Dust Devils (24 page)

Dell avoided the urban tangle of Durban, where he'd spent the first ten years of his life, heading inland, toward a place he'd never been. Far from the four-lane toll road. He switched on the radio. A Durban station, blasting out Bollywood show tunes for the descendants of the cane cutters the British had brought in by the boatload from South India a hundred years ago.

The cane gave way to rolling hills. A town blurred by. Dell looked across at his father. "Remember this place?"

"Yes." Coughing, rousing himself from his trance. "Changed a lot over the years. Was just a dirt road back then."

"So all that stuff about busting Nelson Mandela? It was true?"

"You calling me a liar, boy?" Looking across at him, some of the old swagger back in his voice.

Dell shrugged. His father laughed and smothered a cough. Pointed a gnarled, nicotine-stained finger past the houses and the fields, to a road that ran parallel to the freeway. "Happened right there. August of nineteen sixty-two. Mandela was on the run. Had been for months. The South African security police were after him but they couldn't find their dicks in their breeches. I told them that he was down here, visiting a Zulu chief named Luthuli. That he was pretending to be the chauffeur of an old white commie faggot. We waited, me and the Boers. Saw the car coming along that road. Mandela wasn't even driving. Old homo was. White man driving a black man in this country back in sixty-two?" Laughed. Wheezed. "The South Africans stopped the car and Mandela gave himself up with no fuss at all. Went away for twenty-seven years."

"How did you know where he would be?"

Goodbread was sitting up straight now, more like the man Dell remembered. "I was CIA, boy. My cover was junior consul in Durban, but I was working for Langley. I'd infiltrated the commies and fellow travelers here in Natal. Jews. Indians. Some educated Zulus. It was all too goddam easy. One of them gave Mandela up for fifty dollars."

"He denies that, you know? Mandela. That he was betrayed. Says he was just careless."

"He's a gentleman."

Dell looked across at the old man, searching for signs of sarcasm. Finding none. "Did my mother know who you really were?"

"Didn't you ask her?"

"She wouldn't talk about you."

Goodbread sighed. "No, guess she wouldn't." He watched the road a while. "At first she knew nothing. When we met, she was a college student in Durban, thought I was just some small-time desk jockey. I told her after we were married." He laughed. "Said she was proud of me."

"That didn't last long."

"No. Can't say it did." He shrugged. "I had a young man's appetites, that's true. And I did things of which I'm not proud. God knows, if I could undo a bunch of them I would. But if you think it was all whoring and carousing, boy, you're dead wrong. There was a war to fight."

"Don't dress it up, old man. You just ditched us and fucked off."

"What would you have had me do? Drag a woman and a baby off to goddam Vietnam? I left you and your mother here where it was safe and went and did what had to be done." Goodbread lit another cigarette, drawing smoke into his wrecked lungs, exhaling with a rattle of phlegm. "As a father and a husband I displayed little aptitude, that I will allow. But I would like to believe that I followed my calling. Made a contribution."

"You killed people. Plain and fucking simple."

"Damn straight. Communists. It was a different world back then." Talking around smoke, energized by his memories. "Anyway, after Saigon fell I came home."

"Bullshit. You went to Angola."

"Close enough to keep an eye on you and your ma." Dell shook his head and laughed. "Why do you think you spent two years playing with your johnson in Pretoria while medics were dying like flies in the bush war, boy?" Dell looked at him. "When I got pulled out of Angola and joined the Afrikaners, I used my influence with them. Kept your ass safe."

Dell said nothing. It may even have been true. They didn't speak for a while and Dell thought the old man had fallen asleep. Then Goodbread fired up another cigarette. "Your ma. At the end. Was it bad?"

"It was Alzheimer's. It's always bad."

"I tried to get to her funeral. They wouldn't let me out."

"Nobody wanted you there." The old man nodded, smoked. "You know, she forgot you were in prison," Dell said. "And why. Like she hit a delete button and those dead women and children were just gone." Felt his father's eyes on him. "She asked for you with her last breath."

"Jesus." Something caught in Goodbread's throat and he coughed.

"Maybe it was a kind of a blessing for her, losing her memory. I envied her, sometimes."

Goodbread said, "I'm sorry." His voice wavered, an old man again.

Dell said, "Tell me something . . ."

"What?"

"How do you live with what you've done?"

His father exhaled. More than smoke leaving him as he sagged away from Dell. Shutting down. "I'll not speak of that, boy."

"Why? You scared?"

"Not of you or any other man." He squinted out through the glass, his eyes lost in an eroded landscape of wrinkles. "But I do know I will be held accountable."

Dell said, "You're not going to tell me you found fucking religion in prison?"

"Oh, I always had religion. When you grow up in Texas religion and firearms are part of your birthright." He coughed, tears came to his eyes and he spat into a rust-brown handkerchief. "But religion is like politics. People use it to their own ends. No, I found God." Dell waited for the laugh or the sneer, but he saw the old man was serious. "And if I hadn't of found him he would of found me." He stared at Dell through his watery blue eyes. "You can't hide, boy. Not never."

Inja sped across the bridge and up the main street of Bhambatha's Rock, blue light flashing on the roof of his red Pajero, scattering goats and children and chickens. He had three of his soldiers in the car with him: one at his side, two in the rear. All carrying automatic weapons. And in his mirror he could see a pickup truck with two men inside, eating his dust. This is how he traveled around here, especially in times of war. Always ready for battle.

But no matter how fast he drove he couldn't outrun the hidden enemy that had him sweating with fear. He'd grown used to feeling sick to his gut, but this was different, as if cane rats were gnawing away at his nerves. He had a sense of being eroded from within.

Inja, unhinged by panic, overshot the dressmaker's and when he stood on the brakes, the pickup almost rear-ended the Pajero. The two vehicles slid to a stop, sending a fall of thick dust over the hawkers who squatted on the sidewalk.

When the dust cleared, he saw his betrothed through the dressmaker's dirty windows, being fitted with her traditional bride's outfit. The sight of her calmed him. He sat breathing away his fear, marveling at her resemblance to the only woman he had ever truly desired.

Inja's sister stood looking at him through the glass and he waved her out. Watched her waddle toward the car. Him so small and that one with the ass of a rhino. He called her "sister", but she was a cousin, in truth. The only person who had ever cared a damn about him. He pressed a button and the side window slid down.

She stared at him. "Brother, are you ill?"

"No, no." Waving her words away with a swat of his hand. "Any trouble with the girl?"

"No, brother."

"After she is finished here I want Obed to take her to the Zulu Kingdom. She must work this afternoon."

"I thought her work there was done?"

"Why? She is not yet a married woman. Do as I say."

"Yes, brother." Inja closed the window but the fat woman tapped on the glass.

Irritated, Inja lowered the window halfway. "What is it now?"

"May I talk to you?" she asked. Speaking with the reserve that custom demanded.

"Talk."

"Alone."

Inja told his men to go and buy him a Coke, and they left the Pajero as she climbed up beside him. He caught a whiff of sweat and dirty privates above the scent of cheap talcum powder. "Brother, can I speak my mind?"

"Yes, yes."

"This girl. She is trouble for you."

"No. In fact she is the cure for my trouble."

"I fear when you look at her you see her mother. As if you don't remember that she is dead."

He laughed. "I need no reminding. I put her in the ground. Her and that floor cleaner she called a husband." He shut his eyes a moment, savoring the sweet memory of his revenge.

"I beg of you, don't marry this girl. Let her aunt return the dowry and be done with it. Find another bride."

"What nonsense is this, woman?" Inja asked, fixing his yellow eyes on her.

"I visited the
sangoma
. She threw the bones. She saw blood, my brother. Your blood. And a flame that ate your flesh."

"Enough. You have said enough." Felt his fear rising again like a fever. He reached across and pushed open the passenger door. "Go now."

She looked as if she had more to say, then she thought better of it and slid from the vehicle and wobbled back into the dressmaker's. Inja fought his racing pulse, staring at the girl through the glass. There was truth in what his sister said.

As a youth, he'd watched Zondi with this girl's mother. Lusted after her but couldn't touch his comrade's woman. When he came back from exile he found her married to a useless man who spent his life on his knees before the Boers. Inja attempted to court her, but she'd scorned him. She hadn't lived to do that twice.

Inja had looked on as the girl grew into the image of her mother and when he'd approached her aunt with the marriage proposal he'd had a sense of a circle closing. The skinny woman who had reared the child knew who he was. Knew he had killed her sister. But she was greedy and the promise of cows and money had washed away any familial loyalty.

He watched now as the girl was fitted with a high red hat. Could already see his white bed sheets caked with blood the morning after the wedding, the linen paraded outside his house by the women. Singing, ululating. Rejoicing in the consummation of the marriage. A consummation that would have healed him.

His men returned to the vehicle and Inja gunned the engine and took off down the road. He looked for Zondi's BMW. Gone. Knew he would run, like he had run twenty years ago. A man who had no stomach for blood. Soft, like a woman, in his city clothes.

The Pajero stopped outside the tavern where Inja would drink away his dread. Gamble with the men of the town at
marabaraba
, an African form of checkers, played on an improvised board with beer bottle caps as tokens. They would let him win game after game, until long after the sun had set.

The truck was sucked into a curve and Dell saw the valley spread out below them. The lush cane fields, green hills and pine forests came to a sudden end, as if they'd been sprayed with Agent Orange. He was looking down on a land of red earth and red rock. No grass. No vegetation other than gnarled thorn trees and aloes.

The road, a ragged ribbon of asphalt, twisted down to the valley. The blacktop sparkled with broken glass, and the torn and rusted bodies of cars that hadn't made it down the pass littered the slopes. When a minibus filled his rearview mirror, Dell felt the cold chill of déjà vu, but the taxi muscled past with inches to spare, disappearing around a blind bend.

They reached the valley, the truck drawn down the switchbacks into the heat that burned Dell's lungs. Mud huts clinging to the rocky hillsides. Trenches of erosion carved into the earth like tribal scars. Dry riverbeds. The sprawl of rural poverty. They passed a store, a crumbling pile of pink cinderblocks. A woman in a blanket and beaded headgear stood in the doorway. She stepped back into shadow when she saw Dell's pale face.

He glanced across at his father, who sat smoking. Impassive. He could hear the sigh of the old man's exhalation. "Aren't we helluva conspicuous out here?" Dell asked.