Man Down (18 page)

9

The day announced itself like a SWAT team battering down a door, terror rousting Turner from a fitful sleep, jerking him upright, his heart pounding, toxic sweat on his brow, panic coursing thick through his blood.

Disoriented, he grabbed for the bottle of Jack Daniel’s that lived beside his bed but when his fingers found air he realized that he wasn’t at home, that he was lying stiff and cramped on the ominously stained carpet of the death house, the screams of his prisoner reaching him through the locked bedroom door.

The screaming and banging that had continued into the small hours until, at last, the girl had cried herself to sleep and allowed him to sink into an uneasy slumber.

Turner stood, his back aching, and limped across to the door.

She must’ve heard the scuff of his shoes on the carpet and the screams became whimpers.

“Let me out. Please let me out. Please. Please. Please.”

The sobs that followed drove him toward the front door and he unlocked it and stood looking through the rusted bars of the gate, the tin roofs of the festering shacks catching the sun like mirrors, Sandton’s saw-toothed skyline rising through a blanket of smog in the distance.

He checked his watch and was astonished to see it was almost noon.

Turner unlocked the gate and stepped out into the heat. He took a piss against the side of the house and crossed to the HiAce and slid behind the wheel, the cracked leather of the seat burning his skin.

When he clicked on the radio Kwaito assaulted his ears and he cranked the dial until self-important music announced the midday news on 702 and he listened to a couple of minutes of crime and corruption and meaningless sports results.

Nothing about the girl.

He didn’t know whether that was a good thing or bad.

But he did know he was sorely in need of drink and drugs, patting his pockets in the vain hope that he’d find a spliff.

Zero.

He quit the van and went back into the house, locking up after him.

The girl was quiet and he sat on the floor with his head against the cool plaster of the wall and tried to think.

As Turner took one of the cell phones from his pocket and considered calling Bekker he heard a voice speaking clearly and calmly and for a second he thought he was hallucinating, until he realized it was the girl.

“Hi,” she said through the door, coherent for the first time. “I know you’re out there. Please listen to me.”

He crossed to the bedroom.

“My period has started,” she said, “and I’ve used all the toilet paper. Please, I need some tampons.”

Turner stepped away from the door, knowing that he should ignore this plea.

But he remembered the strip mall he’d seen the first day he’d driven out here with Bekker, a mile or two back past the shacks on the Jo’burg road, and he was pretty sure he’d glimpsed a pharmacy sandwiched between a KFC and a liquor store.

Jesus, the thought of booze had him jonesing.

Before he had time to change his mind he left the house, locked up and jogged to the HiAce, breathless by the time he climbed behind the wheel.

He drove to the gate in the fence and spent what felt like hours at the lock, his hands shaking, the key rattling around the slot.

It took all his resolve to leave the raggedly idling van and close the padlock after him before he sped
off into the scorching day, trailing yellow dust.

When he got to the asphalt road he turned right and passed the shacks, the smell of shit coming in thick and strong.

The strip mall rose up out of the burned veld like an oasis and Turner parked the HiAce and made straight for the liquor store.

The place was a fortress.

He had to buzz at the barred gate and it took a long time for the lock to click.

Turner went in and saw a swarthy man with pomaded hair, a dead ringer for the comeback-period Elvis, watching him through a grille, noisy bangra
blaring through blown speakers.

“Yes?” the man said, his hands hidden under the counter cradling a pistol or a shotgun.

“Jack Daniel’s.”

“Not got.”

“You got Southern Comfort?”

The man shook his greasy head.

Turner squinted through the bars and saw a row of dusty bottles of golden mezcal. The kind with the agave worm inside.

He bought two bottles and uncapped one while he was walking to the HiAce, swigging from it greedily, the bloated little white worm floating toward his lips. Turner coughed at the roughness of the Mexican firewater, splattering booze onto his Chuck Taylors.

But it was helping, the warmth spreading into his gut, dulling the spikes of the ball of barbed wire that filled his abdomen.

He took another couple of long pulls then threw the bottles into the van and went into the pharmacy and bought tampons for the kid.

Eyeing the prescription drugs behind the counter Turner was tempted to try and scam some, but he knew it would be futile and he would be remembered.

On his way back to the van he saw a young black guy dressed in a floppy blue Kangol hat and a Pirates Football team T-shirt hanging on the sidewalk, making a great pretence of ignoring Turner, who’d spent enough years paddling in the murky waters of the drug world to recognize a small time merchant.

He made eye contact with the man as he climbed up behind the wheel and the dealer crossed the parking lot to the HiAce, hips thrust forward, his skinny arms dangling like strings of licorice from his rolling shoulders.

The dealer stuck his head through the open side window and gave Turner a gap-toothed smile as he said, “What you need, my brother?” in a syrupy, faux-American drawl.

He had a surprisingly low voice, starting deep
in his chest, like Isaac Hayes as Chef in
Southpark
.

“You got ganja?” Turner asked.

The man shook his head. “Finish. But I got
tik
, man.”

Turner stared at him.

Tik
. Meth.

Even he, the Evel Knievel of substances, had shied away from methamphetamine.

But right now he needed something to smooth reality’s serrated edge.

“I don’t have a pipe,” Turner said.

The guy, doing his best impersonation of the Devil, smiled and patted his jeans pocket.

“No problem, my brother, I got a lolly.”

Turner pushed open the passenger door.

“Get in,” he said.

The man swung up and pointed at a narrow road leading into the veld.

“Go up there.”

“Why not here?”

“The
boere
my brother. They patrol.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure, sure.”

The mention of the cops had Turner starting the HiAce and following the dealer’s directions. He knew he was crazy, taking this risk in the carjack capital of the world, but what the fuck, he was desperate.

Turner stopped the HiAce behind a stand of trees, tensing when the man reached into his pocket, but his hand emerged clutching a meth pipe.

“How much?” Turner asked.

“Gimme fifty,” the man said, filling the pipe.

Turner handed over the cash.

The dealer fired up the pipe and Turner caught the burning plastic smell as the guy sucked on it, exhaling like his head was on fire, and handed the pipe to Turner who took a deep draft.

Fuck.

The drug hit him in the forehead, literally smacking him back, like an animal felled by a stunbolt gun in a slaughterhouse.

Turner sank against the seat and he felt all anxiety leave him on his exhalation. And when he sucked on the glass teat again he drew into his body joy and magnificence.

By the time he finished the pipe Turner was convinced he had a ringside seat at the Second Coming.

“This is good shit,” he said, his voice honey to his ears.

“Very good shit, my brother.”

“You better give me another rock and the pipe too.”

More money changed hands and Turner drove back to the road in a mood-enhanced daze.

He dropped off the dealer and turned back toward the death house.
What he hadn’t noticed
when he’d driven along the road earlier, in his haste to get to the liquor store, were the women who stood beneath the trees at the roadside, waving languid black arms like the sirens of shackland.

Turner felt a spike of lust so intense that he acted on it immediately, no room for doubt or common sense to vault the gap between his synapses, and rolled the van to a halt next to a young woman, barefoot, in a torn dress.

She came to his window and flashed him an empty smile, naming her pitiful price.

He parted with the cash and she climbed up beside him, the smell of stale sweat and wood smoke that she carried with her an aphrodisiac to his nose.

He sat back while she unbuckled him and pulled his jeans low, took his cock out of his skivvies and tongued him, licked his length until he was prodigiously hard, so hard he experienced a deeply erotic pain.

As she worked on him with her hot mouth for what felt like an eternity, Turner sat and stared over her bobbing wooly head, through the dusty windshield, out at the distant range of hills, the Magaliesberg—the so-called Cradle of Humankind—where early man had lifted himself off his knuckles and taken his first lurching steps into an uncertain future.

When Turner finally came it was as if he were being anointed by an angel and he spasmed and groaned and bucked, a supernova at play on the screens of his closed eyelids.

Returning to himself he saw that the passenger door gaped and the woman was gone and with it all the money he’d had folded in the pocket of his jeans that were concertinaed
around his ankles.

He laughed.

Nothing could dampen his bliss.

He turned on the radio, surfing away from 702, finding a music station, some mindless R&B that he’d usually disdain, but it suited his mood and he drove back to the house humming and singing as if he still owned the right to be happy.

Once through the perimeter fence he parked the HiAce behind the house, took the booze and the tampons and walked to the front door, his mind, as he negotiated the gate and the door locks, on the meth in his pocket, wondering how long he should wait before he fired it up.

As he shoved the door open and stepped into the dank, gloomy living room he took a heavy blow to the right temple that felled him, leaving him on his knees, dazed.

A dark shadow flew past him into the glare.

Turner blinked and put a hand to his head, his fingers coming away bloody.

He saw a piece of metal lying on the carpet. The bedroom door was open, the wood around the lock torn and splintered.

A hot jet of puke spurted from Turner’s mouth and splattered onto the floor between his knees, some of it going up his nose, burning his nostrils.

He grabbed the barred door and hauled himself to his feet, the room tilting and spinning.

Sucking air he launched himself out into the yard of the house in time to see the girl sprint toward the gate, screaming.

When she found the gate locked she rammed it with her body like a penned animal, shaking the fence, yelling.

He ran at her in an off-kilter lope, his breath loud and ragged in his ears, blood filling his right eye, blurring his vision.

The girl saw him and hurtled round the back of the house, as fleet as a hare, addled, lumbering Turner no match for her.

When he came to the backyard he saw her at the shed, rattling the locked door and then she bolted to the chain-link fence which she started to climb, fast and light, and he feared that he had lost her until her hands reached the twists of razor wire at its summit, the sun flaming on the ugly barbs.

Closing the gap on her, Turner heard her sawing breath and animal cries as the razor wire lacerated her hands and arms and with a wail she fell back off the fence, landing in the sand, sending up a small cloud of dust.

He almost had her but she twisted from him and found her feet, a fall of blood patterning the sand as she ran again.

Flinging himself forward to catch her Turner lost his footing and ended up sprawled prone in the dirt, the wind driven from his lungs, and the girl was gone again, around the front of the house.

Turner, wheezing, dizzy, panicked, limped after her, the rutted red earth as unsteady beneath his feet as the ground that day, long ago, when it had swallowed his family.

He reached the porch and supported himself on the low wall, drinking air as he searched the yard for the girl.

She’d disappeared.

Wiping blood from his face he scanned the fence.