The Power of One

FIVE

I woke up early and lay in my bunk listening to the lickity-clack of the rails. Outside in the dawn light lay the grey savannah grasslands; an occasional baobab stood hugely sentinel against the smudged blue sky with the darker blue of the Murchison range just beginning to break out of the flat horizon. The door of the compartment slid open and Hoppie, dressed only in his white shirt and pants with his braces looped and hanging from his waist, came in carrying a steaming mug of coffee.

‘Did you sleep good, Peekay?’ He handed me the mug of coffee.

‘Ja, thanks, Hoppie. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay awake.’

‘No worries, little boetie, there comes a time for all of us when you can’t get up out of your corner.’

I didn’t understand the boxing parlance but it didn’t seem to matter. To my amazement Hoppie then lifted the top of the small compartment table to reveal a wash basin underneath. He turned on the taps and hot water came out of one and cold out of the other. He kept running his fingers through the water until he said the temperature was ‘just right’.

‘When you’ve had your coffee you can have a nice wash and then I’ll take you to breakfast,’ he said.

‘It’s okay, Hoppie, I have my breakfast in my suitcase,’ I said hastily.

Hoppie looked at me with a grin. ‘Humph, this I got to see. In your suitcase you have a stove and a frying pan and butter and eggs and bacon and sausages and tomato and toast and jam and coffee?’ He gave a low whistle. ‘That’s a magic suitcase you’ve got there, Peekay.’

‘Mevrou gave me sandwiches for the first three meals because my oupa didn’t send enough money. Only last night we had a mixed grill when I should have eaten the meat one,’ I said in a hectic tumbling out of words.

Hoppie stood for a moment looking out of the carriage window, he seemed to be talking to himself. ‘Sandwiches, eh? I hate sandwiches. By now the bread is all turned up in the corners and the jam has come through the middle of the bread. I bet it’s peach jam. They alway have blêrrie peach jam.’ He turned to address me directly, ‘Where are these sandwiches?’ I pointed to my suitcase on the seat below my bunk. He stooped down and clicked it open and from the case removed the brown paper package tied with coarse string.

‘As your manager, it is my solemn duty to inspect your breakfast. Fighters have to be very careful about the things they eat, you know.’ He unwrapped the parcel, splotches of grease had stained the brown paper. He was right, the bread had curled up at the corners. He removed the slice of bread uppermost on the first sandwich and sniffed the thin brown slices of meat, then he replaced the slice. He dug down to the bottom two sandwiches; the jam had oozed through the middle of the brown bread while the outside edges had curled inwards dry and hard.

‘Peach!’ Hoppie said triumphantly. ‘Always peach!’ He looked up at me, his eyes expressionless. ‘I have sad news for you, Peekay. These sandwiches have died a horrible death, most likely from a disease they caught in an institution. We must get rid of them immediately before we catch it ourselves.’ With that, he slid down the window of the compartment and hurled the sandwiches into the passing landscape. ‘First-class fighters eat first-class food. Hurry up and have a wash, Peekay, I’m starving and breakfast comes with the compliments of South African Railways.’

I flung the blanket and sheet back to get down from my bunk and looked down at my headless snake in horror. Hoppie had removed my pants before putting me to bed. My heart pounded. Maybe it had been dark and he hadn’t noticed I was a Rooinek. If he found out, everything was spoiled, just when I was having the greatest adventure of my life.

‘C’mon, Peekay, we haven’t got all day you know.’ Hoppie pulled his braces over his shoulders.

‘I am still full from the mixed grill last night, Hoppie, I can’t eat another thing, man.’ I quickly pulled the blanket back over me.

‘Hey, you’re talking to me, man, Hoppie Groenewald. Who are you trying to bluff?’ He took a step nearer to the bunk and ripped the blanket and sheet off me in one swift movement. My hatless snake was exposed, not six inches from his face. I cupped my hands over it but it was too late, I knew that he knew.

‘I’m not the next welterweight contender, Mr Groenewald, I’m just a verdomde Rooinek,’ I said, my voice breaking as I fought to hold back my tears. It always happens, just when things are perfect, down comes the retribution.

Hoppie stood quietly in front of me, saying nothing until his silence forced me to raise my downcast eyes and look at him. His eyes were sad, he shook his head as he spoke. ‘That’s why you’re going to be the next champ, Peekay, you’ve got the reason.’ He paused and smiled. ‘I didn’t tell you before, man. You know that bloke who beat me for the title in Pretoria? Well he was English, a Rooinek like you. He had this left hook, every time it connected it was like a goods train had shunted into me.’ Hoppie brought his arms up and lifted me out of the bunk and put me gently down beside the wash basin. ‘But I think you’re going to be even better than him, little boetie. C’mon wash up and let’s go eat, man.’

I can tell you things were looking up all right. Hoppie took me through to the dining car which had a snowy tablecloth on every table, silver knives and forks and starched linen napkins folded to look like dunces’ caps. Even the coffee came in a silver pot with SAR in running writing on one side and SAS done the same way on the other. A man dressed not unlike Hoppie, but without a cap and with a napkin draped across his arm, said good morning and showed us to a small table. He asked Hoppie if it was true that the light-heavy whom he was to fight that night had a total of twenty-seven fights with seventeen knockouts to his credit… a real brawler?

Hoppie said you couldn’t believe everything you heard, especially in a railway dining car. That it was the first he’d heard of it. Then he shrugged his shoulders and grinned. ‘First he’s got to catch me, man.’ He asked him about something called odds and the man said two to one on the big bloke. Hoppie laughed and gave the man ten bob and the man wrote something in a small book.

The man left and soon returned with toast and two huge plates of bacon and eggs and sausages and tomato, just the way Hoppie said it would happen. I decided that when I grew up the railways were most definitely for me.

‘Are you frightened about tonight?’ I asked Hoppie. Although I couldn’t imagine him being frightened of anything, I wanted him to know I was on his side. He had told me how it was with a light-heavy, and it was obvious the man he was going to fight was to him just as big as the Judge was to me.

Hoppie looked at me for a moment and then washed the sausage he was chewing down with a gulp of coffee. ‘It’s good to be a little frightened. It’s good to respect your opponent. It keeps you sharp. In the fight game, the head rules the heart. But in the end the heart is the boss,’ he said, tapping his heart with the handle of his fork. I noticed he held his fork in the wrong hand and he later explained: a left-handed fighter is called a southpaw. ‘Being a southpaw helps when you’re fighting a big gorilla like the guy tonight. Everything is coming at him the wrong way round. It cuts down his reach, you can get in closer. A straight left becomes a right jab and that leaves him open for a left hook.’

Hoppie might as well have been speaking Chinese, but it didn’t matter: like the feel of my hands in the gloves, the language felt right. A right cross, a left hook, a jab, an uppercut, a straight left. The words and the terms had a direction, they meant business. A set of words that could be turned into action. ‘You work it like a piston, with me it’s the right, you keep it coming all night into the face until you close his eye, then he tries to defend what he can’t see and in goes the left, pow, pow, pow all night until the other eye starts to close. Then whammo! The left uppercut. In a southpaw that’s where the knock-out lives.’

‘Do you think I can do it, Hoppie?’ I was desperate for his confidence in me.

‘Piece sa cake, Peekay. I already told you, man. You’re a natural.’ Hoppie’s words were like seed pods with wings. They flew straight out of his mouth and into my head where they germinated in the rich, fertile, receptive soil of my mind.

The remainder of the morning was taken up with Hoppie writing up some books in the guard’s van where he had a bunk, table and wash basin and a cupboard all to himself. Attached to a hook in the ceiling was a thing he called a speedball, for sharpening your punching. I was too short to reach it but Hoppie punched it so fast he made it almost disappear. I was beginning to like the whole idea of this boxing business.

Hoppie explained that at Gravelotte the train had to take on antimony from the mines. There would be a nine-hour stop before the train left for Kaapmuiden at eleven o’clock that night. ‘No worries, little boetie. You will be my guest at the fight and then I will put you back on the train.’

At lunch my eyes nearly popped out of my head. We sat down at the same table as before and the man who had been at breakfast, whose name turned out to be Gert, brought Hoppie a huge steak and me a little one.

‘Compliments of the cook, Hoppie. The cook’s got his whole week’s pay down on an odds-on bet with four miners. He says it’s rump steak, red in the middle to make you a mean bugger.’ Gert laughed. ‘I reckon his wife is going to be the mean bugger if you don’t win.’

Hoppie squinted up at Gert. ‘I get my head knocked in, the cook loses his money, but the man who keeps the book always wins, eh Gert?’

Gert looked indignant. ‘Not always, Hoppie. I dropped a bundle when you lost to that blêrrie Rooinek in Pretoria.’

‘My heart bleeds for you, man, fifteen fights, fourteen wins and you’ve always given my opponents the better odds. Christ, I’ve made you rich!’ Hoppie said and began to tuck into his steak.

At breakfast we had been in too early to see any other passengers, but at lunch the dining compartment was full and everyone was talking about the fight. Gert was moving from table to table, and in between serving was taking ten-shilling and pound notes from passengers and writing it down in his book.

Hoppie looked up at me, the handle of his fork resting on the table with a piece of red meat spiked on the end. ‘You a betting man, Peekay?’

I looked at him confused. ‘What’s a betting man, Hoppie?’

Hoppie laughed. ‘Mostly a blêrrie fool, little boetie.’ Then he explained about betting. He signalled for Gert to come over. ‘What odds will you give the next welterweight contender?’ he asked, pointing to me.

Gert asked how much I had.

‘One shilling,’ I said nervously.

‘Ten to one,’ Gert said, ‘that’s the best I can do.’

‘Is this an emergency?’ I asked, fearful for Granpa’s shilling.

‘At ten to one? I’ll say so!’ Hoppie answered.

It took positively ages to get the safety pin inside my pocket loose and then to undo the doek Granpa’s shilling had been tied into. I handed Gert the shilling and he wrote something down again in his little book. Hoppie saw the anxiety on my face. It wasn’t really my shilling and he knew it.

‘Sometimes in life doing what we shouldn’t do is the emergency, Peekay,’ he said.

We arrived in Gravelotte at two-thirty on the dot. The heat of the day was at its most intense and the vapoured light shimmered along the railway tracks. Hoppie said the temperature was one hundred and eight degrees and tonight would be a sweat bath. There were lots of rails in what Hoppie called the shunting yards and our train was moved off the main track into a siding.

‘This is where I got my shunting ticket. When the ore comes in from Consolidated Murchison and you got to put together a train in this kind of heat, I’m telling you, Peekay, you know you’re alive, man,’ Hoppie said, pointing to a little shunting engine moving ore trucks around.

We crossed the tracks and walked through the railway workshops where they were working on a train. The men stopped and talked to Hoppie and wished him luck and said they’d be there tonight, no way they were going to work overtime. The temperature inside the corrugated-iron workshops seemed worse than outside and most of the men wore only khaki shorts and boots, their bodies shining from grease and sweat. Hoppie called them ‘Grease Monkeys’ and said they were the salt of the earth.

We arrived at the railway mess where Hoppie lived. We had a shower and Hoppie opened a brown envelope which a mess servant brought to him when we arrived. He read the letter inside for a long time and then, without a word, put it into the top drawer of the small dressing table in his room. He said it was best to keep my old clothes on because we would have another shower before the fight and I could put a clean shirt and pants on then.

‘We are going shopping, little boetie, and then to the railway club to meet my seconds and have a good look over the big gorilla I’m fighting tonight. Bring your tackies, Peekay, I have an idea.’

We set off with my tackies under my arm. The main street was only a few hundred yards from the mess and there didn’t seem to be too much happening. Every time a truck passed it sent up a cloud of dust, and by the time we got to the shop Hoppie was looking for I could taste the dust in my mouth and my eyes were smarting. It sure was hot.

The shop we entered had written above the door, G. Patel & Son, General Merchants. On its verandah were bags of mealie meal and red beans and bundles of pickaxes, a complete plough and a dozen four-gallon tins of Vacuum Oil paraffin. Inside it was dark and hot and there was a peculiar smell quite unlike anything I had previously experienced.

‘It smells funny in here, Hoppie.’

‘It’s coolie stuff they burn, man, it’s called incense.’

A young woman dressed in bright swirls of almost diaphanous cloth came out of the back of the shop. She was a mid-brown colour, her straight black hair was parted in the middle and a long plait hung over her shoulder almost to her waist. Her eyes were large and dark and very beautiful. On the centre of her forehead was painted a red dot.

Hoppie nudged me with his elbow. ‘Give me your tackies, Peekay,’ he whispered. I handed him the two brown canvas shoes which had endured no more than twenty or so steps and showed no sign of wear.

‘Good afternoon, Meneer, I can help you please?’ she said to Hoppie.

Hoppie did not return her greeting and I could tell from the way he looked at her that she was somehow not equal. I thought only Kaffirs were not equal, so it came as quite a surprise that this beautiful lady was not also. ‘Tackies, you got tackies?’ he demanded.

The lady looked down at the tackies Hoppie was holding. ‘Only white and black, not brown like this.’

‘You got a size for the boy?’ Hoppie said curtly. The lady leaned over and looked at my feet and went to the other end of the counter. She brought a whole lot of tackies tied together in a bundle back with her. She unpicked a pair and handed them to Hoppie, who said, ‘Try them on, Peekay. Make sure they fit, you hear?’

I slipped into the tackies which were white and looked splendid. They fitted perfectly. ‘Tie the laces,’ Hoppie instructed.

‘I can’t, Hoppie. Mevrou didn’t show me how.’ The beautiful dark lady came around the counter, went down on her haunches and started to tie the laces. Her coal black hair was oiled and the path down the centre of her head was straight as an arrow. When she had finished tying the laces she tested the front of the tackies with the ball of her thumb, pressing down onto my toes, then she looked up at me and smiled. I couldn’t believe my own eyes, she had a diamond set into the middle of one tooth!

She turned to look up at Hoppie. ‘They fit good,’ she said.

Hoppie waited until she was back behind the counter. ‘Okay, now we make a swap. Those tackies for these tackies.’ He placed my old tackies in front of her.

The lady stood looking at Harry Crown’s tackies and then shook her head slowly. ‘I cannot do this,’ she said quietly.

Hoppie leaned his elbows on the counter so he was looking directly into her eyes. His back was straight, his jaw jutted out and his head was held high, his whole body seemed to be threatening her. He allowed his silence to take effect, forcing her to speak again.

‘These are not the same, where did you buy these tackies?’ She picked up one and examined the sole, then she turned towards the door behind the counter and said something in a strange language. In a few moments we were joined by a man with the same straight black hair and brown skin but dressed in a shirt and pants just like everyone else. The lady handed the tackie to the man, speaking again in the strange language. He seemed much older than she, old enough to be her father. The man turned to Hoppie.

‘We cannot make a change, this tackie is not the same. See here is the brand, made in China.’ He tapped the sole of the tackie with his forefinger. Then he walked over to the bundle on the counter and pulled one tackie loose from the pile. ‘See, by golly, here is altogether another brand and not from China, this time made in Japan. That is a different place you see, this is a different tackie. You did not buy this tackie from Patel & Son. You must pay me three shilling.’

Hoppie appeared not to have heard, and leaning over the counter he tapped the man on the shoulder. ‘Outside it says Patel & Son, this is your daughter but where is your son, Patel?’

Patel’s face lost its aggrieved look. ‘My son is very-very clever. A very-very clever student who is studying at University of Bombay. Every month we are sending him money and he is sending us letters. Soon he will be returning BA and we will be most overjoyed on his returnings.’

‘Sixpence and these tackies, Patel. I can’t be fairer than that, man,’ Hoppie said emphatically. Patel bent and twisted the tackie in his hand, a sour look appearing on his face.

‘One shilling,’ he said suddenly.

‘Sixpence,’ Hoppie said again. Patel shook his head.

‘Too much I am losing,’ he said.

Hoppie looked at him. ‘Patel, this is my last and final offer and only if the boy gets a bansela, I’ll give you another tickey, take it or leave it, man!’ Patel shook his head and clucked his tongue and finally nodded. Hoppie took the ninepence out of his pocket and put it on the counter. The beautiful lady held out a yellow sucker.

‘Here is your bansela,’ she said with a smile and I caught another glimpse of the diamond. I thanked her for the sucker, wondering what yellow tasted like. I still had one red one and with this one I would have two for the fight tonight.

‘Thank you, Hoppie,’ I said, looking down proudly at my new white tackies. I can tell you they looked good and I could walk in them just like that.

‘Better take them off, Peekay. If you’re going to be in my corner tonight we don’t want you wearing dirty tackies, man,’ Hoppie said with a grin. I took the tackies off and Hoppie tied the laces in a knot and hung them around my neck. I turned to thank Patel. He seemed to have become very excited and was pointing to Hoppie.

‘Meneer Kid Louis, I am very-very honoured to meet you! All week, my golly, I am hearing about you and the fisticuffs business. This morning only, the telephone from my brother in Mica and my brother in Letsitele is ringing for placing a wager. My goodness gracious, now I am meeting the person myself!’

Hoppie laughed, ‘Bet the ninepence you rooked out of me on me and it will pay for your son’s education, Patel.’

‘No, no, we are doing much, much better. Ten pounds we are wagering on Kid Louis.’

‘Holy shit! Ten pounds! That’s twice as much as I win if I win.’

Patel proffered the ninepence he had been holding. ‘Please take it back, Meneer Kid Louis, it will bring very-very bad luck if I am keeping this money.’

Hoppie shrugged and pointed to me. ‘Give it to the next welterweight contender.’

‘You are a boxer also?’

I nodded gravely, in my head it seemed almost true. Patel dug into his pocket and produced a handful of change, he dropped the ninepence amongst the coins and selected a shilling. ‘Here is for you a shilling,’ he said fearfully. Turning to Hoppie he said: ‘Please, you must be fighting very-very hard tonight.’

Hoppie grinned at him. ‘You don’t know what you just did, Patel, but it is a very good omen.’

‘Thank you, Mr Patel,’ I said, my hand closing around the silver coin. Granpa’s change was safe again and I must say it was a load off my mind.

As we left the shop Hoppie gave me a bump with his elbow. ‘You’re a funny little bugger, Peekay. You don’t call a blêrrie coolie “Mister”. A coolie is not a Kaffir because he is clever and he will cheat you any time he can. But a coolie is still not a white man!’

‘That lady had a diamond in her tooth, Hoppie.’

‘Yeah, the bastards have got lots of money all right. You never see a poor charah. Behind the shop is probably a big V8 Pontiac.’

‘What if she swallows it?’

‘What?’

‘The diamond… if it comes loose or something?’

Hoppie laughed. ‘They’d be sifting through kak for days!’

We stopped at a café and Hoppie bought two bottles of red stuff. The old lady behind the counter took them out of an ice box, opened them, popped a sort of pipe only made of paper into the tops and handed them to us. I watched to see how Hoppie did it and then I did it too. Tiny bubbles ran up the bottle and went up my nose and it tasted wonderful. On the side were the words American Cream Soda. The stuff was like a raspberry sucker only different. It was the first bottled soft drink I had ever tasted.

We arrived at the railway club just before five o’clock. The club manager, who came onto the verandah to meet us, said the temperature was still in the high nineties, the rains were overdue and there was already severe drought in the Kruger National Park at the far end of the Murchison range.

The club was cool with polished red cement floors and large ceiling fans. The manager told us the boys from the mine had already arrived and the railway boys, including Hoppie’s seconds, were with them in the billiard room having a few beers. Hoppie took my hand and we followed the manager into the billiard room.

The room contained three large tables covered in green stuff on which were lots of pretty coloured balls. Men with long sticks were knocking the balls together all over the place. In the far corner some twenty or so men were seated at a long table covered in aeroplane cloth on which were lots of brown bottles. They all stopped talking as we walked in. Two of them put down their glasses, rose from the table and came towards us smiling. Hoppie shook them by the hand and seemed very happy to see them. He turned to me and said: ‘Peekay, this is Nels and Bokkie. Nels, Bokkie, this is Peekay, the next welterweight contender.’ Both men grinned and said hello and I said hello back. We walked over to the group of men who had remained sitting around the long table.

Bokkie cleared his throat and put his hand on Hoppie’s shoulder. He was a big man with a huge round tummy, and a very red face with a flat nose that appeared to have been broken several times. I noticed that Hoppie was staring at a man who was sitting at the table with a jug of beer in front of him. The man was looking straight back at Hoppie, and their eyes were locked together for a long time. Hoppie was still holding my hand and although his grip didn’t seem to increase I could feel the sudden tension. At last the man grinned and dropped his eyes and reached out for his glass.

‘Gentlemen,’ Bokkie said, ‘this is Kid Louis, the next welterweight champion of the South African Railways.’ The men at the side of the table nearest to us all cheered and whistled, and a man on the other side of the table stood up and pointed to the man Hoppie and I had been staring at.

‘This is Jackhammer Smit. Stand up, Jackhammer, where’s your manners, man?’ he grinned. The miners surrounding Jackhammer whistled and cheered just as the railway men had done a moment before. Jackhammer rose slowly to his feet. He was a giant of a man with his head completely shaved. Hoppie’s grip tightened around my fingers momentarily and then relaxed again. ‘This is one big gorilla, Peekay,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth. Jackhammer took a couple of steps towards us. His heavy eyebrows were like dark awnings above coal-black eyes. A growth of several days made a bluish stubble over his chin and gave him a permanently angry look. His nose was almost as flat as Bokkie’s and one ear looked mashed.

Hoppie stuck his hand out but the big man didn’t take it. The men all fell silent. Jackhammer Smit put his hands on his hips, and tilting his head back slightly he looked down at Hoppie and me with eyes of anthracite and doom. Then he turned back to the miners. ‘Which of the two midgets do I fight?’ The miners broke up and beat the surface of the table and whistled. Jackhammer Smit turned back to face us. ‘Kid Louis, huh? Tell me, man, what’s a Boer fighter doing with a Kaffir name? Shit man, you should be ashamed of yourself. Kid Louis? I don’t usually fight kids and I don’t fight Kaffirboeties, but tonight I’m going to make an exception.’ He laughed. ‘You the exception, railway man. Every time I hit you you’re going to think a bloody train shunted into you!’ He turned and grinned at the seated miners who shouted and cheered again, then he walked the two steps back to his chair where he slumped down and took a deep drink from the jug of beer.

Hoppie was breathing hard beside me but quickly calmed down as the men turned to see his reaction to Jackhammer’s taunts. He grinned and shrugged his shoulders. ‘All I can say is, I’m lucky I’m not fighting your mouth, which is a super heavyweight.’

Jackhammer exploded and sprayed beer all over the railway men who were seated opposite him. ‘Come, Peekay, let’s get going, man,’ Hoppie said moving towards the door to the cheers, whistles and claps of the railway men.

Bokkie and Nels followed quickly. Hoppie turned at the door. ‘Keep him sober, gentlemen, I don’t want people to think I beat him ’cause he was drunk!’

Jackhammer Smit half rose in his chair as if to come after us. ‘You fucking midget, I’ll kill you!’ he shouted.

‘You done good,’ Bokkie said, ‘it will take the bastard two rounds just to get over his anger.’ He then told Hoppie to get some rest, that they’d pick us up at the mess at seven-fifteen to drive to the rugby field where the ring had been set up. ‘People are coming from all over the district and from Letsitele and Mica and even as far as Hoedspruit and Tzaneen. I’m telling you, man, there’s big money on this fight, those miners like a bet.’

‘No worries,’ Hoppie said. ‘See you at quarter past seven.’

We walked the short distance to the railway mess. The sun had not yet set over the Murchison range and the day baked on, hot as ever. ‘If it stays hot then that changes the odds.’ Hoppie squinted up into a sky the colour of pewter, his hand cupped above his eyebrow. ‘I think it’s going to be a bastard of a night, Peekay. A real Gravelotte night, hot as hell.’

When we got to the mess Hoppie told me his plan. ‘First we have a shower, then we lie down, but here’s the plan, Peekay, every ten minutes you bring me a mug of water. Even if I say “no more”, even if I beg you, you still bring me a glass every ten minutes, you understand?’

‘Ja, Hoppie, I understand,’ I replied, pleased that I was playing a part in getting him ready. Hoppie took his railway timekeeper from one of the fob pockets of his blue serge waistcoat hanging up behind the door.

‘Every ten minutes, you hear! And you make me drink it, okay little boetie?’

‘I promise, Hoppie,’ I said solemnly as he began to undress for his shower.

The window of Hoppie’s room was wide open and a ceiling fan moved slowly above us. Hoppie lay on the bed wearing only an old pair of khaki shorts. I sat on the cool cement floor with my back against the wall, the big railway timekeeper in my hands. In almost no time at all Hoppie’s body was wet with perspiration and after a while even the sheet was wet. Every ten minutes I went through to the bathroom and brought him a mug of water. After five mugfuls Hoppie turned to me, still on the bed resting on his elbow.

‘It’s an old trick I read about in Ring magazine. Joe Louis was fighting Jack Sharkey. Anyway, it was hot as hell, just like tonight. Joe’s manager made him drink water all afternoon just like us. To cut a long story short, by the eighth round the fight was still pretty even. Then Sharkey started to run out of steam in the tremendous heat. You see, Peekay, the fight was in the open just like tonight and these huge lights were burning down into the ring, the temperature was over one hundred degrees. In a fifteen-round fight a man can lose two pints of water just sweating and if he can’t get it back, I’m telling you, man, he is in big trouble. I dunno just how it works but you can store water up just like a camel sort of, that’s what Joe did and he’s the heavyweight champion of the world now.’

‘What did Mr Jackhammer mean when he said you were a Kaffir lover, Hoppie?’

‘Ag, man, take no notice of that big gorilla, Peekay. He’s just trying to put me off my stride for tonight. You see Joe Louis is a black man. Not a Kaffir like our Kaffirs, black yes, but not stupid and dirty and ignorant. He is what you call a negro, that’s different, man. He’s sort of a white man with a black skin, black on the top, white underneath. But that big gorilla is too stupid to know the difference.’

It was all very complicated, beautiful ladies with skin like honey who were not as good as us and black men who were white men underneath and as good as us. The world sure was a complicated place where people were concerned.

‘I’ve got a nanny just like Joe Louis,’ I said to Hoppie as I rose to get his sixth mug of water.

Hoppie laughed. ‘In that case I’m glad I’m not fighting your nanny tonight, Peekay.’

After a while Hoppie rose from the bed and went to a small dresser and returned with a mouth organ. For a while we sat there and he played Boeremusiek on the mouth organ. He was very good and the tappy country music seemed to cheer him up.

‘A mouth organ is a man’s best friend, Peekay. You can slip it in your pocket and when you’re sad it will make you happy. When you’re happy it can make you want to dance. If you have a mouth organ in your pocket you’ll never starve for company or a good meal. You should try it, it’s a certain cure for loneliness.’

Just then we heard the sound of a piece of steel being hit against another. ‘Time for your dinner,’ Hoppie said, slipping on a pair of shoes without socks and putting on an old shirt.

Dinner at the railway mess was pretty good. I had roast beef and mashed potatoes and beans and tinned peaches and custard. Hoppie had nothing except another glass of water. Other diners crowded round our table and wished Hoppie luck and joked a bit and he introduced me to some of them as the next contender. They all told him they had their money on him and how Jackhammer Smit was weak down below. They almost all said things like, ‘Box him, Hoppie. Stay away from him, wear him out. They say he’s carrying a lot of flab, go for the belly, man. You can hit him all night in the head, but his belly is his weakness.’ When they had left Hoppie said they were nice blokes but if he listened to them he’d be a dead man.

‘You know why he’s called Jackhammer, Peekay?’

‘What’s a jackhammer, Hoppie?’

‘A jackhammer is used in the mines to drill into rock, it weighs one hundred and thirty pounds. Two Kaffirs work a jackhammer, one holds the end and the other the middle as they drill into the sides of a mine shaft. I’m telling you, it’s blêrrie hard work for two big Kaffirs. Well, Smit is called Jackhammer because, if he wants, he can hold a jackhammer in place on his own pushing against it with his stomach and holding it in both hands. What do you think that would do to his stomach muscles? I’m telling you, hitting that big gorilla in the solar plexus all night would be like fighting a brick wall.’

‘I know,’ I said excitedly, ‘you keep it coming all night into the face until you close his eye, then he tries to defend against what he can’t see and in goes the left, pow, pow, pow until the other eye starts to close. Then whammo!’

Hoppie rose from the table and looked down at me in surprise. ‘Where did you hear that?’ he exclaimed.

‘You told me, Hoppie. It’s right, isn’t it? That’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it?’

‘Shhhhh… you’ll tell everyone my fight plan, Peekay! My, my, you’re the clever one,’ he said as I followed him from the dining hall.

‘You didn’t say what happened to Jack Sharkey?’

‘Who?’

‘In the heat when Joe Louis fought him and drank all the water?’

‘Oh, Joe knocked him out, I forget what round.’

Bokkie and Nels picked us up in a one-ton truck which had South African Railways, Gravelotte painted on the door. Nels and I sat in the back and Hoppie sat in the front with Bokkie. In the back with me was a small suitcase Hoppie had packed with his boxing boots and red pants made of a lovely shiny material and a blue dressing gown. Hoppie was very proud of his gown and he had held it up to show me the ‘Kid Louis’ embroidered in running writing on the back.

‘You know the lady in the café in Tzaneen, the young one?’

‘The pretty one?’ I asked, knowing all along whom he meant.

‘Ja, she’s really pretty, isn’t she? Well, she done this with her own hands.’

‘Is she your nooi? Are you going to marry her, Hoppie?’

‘Ag man, with the war and all that, who knows.’ He had walked over to the dressing table and taken the brown envelope from the top drawer. He tapped the corner of the envelope into the palm of his open hand. ‘These are my call-up papers. They were waiting for me when we got in today. I have to go and fight in the war, Peekay. A man can’t go asking someone to marry him and then go off to a war, it’s not fair.’

I was stunned. How could Hoppie be as nice as he was and fight for Adolf Hitler? If he had got his call-up papers that must mean that Adolf Hitler had arrived and Hoppie would join the Judge in the army that was going to march all the Rooineks, including me, into the sea.

‘Has Hitler arrived already?’ I asked in a fearful voice.

‘No, thank God,’ Hoppie said absently, ‘we’re going to have to fight the bastard before he gets here.’ He looked up and must have seen the distress on my face. ‘What’s the matter, little boetie?’

I told Hoppie about Hitler coming and marching all the Rooineks right over the Lebombo mountains into the sea and how happy all the Afrikaners would be because the Rooineks had killed twenty-six thousand women and children with black water fever and dysentery.

Hoppie came over to me and, kneeling down so that his head was almost the same height as my own, he clasped me to his chest. ‘You poor little bastard.’ He held me tight and safe. Then he took me by the shoulders and held me at arm’s length, looking me straight in the eyes. ‘I’m not going to say the English haven’t got a lot to answer for, Peekay, because they have, but that’s past history, man. You can’t go feeding your hate on the past, it’s not natural. Hitler is a bad, bad man and we’ve got to go and fight him so you can grow up and be welterweight champion of the world. But first we’ve got to go and fight the big gorilla who called me a Kaffir lover. I tell you what, we’ll use Jackhammer Smit as a warm-up for that bastard Hitler. Okay by you?’

We had a good laugh and he told me to hurry up and put my tackies on and he’d show me how to tie the laces like a fighter.

The sudden sound of a motor horn outside made Hoppie jump up. He put the dressing gown in the suitcase with his other things. ‘Let’s go, champ, that’s Bokkie and Nels.’

‘Wait a minute, Hoppie. I nearly forgot my suckers.’ I hurriedly retrieved them from my suitcase.