Man Down (16 page)

4

Tard threw Turner to the floor near Bekker’s body.

As his vision cleared Turner saw Tanya hunkered down beside the corpse, her arms dangling between her knees, staring at the masked man with empty eyes.

Turner heard the rumble of the castors of the sliding door and the slap as it closed. Looking away from his wife he saw Bone turn the tumbler to lock it.

“Tard,” Bone said, “get hold of them shears before this bitch goes all
Hell’s Kitchen
on your ass.”

The hulking man, presenting Turner with a view of a butt crack as vast as the Continental Divide, wheezed and grunted himself to the floor beside Bekker, seized the handles of the poultry shears and withdrew them, blood dripping onto his gloved hand as he inspected the blades before he sheathed the clippers in the hip pocket of his sweats.

Tard looked down at the body, prodded at it in the manner of a curious child and then gripped the black balaclava and yanked it off, revealing the look of disbelief that was Bekker’s death mask.

Tard laughed. “Shit, don’t Shorty look vexed?”

Tanya stared at Bekker’s face.

For a long time she remained impassive and Turner, holding his breath, was about to relax when he saw her body tense and twitch, as if an electrical current had been run through it.

When Tanya stood the giant gained his feet in a series of jerks and lunges, ready to quell any further homicidal impulses.

But she was intent only on Bekker, getting closer, leaning down and inspecting him.

Staring at the dead man, taking in the lips twisted into a sneer beneath the thick black mustache and the good eye stretched wide, like that of a traveler confused by his arrival at an unexpected destination,
Tanya transposed his features onto those of the slender Latino whom she’d encountered on the stairs in that piss-stinky apartment house a few weeks ago.

Black hair swept back from his forehead. Check.

Facial hair. Check.

But, as Tanya attempted to align the mouth half-hidden by the brush of glossy bristles, align death’s rictus with the sneer of the man on the stairs, she was yanked back to the moment after she’d sprung from the floor driven by a primitive
hormonal cascade and jammed the shears into his eye with such force that she felt the tips of the blades jar against his skull bone, the moment when those hair-fringed lips had parted obscenely through the mouth hole of the mask, saying something that was lost to her, deafened as she’d been by the wild spike of her blood pressure.

But she heard them now, heard the two words that had death-rattled out of the mouth of the dark man:

Fokken kont.

Fucking cunt.

Not Spanish but Afrikaans, the language indigenous to South Africa, the mongrel spawn of Low Country dialects that during Tanya’s childhood and adolescence—hothoused in defiantly colonial Natal, more English than England with its polo and cricket and gins and tonic—had been the hated language of the dour Calvinist regime, its hawk and spit harshness perfect for articulating the brutally prosaic lunacy of apartheid.

And her journey through time to identify the face of her assailant accelerated and she was back in that sordid Johannesburg cottage ten years ago and a man—
this
man—this dark haired man, sans mustache but absolutely fucking definitely for sure him, was crouched over Johnny, holding a gun to his head that he’d lazily holstered as he’d displayed his teeth in an arrogant grin and although she’d taken him for a Latin—Portuguese? Italian?—when he’d spoken it was in the slightly Americanized accent of the TV-reared urban Afrikaner, and, now, in her Arizona living room, she understood who this dead man was.

And what her husband had brought him here to do.

5

Turner drove the unconscious girl to the perfect stage for what was to come: the ugly mongrel of a house where the Afrikaner family (Pa, Ma, a toddler and a swaddled infant) had built a trap for themselves of high fences, razor wire and twelve gauge bars, fish in a barrel for their marauding killers—teenagers born the year Nelson Mandela walked free—who had pillaged, plundered, raped and murdered with a ferocity that could only have been fueled by race memory. 

Turner, his shadow a black stain on the bleached grass and red earth, stepped down from the shuddering HiAce and unlocked the gate in the perimeter fence, nosed the vehicle through, then locked up again.

He parked the van behind the house and pulled on the ski mask that Chris Bekker had left for him in the glove box.

When he raised the rear door of the HiAce Turner saw that the girl was still unconscious but he kept the mask on, to hide from himself more than from her.

He unlocked the barred front door of the house before going back and sliding the girl out of the van, wincing when her head bumped against the side of the HiAce.

He carried her into the bedroom, laid her on the mattress, untied her hands and ankles and peeled
free the tape that covered her mouth.

The pain of the removal drew a small sigh from her and her eyelids flickered. She was floating close to consciousness.

Turner left the room and locked it after him, removed the mask, retreating to a corner of the living room far away from the ominous stains and bullet holes and sat down on the carpet, all at once terrifyingly straight and sober, exhausted, a boneless skin bag of toxins and terror.

His hands shook.

His legs spasmed.

He felt an overwhelming anxiety, a feeling of breaking loose, falling and tumbling, of the earth giving way beneath his feet,
and he was twelve-year-old Johnny Turner again in that cramped mine house with its tepid light and its cheap furniture and its smell of stale food and despair. 

His mother, numbed by Valium, sat hypnotized by
St. Elsewhere,
his
two-year-old sister asleep on the couch beside her. Turner changed the child’s diaper and without waking she clutched his finger with her tiny hand.

He left the house, straddled his bike and rode to the drive-in, sneaked in through a gap in the fence and dozed through the final act of
Rocky III
.

It was the second half of the double feature he’d come to see:
The Misfits
. As the old black and white movie juddered and stuttered onto the huge screen, the tramline scratches and projector-burns in the aged print echoing the fissured face of the nearly-dead Clark Gable, the cars leaked away until there were only a few left, mostly couples fucking, but Turner was entranced.

Marilyn Monroe, well into her thirties—older than his pill-head mother—possessed a fragile, shop-worn sensuality that aroused something in the boy, an indefinable longing that would grow within him on his path to dissatisfaction and dissolution.

The film ended and a fat, geeky guy in a white coat carrying a flashlight rousted the lovers who clattered away in their little cars until it was just Turner and the rows of speakers genuflecting at the empty screen.

He fell asleep on the grass and it was dawn when he awoke, the ground bucking and heaving beneath him, undulating like the waterbed he’d bounced on in the Bradlows showroom in town until a salesman had violently ejected him, the speakers clattering and shaking like a legion of beggars on their pole mounts.

Tremors like this, caused by rock falls in the tunnels that honeycombed the earth beneath, were all too common and he found himself saying a child’s prayer for the men who worked all night miles below, chipping and drilling and blasting gold from the rock.

The tremor ended but as Turner rode his bike through the deserted streets, the headgear of the mine black against the red dawn, he heard the mewl of sirens and knew that there had been a calamity.

As he neared his street the sirens grew louder and when he arrived at his house he saw a clot of emergency vehicles and then a sight so surreal that he thought he was still asleep and dreaming.

His house had gone, disappeared into the maw of a gaping sinkhole. His neighbor’s house listed on the edge, buckled and twisted, like a tent with its guy ropes severed.

A cop pushed Turner away from the danger zone and as he stood amongst a group of people in nightclothes, staring, stunned, a car weaved up and his father lurched out, drunk, another man’s wife left sitting in the passenger seat.

Billy Turner, smelling of sweat and brandy and cigarettes and cunt, embraced his son who fought him off, cursing. The cops, who knew his father well, tore him loose from the boy and took him away.

Turner never saw his father again.

Later that day his mother’s parents—genteel Johannesburgers who had disowned their only child after she became pregnant by the handsome, alcoholic gold miner—appeared in a sleek Jaguar and took Turner to their Edwardian mansion in Westcliff, where they stared at him as he grew each day to look more like his father.

But his mind—and his omnivorous consumption of books, and, later, chemicals— was all his mother’s.

He became educated.

He lost his virginity to two rich party girls.

When he tasted booze and smoked weed and popped pills filched from his grandmother’s medicine cabinet he felt that he had come home, finally, after a very long and lonely journey.

In his eighteenth year his grandparents died in successive months and left debt as his inheritance.

Turner was alone.

Alone with a void within as yawning as the hole that had swallowed his mother and sister, living a life that had a way of subsiding beneath him into holes of his own excavation.

6

When Tanya, hunched low over Bekker’s body, looked up at him, Turner saw the venom restored to her gaze.

“You fucker,” she said and suddenly she was flying at Turner who, still winded from Tard’s tackle, could do little but scoot his ass along the wooden floor as she aimed punches at his head.

Wheezing and giggling, the giant enveloped Tanya in a bear hug, lifting her from the floor, her legs kicking
like a furious toddler’s.

Gasping, fighting vainly to free herself, eyes locked on Turner’s, Tanya said, “That’s fucking Chris Bekker.”

“You’re crazy,” Turner said.

“You think that stupid Freddie Mercury mustache can fool me? It’s him, you bastard. You brought him here, with these psychos, to kill me, didn’t you?”

Turner shook his head.

Bone stepped up.

“Okay, hold on just one goddam minute. You sayin you know Shorty Henderson?”

“His name is Chris Bekker,” Tanya said. “He’s a South African. Like us.”

“You’re South Africans?”

“Yes, we’re South Africans.”

“I thought you was British,” Tard said.

“Tard here would know, he enjoys nothin more than putting his stinky feet up after a long day and binge watchin
Downtown Abbey
.”

“And I aint ashamed of that,” Tard said.

“No shame in it, Tard.” Bone looked at Tanya. “He’s got the ear of a fuckin gun dog. If he says you’re British then you’re fuckin British.”

“We’re South African. Check our passports if you don’t believe me.”

“Then why aint you niggers?”

“Because we’re white South Africans.”

“You’re shittin me,” Bone said.

“I am not.”

He pondered this for a moment.

“Now you raise it, I always thought there was somethin slant about Shorty. But I put it down to him bein a smackhead.”

Tard shook his immense dome. “But he always spoke American.”

Tanya said to Bone, “Didn’t you hear what he said? When I stabbed him?”

“Well, I know he weren’t happy.”

“
Fokken kont
.”

“Say what?”

“Afrikaans for fucking cunt.”

“What’s Afrikaans?”

“It’s a language. A South African language.”

Bone nodded. “Bitch is right. Them words weren’t American. Sounded like Kraut to me.”

“Or Creole,” Tard said.

“Creole?”

“Creole.”

“What do you know about fuckin Creole?”

“My mamma was Creole.”

“Shit, Tard, you didn’t have no mama, you just crawled fully formed from the bottom of an outhouse.”

“Now that’s just plain uncalled for.”

Bone had his eyes on Tanya. “You sayin Daddy here knew Shorty?”

“Yes.”

“And he got him to come kill you?”

“Yes.”

“Make it look like a home invasion gone bad?”

“Yes. That’s what I’m saying.”

Bone looked at Tard. “Shorty never shared none of this with us.”

“No he did not.”

Bone contemplated Tanya. “Why Daddy want you dead? Insurance scam?”

Tanya’s eyes were on Turner’s. “He wants me dead so he can have his whore.”

Bone prodded Turner with a boot. “This true, boy?”

“She’s crazy. She’s just trying to create a diversion.”

“That what you doin? Tryin to mislead us?”

“No. Take a look at Bekker’s right bicep. He’s got a tattoo on it. A skull.”

Turner flashed back to the morning that Bekker woke him at gunpoint, crouched over the mattress in the Houghton cottage, the cop’s T-shirt riding up on his arm, the grinning mouth of the skull exposed, while Tanya stood in the doorway, her avid little eyes drinking in the scene, forgetting nothing.

Bone said, “Oblige us, Tard. Check it out.”

Tard levered himself down and pulled Bekker’s jacket free of his right shoulder and raised the T-shirt.

“Ain’t no tattoo,” he said.

Bone leaned in closer. “But there’s a scar, man. Like he had the ink burned away.” He stood. “You know what, Tard?”

“What?”

“I’m inclined to believe this skinny bitch.”

“Okay.”

“I reckon Shorty and Daddy here had plans for the future. Plans that didn’t include us, Tard.”

He swung on Turner and kicked him in the ribs.

“This true, Daddy?”

Turner raised his hands. “She’s crazy. I don’t know this man.”

Bone stared at him and then he nodded.

“I think it’s time for the plain unvarnished truth to be spoken in this room.”

He stripped off his surgical gloves, letting them fall like obscene party favors to the wooden floor, and reached up a hand and lifted off his mask, revealing a face that nature had tweaked a few degrees away from handsome: blue eyes adrift too wide apart on the plains of his flat cheekbones; something asymmetrical about the mouth that was too full-lipped over a receding chin; the hairline of his white-blond mane growing in too close to his almost invisible eyebrows.

“My name’s Lukas Bone and this here is Tard. Short for
Re
tard. Cause he’s a fuckin moron. Show them your pretty face, Tard.”

Tard allowed Tanya to slide to the floor in a heap and followed orders, shedding his gloves and unveiling a head as immense as an Easter Island statue, a few strands of thin hair plastered to his skull by some kind of gasoline-scented pomade.

His many-times broken nose sat crooked on his face, a pair of tiny eyes, dark as cigarette burns, peering from the shadow of the shelf of bone that was his brow. Giggling, his wet mouth fringed by a straggle of hair gaping on missing teeth, he used the thumb and index finger of his right hand to worry at a custardy pustule that poked from the filthy folds of his wrinkled neck. 

Lukas Bone saw the expressions on the faces of the Turners and he laughed.

“Oh yeah, aint we somethin? We were blown in by an ill wind from a place of bad choices and worse luck.”

“That’s right purty, Lukas.”

“Thank you, Tard.”

“And it gets purtier each time you say it.”

Tanya shook her head at Turner.

“Congratulations you cuntstruck piece of shit, you’ve killed us all.”