Blood Safari

31

Phatudi’s troops laughed at me when I walked to the Audi.

As I got in I saw him standing with his chest expanded and a smile of self-satisfaction.

I turned the ignition and drove away.

Past the station I let my rage boil over and banged the car into low gear and stomped on the accelerator. The rear end slid too far around the gravel turn and I fought the wheel, brought it back, accelerated again, spinning the tyres. They found traction and shot the Audi forward, revs too high. I ran through the gears, wanted to stamp the accelerator through the floor, a hundred and fucking sixty, and there was the R40 junction up ahead. I had to brake and the car shuddered and for a while I didn’t know whether I was going to make it, but I stopped in a cloud of dust. I saw that my knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

I opened the door and got out. A truck and trailer thundered past on the R40, loaded high with massive logs. I shouted at it, a meaningless cry.

A minibus taxi passed the other way, filled with black faces staring at me, a crazy white man beside the road.

I didn’t know where to go. That was my problem. It was the primary source of my frustration and rage.

Phatudi had baited, taunted and angered me, but I had handled that. I could wait for him, for the right time and the right place. But the fact that my choices had dwindled to nothing, I could do nothing about.

On the way to the house with the pink concrete wall, I had had three options. Edwin Dibakwane and the letter. Jack Phatudi and the phone call. Donnie Branca and Mogale. And now I had none.

Edwin Dibakwane was dead. Someone had tortured him and shot him and left his body in a plantation. The connection between the letter and its author was broken. Scrap option number one.

No, not entirely. Dibakwane would have told the people pulling out his fingernails where the letter came from. Somebody knew. But I didn’t. It was still no use to me.

Phatudi had been telling the truth. Despite everything, his surprise about the attack on Emma and the connection with the call to him was genuine. Scrap option number two.

That left me with the Mogale rehabilitation centre.

The urge to go there now and thrash Donnie Branca until he told me what was going on was consuming me. I wanted to punish somebody. For Emma.

I wanted to bash someone’s skull against a wall or a rock or a clay floor, over and over again, make the brain bounce back and forth against the sides of the cranium, coup and fucking contrecoup, until his cerebral cortex was a fucking pulp. That is what I wanted to do. I wanted to twist the arms of the two masked wonders at the railway track until they popped out of their joints and I heard the ligaments snap and the bones splinter. I wanted to get that sniper, take his rifle, jam it through his teeth, put my finger on the trigger, look him in the eyes, say ‘goodbye, motherfucker’ and then blow his brains all over the wall.

But who were they? And where could I find them?

Branca was my last hope. What would I do if he refused to talk? What was left if I hit him and he still wouldn’t speak? Because he couldn’t risk it, the whole affair had gone too far – a woman in a coma, a gate guard tortured and murdered, a man dead in a lion pen and mad Cobie de Villiers couldn’t take responsibility for all that. It was one thing to send threatening letters to farmers, to shoot dogs and burn down buildings. Quite another story to go to jail for life.

Scrap option number three.

I walked down the road away from the Audi and then I walked back again. I still had no idea what to do.

I opened the car door and got in. Started the car. Turned right on the tar road, in the general direction of Hoedspruit, Mogale and Mohlolobe.

I just drove. I had nothing else to do.

Past the turn-off to the Kruger National Park, the R351,1 saw the handmade advertising board. WARTHOG BUSH PUB. COLD BEER!!!!! AIRCON!!! OPEN! For the first time it meant something. I thought it over for a kilometre, reduced speed and stopped. Waited for oncoming traffic to pass and then I turned around.

Time to think. Cool down. Let me go and see where they tried to recruit Dick-the-dude.

It was not a place for international tourists. One big building and six or seven small ones between the mopane trees and dust. Whitewashed walls, weathered grey thatch asking for maintenance. Three well-used Land Cruisers, an old Toyota 4×4 single-cab, two big old-fashioned Mercedes sedans, a new Nissan double-cab and a Land Rover Defender of indeterminate age. Three had Mpumalanga number plates, the rest were from Limpopo Province.

Local watering hole.

From the biggest building a cracked panel hung slightly askew. A lifetime ago someone with no remarkable artistic talent had carved out the word ‘Warthog’ and a caricature of the same on the dark wood. A sign in the form of a vehicle number plate was screwed below: BUSH PUB. A white-painted plank fixed neatly square to the wall promised in red letters: PUB LUNCHES! A LA CARTE DINNER! GENUINE GAME DISHES! TRY OUR MIXED GRILL! WARTHOG BURGERS!

In the window beside the large wooden door was a small faded advertisement stuck up with sticky tape like an afterthought. CHALETS AVAILABLE. I opened the door. The air conditioning was working. There was a long bar the length of the building. Wooden tables and benches filled the rest of the room. All were set. A silver banner hung from the open rafters, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!! The management was into exclamation marks.

The bleached wall was covered with graffiti. Jamie & Susan were here. Eddie the German. Morgan and the Gang. Olaff Johanssen. Save the Whale, harpoon a fat chick. Free Mandela – with every box of Rice Krispies. Semper Fi. Naas Botha was hier. Seker omdat Morné nie kom nie. Make Love, Not War – Steek, Maar Nie Met ’n Mes Nie. Cartoons, illegible signatures.

At five tables there were people in groups of eight or more. From the volume of the conversation I gathered they had begun the New Year celebrations. Behind the bar a woman was unpacking glasses from a plastic crate. When I sat down at the long bar she came over.

‘What would you like?’

‘Dry Lemon and ice, please.’

‘On New Year’s Eve?’ Amused laughter lines. She was on the wrong side of forty, but not unattractive, her nose and mouth worked well together. Her eyes were light, more grey than green, hair long and curled in brown waves to her shoulders. Earrings in the shape of the moon and stars. A sleeveless faded orange T-shirt covered her large breasts. Blue jeans with a dramatic belt buckle, African beads around her neck, a cascade of bangles, pretty hands with too many rings. Long nails painted green.

‘Yes, thank you.’

I watched as she went to a fridge with a sliding door. She looked good in the jeans. On the back of her shoulder she had a tattoo, an Eastern letter or sign. She took out a can of cool drink – a small one.

‘Two of those, please.’

She took out another, put both side by side, took a beer glass and filled it with ice. She brought them all to me. ‘Do you want to run a tab?’

‘Please.’

She snapped open the cans. I saw hundreds of visiting cards stuck to the shelves of bottles in long rows. Near the ceiling hung a row of baseball caps. Tractor and car logos. Currie Cup teams. Just another country pub in search of character.

‘Tertia,’ she said, and put out a beringed hand. The name did not suit her.

‘Lemmer,’ I said, and we shook hands. Hers was cool from the cans and her eyes were curious.

‘You don’t look like a tourist.’

‘What does a tourist look like?’

‘Depends. The foreigners wear safari outfits. The Gautengers, from Johannesburg and Pretoria, bring the wife and children. They put their cell phone down first, then a fat wallet beside it. Want to show off a bit, and not miss a call.

You’re working. You came in here for a reason. Waiting for someone? Could be, the way you looked around.’

Then she looked into my eyes. ‘Mercenary.’

I knew what she was doing. She was waiting for me to blink, the subtle narrowing of my eyes, the downward glance. I showed nothing. ‘Consultant. Military consultant.’ Nothing. ‘Smuggler.’

She knew then she wouldn’t get it. ‘OK,’ she said reluctantly. ‘The drink is on the house.’

‘Not bad,’ I said, and emptied my glass.

‘How close was I?’

‘Lukewarm.’

‘You think you can do better, that’s what.’

‘May I have another?’ I pushed the glass towards her.

‘Come on, show me what you’ve got.’ She went to fetch two more cans.

‘Do you have biltong? Or nuts or something?’

‘Maybe.’ She put the cool drinks down in front of me. ‘If you can do better than me.’

‘Tersh,’ someone called from a table. ‘More wine.’ A chorus of similar requests echoed around the room.

‘Coming,’ she said to them, and softly to me, ‘It’s going to be a long night.’

She went to get their wine. I poured for myself again. Watched the skill of her movements. She had the body of a younger woman and she knew it.

Another group came through the door, twelve white people, six men and six women, in their late thirties to mid-fifties. Greeting rang back and forth. There was a festive atmosphere and an air of expectancy.

Tertia fetched an order book and went to stand at the new table. She laughed along with them, touching a man’s shoulder here, a woman’s hand there. Acquaintances, but her body language was slightly defensive, an unconscious statement of ‘I don’t really belong here’. An ‘outlander’, Melanie Posthumus would have called her.

I thought about the game Tertia wanted to play. Wondered how many hundred-rand notes she had won from travelling salesmen. It was easy if you had enough experience of people and knew how to ask your questions and make your statements. I could do better, because I knew them. I had met women like her in the Cape, when Parliament was in session and I could wander around Long Street and St George’s Mall and Green-market Square. They all had the same basic story. I had formulated a Law. Lemmer’s One-Night Law of Quasi-Artistic Women. More than one night and you became an insect in a spiderweb.

She was from the country, within a radius of two hundred kilometres of here at best. Lower middle-class Afrikaans. Intelligent. Rebellious at school.

After school she left for the city with a feeling of euphoria. To Pretoria, to flee her childhood home and position, not knowing that she would carry it with her. She lived in a tiny single flat somewhere in the city centre, took a clerical position with a big company, temporary only, as she fostered vague ideas of studying art. She began to read Oriental philosophy, study astrology.

She reassessed her life. Resigned from her job, packed her Volkswagen Beetle and drove alone to Cape Town. Moved into a commune in Obs or Hout Bay and made quasi-art pieces to sell in Greenmarket Square, wore loose dresses, sandals and coloured bandannas in her hair. Called herself Olga or Natasha or Alexandra. Smoked a bit of pot, slept around a little. She did not feel fulfilled.

Some time or other in the years to come she would relax her standards and say ‘yes’ to the short, middle-aged small businessman or beer-bellied banana farmer who had been asking her so long and politely. So she wouldn’t have to grow old alone.