“You worked in your father’s shop, too?”
“I am standard six,” Thomas replied proudly.
“But these are school holidays, are they not? Or are you so educated that shopwork is not for you?”
“He works for another man, by the deposit-down bazaar, doing all his sums for him.”
“Once I did work for my father,” Thomas added, drawing numbers in the dust on the fender. “But he said I was not a white child who goes to school for free, and that I must earn the money for the fees and the books; he can use a stupid boy instead to ride the bicycle. I must go now. My greetings to your family, Jerry, and my thanks that you will walk with me tomorrow.”
He meant at the funeral, and this caught his throat in a way that made him duck and run.
“If you are not ashamed of being thought arrested,” Zondi said to Jerry, unlocking his door, “then you can ride with me-I will pass your house.”
With a chortle of pleasure, Jerry slid across the seat, bounced on it to test its springs, and began fingering every knob and lever. He pulled at a steel ring on the underside of the dashboard and was bewildered to find it welded fast.
“For cuffs,” explained Zondi, taking off slowly in case younger enthusiasts were underneath examining the substructure.
And the uneven road, rutted by bus tracks during the recent rains, kept their speed down for the rest of the hill. The right moment was chosen carefully.
“Tell me, Jerry, but where were you when Yankee Boy was with your father?” he said, dodging three daredevils naked up to their belly buttons, and giving no hint of having heard of the beating. “I suppose it was with the girls across at the dress house. Or was it with the others who wash clothes in the stream?”
“ Hau! ” the youth gasped.
“Which?”
“The dress house.”
“Would you like me to drive round the top side?”
“Please-that would be special!”
“And on your way back, can you remember what you saw?”
Jerry flopped an arm over to hang down behind the seat, crossed his bare legs, put a foot against the dashboard, and began to whistle between his teeth.
“He cannot remember,” Zondi chided gently, not wanting to drive a dream away. “He who looks so smart and so clever, as if I was his chauffeur man and he Dr. Pentecost.”
His passenger chortled again. “When the one Sithole asks me, he says I have a very clear sight of things but I talk too much.”
“You try to escape me. The truth is your memory is very, very bad.”
“Huh!”
“What color was the car?”
“Red, Sergeant. I remember when it stopped there because I thought there would be trouble if they entered my father’s shop and he wanted me to find a seventy-eight-the car was not so smart, you see? Then the stupid boy from next door, who works for Thomas, he comes up on his bike and says my father was shouting at the back for me.”
“And so?”
Zondi handed over one of two cigarettes he had just lit in his mouth, and Jerry lay back, taking quick sucks at it, and closing his eyes.
“I cross the road and see one man in the car and I go sideways so my father can’t see me. There are two old women talking over there, and there is an old man with a donkey cart the other side. The bus has just been to take away people by the stop, and there is a woman with a baby on her back, packing her suitcase again because it broke open when dropped from the top of the bus.”
“Hmmm. Your memory is not so wonderful, after all.”
“Let me finish,” Jerry said indignantly, settling back again. “I am in the road. Then I go down the path very carefully, because maybe my father is again looking for me. So I am crouching low, just like a dog, through the weeds, round by the broken car. I take a peep. Hau! I see white shining and I know it is my father’s shirt. But next time I look, I see it is only one of those men who come from the hospital when the doctors are finished with them and throw them out. He is looking for food in the rubbish box, and I hide in case my father comes out to chase him away. Then, when he has gone to look in another place, I again go like a dog and I get right to the door, and I put my hand on the knob, turning it so quiet nobody can hear, and then in I go. Yankee Boy Msomi is there and I greet him and we talk together a little. He is a big friend of mine.”
Zondi accelerated onto the divided highway and brought the needle up to the legal limit, then beyond, winding down his window to make the most of the rush of air. The arm swung around from behind the seat, and Jerry gripped the handle on the dashboard, pressed his forehead right against the windshield, and started clicking his tongue, urging them on even faster.
He was half a kilometer late in noticing they had passed his turnoff.
“Do we go somewhere else first?” he shouted hopefully.
“If you are not afraid.”
“Me? I am a man!”
Someone else drove him home again from the mortuary, very subdued, if materially richer for his experience.
Marais was still trying to justify his technique when Kramer left the building in response to Zondi’s honk from the street.
“Look, man-first thing tomorrow we’ll make another start,” Kramer said. “I’m getting a lift from that bloke over there.”
“All the best,” replied Marais, stopping to put on his bicycle clips.
Kramer knew exactly who Zondi meant. “Uh-huh. You don’t get so many, but I’ve seen them,” he said as they started for home; both needed sleep badly. “The boys from the reserves and to-hell-and-gone who get discharged but haven’t the moola to get home again. Live off charity and bugger around in dirt bins until uniformed picks them up on vagrancy and pass charges.”
“The same. Many with no shoes when they come, many without shoes when they go-they sell them to buy sweets and cold drinks in the hospital, and there are the black-bitch nurses who make men pay for their lavatory basins.”
“Zondi, I like this.”
“Where are these persons most commonly seen, boss? At the back of the stores where the rubbish is. How close does anyone look at them? Not close. It can make you feel ashamed inside, but you have not the money for the whole world. What if I tell you a young man tonight identified Mpeta as such a scavenger outside the butcher shop?”
“Man, man, man!”
“There is more; you wait. To double-check, I went first to the station commandant, and he says they have had no prisoner answering the same description in regard to height and so on. In truth, I think they are giving these men an easy time these days. To double-double-check, I saw three people at the scenes of other incidents, who now remember such a man, wearing big bandages on his arms, who they have not seen again. One said he didn’t notice dogs, so why ask such a strange question?”
Zondi stifled a yawn and squeezed his eyes shut once to clear them. The tar ahead widened, forked, narrowed, swept in through the gates of the township and ended abruptly behind the superintendent’s office in a judder of potholed dirt. Then the trees gave out, too; there were just the endless rows of two-roomed Monopoly houses to show by their juxtaposition where the tracks lay. Kramer found he still counted each passing row carefully. A door opened and closed quickly across the way as they stopped outside 2137.
“There are sixteen in that place,” Zondi said, smiling. “They think old Mr. Tchor-tchor is paying them a visit.”
Kramer winced at the evocative name for the bustling superintendent, and muttered, “But what are your thoughts?”
“Exactly that, boss-a lookout. These stores are not white stores with a padlock on the back, but places where
