Karoo Boy (16 page)

– Some guys in a bakkie beat him up, I chip in.

– We better get the police, says the kombi man.

– Please, no police. I have no pass. The police will send me back to the Transkei.

– But we have to do something.

– There is nothing to do, baas.

The kombi man reaches out his hand to hoist Moses to his feet.

I open the door to Moses’s room and fetch cold tap water in his enamel cup.

– Ndiyabonga, young baas.

He winces when he swallows.

I know it is because there is another white man there that he calls me baas. But I want him to call me Douglas. I want him to hold me and forgive me. But a black man does not hold a white boy.

– Jesus, at times I am ashamed to be white, says the kombi man.

He shakes his head.

– Well, I gotta hit the road. Gotta make Jo’burg tonight. I was running low on petrol, so I turned around. But I’ll go to the BP up the road. You take it easy.

– No, baas. I am the petrolboy. If I am too weak to pour petrol then they must come and shoot me.

He hobbles towards the pumps, dragging one foot and hugging his ribs.

I stand on the bridge, listening for the sound of the diesel motor, but it is hard with the seagulls cawing for bread. But then I hear it. I wait till the sound changes under the bridge and then drop the brick. It falls and I think I have dropped it too soon, but no, the front of the Isuzu shoots into view and the brick floats through the glass. The bakkie swerves and flips. The shotgun cowboy is flung from the back. The bakkie careers into a roadside ditch. The cowboy lies dead in the dust and the crows flock to peck his eyes. I hear the sound of their beaks dipping into the jelly of his eyes. I can hear from so far. I see the beaks dip dip dip and come up red. My eye is a zoom lens.

I scream into my mother’s nightie. She holds me to her breasts, the way she did then, till the screaming fades to a sobbing and the story of Moses and his papers and the Isuzu boys tumbles out.

I
CYCLE ALONE OUT
of town on the north road, the road to Johannesburg. I am determined to find a skeleton or something for Marika, but all I see are Simba packets hooked on the barbed wire and rusting tins of Coca-Cola and beer, and a red shotgun cartridge faded pink by the sun. It has not rained in two years and the earth is bone dry.

I see a lizard scurry into a Coca-Cola can.

A jacky hangman on the telegraph wires watches me watching it.

Although I am on the other side of the yellow line, riding on the jagged edge of the tar, a bus hoots at me and I feel the tug of wind in the wake of it. A stamp-sized square of paper butterflies up in the wind and settles again. I drop my bicycle to pick it up. Just paper. I flick it over in my fingers and see that it is not just paper, but part of a faded photograph of a black man. An ear, an eye, a cheekbone, a jagged edge where the nose should be. I stare at the photograph while something tickles my mind, a memory of some kind. Then it dawns on me that this could be Moses, younger and faded.

The Kodak photographs from the spool I saved from the baboons lie scattered on the kitchen table. My mother has not shot off another spool since we came to the Karoo. Why she has had them developed now, after so long, is a mystery to me.

The first photograph that catches my eye is of my father braaiing on a vine-stump fire, his lips snarled back to reveal his teeth. He stabs at the lens with the fire tongs as if he is a Zulu warrior with an assegai. There is fire in his eyes. Behind him, on the grid, slit crayfish cook in their shells.

I flick through photographs of the coral tree in bloom.

Then there is one of Marsden, standing beside his surfboard. He has unzipped his Zero wetsuit and the arms dangle like fins from his hips. I feel a pang of regret, for all the times I felt it unfair he should be so damn good at surfing and drawing.

There is a shot of Byron in the yard, his foot resting on the lug of a spade while he rolls a cigarette out of newspaper and Boxer tobacco. In the background Chaka burrows under the hibiscus.

There is a photograph of my mother in black bra and panties. She reaches out to the camera, as if to block the lens, but all she does is obscure her face. I know it is my mother because of the pink delta lines on her stomach from Marsden and me. The flash makes her skin look waxy.

There is one of me on the stoep, rubbing linseed into the Gunn & Moore bat. Though he is not in the photograph, I know that my father is just out of frame, reading the
Cape Times
, calling out the cricket scores, wondering if he ever told us that he once bowled out Barry Richards.

There is a shot of my father caught unawares at his typewriter. The postcard of the Venus de Milo, tacked to the wall, curls up at the edges. In his eyes there is a guilty, fugitive look. The look I see in Chaka’s eyes when I catch him shitting in the yard.

Then there is an out-of-focus shot of all four of us on the terrace of The Brass Bell, on the edge of the sea. My father has his arm around my mother, but he is not looking at her, or at the camera. He casts his gaze somewhere out to sea. Towards a yacht on the horizon, or Seal Island, or begging seagulls. For the first time, I wonder if my father was still in love with my mother when Marsden died. I imagined that the cricket ball splintered their love, as it did the tomato-box wicket. But what if their love was already falling apart and he longed to sail away from all of us to write his novel? To sail out to sea alone, like old man Santiago, to land the big fish he senses is out there.

Marika dances barefoot on the N1 in her cotton dress and tastes the falling rain with a lolling tongue. Skyfire flickers across a dark sky. For me the rain is not something magic, but Marika is over the moon, dancing, slapping her feet down on the tar.

After the rain the desert floats in a green, fishtank light. A river of frogs hazards the N1. Some make it across. Others pop under the singing wheels of motorcars, pink insides squirting out their mouths. Marika fills buckets of frogs and I cart them across the road and spill them out on the other side. She catches them with her bare hands and laughs at my fear of touching the cold, pulsing things.

As I weave through the flat frogs on the tar, swinging a squirming witchbrew of frogskin, I pray that they will not jump and brush against my hand, or land on my sandaled feet. When I spill them out I stand back, as a frog’s compass may spin haywire and send the frog hopping back towards me, instead of following the eastward drift of the others. They stay in a dazed, blinking-eyed clutch, until Chaka’s sniffing nose spurs them on again. They all head east.

M
ARIKA TUGS HER DRESS
over her head and hangs it in the thorny mimosa. Then she lies down on the sand in her panties, floating flamingo-pink poppy nipples on koppies of unsunned skin. I yearn to lick her poppies.

– I want to feel the sun on my skin before I dive in, she says.

I lie down beside her, just in my underpants. Under my spine the sand burns. I turn my head, shut one eye against the sun and squint through the other at Marika. An ant comes over the horizon of Marika’s hip. Its feelers quiver as it finds its bearings. Then it heads out along the bony curve of her hip. When it reaches the flat of her stomach it zeroes in on her bellybutton. It halts on the rim, feelers twitching. I shut both eyes and her poppies spin into swirling colour fans behind my eyelids.

Chaka’s bark jolts me out of my sunflared dream. I squint against the sun and make out the eyes of a twin-barrelled shotgun fixed on me.

– Pa, Marika cries. Don’t shoot him.

Rows of desks like conjugated Latin verbs. Mister McEwan reads the
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
to us. His reading is lost on me because my mind drifts:

Marika’s father at our frontyard gate, his fingers noosed around Marika’s neck.

– They are still children, Meneer Vink. It does not mean anything, my mother said.

– I am not having my daughter running wild with your boy and turning into a whore girl.

He yanked Marika after him. Her free hand dangled lifelessly, like the hand of a puppet when the string goes slack. He kicked at the door and Marika’s ghost mother drew them into the dark of the house.

Because my head is full of Marika’s pink poppy nipples my mind is not on my schoolwork. Teachers are after me to focus in class. They stab at my foolscap with red pens. Meneer van Taak barks at me to learn my sin, cos and tan. Mister McEwan kills the fly of a
comma
after the
s
, when it should come before, as if it is a sin. As if I care.

I have to work out the value of the angle
Y
in a spiderweb of pencilled lines before the cane comes down on my head.

Y is a fork in a river.

Wye is a river.

Y is a fish tail.

Y is a tale with two endings.

Y is a cattie for potting birds off a wire.

Y is the peace sign my father gives in the photograph where he looks like Cat Stevens on the back cover of
Tea for the Tillerman
.

Y is the taboo junction of leg under Miss Forster’s skirt.

My father, Jack Daniel’s happy, tells Marsden and me he saw a snake in a bar in Bangkok slither into a woman’s Y, U-turn and come out again. Not to tell mother, he says.

A snake: two eyes in one ending of y-less tube.

It was on the wireless on Boxing Day.

Something catches my eye. A glint in the sand. A coin? No. A tiddly bit of glass peering out of the sand. I unbury a jam jar. Bottled in the foggy glass are a lizard and a snake. The lizard has shed its tail. The snake’s Y-tongue flickers red. I untwist the lid, but neither moves. I fish the lizard out with a splinter of driftwood, as if it is a pickled gherkin. It looks dead but its ribs pulse as it sucks in the air. Then, with a flick of tail, it is gone into a black crab crack in the rocks. The dazed, flickery-tongued snake I bottle again and bury in the sand.

– Focus, bellows Van Taak.

The sting of the cane flares across my scalp. My fingers burrow under my hair to see if the skin is split. I will go bald before I get the hang of maths.

The woodwork teacher, Meneer Akkers, who is doddery and half-blind, canes me for my dovetail joints. He holds the joint up to the light and peers at it through his wine-bottle lenses. Light slivers through where the wood does not fit snugly. Because of his poor eyes, his cane does not land squarely on my ass, but cuts under.

When I undress for PT, I am ashamed of the red welts peeping out of the hem of my Speedo. I wish I could wear surfing baggies down to my knees, but Meneer Bester has banned baggies. Moffies wear baggies with flowers and shit on, he reckons. So the Klipdorp boys swim in their black Speedos.

Joost stands by the pool with an assegai of a bone in his Speedo. Instead of hiding it with his hands, he flaunts it, until Meneer Bester’s eyes zoom in on his bone, under a taut tent of Speedo. Meneer Bester makes Joost do push-ups by the side of the pool. He grinds his Nikes into Joost’s spine as if stubbing out a cigarette. He flicks factor 15 warpaint across his cheeks and stands there like a photographed hunter over his kill. Joost begins to quiver like a beaten, cowering dog, but Meneer Bester makes him go on until he bawls.

My mother is after me to be home for tea before dark. Not to drink milk from the carton like a backveld boy. To fetch bones from the butcher for Chaka, and to monkey through his hair for ticks, as Karoo ticks kill dogs. To rub away the shit Hope’s chickens drop on Indlovu’s roof. To rescue the chickens out of Chaka’s gob when he chases them. Not to hang around at the Shell drinking Coca-Cola.

So my life goes. I am forever being plucked out of my daydreams by cane-swinging teachers and my mother-hen mother.

N
OW CHAKA HAS GONE
walkabout. My mother reckons it is because he can smell a bitch out there somewhere. Hope reckons he is on his way back down the N1 to Cape Town.

When the afternoon school bell goes, I cycle down Delarey, keeping an eye peeled for Chaka. I swing in at the Shell, but Moses has not seen Chaka.

I reach the far edge of town, where there is a bus stop for the township taxis and buses.

The bus stop is a makeshift market, with fruit piled up on grass mats, and raw meat stacked on planks on top of 40-gallon drums, out of reach of the bony, tatty-eared dogs that shoo flies away from their eyes with a flick of the head.

I rest here, on the edge, to watch the haggling. Bob Marley’s voice comes sailing out of a boombox. Meat is being braaied on a big fire. The meat catches fire, and a man, who turns it with his bare fingers, dips the burning meat in a bucket of water and then throws it on the fire again. The smoke of the fire mingles with the smoke pumped out of buses and hangs in a haze over the market.

A man, hobbling on his knees, bounces a football on his head. Sometimes a coin lands in his hat.

There is a billboard for Tiger Balm, and another for Omo washing powder.

A caravan has been turned into a cobbler’s shop. A rastaman bobs his dreads to the Bob Marley beat as he knifes out a worn-down sole. Above the window stand the words: Ja Shoe Fix.

A barber shaves a man’s scalp bald under a bare tree. His razor is wired to a motorcar battery, as if he wants to jump-start his head. A mirror dangles from a nail in the bark. OK Bazaars and Pep Stores bags hooked up in the tree bend it like ripe fruit.

Two old men sit smoking long pipes on a red motorcar seat under the shade of a black umbrella. They survey the chaos before them with a calm dignity, as if they have a box in the Baxter Theatre.

I catch sight of Chaka begging from a man who is gnawing at a chicken foot. I call to Chaka, but Chaka does not hear me. The man boards a bus and Chaka follows him up the steps. As I run across the market place the bus moves off, and the chicken foot flies out the window. I catch up with the bus and fist against the door. The driver waves me away, as if flicking flies from his face. As I drop back, faces look down from open windows at me.