Karoo Boy (15 page)

I
FIND A SPARE
headlamp glass in the jungle gym of junkyard cars, and the Volvo has two good eyes again.

I sand down the rust husk of the roofless Volvo, so we can paint her. I want to paint her a buttercup yellow with pink and green flowers like the surfer van my father and mother had when they were young in Sea Point. The reedy voice of Joan Baez singing
Blowin’ in the Wind
comes over the radio.

Under the Camps Bay palms of long ago, my father is the harmonica longing to touch her, my mother the guitar, skipping just out of reach.

Moses does not mind the colour, so long as she hums along the road. For him it is all tuning and timing. He is forever searching the bands for a radio signal on the car radio that he salvaged from the junkyard. He tilts the radio and fiddles with the aerial until the static fades out and music sings through sweetly. Sometimes it takes a good five minutes to find unmuddy music.

After sanding the afternoon away to the Soweto vibes from the car radio, I want to wash my hands. Moses goes with me around to the back of the garage, to use the sink and soap in his room.

The outside of Moses’s room is festooned with relics salvaged from dead motorcars. Flotsam strung on fishing gut from the gutter, fetish dolls and bones and beads and feathers that hung from rearview mirrors. Strings of threaded shells chime in the breeze. A Barbie doll swings nakedly, short of a leg like Hans Christian Andersen’s tin soldier. Pink geraniums overflow hanging beach-buckets. Saint Christopher wades through a river with Jesus clinging on like a monkey. Just so, Marsden and I were blanketed up and carried tutuzela-tutuzela on Hope’s back.

In the shade of a beach umbrella, milk yellows in the lid of a Cobrawax tin. A zizzing fly drowns in the sour liquid.

– For the junkyard cats, says Moses. They come to my door for milk when the sun goes under. Six or seven at a time lap up the milk, jowl to jowl. It is a beautiful thing to see. At night, sometimes, they creep in through my window and lie on my bed. Sometimes they fight on the roof and I jump awake at the screaming. I am afraid the tokoloshe has come for me. But it is only the cats and I shoo them out. His laugh gurgles up from a deep well in his stomach.

I laugh too, at the thought of Moses jumping out of his skin when the banshee yowl of junkyard cats jerks him out of his dreams. Before the mist of sleep clears, the dwarfgoblin tokoloshe bays for blood.

A shaft of dusty sun falls on a dangly-eyed panda on a bed high on bricks to outwit the stubby tokoloshe. The panda watches skewly as I dip under the veil of flowers, into the cool dark of the room.

In a corner, on a Cadac gas stove, is a pot of caked putu.

Over the sink is a broken mirror, tinted green like a fish tank. I scrub my hands, then bend to drink water from the tap. Fish eyes blink at me from the plughole. I look up and Marsden stares back at me. His eyes are like pebbles in the liquid green. Water beads down his forehead into his eyes, so close in the mirror I want to lick it away.

My eyes flick across to the reflection of Moses in the doorway, and back to the mirror again, but Marsden is gone and all I see is me, lips chapped by the Karoo sun and the skin scratched raw in the dent of my chin.

A motorcar hoots.

– I must go, says Moses.

He goes out, leaving me alone. I am scared to look deep into the mirror again, in case Marsden’s face swims up out of the green. I am not sure how to tell my brother I sometimes forget I am a twin.

At school in Cape Town teachers sometimes confused Marsden and me. I did not mind because for me where Marsden ended and I began was undefined. His mind and mine shuttle-cocked back and forth. Sometimes I was Marsden: artist. I saw the magic of a seagull’s feather through his eyes. And then I was me again: staring out the train window, dreaming of how Miss Forster’s milkwhite breasts billowed under her buttons. A knowing glance from Marsden would reveal my vision lay bare before his eyes and I would wish I had the freedom to dream untapped dreams.

Now, untwinned, untwined, I dream untapped dreams, of Marika, of Amsterdam, and of my father in Malindi.

I see my father on a beach. Smoke spirals up from a cigarette, dangling from the corner of his mouth. He sharpens a pencil with a pocket knife, and the shavings fall to the sand. A breeze picks up and whisks the shavings away. He sips coffee from a thermos flask, sunk in the sand. Then he begins to write along the edge of a newspaper. This is what it is like to write a book, cigarettes and pencil shavings, newspapers and coffee. He looks up and winks at me. The words come hard, like reeling in a hooked fish on a hand-line, hand over hand.

– Hey, dad. It was fate. It wasn’t your fault.

– My boy, I know. But a hard fate to ride, hey?

He laughs a bitter, lonely laugh.

A
NOTHER TYPICAL SUNDAY AFTERNOON
in Klipdorp. Time drags. Moses sits on his Black Label beer crate, eating bread and chips. He washes the bread and chips down with Stoney ginger beer. I drown the mamba tube of my bicycle in a drum of water, looking for the telltale bubbles of a hole made by a devil thorn. My grandfather brought the bicycle over from England and some of the patches mark the days he cycled there, through seas of green. Other patches, orange-edged, are from the glass of dropped cooldrink bottles on the road from Muizenberg to Kalk Bay. Still others from fruitbin nails on Oom Jan’s farm.

On the car radio, Miriam Makeba sings with the Skylarks. Her voice floats over the tin sound of the guitar and the tapping of the drums. And higher still than her voice, the pennywhistle glides like a swift dipping and looping in the sky.

– Miriam is in exile, but they still chance her songs on the radio, Moses tells me.

On Sundays in Muizenberg, Hope sat on the doorstep, clicking a long-toothed comb through her spongy hair while the radio played black jazz. On Sundays we went for long drives in Indlovu, east along the sea-road to Hermanus to screwdriver black mussels from the rocks, or inland to Oom Jan’s farm for a braai and sweet potatoes and a swim in the dam. My father tuned in to Radio 5: Fleetwood Mac or the Eagles or Simon and Garfunkel. Good road music, my father called it. But you never heard black African jazz on Radio 5.

And when my father was in a good mood he would tell us stories as we went along:

There once was a slaveboy called Naartjie, because his face was as sweet as the juice of a naartjie. He was so beautiful that all the slavegirls of the Boland wanted him and would lift up their skirts to show him their legs, strong from tramping grapes barefoot, like the legs of hockey girls.

My father was always teasing my mother about her strong legs from all the years she played hockey. He told Marsden and me that he had to fork out a big lobola for his woman. James, please, my mother would beg. But my father would go on regardless.

But Naartjie, he didn’t flutter an eyelid at their legs, so they lifted their skirts higher.

My father would slide my mother’s skirt up her legs and she would smack his hand away and Marsden and I would giggle in the back. My father was on a roll.

One day Naartjie was walking along the Berg River. The Boland sun beat down on his head, so he knelt to drink from the Blougat pool. As he reached out his hand to scoop up water, he saw a beautiful face in the water, beautiful beyond the magic of words or songs to capture it. Whenever he kissed the waterlips, the face melted. And so Naartjie stayed on the banks of the Berg River, staring into the water, pining away with longing for himself.

Then fishbubbles bubble up through my fingers and I turn to Moses:

– I found it.

He peers into the drum, and smiles:

– Good.

He makes me feel skilled, as if I landed a fish instead of just finding a hole in a tube.

At the crossroads down the street a bakkie revs, and jumps red. Tyres claw for grip as the gas kicks in. The pedal is flat and the bakkie shoots by full tilt, one man up front and two on the back. One of the backriders holds a shotgun high in one hand. Although you sometimes see an army lorry rumble through the streets, with soldier guns cocked at the sky, it is an uncommon thing to see a man out of uniform ride around with a gun.

– They are the boys, Moses says to me, the two on the back.

Further up the road, there is a jamming of rubber as the bakkie U-turns, and heads back. It gears down and skids to a halt in front of the diesel pump.

Moses switches off the radio.

The man behind the wheel has a tattoo in the bare skin of his head. He hoots the horn and calls out:

– Hey, Jimboy. Fill up with arabjuice.

Moses reaches for the hose. The numbers of the pump blink back to zero like the wide eyes of a scared comicbook character.

– Tell them you want your pass, I whisper into Moses’s ear.

– Douglas, they are hard boys.

– Hey, you guys have stolen this man’s pass, I yell at them.

– Well, check this out, old Jimboy found himself an albino monkey, says the shotgun cowboy on the back.

– Leave the boy alone, says Moses, his hand quivering on my head.

– What pass? the tattooed head wants to know.

– Forget it, Pa. This blek is fulla shit.

The other boy on the back, with the baboon-ass ears of a rugby prop, laughs a high-pitched laugh. The sort of laugh that, in a comic, would be written: tee hee hee hee.

Moses shakes his head.

– Baas, the boy is right. They took my jacket with my pass in the pocket.

The shotgun cowboy and the rugby prop jump down from the back, as if on signal.

– You got something to say, old kaffir? demands the shotgun cowboy.

– Ya, you got something to say? goes the rugby prop.

– I want no trouble. I just want my pass.

– Oooh, shame. Old Jimboy lost his dog licence, says the shotgun cowboy to the tattoo-headed father behind the wheel.

– Sad story, tuts the tattooed head. But you are going too far, accusing my boys of stealing your jacket.

– But they did steal it and now the post office will not give him his money, I blurt out.

– Hey, Jimboy, where you find this monkey? jibes the shotgun cowboy.

– He is a good boy, baas.

– Now you be a good boy too, Jim, and make no trouble in this town, or you’ll be sorry, goes the shotgun cowboy as he turns to look down the road.

Then he spins around and stabs Moses in the stomach with the barrel of the gun.

My heart beats wildly and I want to run. Moses holds his stomach, as if to catch his guts.

– What shall I stir up, baas? I just want my papers, Moses mouths under cast-down eyes.

– Well, the truth is, Jim, you bleks hate your pass. So we did you a favour and cut it up.

– That was a cruel thing to do, baas.

The shotgun cowboy yanks his knee up against Moses’s balls. Moses slumps to the tar, with a long low moan, the moan of a shot Christmas cow on Oom Jan’s farm. They tow Moses by his feet, round to the back of the garage. His head jigs on the tar, trailing a spoor of liquid, like snail slime.

– We got nothing against you, boy, but if bleks are free to run around telling stories, this country will go to pot, tunes the shotgun cowboy.

A Volkswagen kombi drives by the garage with a Neil Young tune sailing out of the windows. The man at the wheel is wearing ski shades with leather on the sides like donkey blinkers. He does not see us. I pick up the words:
I been to Hollywood, I been to Redwood, I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold.
The words fade as the kombi goes.

Moses is down under the beach umbrella that shades the doorstep of his room. The shotgun cowboy is booting him in the ribs.

– Don’t you get white with us, Jimboy.

He kicks again. Moses rolls on the tar. In my head the needle sticks in a groove and all I think is: Please God, don’t let him die. Please God. Please God. Then the needle jumps and I think: They’ll kill me too. I survived sharks and baboons to be skopped to death. My ribs will cave in and then I will sink into the place of shadows and reflections.

I jika on my heels and begin to run.

– You run to the police, the shotgun cowboy barks after me, and we keel the old man.

I falter, sway on my heels. My mind mists.

I hear Neil Young over the deep chugging of a Volkswagen motor:
I been a miner for a heart of gold
. The kombi has turned around.

Hope sweeps the mist out of my mind.

– Let him go, I yell.

– Kom, julle, calls the father to his sons.

I hear the dull thud of the cowboy’s boots landing in Moses’s stomach, but Moses makes no sound.

Please God, I cry out inside my head.

As they go, I hear the rugby prop:

– Did you kick him dead?

– You crazy. You can’t kick a kaffir dead. You have to pump a bullet in the head.

Behind me, the Isuzu bakkie kicks into life.

I drop to my knees and put my ear to his mouth. Through the
chook chook
chugging of the Volkswagen and the voice of Neil Young, I can just hear his breath: the sigh of a wind off the vlei. The motor chokes out. Overhead, the tassles of the beach umbrella dance and the strung shells jingle in the breeze. I hear a hoot for petrol. But Moses lies still, with his knees tucked in, like a dog by a fire.

I run around the corner. The man in the ski shades is standing by his kombi. I go up to him and grab his hand, wordlessly.

– What the hell? he cries, tipping his shades up onto his forehead.

Maybe it is the horror in my eyes that makes him follow me around to where Moses hugs his knees, a bleeding old-man foetus.

When he sees Moses, the kombi man just goes:

– Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus

He is unaware of the river of words. He runs back for the water-can you use to fill a radiator and pours water over Moses’s head. Moses splutters, then wipes his fingers over his eyes and nose and mouth, the way coloured kids do on Oom Jan’s farm when they come up from under the dam water.

– Are you alright? the kombi man wants to know.

– Ndilungile, baas. This old kaffir, he does not die so fast.