Dust Devils (23 page)

Inja reached up and grabbed Vusi by his shirtfront, pulled him down toward the table, his chin banging on the plastic surface, squashed face turned to Zondi. Eyes glazed with fear. Inja ducked his right hand beneath his jacket and came out with a .44. Jammed the barrel into Vusi's ear. "Is he lying?"

Zondi could hear the rush of Vusi's breath and saw his eyes widen, staring at him. Pleading. Zondi shook his head. "No. He's not lying. Let him go."

Inja nodded. Lifted the gun away from Vusi's head. "Okay. Fuck off, you."

Vusi pushed himself to standing and took off toward the door, leaving a trail of drops behind him. Zondi saw a puddle of piss beneath the table, rivulets reaching out toward his Reeboks. Moved his feet under his chair.

Inja put the gun down on the table. He snapped his fingers, speaking to one of his men but never taking his eyes from Zondi's. "Get me a Coke. Cold." The man hurried toward the fridge. "My betrothed. You know who her mother was?"

"It's difficult to miss."

"Yes." The man was back with the Coke and Inja cracked the tab and took a long draft. Burped. Wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "So what is your interest in this girl?"

"I have no interest."

Inja stared at Zondi, then he smiled like a feral dog. "You're a liar, Zondi. You're a liar."

"Why would I lie?"

Inja tapped his index finger against his skull. "Because I've just now worked you out, my friend."

"Ja?"

"Ja." Sitting forward. "You think she's your child, don't you?"

"I'm not sure," Zondi said.

"And what if she is? Are you here to collect the dowry?" Laughing. But no humor in his dead eyes. Drinking. Closing his eyes. Opening them, smeared and unfocused for a moment. Then finding Zondi, who said nothing. "You are not going to get in my way are you, Zondi?"

"No. I'm leaving, heading back to Jo'burg."

"Good idea. This is no place for you. You're city now. Soft." Slumping in his chair, rubbing his temples. "I'll look after her, Zondi. She'll want for nothing. She is a lucky girl."

"I'm sure she is."

Inja stood. Zondi could smell him, something sharp and sour and almost metallic. The smell of disease. Inja lifted the gun from the table, reached forward and put the front sight under Zondi's chin, forcing his head upward.

"Because we were once friends, Zondi – comrades – I'm letting you get into your car," jerking a thumb at Zondi's BMW parked out in the sun, "and drive your ass back to Jo'burg. I see you again, I'm not so kind. Understand?"

"Yes," Zondi said, his voice coming out muffled and strained.

Inja released Zondi's head and holstered the pistol. Nodded. Hitched up his crème pants and walked to the door, his men falling in behind him, ordnance clanking. Zondi watched them get into their vehicles and leave in display of red dust.

You win
, he heard himself say. Not sure who he was talking to. Not Inja. That much he knew. Then Zondi realized that he was talking to himself. Not the man of nearly forty, but the boy he had once been. And if it was a debt he was here to repay, it wasn't to the woman long dead. Or to a girl who was a stranger to him. It was to that boy. To atone, maybe, for the things that he had done to turn him into the man he had become.

Driving through a different landscape. Rolling sugarcane fields like a thick green carpet spread across the rolling hills. A different heat, too. Moist. Humid.

"How far away are we?" Dell asked.

"Reckon we'll be there early afternoon."

"Want to tell me your plan?"

The old man said nothing, stared out over the landscape. Then he sighed, sat up a little straighter. "The girl Inja Mazibuko has chosen as his bride, she's young, barely sixteen . . ." Words dying in a coughing spasm that rattled to a wheezing end. Goodbread wiped his mouth. Gasped. "Heard it told she works at some tourist attraction up in Zululand."

"So?"

"We're going to take her. Catch Inja wrong-footed. Draw him out."

"Take her?" Dell stared across at him. "You're saying we're going to kidnap this girl and use her as bait?"

"Yes."

"No fucking way."

"You getting all squeamish on me, boy?"

"I'm not going to let you put another innocent person in the firing line. You said we're going after Inja. I'm up for that. But not some girl. Forget it."

"I have no great desire to risk anybody's life, son. But do you think we can just ride on up to Inja's homestead and get him to come along with us, meek as you please? He's a goddam warlord. Sitting up there with a mess of weapons and an army of crazy dopehead Zulu warriors. This is the way it's going down."

"Fuck that."

The roofs of a town broke the cane fields. Dell nudged the turn signal and took the truck off the highway onto a narrow road scarred by potholes.

"What you doing, boy?"

"I'm going to find a phone. Call my lawyer. Then I'm going to the police station and I'm handing myself over."

"Reckon that's a good idea?"

"Yes."

"'Cause I surely don't."

Dell said nothing as they headed into the town on a road flanked by pine trees, slowing when speed bumps drummed under their tires. They passed a faded pink billboard saying STOP AIDS, LOVE LIFE. It had been used for target practice.

Dell drove toward a church steeple that threw its shadow across low cinderblock buildings. Saw a Coke sign painted on the window of a store, eased the truck to a halt. Double-parked next to a truck, two Indian men unloading bundles of newspapers from the rear.

Goodbread fixed Dell with his torn eyes. "You're going to get yourself dead, son. And the law will never trouble Inja Mazibuko."

Dell slid the pistol from the waist of his khakis and threw it into Goodbread's lap. Cracked the door. "Take the truck and go." He slammed the door and walked. Heard the scrape of gears as the truck drove away. Didn't look back.

Dell entered the store. Half-empty shelves of canned food, toilet paper and detergent. A swarthy man sat slumped behind the counter in the draft of a lazy fan. A woman in a pinafore and headscarf shouted Zulu into a pay phone mounted on a wall in the rear. The Indian men dumped the newspapers near the cash register and walked out with the unsold piles from the day before.

While he waited for the phone Dell picked up the
Mercury
from Durban. The headline suggested that Ben Baker's death was a hit. Denied by the cops who were calling it a home invasion. Dell flicked through the pages to see whether there was any news of the man his father had killed the day before. Nothing.

"Hey."

Dell looked up, saw the store owner, a Greek or a Portuguese, watching him over the counter. Chewing on a length of dried sausage. "You think maybe this is a bloody library?"

Dell dug in his pocket and came up with two coins, threw them onto the counter in front of the man. Heard the Zulu woman still busy on the phone. He laid the newspaper across a shelf of chips and tabloid magazines, carried on turning pages.

Saw his mugshot on page four under the headline: KILLER REPORTER IN NAMIBIA? He looked wild-eyed. Deranged. Knew the story was only getting this much ink because he'd been a newsman. His ex-colleagues on a
Schadenfreude
binge. Dell's pic was flanked by a blurred snapshot of Goodbread from his glory days. Dell shifted his arm, revealed the color photograph beneath: a knot of mourners around three coffins. One large. Two tiny. Felt his gut contract as if somebody had grabbed it in their fist. Saw Rosie's parents, the woman's face buried in the old man's shoulder. Before he knew it Dell was walking back out the door, sheets of newspaper whispering to the floor behind him.

The truck idled in a parking bay, his father at the wheel. Dell opened the passenger door and sat. Goodbread said nothing, shoved the car into gear and they took off down the road.

"Give me the gun," Dell said.

Sunday felt like a thin slice of baloney between two chunks of bread, flanked by the big man and Auntie Mavis as the old truck bounced into Bhambatha's Rock. The man stank of bad breath and unwashed feet. And something else, a dark, sour smell, as if he hadn't wiped himself properly. Auntie Mavis, overflowing her pink dress, sweated through layers of cheap perfume, and Sunday could feel the dampness of the woman's arm as her dimpled flesh danced over the potholes.

Sunday spoke a silent prayer to her mother. Begging for her to come. To guide her. But Sunday feared that her mother had forsaken her, the last of her burned away with the book. Sunday hadn't heard her voice or felt her presence. No tingling up the spine, no cool breeze catching the back of her neck.

Sunday felt more alone than she ever had. There was nobody she could turn to in this town that lived in fear of the old dog. The police, tired of being slaughtered, had long ago shut the station house and moved to faraway Dundee. The law in Bhambatha's Rock was made by Inja Mazibuko.

"Come girl, stop your bloody dreaming!" The fat woman stood up out of the truck and set off for the sidewalk, looking like the hot air balloon Sunday had seen one day, floating pink and magical across the sky.

Sunday followed Auntie Mavis into a small building on the main road, feeling ugly in the sack of a dress that hung on her. The dressmaker, a woman as old as the rocks on the hills, waited at the door. She was one of the few who still remembered the pure traditions, handed down from her mother and her mother's mother before her.

The old crone bowed her already bent spine. Fawning over Auntie Mavis, toothless mouth drooling at the vision of the dog's money flowing into her pockets. Sunday knew she had hours of torture ahead, while the old woman poked and prodded at her and remodeled the clothes on her body, uncaring if the needles drew blood.

The big man
closed the door and
sighed as he lowered himself onto a
wooden stool by the window, staring out into the street, scratching his balls, the gun at his hip.

The dressmaker clucked her tongue and her young assistant, a mournful-looking girl Sunday's age, lifted away a sheet to reveal the wedding garments laid out on a tabletop. The embroidered shawl. The tall red bridal hat. The beaded black bra. The short tasseled skirt. The veil of beads that would be woven into Sunday's hair the morning of the wedding and remain there until her dying day. Telling the world that she was the property of Inja Mazibuko.

Dell drove deeper into the heat. Humidity so thick you could chew on it. Goodbread said the A/C tore his lungs, so Dell had the windows rolled down. Still felt the water dripping freely from his body. The old man didn't seem to sweat, sat like a dried-out husk, staring through the windshield, smoking endless cigarettes.

Dell followed the coast road, along the edge of Africa. To the left the cane fields, to the right the Indian Ocean. He caught glimpses of water, flat and greasy, through the fungus of condos and golf estates – the privileged hunkered down behind razor wire and electric fences, staring off toward far Australia and wondering why they hadn't got the hell out when their currency still meant something. The hungry poor getting closer by the day, their shacks flung up against the perimeter walls of the rich men's enclaves, their shit turning the streams and lagoons black with disease.