But he had run into it, an elephant. Surely, it had suffered as much damage as—if not more than—the Eldorado. He had heard it bellow its agony. Still, it had managed to totter away from the accident scene. Even when he made a painful circuit of his Caddy, stooping to search for blood or other spoor, nothing on the paving or in the nearby bush reassured him that what he knew had happened had actually happened.
At least it wasn’t pink, Myburgh thought. At least the damned thing wasn’t flying, like Dumbo.
The elephant may have been a phantom, but the gash on his head was real. So were his battered thighs, his lacerated jacket, his blood-smeared trousers. He stood like a scarecrow in the center of the road, guarding the wrecked vehicle and peering about for some sign of a farmhouse, a police van, or a besotted Ndebele tramp who could be bribed to help him.
He took a monogrammed handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and touched his brow. This simple act made him flinch, but he held the handkerchief to the wound, determined both to halt the bleeding and to restore some clarity to his thoughts.
Should he walk back toward his brother’s farm or on toward the Pretoria suburb in which he had a condominium flat? Onward, of course. Nothing but wintry veld lay behind him, whereas a hike southwestward would carry him into populated areas, white or black, where he could buy or beg assistance.
God help me, Myburgh thought, calculating—for a quick glance at the mileage counter on the Eldorado’s caved-in dashboard told him that Pretoria was still eighty miles away. It would take him days to walk home. He felt too weak to start hiking.
Holding his handkerchief to his temple, Gerrit Myburgh began to cry. He sat down on the wet pavement and hugged himself as if he were his own lost child.
* * * *
He heard it before he saw it, a raw chugging from the alley of Boer farmland dividing the eastern boundary of KwaNdebele from the western boundary of Bophuthatswana.
It was coming down the road toward him, a blunt-grilled Putco “commuter” bus, one of the armada of state-subsidized motorized argosies that hauled residents of the homelands to and from work in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Witbank, and Middleburg. They ran morning and evening, Myburgh knew, but he was surprised to hear one coming so early. It wasn’t yet three o’clock, and surely no one would be riding at this godforsaken hour. Myburgh himself usually arose at seven-thirty, took a leisurely Continental breakfast, and got to the bank by nine. It was an accident that he was still up tonight, the result of his journey to see Kiewit and of his mulish brother’s mulish disdain for reason. Otherwise, he’d be safe in his bed in Pretoria.
Myburgh got up off the road, spread his arms, and began waving his clotted handkerchief. Then, seeing that the bus would have to stop or slow down for the wreck of his Caddy, he realized that maybe he didn’t want to be rescued—not by a bus full of kaffirs on their way to grinding dead-end jobs paying them just enough to get potted in a shebeen and to listen in ale-beclouded sullenness to rabble-rousing ANC shortwave broadcasts from Lusaka, Zambia. No, he didn’t want that at all.
But just as it had been too late to brake for the elephant, it was too late to sidestep the bus. Its wan headlamps picked him out of the darkness, and it squealed to an eardrum-puncturing halt a few meters away, then rocked back and forth on its shocks like a melancholy elephant. Its driver remained invisible, hidden by the tocking blade of a lone windshield wiper and the fuzzy glare of the headlamps.
All right, then. He’d assert himself. He’d force the pathetic kaffirs to help him.
Myburgh limped over to the bus’s door. The bus itself, he saw, was painted a chalky blue. A legend in English on its dented flank read grim boy’s toe. That, Myburgh supposed, was its name—the way wealthy tycoons named their yachts. Whether Grim Boy’s Toe carried a full allotment of passengers, he couldn’t tell, for the bus’s windows were smeared with dried mud and its rear third tailed off into mist and darkness.
The hinged passenger door creaked open. Myburgh peered up and in. He saw—in the wash of a single bulb in a crimson globe—that the bus’s driver was a heavyset African with a face etched of ruby shadows. The driver gazed impudently out, as if Myburgh meant less to him than a crippled plowhorse.
Myburgh began to regret not jumping into the roadside donga and cowering there until the bus had chugged on by. Its passengers, he suddenly understood, could kill him with impunity, bludgeoning him to a ruddy paste and sticking his body under the collapsed steering column as if he’d died in the accident.
“Go find me help,” he said in English, expanding his chest even as he took a half step back. (Afrikaans, his own tongue, wouldn’t do—he didn’t trust it here.)
The insolent driver merely stared at him.
“Get me help!” Myburgh shouted. “Understand?”
At this, the driver’s eyes widened—in astonishment, it seemed, to Myburgh. He leaned toward the door, as if to make sure that his eyes weren’t playing tricks.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Myburgh said. “Find me help.”
“No can do, nkosi.”
“Of course you can. Can’t you see I’ve had an accident? Can’t you see” —blotting his forehead—”I’ve been hurt?”
“Nkosi, number 496 has run late three times this week. I can’t afford to run late again. There are men in Tweefontein E and other closer settlements who’d kill for my job.”
“Why do you run late? Are you a bad driver?”
The driver glanced at Myburgh’s wrecked Caddy. “I do as well as many,” he said. His expression grew conspiratorily earnest. “A blowout one night, sir. Two nights later, a dope-fiend trucker ran me off the road. And last night—with all the unexpected rain, you see—well, we got stuck.”
“Look,” Myburgh said, feeling both exposed and ridiculous, “I’m in trouble.”
“Yes, and I will help you. But not by going off my route. No, sir. You must climb aboard and ride into Belle Ombre station with the rest of my passengers.”
“How long will that take?” Belle Ombre was in the Marabastad neighborhood of Pretoria, once an Indian enclave.
“Three hours. No. Two hours, forty-five minutes.”
“That’s absurd. You ought to be able to make it in an hour and a half. Two at the most.”
The driver laughed, shrugging his bearish shoulders and holding out his hands to indicate the ramshackle condition of number 496. “Not possible, my baas. We have more pickups and a Putco checkoff still to do. Really.”
“Don’t you have a two-way?”
“No, nkosi. And no landing gear, either.”
Myburgh heard laughter—not obnoxious or general laughter, but the weary guffaws of a few riders near enough to overhear.
“Take me to the Putco checkoff.” He gritted his teeth against their amusement. “Somebody there will help me.”
“Maybe. Not to get your car towed, though. You should go all the way into Pretoria with us.”
Myburgh considered. “Very well—let me on.” He climbed aboard and turned to limp down the aisle.
The driver put out a hand. “My name is Ernest Kabini, nkosi. Sorry to say so, but you must pay.”
“Pay?” Should he also introduce himself, as Kabini had just done? Damned if he’d do it.
“Your fare. Everyone must pay, you know. Sixty cents to town, sixty cents back.”
“Sixty cents?”
Kabini hesitated. “Half a rand, okay? Ten cents off. Putco doesn’t want to screw a fellow down on his luck.”
Myburgh dug into his pocket and handed over the fare—the full fare. He was a paying passenger on number 496. He turned again to face the kaffirs with whom he was going to be riding for the next three hours and found himself staring as into an immense shotgun bore that seemed to extend all the way to the Transvaal’s border with Zimbabwe. The faces peering back were devoid of distinctiveness or personality—like a grainy group photograph of skin-headed National Defense Force recruits. A bulb in a green globe threw sickly khaki shadows over the bod
ies slumped in the bus’s middle rows, while, at the back, a bulb in a yellow globe jaundiced the half-dozen riders napping beneath its pale sheen.
If hell had bus service, Myburgh told himself, this is what the inside of one of its buses would look like. He grabbed a seat back for support and silently cursed the inconsiderate elephant that had brought him here.
* * * *
At this point on its route, Myburgh could have chosen any of a number of seats behind Kabini, but, more angry than grateful, he limped down the center aisle.
His wet sock slapped the metal floor. The twelve to fifteen riders inhabiting the bus seemed to shift from one seat to another without getting up and physically moving.
Meanwhile, Grim Boy’s Toe leapt into gear and growled around the abstract sculpture of his Eldorado. Myburgh stumbled, caught himself, shakily tottered on.
You’ve had a blow to the head, he reminded himself. It’s not so unusual that you should be seeing things.
But it was troubling. Why wouldn’t these seat-hopping kaffirs settle down? No, that was wrong. Why wouldn’t his dizziness go away so that he could see things as they really were?
He stopped again. The black faces watching him were no longer popping up in different seats with the same annoying frequency. Maybe he was beginning to get a grip on himself. Maybe the world—or this incapsulated portion of it—was finally beginning to come into focus.
“Sit here, sir.”
He looked. The voice belonged to a slender man in a trenchcoat ridiculously at odds with the filthy woolen cap he was wearing; the coat might have belonged to a movie star, but the cap you could see on any street cleaner or garbage man at work in the city from June through August. This bloke, his thin face almost cadaverous in the dark, scooted over and patted that part of the cracked seat cushion that his skinny bottom had already warmed.
An invitation. A friendly invitation.
Myburgh spurned it. Unfamiliar people—strangers—didn’t sit next to each other when there were plenty of seats to choose from. It wasn’t racial; it was personal, a way to keep one’s identity intact, a means of securing a helpful modicum of privacy. And yet it wouldn’t do to stupidly insult the man, even if his pigmentation suggested purple spray paint under a sheen of preserving lacquer. Myburgh eased into the seat in front of the African’s, pointedly hugging the aisle.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the slender young man, leaning over the seat back as if Kabini had introduced them. “Did you really have an accident?”
What colossal cheek. Myburgh reined in his temper. “What do you think, I staged it?”
“Possibly.”
“Why in God’s name would I do something so stupid—not to say expensive—as that?”
“Forgive me,” the man said, placatingly touching Myburgh’s shoulder. “I thought you might be a member of—or, possibly, an advisor to—a Faking Club.”
“Faking Club?”
“Yes, sir. A few years ago, until caught without my stinker”—his pass, he meant—”and endorsed out, I lived near Cape Town. At the universities there, students staged accidents—bloody ones—to test public awareness of first aid. Faking Clubs.”
“I’m not a member of—or an advisor to—any Faking Club. Why, out here, would you even assume that?”
“So queer an accident. Your car was smashed, but with no sign of any other banged-up vehicle to have caused such damage.”
“I hit an elephant.”
The man—to Myburgh’s relief—withdrew his hand, then simply gazed at the banker sidelong. “My name is Mordecai Thubana, sir. Glad to meet you.”
Myburgh grunted. But Mordecai Thubana’s gaze was so implacable that he glanced away and began rubbing his thigh as if a pain there had distracted him.
“The blow to your head,” Thubana said, nodding at him, “is it bad? Did it make you delirious?”
“Who are you to question me?” Myburgh snapped. “Who are you to imply I’m lying?”
“Mordecai Thubana, sir. And I’m not meaning to be questioning or implying anything.”
“If you don’t mean to, don’t do it.”
“No, sir, I won’t. Except, you know, courtesy would hint that maybe you should—forgive me—tell me your name.”
“Because you’ve told me yours?”
Thubana grinned. He had strong, straight teeth. His grin was almost fetching. “One man, one name.” He leaned nearer. “When I was in Cape Town, I attended university. I’m not just an ignorant construction worker, sir.”
Myburgh pursed his lips. His own name would reveal more than he wanted. Grim Boy’s Toe was hardly the nave of a Dutch Reformed Church, and its passengers certainly weren’t Voortrekkers. But why not tell? Did fear or shame restrain him?
“My name is Gerrit Myburgh,” he said defiantly. “My family had a huge farm out here once, on a healthy remnant of which my brother Kiewit continues to live. Three Ndebele families—more than twenty people—still work for him.”
“Ah,” said Thubana. “But now the government wants it?”
“Yes.”
“To make the Ndebele ‘homeland’ bigger?”
“I suppose.”
“And you and your brother are fighting the government’s plans to take your land?”
“Kiewit is. I’m not. I think we should sell.”
“For the sake of Grand Apartheid?”
“Because we’re not likely to get a better offer, and they’ll end up taking it anyway. Kiewit’s a stubborn ass.”
“Ah. You argued.”
“Would I be out here in the goddamn bundu at such an hour if we hadn’t?” He meant, as they both knew, Would I be on this Putco bus with all you kaffirs if there weren’t a damned good reason?
“No, Mr. Myburgh. I guess not.”
Conversation lapsed. Myburgh was grateful. He didn’t know why he’d indulged Thubana as far as he had. Under most circumstances, he would have ignored the man or fixed upon him a withering, mind-your-own-business stare. But Thubana’s interest in his plight had seduced him into talking. Weak. Shamefully weak.
Myburgh faced front, clutching his own upper arms. Grim Boy’s Toe was a real kidney bouncer, even on asphalt, and now the bus was bumping down a dirt track among enkeldoring trees to another pickup point.
His bruises had bruises. During the accident, he’d apparently bitten a chunk of mucus-coated flesh from the inside of his mouth, and now that slimy flap of skin was overlapping his tongue. He bit down on it and swallowed. His facial muscles tightened.
Twelve people came aboard at this pickup. All gave him the eye as they bumped down the aisle; all made a point of not sitting next to or across from him. The bus chugged off again. A hubbub of African dialects led Myburgh to suspect that some of these people were talking about him. He refused to turn around. Why give them the satisfaction?
* * * *
Grim Boy’s Toe made three more stops.
At the last one, rows and rows of scrap-wood and corrugated-tin bodoks—shanties—grew like crooked architectural cancers. Smoke from Primus stoves billowed into the sky, mistily visible, while a throat-scalding stench eeled into the bus through window cracks and holes in the floorboard.
Although Kabini kept telling the new passengers to move back, move back, several of them bunched at Myburgh’s seat. He realized that he would either have to stand, as two dozen other people were already doing, or scoot over and share his seat with one of the intimidating construction workers or mechanics waiting for him to make room.
“Hey, my baas,” said a man in an overcoat, tapping Myburgh’s knee, “you saving that spot for your lady?”
“Maybe he’s got a disease,” said someone else.
“You may have this seat,” Mordecai Thubana told the man. He came forward and levered Myburgh over against the window with his hip. The man in the overcoat grunted approval and sat down. The logjam of bodies broke. Myburgh watched as several people placed folded newspapers on the floor, dropped down cross-legged, and gave in, alm
ost instantly, to sleep.
One man in particular drew Myburgh’s attention, for, although still young, he was as bald as a stone. Moreover, he held in his lap what appeared to be half a rubber volleyball.
“Hey, Mpandhlani,” Thubana greeted the bald-headed man. “How goes it?”
“No reception,” said Mpandhlani cryptically. “No reception. A relief, Mordecai. I’m almost grateful.” He held the volleyball-half in his lap like a vulcanized begging bowl.
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 53
