Dust Devils (12 page)

"And what do you do these days?" asked Zondi, watching as the man lifted a yellow chicken foot, wrinkled and gelatinous, to his mouth. Crunched his way through cartilage, skin and claws. Reached for a beak cooked in batter.

"I'm an undertaker. That's my place over there." Pointed an oily finger toward the cinderblock building across the road, picture window filled with coffins.

"Business must be good."

"Too good, Zondi. Too good. Lots of TB, and of course the taxi wars are keeping me busy right now. But mostly AIDS."

The undertaker tore loose a chunk of bread and dunked it in the curry. Zondi remembered that this full loaf was known as a
coffin bunny
. Giraffe crammed in the food, the white bread bulging out of his mouth. He belched and leaned toward Zondi who caught the ripe mix of curried meat and embalming fluid.

"This AIDS, it is worse than anybody says, my friend. Especially the women and the girls – they are dying like flies. And you know what these people are like," waving a beringed hand at the passersby, "they must have the very best coffin even though they don't have two cents to wipe their asses with. I tried, Zondi, to offer them cheap pine boxes. But no. Top of the range, my friend. Top of the range or nothing." Shaking his head. As the light caught his face, the features of the delicate youth Zondi remembered surfaced for a moment in the sea of fat, then sank again. The undertaker belched and shoveled in more curry. "Have you stayed in touch with Inja?"

Zondi shook his head, staring down the street, watching a minibus taxi take on passengers. "No. Maybe I'll bump into him while I'm down here."

"He's away, I hear. Out of town." Chewing. "You know, we three are the last from those old days. I buried Mussolini, Dudu and Solly myself. Gunshot. AIDS. AIDS." Swallowing and fighting for breath. Chasing the food with Coke from the liter bottle. Gas escaped from him, like from a punctured blimp. "Inja has done well for himself. The chief has rewarded him, made him an
induna
." Waving a greasy hand toward the man on the election poster. Feeding again. "And you know Inja's got a badge, now?" Zondi turned to look at the undertaker, playing dumb. "Ja, the chief has appointed him a special agent in that police unit of his. A powerful man now, is Inja."

Of course, Inja the dog ran with the minister's new pack – a
Tonton Macoute
of licensed killers, ready to do their master's dirty work. Zondi's boss had been vocal in his opposition to the special unit. Left him dead and buried.

"You know he's taking a fourth bride this weekend? Inja?" Zondi lied with a shake of his head. Giraffe sat back and sighed. "Poor child. She's a replacement, I suppose, for the wife I buried last month." Zondi stared at him. Said nothing. "So small and skinny, that one, I could have fitted her into a tomato box."

The big man had ingested all the food. He shot a cuff and looked at the gold watch recessed into the fat of his wrist. "I must go. An appointment with the recently bereaved."

Giraffe reached out a limp hand, sticky now. Reluctantly, Zondi shook it.

"Pop in for a visit before you leave. I'll show you my place."

Zondi nodded and watched the fat man roll out, halting a taxi in its tracks as he held up a hand and crossed the road toward his funeral parlor. The undertaker stopped before the picture window, lifted an arm and wiped at a spot on the glass with the sleeve of his suit jacket. Turned, paused for a moment, then walked away, as padded as the insides of the coffins on display behind him.

Dell, still with the blanket over his head, was led from the car. He heard the sound of chickens and a sheep's low moan in the distance. No city buzz. The smell of the country in his nostrils. Rich soil and animal shit. He could see part of his one flip-flop past the drape of the blanket, crunching on dark gravel. Night had fallen. Dell stumbled, sent out his cuffed hands and felt the shape of a doorframe.

"Easy," his father said. Guiding him up a step.

"Where the fuck am I?" Dell asked.

"Watch your tongue, boy. There are children present."

Dell heard the unmistakable patter of kids running on wooden floors. Light drumming, almost animal-like. The sound the twins had made on the floors back home.

The pain of memory sharpened when he was led past a TV warbling out the intro to a program that had been one of Rosie's lowbrow pleasures. An Afrikaans quiz show, where contestants listened to snatches of music and had to identify the tunes. Dell heard the greetings of the show's host, a man with the smile of a pedophile. He saw Rosie curled up on their sofa, eating popcorn, laughing, singing along with the mindless songs of her childhood.

A door closed, muting the music. Dell shuffled on, his father's hand on his arm. He heard a young man's voice, a low mumble. Another door closed. The fingers released him and bedsprings creaked as somebody sat down.

"Okay, you can lose the blanket," his father said.

Dell lifted his hands and pulled the blanket from his head, blinking in the sudden light. He saw an old man sitting on the bed, in the glare of a lamp. Looked around for Bobby Goodbread.

"It's me, you dumb bastard." The old man spoke in his father's voice.

Goodbread was hollowed out. Emaciated. His frame stripped of flesh and muscle. Skin gray as dishwater pulled across sunken cheeks. Thick white hair cropped close to his skull. Dark eyes peering out from under heavy lids.

"What the fuck's going on?" Dell asked.

"Good question, boy. One I can't give the answer it rightly deserves. Not until we have more time. Let's just say I saved your skinny white butt, and leave it there for now." The Texan accent was as Dell remembered it. Strong and loud. Like a ventriloquist's voice emerging from the wasted body.

Dell shook his head. Staring at his father. "Get these cuffs off. Get me to a phone."

Goodbread lit a cigarette, sucking on it like it was an iron lung. "Who you gonna call, boy? The cops?" Coughed. Wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "The people who murdered your kin were fixing to send you to Pollsmoor Prison. Throw you in with the half-breed gangsters who'd kill you for the price of a cigarette. And believe me, nobody would ask no fucking questions."

"And you know this how?"

"Same way I knew what had happened to you. Same way I know who drove the big old truck that killed your family. I'm still connected, boy." Drawing long and hard on the cigarette, speaking around smoke. "Lot of seriously disaffected people in this sorry country. Law enforcement. Military. People who look out for one another."

Dell watched him. Listening for the lies. A knock at the door. Goodbread held up a hand, went to the door, opened it a crack, then stepped out and shut it after him. Dell heard his father's low drawl and a female voice in reply.

Dell was in a woman's bedroom. A double bed with a floral comforter, hastily pulled straight, two Afrikaans gossip magazines lying beside the single pillow. Durer's praying hands in copper, hanging above the bed. Thick orange drapes across the window. An old-style wooden vanity table, with chipped legs and a mirror gone smoky. A pine closet loomed over the bed, one door open, clothes bulging out. And a smell: cloying perfume and aging woman flesh. Like Dell's grandmother's room, when he'd visited her as a kid.

The door opened and Goodbread came back in, followed by a blonde woman. At first glance Dell thought she was middle-aged, busty, with a cigarette dangling from her lips. Then he saw she was much older, at least sixty, gray hair dyed straw yellow, thick make-up caking the cracks in her face. She wheeled a plastic basin mounted on a metal frame.

"This fine lady, who will remain nameless, has kindly agreed to give you a shave and a haircut," Goodbread said.

The blonde smiled at Dell, painted lips curling back from the cigarette. The smile of a woman who flirted as a reflex.

Dell didn't smile back. "What the fuck for?"

Her smile disappeared. "He's got his daddy's mouth, okay." Speaking English with an Afrikaans accent. A low voice, that crawled out from under years of booze and cigarettes. His father's kind of woman.

Goodbread had an arm around her thick waist, smiling down at her. "Now, that's a lie and you know it." He was screwing her, Dell supposed.

Goodbread released the woman and crossed to Dell. "Meet the new you."

He held up a South African driver's license, a laminated plastic rectangle the size of a credit card. Dell saw the face of a man his age, clean shaven, with short, dark hair, gazing blankly at the camera. Caught the name David Stander before Goodbread set the license down on the vanity table and unlocked Dell's handcuffs. Dell flexed his fingers, wrists tingling where the metal had cut into his flesh.

"We'll talk later, okay?" Goodbread left the room, closing the door after him.

The woman wheeled the basin up to the vanity. "Come, sit."

Dell did as she said. The blonde, cigarette still hanging from her lip, unwound the bandage from his head and saw him wince.

"Shame," she said, parting his hair, squinting through the smoke. "It's okay, just a few cuts. But I'm sorry, this is going to sting you a bit."

She stubbed out the cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and pulled the basin closer. It was filled with warm water and she had him sit with his head hanging back over the rim as she shampooed his hair. It stung. Then she rolled the basin away and laid a towel across his shoulders, turning him so that he faced the mirror.

"Where am I?" he asked.

"You better wait and ask your dad." Scratching for a pair of a scissors and a comb in the vanity drawer, squinting down at the photograph on the driver's license.

"Just tell me," he said.

"I don't want no trouble."

He looked up at her. "Lady, you've already got trouble. You know who I am?"

She took his head in her hands and turned it to face forward again. "You his son. That's all I need to know."

The blonde lit another cigarette, left it pressed between her wrinkled lips as if it would keep her secrets safe. Then she started cutting Dell's hair. She was good, her hands moving in a practiced blur, his salt-and-pepper curls falling to his shoulders and onto the floor.

He hadn't had short hair in nearly thirty years, since he'd finished his compulsory stint in South Africa's apartheid army. Went into basic training as a conscientious objector. A pacifist. Marched with a broomstick instead of an R1 rifle. The Afrikaners he was with had called him a faggot. A commie. Beaten the shit out of him for sport. He'd ended up as a medic on a Pretoria infantry base, consuming all the chemicals he could lay his hands on, two years passing in a fucked-up smear.

The woman left him with a fringe and sideburns. Looking like somebody he'd avoid on the street. Then she slipped on rubber gloves and mixed up a thick paste in a plastic bowl. Massaged the paste into his hair, dying it dark. Got busy with a hair dryer that screamed in his ears and burned the cuts in his scalp. She trimmed his beard with the scissors. Lathered his face with foam and shaved him with a straight razor. Did it expertly.

Goodbread was back in the room. "Well, I'll be dipped in shit," he said, checking out Dell's reflection.

The woman laughed through phlegm. "Ja. He's almost as handsome as his dad."

Dell stared into the mirror. The man looking back at him was a dead-ringer for the one who'd kicked the Cuban out of the chopper twenty-five years ago.

The boy lifted a sheep's head from the bucket and stuck it on the fence pole, under the yellow light of a naked light bulb. Then he fired up the blowtorch that snaked away from a rusted red gas cylinder and applied the blue flame to the head, until the wool burned away and the eyes popped and bubbled.

Inja sat on an old car seat, drinking a brandy and Coke, letting the smell of burning flesh fill his nostrils. He was in the shackland that spread like a disease beside the freeway between Cape Town and the airport. Sitting in the yard of a house thrown together from pieces of rusted corrugated iron and bits of wood. A one room hovel identical to the others that sprawled out into the darkness.