Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [46]
Cephas is the lead tracker; he takes off at a run, watching the ground steadily, not hesitating, reading soft signs in the dew-crushed earth which tell him secrets. The other men hang back and let Cephas lead until he is steadily, confidently on the track. He has found the place, he says, where the men have gone. He says, “There are two.”
To begin with Dad can’t see how Cephas can tell which way July and his companion have gone—and he is not sure how Cephas can be so sure of himself—but then they find things that the cook has dropped. A cooking pot, a dress, some packaged food. July or his companion is wearing Dad’s gumboots. When the men come to a muddy place, they can see the tracks clearly. And then they find the gumboots, discarded in the grass. Cephas laughs: “His feet are getting pain.” July is not used to gumboots. He is given a new pair of Bata tackies every year but he chops the toe out of them and ties the laces loosely so that his dry-cracked feet will fit in them even when they swell in the heat.
When the men come to a river, wide and deep enough that it would soak them to their waists, they hesitate. Cephas shakes his head. “They didn’t cross here,” he says, and then he sees that there is an old bridge upstream. The path that used to lead to and from the bridge has long ago been swallowed by thick ground cover. Small shrubs and baby trees have started to fill in the swath cut by the cleared old growth. Cephas says, “They saw the bridge, too.” He holds up his hand and the men drop behind him. He has gone crouched and his energy is forward and is like something you can almost feel—like wind when it moves the leaves and grass. He creeps over the bridge silently and the other men follow him and then suddenly Cephas stops and shakes his head. In one sweep he retraces his steps back to the middle of the bridge and jumps up and down on it.
“They are under here,” he says. “See? This bridge should bend. It does not bend.”
Dad’s “boys” scramble into the river and pull July and his companion out from under the bridge, where they have been hanging on to the old, half-rotten beams with their fingernails. They haul them onto the bank. For some minutes Dad’s “boys” beat the thieves, kicking them and punching them, until Dad says, “Let’s get them back to the car.”
Dad radios Mum from the car. “Oscar Papa 28, Oscar Papa 28, this is Oscar Papa 28 mobile. Do you read, over?”
Mum runs from her bedroom, but Vanessa and I have heard the Agricalert crackle into life, too. “Tim? Oscar Papa 28 mobile? This is Oscar Papa 28. Are you all right? Over.”
There is a pause and then Dad’s voice, hissing with static, “I got the bastards. We found your rings. Over and out.”
Mum shouts, “Wa-hoo!”
And Vanessa and I spontaneously perform our version of a Red Indian War Dance around the veranda—“Wa-wa-wa-wa”—we skip on alternate legs.
By the time Dad comes back with July and his companion, both the cook and his accomplice have swelling eyes and lips and hard bonelike lumps on their faces. Vanessa and Mum and I are standing in the yard. When Mum sees July get out of the car, she runs at him. She is screaming, “Fucking kaffir! Murderer!” She starts to beat him but Dad pulls her back.
He says, “Let the boys deal with him.” He nods to the “boys.” The militia who have come to arrest July and his companion turn and look the other way.
Dad’s “boys” kick July and in one soft sound, like a sack of mealie meal hitting concrete, he buckles to his knees. And then they kick him again and again. July curls himself up and covers his head with his hands but the feet find holds to flip him back on his belly and prize open his arms to expose his belly and ribs, which I can hear cracking like the branches of the frangipani tree. His skin splits open like a ripe papaya.
Then Dad says, “That’s enough, hey.”
But they don’t stop.