstone. The lack of grass or vegetation on the newly cleared plot of land meant that the hot winds could gather speed and substance. The breeze whipped up the newly turned earth into eddies of dust that coated the mourners, in their best clothes, and scattered bouquets of cheap flowers, poorly anchored photographs, dead children’s toys. The rain had not yet reached as far north as the Falls. When it did, the grassless graveyard would become a quagmire.
AIDS and economic mismanagement were decimating the continent. The only things growing in Africa were bone yards and the funeral business. He shook his head at the futility of it all, and his lack of understanding of why a good man would, so close to death, turn his back on the law. To protect his family, of course. Fletcher wasn’t at the service, conducted by a priest in fraying robes.
