Dust Devils (2 page)

"I busted Nelson Mandela's black ass. You're looking at the reason he got sent to prison. I changed the course of history and that is no word of a goddam lie."

Robert Dell, head thick with lunch wine, slumped in the passenger seat of the Volvo – not asleep but not fully awake either – haunted by the memory of his father's voice from deep in his childhood: loud, overbearing, marinated in Jack and Coke and unfiltered cigarettes. Defiantly West Texas, like Tommy Lee Jones in a lesser role. He hadn't seen his father in twenty-five years but his voice was right there in the car, unwanted fragments of Dell's past circling him like bats.

He sat up. Glanced at his wife concentrating on the road as she steered into a sharp bend, heard his children laughing in the rear. Dell looked out at the sun. Let the bright light burn the bad shit away.

They were driving over a narrow mountain pass, road switchbacking its way down to a far valley, a sheer drop falling away to Dell's left, the small town where they'd eaten lunch lost behind them. Franschhoek, an hour out of Cape Town, always reminded Dell of a movie set: vineyards encircled by mountains, gabled white houses built by Huguenot settlers god-knew when, gift shops and pretentious restaurants with French names. Over lunch Dell had flattened a bottle of red wine, trying to blur the edges of a fucked-up couple of days. Not surprising that his father had spoken to him, after yesterday's news.

"You okay?" Rosie asked, eyes on the road.

"Ja. Too much vino."

"Hell, you were really hammering that bottle." Shot him a smile. Smart schools and college had smoothed out the guttural accent of Rosie's childhood, but he could still pick it up on the roll of the 'r' – the slight bray of the Cape Flats that was almost Spanish.
Rrreeely. Hammerrring.

"Sorry," he said.

"Don't be. It's your birthday. Relax."

His birthday. Jesus, how the hell had he ended up being forty-eight anyway? Dell ran his fingers through his long sandy hair, streaked with gray. Two weeks' beard itching on his face. Mostly silver. Time to thin it out. His wife said his stubble was sexy. Or she used to.

Dell turned to look at the twins in the rear, strapped into kid's car seats, side by side. Mary and Thomas, five years old, sucking fruit juice through bent straws. Tommy saying that
Ben 10
was way cooler than
Pokemon
. Mary disagreeing. Tommy emphatic.

Mary said, "Tommy, you're a complete and total idiot." Sounding middle-aged.

The sun haloed their wild hair, halfway down their backs in dark corkscrews. Their mother's hair. They had her skin, too. Exactly the color of caramel.

Dell put a hand on his wife's leg, feeling her warmth through the denim. "And you, Rosebud? How're you holding up?"

Rosie worked on another smile but it didn't take. She was doing her best to give him a treat on his birthday but her heart wasn't in it. She'd been in a dark, interior place since he'd walked in on her two days ago, huddled on the sofa, hugging her knees, watching the early morning news on TV.

Saying, "Ben Baker's dead," as Dell saw images of cops around a luxury apartment on Clifton and heard the TV anchor announce that Baker had been killed in a home invasion the night before. A robbery gone bad. All too common in Cape Town. Only made the news was because Ben Baker had been one of the richest men in the country. His loot had endowed the arts foundation Rosie headed. He was the reason they were driving in this shiny new Volvo.

"I found myself looking in my pocket for a smoke just now," Rosie said. She'd quit when she fell pregnant with the twins. "What does that mean?"

"Means you're stressing."

Ben Baker dying meant that she'd be out of a job soon. Leaving them both unemployed. "It'll all work out," he said. His words hollow.

He touched her hand on the wheel. Elegant fingers ending in long nails. Manicured, these days. When he'd first met her, the nails had been kept short, her fingers stained by the oil pigments she'd used to make her giant abstracts. But she'd stopped painting when she became a bureaucrat. He missed the smell around the house. Turpentine and linseed oil.

Dell looked away from his beautiful wife. Today he was feeling the age difference more sharply than he ever had. He watched the road. The cultivated land had fallen away. Gone were the fruit farms and the vineyards. In the last week a fire had attacked the mountains and torched the fringe of indigenous bush, leaving a post-apocalyptic landscape of rock and gray ash, some of it still smoking. Dell stared over the edge, down to where a dry river bed lay in a narrow gash of a valley. He felt a rush of vertigo and closed his eyes. Too much wine.

Dell opened his eyes and spoke before he could stop himself. "He's out, Rosie."

"Who?"

"My father. He's been released."

His wife's hands tightened on the wheel. She looked away from the road long enough for him to see distress in those big, dark eyes. "You're kidding me, right?"

He shook his head. "I got a call from a talk radio station up in Jo'burg yesterday. Bloody ambushed me. Wanted a comment."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Jesus, Rosie. You've had the whole Ben Baker thing to deal with."

Her eyes flicked across to him, then back onto the road. "When did they release him?"

"A few weeks ago, apparently. Let him out the back door, which is why we didn't hear."

"I thought life meant life?"

He shrugged. "In this case it meant sixteen years."

"Think he'll contact you?"

"No way, Rosie. Don't worry."

"He's their grandfather." She glanced at the twins in the rearview, still caught up in their TV debate.

"He knows better than to come near me. And even if he did, you think I'd let him within a fucking mile of them?"

Mary's radar ears caught this. "Daddy said a bad word."

Dell turned in his seat. "Yes, Daddy said a very bad word. And Daddy's sorry. Okay?"

"Where is he?" Rosie's voice edgy.

"Dunno. I imagine his Right Wing buddies have taken him in."

"Jesus, Rob . . ."

"I know, I know. It was rough when he did what he did, being his son. Now it's all going to start up again, isn't it?"

"You're not your father, Rob." Rosie's eyes were on the road but she reached out a hand and touched his face.

"No, I'm not."

He'd taken his mother's surname. Spoke with her South African accent. Practiced a leftist brand of politics that had made him his father's enemy. Sired mixed-race children. But sometimes, when a mirror caught him unawares, he glimpsed the older man staring back at him.

There was a commotion in the rear. Tommy trying to get Mary's drink, spilling juice over her. Mary shouting, Tommy shouting back.

Dell turned, yelling, "For Chrissakes, you two, can't you bloody behave!"

His outburst left a vacuum that was quickly filled by Mary's bawling.

"Okay, okay, okay. Take it easy," Dell said, fumbling in the glove box for a container of wet wipes. He unclipped his seatbelt and turned around to face his daughter, kneeling on his seat, reaching into the rear to dab at her damp T-shirt. "Relax, Mary, it's only juice."

"Daddy shouted."

"I'm sorry, baby. I didn't mean to."

The girl clung to Dell and he buried his nose in her hair. She smelled of coconut shampoo. He could feel her ribs beneath his hands, small bones shaking as she sobbed. Heart pumping. There was little physical sign of Dell in the twins, but he believed Mary had his nature. Pensive. Sometimes sad. Tom was more volatile, like his mother.

The boy was sniffling now too, so Dell freed his left hand and embraced his son. Holding the two of them. Back when he was working, when he was away from his family, lying alone in a hotel room or sitting in the darkened tube of a passenger jet, Dell had caught himself repeating the names of his wife and children in a silent mantra. As if that would keep them bound together in an unbreakable unit.
Rosie, Mary, Tommy.

Tom was wriggling and Dell let him go. But Mary held on. "I love you, Daddy."

"And I love you too, my angel."

Finally his daughter's small fingers released him and Dell, still kneeling, lifted his face from her hair and saw the black pickup truck, a four-wheel drive with smoked windows and bull bars, coming up behind them. Fast. He watched it grow in the rear window, waiting for it to swing out and pass. It didn't.

The bull bars smashed into the trunk of the Volvo. The car yawed and Rosie fought to keep it on the road. The children screamed and Dell was shouting at the truck, as if that would stop it.

The black fender and fat nubby tire loomed up next to Rosie, who cursed in Afrikaans, fighting the wheel. She lost control when the truck rammed them from the side, edging the Volvo toward the skinny silver guardrail. The truck hit them again and the car leapt at the crash barrier, tearing free the short wooden uprights that tethered it to the edge.

The impact of the collision sent Dell, unrestrained by a seatbelt, through the windshield. He went out backwards, in an explosion of glass, like he'd been ejected. Hanging over empty space for what seemed like hours before he hit the earth, landing on his side, on the narrow strip of coarse grass that grew between the torn and twisted steel and the endless drop.

The last thing he saw before the world went black was the Volvo with everything he loved inside it, turning in the air, tumbling forever, as it fell toward the jagged rocks below.

Inja Mazibuko was hungry. He hadn't eaten since he'd shot the fat white man. His fast an attempt to starve the dark thing that ate his strength, and a penance to appease the ancestors, a plea to them to lead him to the woman who had escaped. The one who had seen his face. The half-breed. Now, watching her car smash into the rocks, exploding in a ball of dirty orange fire, he felt his appetite stirring.

The Xhosa idiot at his side laughed, pointing down at the car. "Yoh, yoh, yoh!" A braying donkey who never shut up.

Inja shoved the Toyota truck into gear and started down the pass toward distant Cape Town. He was a Zulu by birth, his home nearly two thousand miles away, up the East Coast, past Durban, where he was an
induna
, a headman, in the service of his chief. He'd flown in to kill the rich white man and he was anxious to leave, now he'd cleaned up the mess. He didn't like this place, full of half-breeds and Xhosa fools. Like the boy yapping at his side.

Inja had recruited the youth in Cape Town, one of the animals running wild in the shack settlements that festered around the city's airport. He didn't know the town and needed a local to guide him. He hadn't let the boy out of his sight for three days and he was growing weary of his empty-headed babbling. Inja tuned him out and thought of food. He was lusting after a sheep's head, the way it was cooked in the ghetto townships, his mouth heavy with saliva.

At the bottom of the pass the empty road flattened and ran straight toward a dam that lay like a mirror in the blackened veld. Inja slowed and turned off the asphalt, drove a little way up the gravel path that led to the dam wall.

"Why are we stopping,
baba
?" The idiot calling him
father
in deference to his greater age. He'd never shared with the boy his clan name. Definitely never shared the nickname that had haunted him since his childhood in Zululand.
Inja
. Dog.

"I need to pass water." He opened the door and stepped down. "Get me a Coke from the back." Inja, skinny and black as a stick of licorice, walked a few paces from the vehicle and stopped beside a tree trunk that lay singed and twisted in the ash.

While he pissed, Inja saw the boy open the flap of the camper shell and climb into the rear of the Toyota, on his hands and knees, rooting in the Coleman cooler. Inja shook himself and zipped. Opened his check sport jacket and took the pistol from the holster at his hip. Not the weapon he used to kill the white man. This was the one he'd given the boy to carry. Still unfired. He found the silencer in his pocket and screwed it on while he walked back to the truck. Nobody for miles, but better to be careful.

The Xhosa's fat buttocks bulged out toward him. "There's no Coke,
baba
. Only Pepsi."

Inja leaned in and placed the gun barrel against the base of the boy's skull, where the skin furrowed like the rear of a bull. Pulled the trigger twice. The fool slumped forward, his backside still in the air. Inja reached up a gray belted loafer and shoved the ass until the boy sprawled flat. Grabbed the tarp that lay on the metal bed of the truck and covered the body. He slammed the tailgate closed and locked the camper shell.

Then he took the intimate garment from his coat pocket, held it between thumb and forefinger. Regarded it. The panties that he had found in the white man's bedroom. Tiny, immodest. The underwear of a whore. If he caught his wives wearing something like this, he'd take a horsewhip to them.