Man Down (9 page)

4

Turner, looking at Tanya sprawled unmoving on the wooden floor, told himself that his wife was dead, even though he knew she wasn’t. He guessed he was just test-driving that scenario,
getting as close to that fire as he could without being burned.

For now.

Back
in the aircraft boneyard, Bekker had said, “You do this, Englishman, and there’s no turning back.”

“I know that. I want it done,” Turner said.

Bekker nodded, blinking as a hot breeze stirred the dust like a swizzle stick. A door in the torn fuselage looming over them creaked and banged.

“Then I will make it so,” he said, flashing his trademark sneer.

“How?”

“I’m thinking a home invasion.”

“You mean I’d have to be there?”

“You too chickenshit for that?”

Turner shrugged.

“I imagined you’d take care of it while she was out of the house, maybe on her way to work. I’d be in my office, or in a meeting, to set up a solid alibi.”

Bekker shook his head. “What’s the why?”

“The why?”

“Why would anyone want to kill your wife?”

“A carjacking?”

“This isn’t Jo’burg, Englishman. No, the scenario we construct has to be believable.”

“A home invasion’s believable?”

“Sure. There are a couple hundred a year in Tucson.”

“Yeah?”

“Fact. The cops have even set up a special unit dedicated to home invasions.”

“Isn’t it all cartel shit?”

“Some, but not all. You’ve got a bunch of crazy tweakers out there looking for bucks to get high. You have a safe?”

“In my office. Why?”

“Can you get, say, twenty thousand in cash to put in that safe?”

“Sure.”

“Livin large, Englishman. Livin large.”

“What’s the cash for?”

“What I’m envisioning is me and two of my associates come into your house. They know nothing of our plan. All I’ll tell them is that there’s cash to be had. We’ll take the money, give you a few smacks to make things look realistic and I’ll pop your wife.” He saw Turner’s face. “Don’t worry, Englishman, I’ll take her into another room like I’m going to jump her skinny bones. I’ll shoot her and then get the fuck out of there with my guys.”

“Won’t they talk?”

Bekker smiled. “Leave the story arcs to me, Englishman. I’m the fuckin showrunner, okay? I give you my word, it’ll be airtight.”

“I want my daughter as far away from this as possible. Every Friday night she has a sleepover at a friend’s house. Can you do it next week?”

“Today’s Friday.”

“So?”

“She sleeping over tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s do it tonight.”

Turner stared at him. “Tonight?”

“Yeah. You got other plans? Taking Wifey bowling?”

“You can get your people together that quickly?”

“We’re in the borderlands, Englishman, the fuckin septic tank of these great United States. There’s no shortage of talent.”

“Jesus, it’s soon.”

“Soon is good.”

“I don’t know.”

“Bitch like that could start yapping her mouth just to fuck up your life. It’s in all our interests to do this fast.”

“I thought I’d have time to prepare myself.”

“Don’t overthink it, Englishman. Be spontaneous. Be in the moment.”

The nature of what he was setting in motion hit Turner and, suddenly lightheaded, he stared out at the broken aircraft swimming in the heat shimmer.

Bekker smirked.

“If you don’t have the balls just say so. You can go on back to Tucson and kiss your sweetheart goodbye and tie yourself to Wifey’s apron strings for the rest of your miserable goddam life.”

Turner forced himself to hold Bekker’s gaze.

“No. Do it.”

“Good.” Bekker threw his cigarette to the sand and ground it dead with his heel. “Go now.”

Turner walked back to his car and drove away, watching Bekker grow smaller and smaller in his rearview until he disappeared into the dust and then, Christ knew why, he flashed back on Tanya, years ago in Jo’burg, straddling him, bucking like she was on a mechanical bull, greedily straining for yet another orgasm and after it came falling back onto the mattress, staring at the pressed tin ceiling of her cottage, her face settling into an expression of infinite ennui as she said, “Okay, Johnny, you can fuck off now.”

5

Tanya surfaced into a pungent fog of stale perfume, alcoholic sweat and briny genital secretions. When she tried to open her eyes and couldn’t part the lids she thought she’d been struck blind for her sins, until she realized that the mascara she’d inexpertly applied the night before at her mother’s urging was gluing them closed.

Fuck.

Taking her eyelids between her fingertips she pulled them apart and sat blinking out the car windshield at the gaudy deities clotting the tower of the Tamil temple rising into the hot dawn from the sugarcane that stretched like a thick green carpet down to where the torpid Indian Ocean slapped at a deserted stretch of yellow beach.

The temple—built a hundred years ago by the South Indian laborers who’d been shipped over in their droves to hand harvest cane here north of Durban—the sugar plantations and the greasy ocean were all too familiar, but the big car (a starburst of sun flaring on the three-pointed star on its the hood) wasn’t. A
miniature golf ball dangling from the rearview mirror just above Tanya’s head—she was sprawled in the partly-reclined passenger seat, naked but for her Robert Mugabe T-shirt (those were more innocent times, before Bob had morphed into a syphilitic tyrant) and the single hippie sandal that remained attached to her left foot—provided a clue to the Mercedes-Benz’s owner.

A wet snore had her looking over her shoulder at the rear seat, into the sweaty, florid face of the beefy man who’d picked her up in the bar of the Salt Rock hotel the night before after she’d ditched a group of her ex-schoolmates (barely two months into her first year at Durban University Tanya found them unbearably dull and provincial) at a local disco and headed for the cocktail lounge filled with rowdy men her father’s age.

She couldn’t remember the man’s name but she did remember that he was the pro at the local golf course and—once he’d berated her for wearing a T-shirt glorifying a “communist coon”—had plied her with gin and bragged that he’d helped her father overcome his slice, whatever that meant, and (with sudden, almost forensic clarity) she remembered sliding unsteadily off her bar stool and following him through a swinging door after he’d told her he needed to use the “loo.”

Following him into a gloomy corridor, tart pine disinfectant not quite masking the stink of stale urine and human dung, the big man’s cloying aftershave and meaty body odor adding further noxious layers to the fetid air of the corridor as he’d closed in on her.

She’d ducked his kiss—beer and tobacco and poor dental hygiene—kneeled and unbuckled his belt, his paunch sagging as she unzipped him and pulled his khaki shorts to his knees, revealing a pair of white underpants that were ludicrously boyish.

Feeling laughter bubbling in her throat she’d reached into his skivvies and freed his cock, a blunt, fleshy thing that rose from a thicket of blondish pubes and taken it into her mouth, using it to cork her hilarity.

He’d gasped and flailed at her hair, his prick hardening against her palate.

For a moment she’d fancied that if she bit into this veiny plug of skin and gristle he would deflate like a punctured blimp, disappearing with a flatulent hiss.

The door had creaked and, as she’d tongued and slurped, she’d looked up and seen another man standing in the doorway watching, quite motionless.

The golf pro had seen him too and the stranger’s appearance, coupled with her ministrations, had brought forth a groaning, glottal climax, jism filling her mouth like watery dollops of albumen from a botched poached egg.

She’d spat out the man’s twitching dick and with it his semen—gobs landing on his pants and dappling the tiled floor—and stood, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.

Her memory dimmed again and she had no recollection of leaving the bar, but as she moved in the seat of the Mercedes, her bare, sweaty butt cheeks squealing on the leather, an ache radiated outward from her cunt (which felt like a recently tenderized chunk of raw meat) into the rest of her body, and the T-shirt rubbed painfully across her nipples that itched and burned from beard rash.

The muscles and tendons of her legs and back throbbed from the unaccustomed positions the randy golf pro had ragdolled her into on the rear seat of the car, and she saw his jowly face made silver by moonlight as he had her straddle and ride him to some invisible finish line, which he’d reached with loud grunts and oaths—and even something that could have been a snatch of a drinking song.

As she searched for her jeans and panties Tanya caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview: her black hair (worn long in those days) was the nest of a mad bird and lipstick and rouge were smeared across her face, lending her the appearance of a depraved mime.

She found her jeans and her other sandal but her panties were gone. As she cracked the car door a child’s action figure tumbled out onto the red earth of the road and lay looking up at her accusingly.

Tanya almost sobbed with relief when she saw the roof of the shiny little white Volkswagen her parents had bought her three months ago for her eighteenth birthday gleaming across the cane.

The short walk to her car had her sweating in the February heat and heavy humidity and her mouth was dry and bitter.

She slid in behind the wheel of the Volkswagen and cranked the engine. Hot air blew out of the vents and the plastic bottle of water she found on the floor beneath yesterday’s
Mercury
(the front page trumpeting the imminent release of Nelson Mandela) was as warm as piss.

She drank it, anyway, as she rattled down the gravel track and found the coast highway that wound through the blinding green landscape until she swung off onto another unpaved farm road that led her to the house she’d grown up in, a white double story that looked as if it had become unmoored from English Home Counties suburbia only to run aground in this sea of sugarcane on the tip of Africa.

She parked between her father’s Land Rover and her mother’s sensible Toyota and let herself into the silent house, the grandfather clock in the hallway bonging once at the bottom of the hour: seven thirty.

It was Sunday, the only day of the week when the uniformed houseboys and girls (Zulu men and women in their forties and fifties) were permitted to stay late in their cramped quarters—hidden from the house by a froth of purple bougainvillea—and were expected in the kitchen only at nine a.m. to prepare the brunch that her parents took on the patio, her mother gabbling inanely, her father, hidden behind the
Sunday Tribune
, grunting with the perfect timing of the long-married man.

Feeling edgy and hungover Tanya went through to the kitchen and found a can of Coke in the refrigerator. She washed down a couple of aspirins with the treacly soda, splashed her face at the sink and dried herself on a kitchen towel.

She had no desire to climb the stairs to the bedroom of her childhood and early pubescence—still frozen in time from when she’d gone to boarding school in Durban at thirteen—in case she encountered one of her parents and was subjected to the inevitable interrogation about why she hadn’t come home last night, so she went into the living room.

Crossing to the window seat—a favorite haunt of hers as a child—she saw the 1960s Anne Sexton anthology,
Live or Die
, lying on the cushions. It was dog-eared and a couple of pages had come adrift of the spine through the years of mother immersing herself in these tormented, confessional poems.

She found the silence of the house oppressive and went to the stereo perched beneath shelves of long playing records—her father scorning cassettes and CDs. A recording of the Ray Conniff Singers lay on the turntable, visible through its closed plastic lid.

As a child she’d been forbidden to touch the stereo on pain of death, and she presumed the ban was still in place, which didn’t bother her as, on the infrequent weekends when she came home, she spent her time listening to reggae on the Walkman that lay upstairs in her bedroom.

She lifted the lid and sheathed the disc in its sleeve that she returned to the shelf and spent a moment pondering her father’s record collection before she withdrew another LP—Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies”, surely an unwanted gift—and settled it on the turntable.

She made sure that the headphones, enormous puffy things with a coiled black cable, were plugged in and slipped them over her ears.

A slim burnished metal rectangle beside the turntable sported a couple of buttons and dials and she jabbed at what she assumed was the power switch, triggering a low and somehow ominous hum. A green light bloomed and the needle of one of the dials twitched.

So far so good.

When she lifted the curved tone arm from its little cradle the record started to rotate slowly.

Holding her breath—still fearful of her cold, controlling father—she gently lowered the stylus onto the grooved vinyl.

There was a sucking hiss, like distant surf breaking, before the sweet, dissonant piano filled the air. Tanya settled into the armchair reserved for her father’s hours of solitary music appreciation and closed her eyes. The melancholy beauty of the Satie, in combination with the night of debauch and vague depression from the hangover sent her to sleep.

She woke as the record ended and, with a series of delicate clucks, the turntable arm lifted and settled itself back in its cradle, the ticking of the clock almost menacing when she removed the headphones

As Tanya rose from the chair the semen of the nameless man dripped from her. She turned off the stereo and stowed the headphones, surprised that her father hadn’t already come down and caught her in the act.

She was desperate for a shower and there was nothing for it but to climb the stairs, her limbs aching and her lower regions sending out distress signals as her jeans chafed at them.

She had to pass her parents’ bedroom en route to hers and was about to creep past the door that stood ajar when something gave her pause. The porcelain figurine of a Victorian shepherdess that had forever adorned her mother’s vanity table lay on the wooden floor of the landing, the bonneted head severed from the body and the arm carrying the crook lying in pieces nearby.

A low hum reached Tanya’s ears and when a meat fly landed on her bare arm she realized what she was hearing was the insistent moan of scores of those insects. She stepped toward the door, the bed invisible from where she stood, a shaft of hard sunlight striking a pale oyster wall hung with three antique Chinese brushpaintings of mist-clad mountains, rivers and waterfalls.

Something, some kind of decoration, was draped atop the paintings and Tanya wondered what had inspired her mother to this atypical frivolity.

Her mind, still fogged by booze, was slow to process that what she was seeing was no decoration: it was a length of human intestine.

This realization struck her when she nudged open the door revealing the charnel house within.

Her parents, in their night clothes, lay side by side on the double bed with its ornate brass head and footboards. Their bodies and the bed, floor and walls were awash with their blood, and the room seethed with a black shroud of meat flies.

Her mother and father had been hacked to death and the hacking had not stopped until limbs had been nearly severed and bone and viscera exposed.

The killer had then removed her father’s intestines and draped them on the picture frames, letting them dangle down to the black lacquer wood vanity where a bottle of her mother’s Arpège lay shattered, the cloying perfume mixing with the ripe stench of blood and shit.

Tanya, vomit spewing from her mouth and landing on the face of Robert Mugabe, retreated from the room and half fell down the stairs, screaming, the Zulu servants in their crisp white uniforms who’d just entered the kitchen staring at her in horror.

The police—blond, shovel-faced Afrikaners and their stolid black underlings—arrived and within an hour a Zulu laborer surrendered himself and the bloody cane cutting panga he’d used to slaughter her parents.

The police explained that her father had fired the man the day before and the worker had poured a bottle of homebrewed rotgut alcohol down his throat and smoked enough Durban Poison—the hallucinogenic cannabis grown in these parts—to send an impi of Zulu warriors into battle and had entered the house after midnight and done what he’d done.

If Tanya hadn’t been rattling the springs of the golf pro’s Mercedes-Benz she would have been hacked to pieces, too.

For a while she had felt numb.

Then she’d felt terror and an all-encompassing dread had invaded her at a cellular level and changed forever the way she viewed the world and lived her life.

She’d buried her parents and bolted to Johannesburg, her inheritance guaranteeing her financial if not psychological well-being, and used anger to mask her fear, over the years hardening and souring, shielding herself from the world with a rage that was all-consuming, and when she became known as a ballbreaking cunt she’d worn that handle with pride.

Anything but a fucking victim.

But she’d awakened each day waiting for the bloodshed to come.

And ten years ago in Johannesburg, when she’d stared down the muzzle of a carjacker’s pistol in her driveway, she’d been convinced it was there.