Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [38]
“Better not,” I said.
“I punched a guy here last year.”
“A South African,” I said. “I heard.”
“See?” said K. “Shit. My reputation! That’s why I won’t fight anymore.” K sighed. “Wherever I go people have heard about me before I even arrive. And the thing is”—K spread out his hands—“I’ve never punched anyone who didn’t deserve it. I’ve never gone looking for a fight in my life.”
I leaned back on the front seat so that my feet could dangle out the window and catch the weak puff of warm wind that lifted off the valley floor and up the escarpment. I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke trickle off the tips of my fingers. “How many people do you reckon you’ve punched? I mean, put on the floor.”
K looked down at me for a long time, considering. “I don’t know,” he said at last. Then he asked, “Not counting the war?”
“Not counting combat,” I agreed.
“Maybe a couple of hundred.”
“Two hundred!” I said, sitting up.
“Hey, I’m not proud of it,” said K.
“And how many of those ended up in hospital?”
K shrugged. “Well, I put three in at once, does that count as three people or one?”
“Three people are three people.”
“Then, let me see . . .” K stared at his hands for a moment. “A dozen, I reckon.”
The heat outside sung its stinging tune. There were shouts from the men on the cliff. Rocks tumbled down onto the road and exploded in dust and shards of splintered granite. The trader women argued and shouted and chased children and flies from the food. The men who weren’t fighting or rolling rocks off the cliff sat in whatever shade they could find and drank beer.
K stretched and said lazily, “My last week in the army, I was in an accident. I was in a truck that rolled. I was sitting in the back and I tried to jump clear but the damn thing came down on me. I did this”—K showed me his knee, which was snaked with a thick, brown scar. “It was a blerry mess. The army docs fixed it and sent me home on sick leave and I got so pie-eyed my first night home that I drove my own car off an embankment. They reckon it was thirty meters high, more. I should have been dead probably, but I just got my crutches out of the wreck and walked back to the bar and the bartender told me, ‘You’ve had enough,’ so I turned the place upside down. I told him, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are? No one tells me when I’ve had enough.’ I locked him in the storeroom and I started to drink the bar dry except the cops came and dragged me off to jail. It took six of them.” K sighed unhappily. “That’s where I was when I got my papers getting me out of the army. I was in chook with the biggest babalas of my life.”
I closed my eyes. K started to tell me a story about a time, shortly after that, when he destroyed three taxi drivers and a cab in Bulawayo: “I was still on crutches too. Man! I remember ripping a door off the taxi and then my mind went. . . . You know, one moment I was aware of fighting . . . These ous had a crowbar, and they broke open the top of my head. Then my mind went blank. I wasn’t unconscious, I just don’t remember . . . I mean, my mind was blank from rage, not from getting knocked out. When I was aware of what was going on again, the taxi drivers had fucked off. But the taxi! The thing looked like it had been rolled. The roof was squashed in, the steering wheel twisted, the rims buckled, and I had the rearview mirror in my hand.
“I had to go to court three weeks later—assault and grievous blerry harm—and the taxi drivers were still a mess. One of them was in a wheelchair, one had to come to court on a stretcher, the other guy . . . fuck, I’d ripped his scalp off. It was frightening. I got fined two thousand bucks for that and a ten years’ suspended sentence.
“The judge said, ‘Animals like you should not be allowed to walk freely on the streets.’ ”
K’s voice