19 With a Bullet (2 page)

HOWZIT

I don’t like Mondays—Boomtown Rats

It was a beautiful spring afternoon. The bright sun filtered through the long rows of jacaranda trees that lined the main road. The sidewalk was covered in a thick purple blanket of fallen blossoms that spread out into the busy street, crushed into a purple pulp by the wheels of passing cars.

It was a little past noon; the lunch crowd was starting to throng the sidewalks. Cars stood idling in gridlock at the traffic lights, honking their horns at impatient pedestrians who ignored the ‘don’t walk’ lights as they dashed through the slow-moving traffic.

I was on my way to meet my friend Paul at the Wimpy burger joint for lunch. I had left the town library early hoping to beat the lunch crowd to a seat, and was taking a short cut through the small mall. But it seemed like fate had other plans; it began to look as though I would be late anyway. There were three clear reasons for this and they all stood in the entrance of the plaza eyeballing me.

The first one ran about 95 kilograms, with huge hairy forearms and curly blond hair. The other two weren’t as big as their friend but all three glared at me as they stood wide-legged, guarding the entrance to the plaza.

It had all gone down in a few seconds without a word being said. The three goons had watched me as I approached the entrance where they were standing, my shoulder-length hair no doubt the object of their conservative technical-college attention. Never one to back down from a challenge or the chance of a quick scrap, I glared back at them and, holding their collective stare for a few seconds too long, raised a macho eyebrow that clearly said: “What the fuck are you looking at, prickhead?”

That’s all it took for things to go down.

Hairy Arms was clearly the leader of the pack. I watched him crack a little smile as he made a show of passing whatever was in his top pocket to his goon buddy before heading towards me. There was a hectic sparkle in his eye that said this was really going to make his day.

At 77 kilograms I was lean and in pretty good shape. Changing course in mid-stride, I met Hairy Arms head on. It was child’s play. I had already judged my timing as he started towards me and closed on him in five or six quick steps.

The moment he was within range I threw a hard, fast straight left to his mid-section, followed by an immediate right to his mouth. I had done it many times before; both punches landed solidly. I had leaned my head into the punch and felt it connect but as I lifted my head I was puzzled to see that Hairy Arms was still standing in front of me.

“What the hell …?”

Quick as a shot, I cocked my right hand. With all my strength I smashed a straight right into his face and, this time, I watched as he went head-overheels and then down flat on his back. He half sat up on his butt; for a second I thought he might try to get up— but he stayed put, looking dazed and confused.

As I stood poised over him with my fists cocked, daring him to get up, I realized that there were actually two bodies sitting on their asses in front of me, dazed. It mystified me for a second and somehow stole my concentration.

“What the hell’s going on here?”

I snapped out of it when the third goon hit me low with a sloppy tackle from the side. He knocked me off balance a little but I could feel there was no conviction in his grip around my waist and I quickly recovered and managed to flip him over in a sort of half-assed Judo throw, using his own momentum to slam him onto the floor. As he fell he grabbed a handful of my newly permed, shoulder-length hair and held on fiercely. I felt my hair tearing out at the roots, so I began bouncing him up and down seriously against the tile floor.

“Let go, you fucking moron!”

I bounced him until he couldn’t take any more and let go but not before he had ripped a good chunk of my hair out by the roots. I slammed him once more just for good measure. Just then I looked up to see Paul who had been passing by on his way to meet me at the Wimpy and who was now standing at my side with his fists raised, ready for action. For the first time I was able to look around me and assess the situation.

I let go of the turkey who had tried to scalp me. He rolled away, sprang up like a jack-in-the-box and scuttled off to stand at a safe distance. In a moment of good-buddy-bonding Paul and I stood ready, back-to-back with fists up, but there was no need for the dramatics.

Hairy Arms was yelling withdrawal instructions to his Neanderthal friends who were only now rising groggily from the deck. “
Pas op, pas op! Hy’s getrain … los hom uit
!” he shouted. (Watch out, watch out! He’s trained … leave him alone!)

A crowd had begun to form around us, gawking stupidly at the action. The three dipshits began to take off, one of them bleeding heavily from his nose and trying to stem the flow of blood that had saturated the front of his white button-down shirt.

It had ended as quickly as it had started. Paul and I turned and headed in the opposite direction, the only evidence of any action a thick handful of my hair that I watched blow across the brown-tiled floor of the plaza on the errant breeze.

I was untouched, except for the burning sensation in my scalp. “Fucking idiots,” I mumbled with feeling. We walked fast, in silence, and I glared over my shoulder as we weaved between pedestrians.

I had known easily enough what the outcome of the scrap would be but I was still puzzled how Hairy Arms and his mate had ended up on the floor together. Paul and I walked down the main road past the bus terminal, went into the Wimpy and sat down.

“Damn, you decked all three of those mothers! I saw it go down as I came around the corner but I couldn’t get there in time. Not that you needed any help,
broer
. You decked both those
okes
¹
in a nanosecond.”

I craned my neck and glanced out of the big plate-glass window to see if there was going to be any follow-up, but didn’t see any sign of the unlovely trio. All at once what had happened flashed on the inner eye, so to speak. I had slugged Hairy Arms, but must have closed my eyes for a second as I nailed him and didn’t see him go down. As I opened my eyes I thought Hairy Arms was still standing in front of me, so I had slugged him again in doublequick time, but it was his mate I had nailed—the mate who had been standing behind him. Paul cracked up with laughter when I told him about the mystery punch.

“Two birds with one stone, my
boet
,”
²
he hooted, his eyes almost closing with his laughter. He had Chinese eyes and looked stoned again.

No wonder they thought I was trained—I had dropped two of them in onepoint-one seconds flat! But they were right. I was trained—backyard trained. For years my brother and I had sparred with each other, using the old black leather boxing gloves my dad had bought us when we were ten. I slammed heavy, rain-soaked bags hanging from a tree in the backyard until my fists were hard as rocks. We even worked on developing our own style of streetfighting that we called ‘full force’. It was a pretty useful style; the dynamics of it were that every move you made in the fight, whether it was a shove, a punch or a grip, was to be done with one hundred percent of your force, so that if you shoved a guy he ended up across the room. If you blocked, pushed or pulled, you always used full force and all your strength. It worked but the training was tough.

South Africa, for the most part, is an aggressive country. Growing up on the East Rand of Johannesburg, which has a crime rate that makes New York or Rio look like a walk in the park, it was very easy to end up in a ‘situation’ if you were that way inclined. So it was wise to learn some tricks of the trade early in life. The East Rand was a string of five or six gold-mining towns that had sprung up in the late 1800s and grown quickly, thriving on the gold mines that expanded and followed the hundreds of miles of gold reef that joined up with Johannesburg and beyond to the West Rand.

Gold!

Our African gold mines were the biggest and deepest in the world, with shafts plunging 6,000 feet into the ground to purge the earth of the precious ore the world hungered for. A century of gold fever brought a flood of fortune seekers from all over South Africa and the world to the gold mines of the Transvaal and the East Rand. Black labourers flooded to the mines and cities looking for work. It became almost traditional for young black men from tribes who lived thousands of miles away to flock in droves to the City of Gold to live in cramped single quarters and throw themselves at the rock face every day, miles underground, blasting reluctant Witwatersrand gold out of the earth to get it to the world. Johannesburg itself was built with mined sand that still contained tons of unextracted gold, earning itself the name ‘the city built on gold’.

Most of the mines had closed down long since. The straggling reef towns grew to become thriving modern cities and Johannesburg a thriving metropolis. Only the mine dumps towered over the silent old gold mines now—mountains of yellow sand a kilometre or more across, hauled from 6,000 feet below the earth, purged of their gold and left in scattered dumps that stretched as far as the eye could see. Most had now been planted with wild pampas grass and trees; one had a drive-in cinema on the top.

Nevertheless, Johannesburg and the East Rand were good places to grow up … as long as you were white. An endless sprawl of lovely modern neighbourhoods with clay-tile-roofed houses and well-kept gardens; BMWs in every other driveway; housemaids and gardeners chatting over garden fences as they clacked, chased and reprimanded white babies in Zulu or Tswana as they strapped them, tightly wrapped in blankets, onto their backs and rocked them to sleep.

Johannesburg and South Africa had universities, schools, shopping malls and freeways equal to any in the world—and then some—but they were a city and country suffocating with discontent and torn by strife and racial conflict. Tempers were short and men were quiet and deep.

In my last few years of high school the evidence of this social unrest—the thick smoke of burning car tyres—could be seen in the distance now and then, coming from the sprawling African townships that lay on the outskirts of our towns. Some of these townships housed up to a million black people. These were the workers and families who rose at 04:00 every day and journeyed the 30 or so kilometres to the white world in a stream of taxis and buses, to clean our houses and mow our lawns. A sea of humanity who lived, mostly in squalor, in their own world. A world separate from ours and apart.

A world of apartheid.

The world had damned South Africa, boycotted trade and blackballed any country that broke sanctions and dealt with us. “The evil racist regime,” they called us. Personally, I didn’t see much wrong with what was going on, and neither did a lot of the Africans I spoke to. It made pretty good sense. We were very different, culturally and economically. After all, this was Africa. The black African people lived over here, the white people lived on that side, and the Indians and Coloureds lived just behind that distant hill over there. It made sense to me.

The world did not see things the same way as me and millions of other South Africans, however, and the world trade boycott that had been imposed on the country for years now was strangling the economy and making life difficult for both black and white.

I wasn’t a hundred percent clear on the details, nor did I give a shit. Things were pretty okay as far as I could tell and I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about. The world was claiming that the black Africans were being oppressed because they were Africans. But, as far as I knew, any of the black political parties that were banned at the time had links to communist states that were just waiting to get their claws into our country. That was the reason the blacks weren’t given any power even though they were a majority.

Well, it was a good excuse anyway; that’s what the newspaper told us. So, like any South African, I just went about my business, not too concerned about world opinion or that we were No. 1 on the world’s shit-list.

The scrap at the plaza had lightened my mood; I smoked a cigarette and walked back to the town library. Amazing how cheerful kicking someone’s ass can make you feel. I felt in touch again, in control. I felt good. My right cross had not betrayed me, and if ‘they’ didn’t want to see things my way, I would educate them. Whoever it was. But things had not been that easy lately, nor as simple as the ass-kicking of idiots, which was not the source of my frustration. I was 19 and it was the end of 1979—my last year of high school. There were only three months to go before final matric exams and graduation, and I had been ‘asked’ to leave school. Again. And the school I was at did not expel students lightly.

It was one of the new, very liberal, private college-type schools in an office building downtown where one could do interesting subjects like criminal law, criminology and so on. There were only about 150 students in the whole school. It did not have a uniform like all the other public schools. We could wear our hair long and we could come and go on breaks as we chose. We could also smoke at school, so all in all it was a pretty good thing.

I was just beginning to feel good about myself when word inconveniently leaked out that I was screwing the English teacher, and reached the headmaster. Apparently he had suspected it for a while but could not prove it, while she had denied it with outrage and shock when he had questioned her about it—‘she’ being the English teacher—a little brunette with freckles, cute as a button and the dream of every schoolboy at the college.

Bev was a doll. All the guys talked about her—the provocative way she stood in front of the class with her tight white slacks riding up her crotch, or how she sat up against the desk with her legs slightly spread as she read from a book. She would pace the classroom, enthusiastically dissecting a sonnet or reading ‘The Rubaiyat of Kublai Khan’, a poem written hundreds of years ago by a stoned, self-proclaimed opium addict. When she got mad she would pout her lips and flick her short curly brown hair and scowl as she wrote long notes on the blackboard for us to copy, driving the guys wild watching her round backside wiggle up and down the madder she got and the faster she wrote.