Ishmael Toffee (8 page)

The little bitch laps it up, hands on her skinny hips, sniffing the air with her button nose, saying, “Stinks like the docks in here.”

The men laugh as they start tearing up the place, pulling out drawers and tipping over the bed. The blondie yanks open the closet and reaches in, grabs hold of Florence’s under things—her panties and her girdles and her bras, some of them mended ’cause they cost so much these days—and throws them on the floor.

Florence
feels like she’s going to faint
and she sinks down on the kitchen chair, her heart beating too fast
, sweat running between her breasts
. She closes her eyes
and fights back tears, doesn’t want to give these Boers the satisfaction of seeing her cry. S
he hears glass breaking, opening her eyes to see the only photo she has of her dead mother trampled under a boot.

She sits like this till the cops walk out into the heat, their pale faces melting into the hot white sky.

Only the big Boer is left, standing over her. “If you know anything, now is the time to talk. Maybe you can still save that child’s life.”

Florence
shakes her head. “I know nothing. This business has got nothing to do with me.”

The cop stares at her then he turns and goes outside.

Florence
sinks her head into her hands and cries her eyes out. What else is she to do?

25

Ishmael and the girly hide behind a bent tree in a little patch of veld. He’s eyeballing a store, a small white building with more steel on its windows than
Pollsmoor Prison and curls of razor wire around the roof. There’s a big yellow bottle painted on one wall, surrounded by a mess of gang tags.

Ishmael knows he’s taking a chance going in there, but the kid is thirsty and starved. There’s a woman inside, buying bread from the man behind the barred counter. When she leaves, Ishmael tells the kid to stay down and he walks into the store, trying to be all casual but feeling like he’s got gun sights on his back.

The man behind the bars—fat thing with thick glasses, shirt popping open like tent flaps to show a hairy gut—stares straight through Ishmael when he walks in, not bothering to greet him. Ishmael grabs some drinks from the fridge and carries them over to the counter. There are chips and pink sausages and some apples wrinkled like Ishmael behind the glass counter, and he tells the man what he wants.

The man takes his time to put it all in a bag and make change and Ishmael wants to tell him to hurry his fat ass up, but he says nothing, just keeps checking back that nobody’s coming in at him through the door.

At last the fatso,  moving like he’s swimming though oil, hands a pink plastic bag through the bars and Ishmael hustles out, whistling for the girly who ducks in next to him and they take off down the road on the border of Paradise Park and Tin Town.

Ishmael hears a chorus of voices yapping like dogs. First he thinks they’re in his head, but then he and the kid turn a corner and he checks out the mob, ten deep, crowding round a minibus taxi stalled on the road to Tin Town.

The taxi driver sticks his skinny arm out the window and he’s holding a gun, shining silver in the sun. Before can use the thing the mob is all over him and they drag him out of his seat and he goes under like he’s drowning in this mess of human rubbish.

The co-driver scrambles out the passenger window—can’t open the door against the bodies—and lands on the mob like he’s stage diving. He crowd surfs and almost makes it to the road before he goes under, too.

The men, armed with sticks and pipes and bits of sharpened metal, tear open the sliding door of the taxi and pull people out. Ishmael understands what this is all about when he hears them chanting, mad as meth-monsters on a Monday morning:  “Little Cindy! Little Cindy!”

The men haul out a woman who clutches a child to her tits. Small child— girl—with dreadlocks the color of beer.

“Little Cindy! Little Cindy!” they shout as they drag the child from the woman, thinking they got half a mil in their paws.

Just when it looks like the kid’s gonna get ripped apart like a chicken take-out, there’s the whoop of a siren. A cop truck bounces up and the men scatter like lice, disappearing into the houses and onto the dump.

The woman, bleeding from her mouth and knees, grabs for the kid who sits on its ass in the dust and howls seven kinds of hell at the sky. The kid is as colored as Ishmael, just a mixed-race brat whose white daddy got it on with some hot brown meat.

Ishmael takes the girly’s hand and hurries them down a narrow street, keeps them walking fast, pulling her along when she falls behind, ducking away from people. He needs to get them a place to hide, till it gets dark. He sees white crosses sticking up over a tumbled down wall and hurries the girly on toward the graveyard.

When Ishmael hears the commotion, people shouting, he’s ready to turn and get them out of there. Then he sees maybe fifty darkies in bright red jumpsuits, with red helmets and black gumboots, pushing people out of the shacks built in the cemetery, pathetic piles of belongings dumped amongst the crosses.

They call them Red Ants, these darkies, private security guards brought in to throw out squatters. Some of the people from the shacks try to fight back, and the Ants get stuck into them with whips and nightsticks and their boots.

So Ishmael doesn’t run. Thinks:
no wait Ishmael, this here’s a gap you can take. These people are too busy with their problems to be worrying about your stinking ass.

Ishmael takes the kid’s hand and walks along the graveyard wall and through a hole, into a quiet place where no squatters have built their shacks.

●

They hide behind a scary grave, the stone cracked and leaning like something horrible is pushing it up from under the ground. Cindy didn’t want to come into the graveyard, and the little man had to get down and look into her eyes and tell her, “The dead they only got problems with bad people, hear? They don’t trouble with good people like you.”

“But I’m not good, Ishmael,” she said, her voice sticking in her throat like food she couldn’t swallow.

“’Course you are,” he said.

She shook her head. “My mommy made her dead because of what I did with Daddy.”

He grabbed her shoulders, so hard it hurt. “Now you listen to me and you listen good. What your daddy done to you is nothing you could stop, hard as you could try. It’s not never your fault. Never. You understanding me, Cindy?”

“Bobby,” she said, smiling through the tears that came like water down her face.

“Ja, Bobby,” he said laughing, standing up and taking her hand and she let herself be walked to where they are sitting now, having their picnic: bread and Simba chips and guava juice and apples and Vienna sausages red like lipstick, all greasy but tasting so good because she is very hungry.

They sit with their backs against the stone and eat their feast, and when her tummy is swollen up Cindy feels her eyes getting heavier and heavier and she lies down on the sand and goes to sleep because she knows that Ishmael is her friend and he is there to watch over her and keep her safe.

●

The girly snores softly and Ishmael lifts the pack of Luckies—red circle like a target on the front—and tears open the silver top. He puts the pack to his nose, catching that nice, rich smell of fresh tobacco. The first proper cigarettes he’s bought in more than twenty years. He’s spoiling himself, but what’s the harm?

He got himself matches, too. Knows they are Lion matches because they’re yellow and got a drawing of red lion on the box. Ishmael taps out a Lucky and is disappointed to see that it has a filter tip. Can’t buy plains no more. He busts off the tip, chucks it on the ground and puts the cigarette in his mouth, feeling bits of tobacco tickling his tongue like little worms.

He fires up and takes a long drag, coughing smoke, then shuts up, fast. Doesn’t want to wake the girly. Wants her strong tonight, so they can get their asses gone from here when it’s dark. Not sure where they’re going to go, but wants to put as much distance between them and Tin Town as he can. He found a couple of hundred rand in the lady’s purse—must have been payday for her—and that’ll be enough to get them on a train upcountry, where he’s never in his life been.

He takes a peep around the side of the tombstone and sees the Red Ants have got all the people out, up there on the airport side of the graveyard. Now they’re smashing down the shacks made of old tin and wood and plastic.

A woman with a baby tied to her back tries to stop them and an Ant smacks her down with his nightstick. Some other people come and drag the woman away, and Ishmael can see from here that her face is red as the Ant’s uniform.

Not Ishmael’s problem. Got him plenty of his own. And he don’t like it here fuck-all, in this cemetery. Believes every word of what he told the kid, about the dead not hassling good people. But what about him? He put countless men in their graves. Some women too, truth be told. And for sure, a whole lot of them gonna be planted right here in this graveyard, maybe even under where he’s sitting his ass.

Ishmael, even though it’s hotter than hell on a bad day, feels a shiver run up his spine. All of a sudden the smoke tastes sour in his mouth, and—though he reckons it’s not yet noon—he tells the night to get a move on and come.

26

His name’s Taswell, but call him that and you’ll see your mother. Angel, that’s his handle. Angel. Proud of his American gang tattoos. Barely out of his teens but he’s on his way up, running drugs and women. Taking what he wants, when he fucken wants it.

He sits slumped low in the shotgun seat of the Honda Civic, shacks blurring by, looking past the driver, Boston, at a group of men coming on, some of them carrying sticks and metal pipes, and he knows what this is about: street justice, they call it. Say they gonna find the rapist and save the child, but the stink of that reward money is thick in their nostrils.

And he was so close to that little fucker last night on the dump.

“That close,” he said to Boston once the chopper clattered away and they made it back to the car. “That fucking close,” holding his thumb and index finger a few millimeters apart.

That close to the half-mil.

The mob parts slowly to let them through and just in case these losers get any ideas Angel cocks the .44 as Boston slides the Civic between the men. Angel prefers a knife—likes to do his work up close—but with these bastards on the street a man needs a gun.

He hears the sounds of sirens heading this way. Too much heat this little Cindy thing is bringing to his turf. Not a good idea to be driving around in this stolen car. Not today.

 “We gotta lose these wheels,” Angel says and Boston shoots the Civic behind a half-demolished store,
THINGS GO BETTER WITH COKE
still painted in red on the peeling walls.

Angel is already half way out the car when he sees that Boston has dug in the glove box and produced a bottleneck, sucking on it as he holds it over a lighter flame. Angel catches the sweet-sour whiff of Mandrax mixed with weed. A white pipe. This muscle relaxant is the downer of choice, out here on the Flats.

Boston sucks for a long while, eyes closed, before he leans back and lets go of a cloud of smoke, holding the pipe out to Angel who is ready to refuse, then he thinks what the fuck, maybe he needs to chill him out a bit, and he sits back down and takes a hit.

He doesn’t do much of this shit, Mandrax, and feels it smack him between the eyes like a cattle hammer, and then it’s like his body is deboned, his flesh melting back into the car seat. He sits there, mind blank, staring out at the hot sky. Boston takes another hit and passes the pipe back to Angel who, as he grips it, has a sudden crazy flash that it’s a relay baton and that he’s in a race. And that if he doesn’t win the race he’s dead meat.

He escapes the hot, airless Civic, drinking air, watching another crowd of men stopping cars, staring through the windows at the passengers inside.

Boston, lanky as an NBA player, comes and stands beside Angel and kicks at a beer can with his giant Reebok. “So, what the fuck we do now?”

 “Jesus Christ, my brother, just think of all that fucken money,” Angel says. “All we gotta do is find us that kid.”

“Ja, and how the fuck we gonna do that?”

Before Angel can reply the white police chopper comes clattering low over Tin Town, sending people running from the blades. Boston turns his back and covers his head with his hoodie but Angel just stands there with his eyes shut, in the middle of the sandstorm, and lets the wind and the dust and the Mandrax suck him up high till he has a helicopter view across the rotten shacks and fucked-up houses and acres of garbage.

Puts himself in the head of that little fucker who took the kid. Where would he go, the little jockey? Where would he hide? For sure nowhere in Tin Town or Paradise Park, not with these money hungry bastards running the streets. And not on the dump that’s crawling with cops and the greedy homeless.

Then Angel has a vision, honest to Christ, clear as if he’s watching TV, and he starts to laugh as he opens his eyes and takes off down the road, Boston falling in beside him.

“Where we going?” asks Boston.

“Only place nobody bothering with that little jockey and the white girly.”

“Ja? Where’s that?”

“The graveyard, my brother. The fucken graveyard.”

27

Ishmael takes a leak. Out of respect he’s careful to keep the stream of piss off the graves, aiming at a skinny tree with no leaves. He’s walked a bit away from the sleeping kid, not wanting her to see him.

He watches the helicopter moving slow and low over Tin Town, the blades chopping up the air. The Red Ants are still busy tearing apart the shacks at the far end of the graveyard, and he hears their darky shouts mixed with the angry colored voices of the squatters.