Karoo Boy (20 page)

My heart drums a tattoo as I hand him my licence.

– Your licence is in order. Does the man beside you have a licence?

Moses keeps his eyes averted.

– A licence?

– A pass. A licence to be out of his homeland.

– All his papers were stolen, sir.

– Do you mean to say you have no pass for the Bantu?

Moses bows his head under the inevitable.

– His pass was among his papers.

– Okay. Out you get.

Me, I stand by the car, fear lapping at my brain. Moses, they handcuff.

– You follow in the car, boy.

I see Moses, head bent, as they steer him towards the back of the yellow van. His hands bound behind his back. His fingers clasped like fingers of an old man on a windy beach, eyes trawling the sand for flotsam or cowries. Let him go, I want to cry out. He is a beautiful man. But I am scared of the lancing blue eyes of the sarge and of the baying, caged dog. And of the rumour: they sjambok boys under 18 instead of jailing them like men. They tie you down. They gag your teeth before the sjambok flies. The sjambok, the flying boomslang that drops from overhead and fangs through your skin. And the sting is beyond the sting of clay flung from a kleilat. Or the sting of a cane. I pinch my fly to plug a spit of pee.

I follow behind the police van. The gears catch because I am so scared. We pull up outside a typical police station under a red zinc roof and a listless flag. I park next to the van. They leave Moses hunched in the back.

– Come inside, boy, the sarge says to me.

– Can I call my mother? I beg.

– If you are big enough to ferry illegal blacks around, you are big enough for a night in jail without holding your mama’s hand.

– Jail?

– Just joking. We will get you back to your mama and you can suck her breast all you want. But we have to figure out what to do with the Bantu.

The typewriter zings as it reaches the end of a line.

– So, tell me your name.

– Douglas. Douglas Thomas.

Chaka barks. My mother comes running out onto the stoep. – Douglas, are you hurt? What happened? she cries.

– They have Moses in the back because he has no pass.

– How could you lock an old man in the back of a van? she confronts the police.

The sarge shuffles his feet awkwardly.

– I am sorry, ma’am, we are just doing our duty. Illegal blacks are always hitching down to Cape Town, and there they squat in Crossroads.

– What do you intend to do with him?

– Well, ma’am. He has no pass. Under the law, we have no choice but to send him back to the Transkei. He is a Xhosa, is he not?

– He’s a man, and you’ve caged him like an animal. His name is Moses and he’s spent his life working down your goddamn mines. Now he’s old and you want to exile him. No doubt you’d like to shoot him, like you would an old horse.

– Ma’am, we have a job to do.

– Look, I’ve seen his papers. They were in order.

My mother frowns at me because my gob is hanging open.

– It’s not his fault his papers were stolen. And Pretoria has been slow to send him new papers. He’s been a good gardenboy, captain.

– Sergeant, ma’am.

He glances at the other policeman. I have a feeling he would have been happy to be called captain had he been alone.

– Alright, ma’am, if you vouch for him, I’ll let him go. But this is unusual procedure and could land me in trouble if it gets out.

– It won’t get out. You have my word.

– Laat hom gaan, he mumbles.

The other policeman goes round to the back of the van. I hear the bolt slide, and then Moses comes out.

He bows his head to my mother.

– I’m sorry for the trouble, madam.

– Never mind. You go and lie down now.

He walks along the side of the house, past the kitchen steps, to the backyard khaya. The eyes of the policemen follow him, to make sure he does belong and is not going to scarper over the fence. He stops at the door. My heart beats. He reaches for the handle, as you do not knock at your own door. The door opens, though Hope remains unseen in the shadows. Moses goes inside.

– Perhaps your boy should stay put until his papers come, calls the sarge from the Land Rover window.

My mother waves and the Land Rover rumbles away.

Moses and Hope come out of Hope’s khaya.

– Aai aai aai, goes Hope. I told you something bad would happen, madam. I told you.

– Hush now, Hope. How are you, Moses?

– I was a fool. Why would they let an old kaffir go down to Cape Town? Such a dream is just to dream.

– But Moses, we can go another way. Down the coast, past Port Elizabeth. Or through Montagu.

– Master Douglas, they are everywhere. If they do not catch me on the road, they will catch me in Cape Town. No, you go alone. I will stay here in this stone town.

– Moses, says my mother, if you want to, you can stay here and look after us, Hope and me. Hope, you can move inside.

– But, Madam, the law forbids it.

– To hell with the law. Hope, you sleep in the spare room tonight.

T
HERE IS A GAPING
yearning in me to hold Moses, to nook my forehead in the hollow of his neck, to breathe him in. White yinyanged on black. Instead, we clasp hands.

– Go well, says Moses. You are a man.

– Stay well, Moses, I mouth.

Hope flaps about, full of foreboding that I will wind up dead if I go back to Muizenberg:

– The Langa skollies will kill you dead. Or the baboons.

My mother hugs me.

– You call me from Bessie’s, or from a callbox, you hear.

As I climb into the Volvo, my mother has to prop Hope up, to keep her from flopping down to the grass. Chaka pees against the Volvo’s tyres.

I reverse out of the yard.

– Don’t forget to look up Johan Myburgh at the
Cape Times
, my mother calls after me. He’ll give you a foot in the door.

Chaka chases the Volvo, biting at the tyres. My mother and Hope and Moses dwindle in the rearview mirror.

Chaka abandons the chase, his lolling pink tongue hangs out.

I turn into the Shell to fill up.

There is a new Jim, wearing the overall with Jim sewn on the back. He is a wiry man and the overall looks flappy on him.

– Kunjani. Fill her up with 97.

While the pump runs up rands, Ou Piet Olifant lopes over from the Rhodes Hotel.

– Cape Town, hey my boy?

I nod.

– I thought so. Can I catch a ride?

I don’t know what to say. This was the dream I shared with Moses.

– Just a joke, my boy. But I tell you, if District Six was still jiving, I would go for the show. Totsiens, my boy. Say howzit to Cape Town for me.

– Totsiens.

Clapton surfs a solo guitar riff on Radio 5 as I drive south out of Klipdorp, coral seeds in one pocket, Dodi’s blood money in the other, Moses’s dream in my head.

A few miles out, a hawk on a telegraph pole tilts an eye at me. Apart from random koppies and gullies and, sometimes, a koala gum shading a picnic spot, the veld is flat. It gives no hint of the mountains that will thrust up through the sand when I get to the Boland.

By nine the sun begins to burn and I imagine rockrabbits hiding under stones. Only the lizards stay out, etched like bushman paintings against stone.

I bite into a Granny Smith from the tuckbox of padkos Hope packed for me. Such apples they export overseas, to London and Amsterdam.

I squint out the sun as the road unwinds dizzily.

It begins to seep into my head that my tuckbox days are over and that I will have to find food alone.

I see a small buck on the peak of a distant koppie. A dikdik, or a duiker maybe. Or just a stray dog.

As I cross the vast veld under a pelting sun, images of Cape Town pop up in my head:

In front of the Harbour Café, seals scull lazily, their stomachs turned to the sun.

The patchwork of canvas-shaded stalls of Greenmarket Square.

The parrotfeather colours of the fishing boats in Hout Bay.

The Atlantic breaks against the Kalk Bay harbour wall. In the lagoon calm of the harbour, fish surface to nibble at red bait or bread crusts.

The compass hand of Cecil John Rhodes signposts the un-discovered hinterland northeast. Trek this tack over the mountains and through the Karoo and beyond, and you will find diamonds and gold.

The car gives up the ghost in Banhoek, on the hill beyond Pniel. I freewheel back down the hill to a sad, roadside garage. A cigarette stub dances in the corner of the mechanic’s mouth as he mumbles his verdict.

– Engine’s shot.

– Will you give me something for the car?

He smears grease on the bib of his overall and stares down the road to Pniel. I wonder if he has heard me.

– Is she worth anything?

– Two hundred rand, maybe.

– Two hundred rand?

– Might get something for the tyres.

I am glad Moses does not see me pocket the rand notes as dirty as a dipstick cloth. All the Sunday afternoons of tinkering under the hood or staring up at the diff, reduced to a few red notes.

I grab the duffelbag from the boot, and the Basotho blanket from the backseat, and walk uphill, lugging a heavy heart. I cannot bear to turn around. I know the yellow Volvo, jilted, abandoned, gazes her accusing headlights after me.

Further up the hill, I stop to buy hanepoot jam from a farm stall. I dip my finger into the hanepoot and lick it.

There is a dam just below the road, and the road bends around it. I climb through the fence and slither down the sandy slope to wash the stickiness away. The water is low and you can see the frame of a half-sunk bicycle. Three Egyptian geese glide further out, and watch me wash in water stained orange by the clay.

Back on the road, I thumb the cars that whine by. A blue Ford tractor rumbles along, towing a train of empty fruitbins that go
clatter, clatter clank
. The Egyptian geese beat the water with their wings, then fly over away towards the Simonsberg. I run after the tractor and jump onto the running-board of the trailer, the way the blacks do at dusk on Oom Jan’s farm, after the last shift of fruitpicking. The driver turns around and waves me away. I just wave back at him. He shakes his head but drives on.

Sitting on the rim of a fruitbin, I watch the roadside pines go by and, behind the pines, the fruit Moses dreams of.

The tractor turns off the road just before Stellenbosch. I jump down and watch the tractor rattle out of sight along a dirt road.

I walk downhill on the rippling edge of the tar, past the bus depot and into the coloured quarter of Idas Valley.

I sit on the steps in front of the café in the afternoon sun, washing spicy samosa down with neon-yellow Pinenut.

Then I walk to the crossroads, and I go up to cars when they stop at the light, the way beggars and newspaper boys do. A farmer in a bakkie says he can give me a ride as far as Spier, the wine farm.

– From there you can easy get a lift to Muizenberg.

It turns out he knows Oom Jan and that they once went fishing together in South West Africa.

At Spier, I stand by the side of the road. The train from Cape Town goes by:
kudu kudu kudu kudu kudu kudu kudu kudu.
I wave and the train whistles. Marsden and I sometimes rode this train from Cape Town to Stellenbosch, to spend a weekend with Dirkie.

An old Chev stops. It is a coloured family on their way to the beach. The father opens the boot to put the duffelbag inside, and beachbuckets and spades spill out. He gathers things again and ties down the boot with wire. The kids jump over the seat into the boot, and park on top of the bags and baskets and coolbox. They are going to the beach just this side of Sunrise we always drove past in Indlovu. I remember the colourful playground and braai spots the government built there for non-whites.

– They give us the beaches where the backwash is strong and where the sharks cruise up and down, up and down, the father laughs.

He drives past their beach to Sunrise Beach and drops me off by the fruitsellers. Then he U-turns and the kids wave through the back window as they head back.

The same fisherman is dodging motorcars and dangling his catch of snoek on the same spot. Four years of hawking snoek, come burning sun or howling southeaster. Four years of dancing on a compass foot while Muizenberg orbits round. Fours years of my drifting beyond the snoekseller’s world, a world unaware of my exile, not batting an eyelid at my return.

I buy some grapes. A man wraps the fruit in brown paper.

– There you go, chief.

– I’ve come home, I tell him.

He nods. It is the only tangible thing to mark my homecoming.

– I’ve been away a long time.

– That’s so, chief, that’s so.

– Do you remember me?

– I remember you, chief. You and your brother, and the dog. Twins is not something you forget.

I feel ashamed that I do not remember him. I remember Byron and Matches, and the snoekseller, but the fruitsellers and lollyboys and paperboys and dustbinmen are just a blur of black faces in my mind.

– I was in the Karoo.

– I just know Cape Town, my basie.

– Well, see you, hey.

– See you, basie.

There are no sand yachts on the lot where we played cricket. I spit grape pips in the beach sand. I drop my shorts, not caring that I am wearing Jockeys rather than a Speedo, and run to the sea, the way Marsden and I used to run on my father’s sandflicking heels. I dive as the tide sucks at my feet. It feels as if the cold will crush my skull. I surface and tread water. The cold gnaws into the bones in my feet, but I swim out to where the surfers ride the waves in rubber skins. Far away: the matchstick sunbathers and umbrella flowers.

– Chips, dude. We spotted a fin this morning.

– Thanks.

My heart pounds as I peer into the deep, shadowy water. Somewhere, down there, death lurks. A hint of the latent speed of an unshot torpedo in the casual flick of a tail. Gills rippling. Fine-tuned senses yearning for a rumour of blood. Chips, dude. Thanks for telling me, dude. Do I flap my hands and fly?