Dust Devils (21 page)

Inja stood with his back to the cool whitewashed wall and tried to breathe through the fear and the fever that heated his blood. Yellow light from the doorway at his side spilled out across the sand, in an elongated rectangle that brought a pine coffin to his mind.

He tried to shake these morbid thoughts, looking at the new hut, the half-thatched roof beams just visible against the night sky. The house of his fourth bride. He'd torched the house that had belonged to the wife who had rotted to nothing before she died. Commissioned locals to build this one for the virgin he would marry on Saturday.

Inja thought of her in the car with that polluted pig and a fury rose in him. He had wanted to fall upon her at the roadside, force himself between her thighs, feel his manhood rip that little skin inside her. Then leave her dead beside the trash she had wanted to abscond with.

But he had held back. Heard the counsel of his
sangoma
, that only by marrying this virgin in the way of his ancestors would he free himself from the curse that had turned his blood to poison. He needed her. Simple. Only she could save him.

Inja sat, trying to calm himself. He watched flying ants commit suicide against the lightbulb that hung above his chair. Tiny explosions of wings as the hot glass fried them. He closed his eyes. The afterimage of the light burning into his retina.

Two shrill bleats woke Zondi. He'd slept like the dead. The pumping music and drunken shouts from the tavern hadn't disturbed him, but his cell phone message alerts startled him awake. He lay, disoriented for a moment, in the blackness of the room, hearing nothing now but the oppressive quiet of the country, the tavern long closed. Thought he'd imagined the digital yelps.

The phone, lying beside the bed on the beer crate that served as a table, had been mute since he arrived. He fumbled in the dark, lifted its glowing face and saw one skinny bar on the signal strength indicator. Some freak of the elements: the microwaves bouncing off a mountain or a cloud. He dialed and listened to a mechanical voice speaking faintly African-accented English, telling him he had one message. One single fucking message. An indication of his pariah status. He hit play.

Heard a voice say, "Call a man about a dog." A chuckle and then nothing more.

Zondi played the message again. He recognized the voice. M. K. Moloi. A one-time colleague of his who had disappeared into a political think tank a year ago. A flashy man of thirty, part of a new alliance that had split from the ruling party. Men who were in opposition to the justice minister.

As Zondi tried to call M.K. the signal evaporated. He stood up from the bed and hit the wall switch. The low-voltage bulb dangling from the ceiling dribbled its sickly blue light down on him. He paced the cramped room, holding the phone out like a dowsing rod. Nothing. He tossed it onto the bed.

Zondi scratched at himself. He'd slept on top of the covers, dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, but he itched where the bedbugs had fed. And his head throbbed like some Zulu drummer was hard at work inside his skull.

The light hurt his eyes so he killed it. Sat down on the bed. Listened to the night sounds – a dog barking, a muffled cough that could have been human – and thought about the message. Felt certain that whatever happened now was preordained. Beyond his control.

Goodbread slumped in the front of the truck, looking up at the stars, like a hot white rash out here in the middle of nowhere. Heard the rumble of a rig down on the highway, its headlamps raking the bush that hid the pickup from view, sending dappled light across the interior of the cab.

You're on a hiding to nothing, that's for damn sure.
Talking to himself. Prison habit. Years in solitary confinement. Not loud enough to wake his son who slept in the rear of the truck, his long legs hanging out over the open tailgate.

Goodbread ducked below the level of the dashboard and lit a smoke, killed the match before he sat back up. Kept the cigarette cupped in his hand so the glowing ember would be invisible. Behaving as if he was on night ops a lifetime ago. In some godforsaken rice paddy or a stretch of desert scrub.

Goodbread felt a coughing spasm coming and he opened the door, reached across for the rifle at his side, wanting to get away from the truck so he didn't disturb his son. The dome light kicked in, making him a sitting target. He lifted a shaking hand to kill it.

He slid from the truck, gripping the rifle. Ended up standing with his knees bent, head hanging down, hot blood spilling from his rotten lungs onto the sand between his feet.

Goodbread felt his knees give way like he'd been poleaxed and he found himself kneeling in the dust, jamming the stock of the rifle into the earth to stop himself falling on his face. He sucked air. Choking. Bright lights spinning before his eyes like a mirror ball in a Saigon cathouse. Used the weapon to push himself to his feet.

He looked back toward the Toyota. Didn't seem as if he'd woken the sleeping man. The spasm was over, and his breath was coming easier. But he still felt as if he was suffocating. Out here in all this space, with all this goddam air, and he couldn't seem to get any of it into his lungs.

After he was released from prison Goodbread had seen a doctor in Cape Town. Man told him he should be hospitalized. He'd walked out without saying a word. Went and holed up on Althea Vorster's farm. Her dead husband, Hendrik, had served under him in Angola. When Goodbread went to prison the Vorsters had been the only people who stayed in touch with him. Sent him packages that arrived torn and looted at his cell.

After Hendrik was murdered Althea kept up the contact. Insisted he come and stay on her farm after he was released. The old bottle-blonde had been sweet on him, Goodbread guessed. Muffled a laugh. If she'd been expecting anything from him, she'd gone to her grave a disappointed woman. The years in prison and the disease eating his lungs had long ago robbed him of any firepower down below.

Althea had known he was sick but had never questioned him. Let him alone to do his dying. He had reckoned he'd wait for the day it got too bad. Take the truck and drive out into the desert. Flatten a bottle of Jack and suck on a shotgun. Then this mess came along.

Goodbread sat down on the warm sand and took a stainless-steel hip flask from his pants pocket. Drank bourbon and stared out at the stars. Thought about a vengeful God. The one he'd been taught to fear as a boy back in the ramshackle churches of West Texas.

Spoke to that God now, old fool that he was:
Just give me a few more days
.

He could tell himself he was atoning. Find grand words to explain that he was on this last mission to get justice for his boy. Truth was, he was terrified. Him, a man who had taken more lives than he could count, didn't know if he had the balls to pull that trigger and take his own. Saw himself trapped in a bed, an oxygen mask stuck like a limpet to his face, dark women in white uniforms prodding at him as he drowned in his own snot.

But this was a chance to go out like a man. He'd never felt fear in battle. And he was driving them into one, up the road a ways. Knew there was a bullet waiting for him in Zululand. Knew he'd welcome it.

Sunday's bladder, full as a sack of fermenting beer, woke her. She kept her eyes closed. Tried to burrow deep into the rough blanket, avoiding the thin daylight that reached out from the single window. Tried to stay unconscious where nothing could touch her. Where she wouldn't have to wake up and face the reality that she had killed Sipho, surely as if she had pulled that trigger herself.

Sunday sobbed and sat up. She had slept on the blanket on the dung floor, the fat body of Auntie Mavis blocking the doorway to the hut. The woman lay on her back and snored, sounding like a wasp's nest being smoked out. Last night the men in the taxi had brought Sunday here to the old dog's sister. Where she would be held prisoner until her wedding day.

The hut was no bigger than the one Sunday had shared with Ma Beauty but it was crammed full of furniture. A sofa and two chairs. A TV perched on top of shelves filled with dusty little ornaments. A white dancer in a frilly dress, balancing on tiptoe, her arms above her head. A seashell with DURBAN painted on the side in flowing blue letters. A little white wooden rabbit with a pink bow on its neck. Plastic flowers. The walls were full of photographs in ornate frames, all of Auntie Mavis smiling, posing with her brother or with her arms around children Sunday assumed belonged to the old dog.

Sunday stood, squeezed herself around a wooden dining table and upholstered chairs. She had slept in her jeans and T-shirt and slipped her feet into her tennis shoes. She stepped over the fat woman and opened the door.

The hut was on the slope of a hill close to town and Sunday could see the taxis already bumping toward the jumble of buildings. A man sat outside the door, his back against the mud wall of the hut, chin to his chest as he slept. The squeak of the door roused him and he opened one yellow eye.

"Where are you going, girl?" he asked, grunting as he pulled himself to his feet. He was a big man. Slow. With a belly that bulged from under his T-shirt, a pistol stuck into the waistband of his jeans.

"I need to use the toilet," she said. Pointing down toward the communal pit latrine, chimney poking up into the dawn sky like a crooked finger.

He coughed and spat, waved a hand for her to get moving. She walked down to the outhouse, the big man at her heels. She could hear him yawning and a sound like steel wool on a wooden board as he scratched at the tight curls of dark hair on his belly.

Sunday went into the latrine and closed the door. A gap at the top gave her a view of the pink and orange sunrise. The outhouse stank even worse than the one she and her aunt used. Sunday finished and wiped herself on the scraps of newspaper she had brought from the hut.

She opened the door and saw the man standing pissing, steam rising from where the jet of urine hit the sand. He made no move to cover himself and shook his thing before he folded it back into his pants and zipped the flies.

He waved his hand again. "Go."

She walked back up the hill. A girl of about ten, in a dress so torn it left more of her skinny body naked than covered, stoked a wood fire beside the fat woman's hut. A neighbor's child, Sunday guessed. Used as a slave by Auntie Mavis, who stood in the doorway of the hut, dressed in a fluffy nightgown. The fat woman walked toward the fire carrying the shopping bag that held Sunday's things. Auntie Mavis threw Sunday's jeans and underwear onto the fire.

Sunday broke into a sprint, the big man lumbering after her. As she reached the fire she saw the woman dip a fat hand into the bag and lift out the remains of the photo album.

"No!" Sunday shouted. Her cry scaring a bush shrike from the roof of the hut.

Sunday lunged at Auntie Mavis but the big man grabbed her from behind and enfolded her in a bear hug, holding her kicking feet off the ground. She watched as the flames ate the book, finishing the job of the fire ten years before, reducing the photograph of her mother to curling ashes.