Dust Devils (7 page)

Sunday and her aunt sat on the sand beside the main road, waiting for a taxi. A few people waited with them. A young mother whose baby chewed at her breast, as if he wanted meat, not milk. A drunk old man in a threadbare suit, feet bare and calloused. Two girls in jeans, giggling as they shared a soda. A stout woman with a chicken in a wire basket. The chicken sent its red beak through the wire, scratching in the dirt for feed.

Every few minutes Ma Beauty would grunt and shift her withered leg, muttering under her breath, using the wedding invites to wave away the droning flies that circled her head. Sunday watched the shadow of the AIDS billboard inch across the sidewalk and up the wall of the undertakers.

She heard the bleat of a horn and a dented minibus rattled over the bridge and came to sliding stop, sending up a cloud of dust. The driver stayed at the wheel, smoking a cigarette as the co-driver jumped down and ushered passengers into the rear, collecting fares.

The mother shrugged the baby onto her back, tying it in place with a tartan blanket, clucking as it let out a thin cry. Sunday stood and Ma Beauty levered herself to her feet, gripping Sunday's arm for support. Then she hobbled off toward the taxi. Sunday lifted her bag, about to follow. She stopped. Heard a low growl.

Ma Beauty scowled over her shoulder, lips moving, but Sunday heard only that deep rumble. Getting louder now. She turned to look up the road. A car was coming. A blue car, sun kicking off the chrome wheel rims, the windshield ablaze with glare. When the car slid into the shadow of the undertaker's building, Sunday saw the pink dice swinging from the rearview mirror, as slowly as if they were under water. Saw the blurred shapes of the driver and his passenger. Saw the open side window, the sun flaring on metal as the passenger sent out a sinewy arm, something dark growing from his hand. Heard hard, flat slaps. Like doors banging in the wind.

The mother with the baby opened her mouth and a speech bubble of blood floated out. As she sagged, the blanket on her back loosened and the baby took forever to fall to the dirt, where it lay face down like a red doll.

The woman carrying the chicken stopped, one foot on the running board of the taxi, the other on the sand. Put a hand to where her jaw had been. The wire basket hit the ground and fell open and the chicken fled, leaving a single white feather floating in dust. Sunday heard screaming and the roar of the blue car as it sped to the bridge, its tires drumming over the metal joins. Then it was gone.

She found herself on her knees, lifting the dead baby. Fingers gripped her arm and she looked up at her aunt. "Put that down, girl." Sunday obeyed, laid the baby next to its mother's body. Her aunt was tugging at her. "Come, you. Let somebody else clean up this mess."

As she stood, Sunday felt something stuck to her shoe. One of the wedding invites. She pulled it free and put it in her bag. Saw there was blood on her hand. Wiped it on her skirt.

Ma Beauty grabbed Sunday's wrist and walked her away. They passed the taxi, the dead driver slumped over the steering wheel, arm dangling through the open window, cigarette still smoking between his fingers. The drunk man and the girls in jeans sat in the sand, bleeding, faces blank with shock.

As Sunday let her aunt lead her through the crowd that swarmed around the minibus, she heard fragments of sentences, words strung together like beads on a wire:
Taxi war. Hit men from Durban.

Her aunt limped toward a tree encircled by whitewashed rocks, where the African Zionist Church held its open-air services every Saturday. Ma Beauty sat down on a rock, dabbing at her forehead with a Kleenex. "Uh-uh, my nerves they are finished." She drew a banknote from her purse and handed it to Sunday. "You, go buy me a Coke and a Grandpa. Make quick now."

Her aunt's recipe in any kind of crisis: a headache powder as bitter as bile, chased down with a Coca-Cola. Sunday took the money and crossed the street like she was sleepwalking, still carrying her bag. She skirted the ambushed taxi. Heard the moans and sobs of the wounded, the excited chatter of the crowd.

As she headed toward the store she passed the bright red metal container stenciled with white silhouettes of people talking on telephones. Thought of the number in the burned book. Sunday looked back, saw her aunt talking to a woman who had come to sit on a rock beside her, hands flapping toward the taxi. Sunday ducked into the container.

A man in his early twenties stood in the doorway, watching the activity in the street. He grunted at her as she passed. A woman thin as death was crying into one of the phones. Sunday stood looking at the telephones. Unlike any she had seen before. These were small, shiny, modern. Like cell phones. The man turned from the doorway. Sunday showed him the number on the burned card.

He squinted at it. "Pretoria. Long distance. Ten rand."

The value of the note Ma Mavis had given her. Sunday handed over the money and the man dialed for her. She had no idea what she was going to say to whoever answered in that city in another world.

The man shook his head. "It is a fax number." Sunday stared at him. "A fax. You know, you can send a letter or a picture?" He pointed to a machine that sat on the counter, black and full of buttons.

Sunday nodded. She had seen something like that in the office at the cultural village. But it was no help to her. Then she heard her mother's voice again and she scratched in her bag and found the wedding invite. She held it out. "Please, brother. Send this."

He fed the invite into the machine. Sunday wondered whether it had been eaten, but after some clicking and whirring it slid out the other end and the man handed it back to her. He also gave her a slip of paper. "That tells you it was received," he said.

Sunday thinking,
received, yes. In Pretoria. But who received it?

She left the container and threw the paper onto the mound of garbage that lay in the gutter. Sunday crossed the road toward her aunt, trying to decide on a lie to explain why she was returning with no Coke, no Grandpa and no money.

Disaster Zondi sat at his desk, staring out across the empty expanse of soiled carpet, seeing a head on a stick. The head of one of his ancestors, a Zulu chief named Bhambatha who'd led an uprising against the British colonial powers a century before, protesting a poll tax his people were too poor to pay. The British had used machine guns and canon against the spears of Bhambatha's men. Cut off his head, impaled it, and toured it around Zululand as a warning.

The British were long gone and so were their successors, the apartheid butchers. But in the last weeks Zondi had watched as another head, that of his boss and mentor, had been taken and paraded. Also as a warning. Don't fuck with the minister of justice, the man widely tipped to be the country's next president.

The beheading had been virtual, of course. Done with smear campaigns and innuendo and commissions of inquiry held
in camera
. But Archibald Mathebula, once the fiercely principled chief of a special investigative unit tasked with combating corruption, had been left broken, banished from the ruling party he'd given his life to. Zondi had been one of the handful of mourners at Mathebula's funeral a week ago. Dead of a heart attack, the media said.

Bullshit. He'd died of disgust. Plain and fucking simple.

Mathebula's downfall was caused by his unit's probe into the crooked relationship between the minister of justice and Ben Baker, an entrepreneur who had thrived in post-apartheid South Africa. Fat but agile, Baker had quickly learned to dance to the new drum, enjoying endless photo ops with sleek black men in Italian suits. When Mathebula's crusade drew unwelcome media attention, the minister had the unit dismembered like a stolen car in a chop shop. And now Baker had danced his last dance and the minister was smiling his way toward the highest office in the land.

Some of Zondi's colleagues had been absorbed by the police. Some by academia. Others were setting out their stalls as consultants on crime and corruption. Making a killing talking to businessmen over breakfast, giving them statistics and indigestion.

Zondi had refused all offers. So here he was – a dark man, in a dark suit and a white shirt, no necktie – sitting at his desk on a Sunday afternoon in the vast, empty room that, until two days ago, had been a warren of partitioned cubicles.

In the morning men in overalls would carry the desk down to another office in the gray building in downtown Pretoria – South Africa's administrative capital – joined by a sprawl of bedroom suburbs to Johannesburg, its greedy Siamese twin. If Jo'burg, built on a honeycomb of dead gold mines, was all about money, Pretoria was all about political power. It had once been the showcase of apartheid. Now the statues commemorating Boer generals had been felled and lay gathering dust in warehouses on streets named after Marxist heroes.

Zondi sat with a small cardboard box on the desk in front of him. It contained a dictionary, a stapler, three pens and a dog-eared copy of Trotsky's
The Revolution Betrayed
. The book had lain forgotten in a drawer for years. He was tempted to open it and wallow in the irony. Instead he dropped the box into the trash basket beside his chair and stood, ready to start his last walk to the elevator, toward his uncertain future.

When he heard a warbling from beneath his desk it took him a moment to realize it was his fax machine ringing. The machine – an ancient thing held together by duct tape – whirred and groaned as it expressed a page, millimeter by millimeter. A high-contrast black and white image emerged, like a Rorschach blot on paper discolored by age. The machine beeped and Zondi reached down and tore the page free.

He saw a man and a girl, posing stiffly for the camera. At first Zondi was convinced that he was looking at a youthful photograph of a woman he had once loved, dead more than ten years. But the girl in the picture only resembled her. This photograph was recent. The man was familiar, too, and when Zondi placed him, he felt another part of his carefully managed life slip out of alignment. He was holding a wedding invite. But Zondi knew he wasn't being invited to a wedding. This was an invitation to something altogether different.

He crumpled the page, still warm from its journey out of the belly of the machine, ready to toss it into the trash. But some impulse stayed his hand, and instead he put the fax in his pocket and left the room forever.

Inja stood at the stainless-steel urinal, pissing down onto the little white balls that lay in the trough, smelling his urine mixing with the fake pine. He held his cell phone in his free hand, speaking Zulu, saying "Yes, yes. When? And who is dead?" Voice booming off the tiles, loud as if he was using a public address system.

An old white man in short pants, knee-length socks and polished shoes, came into the men's room, took one look at Inja, and chose the privacy of a stall. Inja ended the call and pocketed his phone. Shook and zipped. Left the bathroom.

One of his taxis had been hit in Bhambatha's Rock. Driver dead. Part of the ongoing war he and the other operators waged against one another for control of the rich taxi routes. There would have to be reprisals. Even more reason for him to get out of this place.

Inja walked across the steakhouse in the town of Stellenbosch, forty minutes outside Cape Town. Dodging waiters in cowboy hats and white and half-breed children shouting, running wild. If a child of his behaved this way he would feel the whip till he bled.

Theron sat eating in a booth in the smoking section, behind airtight glass, a haze thick as a veld fire hanging over the tables. Inja sat down opposite the Boer. A steak and chips waited for him, the meat well cooked the way he liked it.

"I want it cremated," he'd told the colored waitress with the tits Theron couldn't keep his eyes off.

Breasts meant nothing to a Zulu man like Inja, growing up with girls walking around topless in the traditional way. But the flesh of a woman's calf – just below the hollow of the knee – now that aroused him. And that was the area the Zulu girls always kept covered, with skins and beads. The waitress wore a short skirt and when she'd walked away his eyes were drawn to that area just south of her knee. Inja had a flash of his fingers untying the beads around his new young wife's calf on the night of their coming nuptials. He had to send a hand down to adjust the fit of his pants.