The Devil's Horn (8 page)

Nine months ago, in the first week of the mine strike, Allyn had called Juma to come see him. They’d not been in each other’s company in twelve years, not since Allyn had left Zimbabwe for South Africa to buy the mine outside Pretoria. In those dozen years, they’d spoken on the phone for holiday wishes and birthdays, but few other occasions. Allyn and Juma had both become rich, Allyn very much so. When they talked, Allyn described for Juma the growing mine operation and the rising market for platinum; many times he asked Juma to come work for him, but Juma would not. Juma never spoke of how he’d made his own money. Eva, who’d known Juma as long as Allyn, suspected him, believed an old black man from the mines could not have made proper wealth; she meant legal. Privately, Allyn sensed this might be so but would not admit it to her and would not say anything to Juma. Besides, it made no difference; whatever Juma was doing—and he must have been very good at it—he did it far away in Mozambique. Eva, with the cancer in its first stages, would not have liked to know Allyn was meeting Juma after so many years. Allyn had asked Juma to come to Jo’burg, to a small restaurant downtown where few whites ate. Juma agreed and did not ask why.

That evening they’d filled a patio table with stout beers. Allyn brought cigars. For the first hour they made no mention of business or money. Instead, they skipped backward across their current lives for the stronger clasp of their past. They reminisced about being teenagers in the mines, Allyn a fatherless boy, Juma his big Zulu mentor. How Allyn had become a full-fledged miner while Juma stayed a trammer. How Allyn, on his return from school in England, made certain that Juma was promoted.

On the patio of the little Jo’burg restaurant, Allyn was the only white face. This and the Fanagolo helped him feel safe from prying ears. When they’d had their fill of recollections and found their bond still strong, Juma gave a long sigh. He rested his big arms on the table, clearly happy to have been called.

He asked only, “Ja?”

No black man on the patio or passing in the dim street was the size of Juma. Allyn stubbed out his cigar, finished the last beer, and placed his own arms on the table. He was dwarfed by his old friend, as he’d always been, and this was a comfort. It gave him the sense that nothing had changed and Juma would still help him.

“Meena kona maningi endaba.”
(I have a big problem.)

Juma reached across the table. He clapped a broad, dark hand over Allyn’s forearm.

“I am well if you are well.”

“Come on the veranda. The fireflies are out.”

Juma rose from the cushions to follow Allyn outdoors. Under the first stars and open air, Allyn wouldn’t feel such unfaithfulness to Eva as he might inside, talking to Juma about things that would have upset her, with Juma on the sofa she disliked. Allyn carried out the brandy decanter.

They settled in chaise lounges overlooking the lake; the decanter stood on the table between them. They did not face each other, both watched the blinking fireflies.

“Why are you here?”

“Several things. First, to tell you how sorry I am.”

“You’ve done that. I’ll be alright.”

“This I know.”

“What else?”

“I need two hundred thousand rand. Cash.”

“For what?”

“Two of our poachers were killed a few days ago. From Tchonguene village. It’s for the families.”

“It’s generous.”

“Perhaps.”

“Alright. What else?”

“I shipped off some very good horn yesterday. I have a new connection in the Kruger. Very promising.”

“Tell me.”

Juma reached for the decanter to refresh his brandy.

“No, shamwari.”

Juma poured for himself and sipped. The brandy glass in his hand seemed no larger than a thimble. Allyn pursed his lips and nodded. Many years back, in the tunnels, he’d learned that the darker and deeper the world became, the more he should trust Juma.

“I’ll go get the money.”

Allyn left Juma on the veranda. He moved through the house without turning on more lights, and from his office safe removed four banded packets of bills. Outside, he stood before Juma; the man’s width spread past the confines of the chaise lounge. Allyn handed over the money and remained standing.

“All this could have been done on the phone.”

“True.”

“I could have couriered the money to you.”

“Yes.”

“So why did you come all this way?”

“Sit, Allyn.”

He did, elbows on knees, facing Juma. The big man kept his gaze fixed on the lake and the glittering bugs.

“You have a beautiful home.”

“Thank you.”

“The strike is over.”

“It is. And you know how much I appreciate your help. The mine would not have survived without it.”

“Of course.”

“Juma. What do you want?”

“I came to ask if you want to continue.”

“What are you saying?”

Juma set the brandy glass down with a lovely delicacy, something Allyn had noted in the massive Zulu boy almost fifty years ago. A drill, a stone, a woman, a glass, all seemed to soften in his great hands. Juma gave every movement such focus, so careful of his strength that he became gentle.

Juma pivoted on the chaise lounge to face Allyn. He mirrored Allyn’s posture, black elbows on his own knees.

“I am saying you do not need me now. Your mine is operating again. The price for platinum is high. The crisis has passed.”

Above the lake, something darker than the night cut through the fireflies, a bat feeding on them. Allyn was watching this when Juma asked, “Do you want to stop, shamwari?”

Allyn didn’t need to save the mine anymore, that was done. During the strike, Ingwe had lost almost two thousand ounces a day of production. While Allyn’s miners sat idle, the world market for platinum continued to grow as the demand for cleaner automobile emissions kept rising. The mine would take a few months until it was fully ramped up again, but Ingwe was a secondary seam to the Merensky Reef, shallower and less expensive to work. Even with the increased salaries and benefits that came out of the negotiations, Ingwe would return to profitability soon. Allyn’s investors had been kept in the fold by the money Juma sent, five million rand—half a million American dollars—every month, sometimes much more.

With Juma’s help, Allyn had set up a complex web of corporations and accounts, some offshore, one in China, two in Vietnam. He’d bought a small shipping company based in Harare where Juma could make deliveries. Juma was an officer of the firm and received his share of the horn sales as salary. Allyn knew only one name below him, Juma, above, he dealt only with a shadowy Mr. Phuong in Hanoi, who received the intact horns and paid an agreed-upon rate per US pound into a shell corporation in the Philippines. The price for one pound of rhino horn hovered just above $50,000, twice the cost of platinum, almost three times that of gold.

“You’re right, Juma.”

“I often am. What am I right about in this instance?”

“What you’re not saying.”

“That is?”

“From this point on, it’s just about the money. Greed, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“It is easy money.”

“It must seem that way to you.” Juma hefted the banded packets of rand for Allyn to see. “I promise you it is not.”

Juma stood from the chaise lounge, towering over Allyn.

“I will be going.”

Allyn stood as well, near enough to feel a damp warmth radiating off Juma’s chest.

“I haven’t given you my answer.”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“Because you are my friend.”

“I know that. But I’d like us to speak as partners. Don’t go, Juma. Tell me.”

“You will not like it, Allyn. You may, I think, like me less.”

“That can’t happen, shamwari.”

“You have lost your wife. You almost lost your company. I should have waited to come. This is not a good time for you to decide things.”

“Juma, you know me.”

“Very well.”

“With Eva gone, I haven’t much else except business. I’ve no other interests, to tell you the truth. The last nine months frightened me. I thought I might lose everything. I did lose my wife, but because of you I kept the mine. What I’m saying is, if I had to choose between the two, I would have chosen this. I loved Eva, you know it. But I won’t let Ingwe be at risk again. Ever. So please. Sit, friend.”

Juma considered, looking down his dark cheeks to eye Allyn. He nodded like a tree in a breeze, solemnly, slowly.

“I started trading in horn only to help you. It was the fastest way to raise your cash.”

“I know. Thank you.”

“I don’t tell you this for thanks.”

“I understand.”

“The horn money is good. But it’s dangerous. People die, Allyn.”

“They died in the mines, too.”

“They did. For much less. I tell you so you will know. If you do business with me from this point forward, it’s more than horn.”

“What is it?”

“Weapons. Some drugs. And women.”

Heavily, Juma sat. Allyn joined him. On the chaise lounges, they turned again to the lake, the fireflies, and the devouring, swooping bat.

Chapter 5

Promise stepped off the morning bus into Nyongane. The clear, early light made the many-colored garb of the women in the paved street electric. They wore sky-blue cotton wraps, orange and yellow shawls, and green sandals. They carried white baskets on their shoulders or balanced on their heads. The women were on their way to the well with laundry or bearing vegetables to sell in the township market. A few women knew Promise and greeted her: fat Blessed, Righteous, and one-eyed Bakabaka, whose name meant “pretty woman.” Stepping to them in her olive drab uniform, Promise felt bland, no more vivid than the bare dirt beside the road. But the ladies were loud in their welcome, like all the Zulu women in the street who never whispered in public for fear they would be seen as plotting by other women.

“
Heita
, Promise. Come here, girl.”

“Look at her.”

“Ha, give us some sugar,
isingane
.”

Promise hugged all three, leaning across their large bosoms to peck them on the cheeks. Righteous gestured at the small, white cooler Promise carried.

“You bring your lunch to the Kruger? I thought you ate leaves, girl.”

The women jiggled and picked up their baskets to continue on their way. Blessed, her basket hefted high onto her head, pointed a pendulous arm up the road.

“I seen your
gogo
. She’s in.”

The women walked away, off the pavement, headed on a bare path downhill into the jumble of pastel shanties, tin roofs, and teetering lean-tos that jostled for space on this poor patch of land. Promise moved on, waving to an old woman who’d helped care for her in the AIDS orphanage and two teen girls she’d cared for years later. Both girls wore jean shorts cut short to show their whole dark thighs, and the women in the street clucked while boys watched them go by.

The morning threatened to be hot. Today’s patrol started at one o’clock, in the scorching stretch of the afternoon. The Kruger held no shouting women or squalid homes or poverty, only the wildness of the world, the breeze of the bicycles, the open air, the hiding animals, trees, monkeys, birds. Promise liked the Kruger best. She would be on the next bus out of Nyongane.

Twenty thousand lived in the township, and not many owned cars. The few that did had jobs in Hazy View. They began to roll for the gate out to the main road. Each vehicle was packed with four in the rear seats, three in the front, some with loads roped to the roof, items to sell or barter in the city. The men in the cars touched their caps when they passed Promise, the township girl who’d become a ranger.

She stopped first in the co-op machine shop to see her
khulu
. She found him behind a big diesel engine that had been pulled by chains out of a tractor. Shirtless, he gleamed with sweat in the stuffy garage, his muscles shone like wet pebbles. Khulu’s hair had only started to gray this year. He waved and called out.

“Will you stay for lunch?”

“No. I have to be at the park.”

Khulu waved again, with a wrench in his dark hand. He lowered his head to the motor. Promise did not leave with the dismissal but rounded the large engine to plant a kiss on her grandfather’s ear. He showed white teeth. His almond eyes crinkled in the merry way Promise imagined Khulu’s daughter’s, her own mother, might have done. She left, careful not to track through the grease on the concrete floor.

In the busy street again, under the climbing heat, Promise turned down an alley. Barefoot children scuffled after a ball, not playing a game but just sharing kicks back and forth. Promise wanted to kick with them, but she was older and wore boots and did not fit in their fun.

The structures here were huts of scavenged materials, some wood, some plastic corrugation, cinder blocks, salvaged bricks; the roofs were canted to make the rain run off behind them into the ditch where some urinated or shit. Many huts were rickety and leaned against a neighbor. Each was oddly tidy, because the women ran this alley, swept it and ordered the life of it. None of the people who lived in these shelters called them homes.

Promise stopped outside Gogo’s red door, swung wide open for ventilation. Inside, the rooms were dim, the electricity was spotty on this alley. The blue water cistern beside the door had been filled; the truck came twice weekly. Gogo’s wood-slat walls were not ramshackle but painted, straight, and sound, as were the walls of the shanties to the left and right. Gogo harangued her neighbors to keep their premises up.

Above the alley, above Gogo’s shanty, on the green hillside overlooking the township, the claps of hammering filtered down to Promise. A concrete truck worked its way up a gravel road to the new development, to pour pads and sidewalks for the first houses going up. The government was doing this for Nyongane. The houses on the hill would be tiny, not much bigger than the huts below, but solid and real. They wouldn’t leak or fall down, they’d catch the breezes and see far beyond the township; they would not shame their occupants. The homes’ first owners would be those township people who could put down a deposit of fifty thousand rand, then pay the rest, almost half a million rand. Only a few in Nyongane could do this, and it would be their life savings. Some families pooled their money with others. They would continue living crowded, but they would live up there.

Promise stepped inside Gogo’s open door. She did not announce herself but spent a moment without her grandmother knowing she was visiting. Gogo moved about in the second room, humming while changing bedsheets. Promise set the cooler on the floorboards; this floor was one of the prides of the alley. A decade ago, Khulu had scavenged the wood from an abandoned railroad cattle car. He’d planed the boards by hand to remove splinters and painted them dusky rose, then set them on tarred timbers to lift his wife above the dirt.

Promise tiptoed through the sitting room to the kitchen, the smallest room of the shanty. A kettle simmered, still hot on the gas burner. She poured herself a china cup and dropped in the next-to-last tea bag. Promise eased toward the sounds of Gogo snapping linens and humming in her lovely voice. In nooks and crannies, on the tabletops, stood Gogo’s collection of black glass sculptures, all of African women. Some were bottles, some lamps. Gogo decorated with these figurines and artwork of female warriors, black as the points of their spears, and with photos of her dead children and Promise.

Promise stepped into the little bedroom. Gogo stopped tucking a pillow into a clean case and put her hands to her tiny hips. She raised an eyebrow to ask,
You do not announce yourself in my house
? Promise offered her the fresh cup of tea. Gogo reached knobby hands for it and sat on the made bed, patting for Promise to sit with her.

Gogo’s sandals did not reach the floorboards. She was a short woman, narrow from face to feet, winnowed by a life of labor and loss. She held an energy that seemed to consume her as she aged. Gogo was a black Zulu with nothing brown about her, not even her eyes. Gogo, like Khulu, had all her teeth; her tongue was her strength, the way Khulu’s arms were his.

When Promise sat next to her grandmother, the mattress was so high that Promise’s own feet barely met the floor. Ever since her own childhood in the township, Gogo had raised her beds on stacks of cinder blocks, to guard against the black ghost, the spirit that seeped out of the ground in the night to take sleepers and not let them wake. Though it was understood long ago that the deaths were from the fumes of tires burned in the camp for warmth, even after the practice was stopped Gogo and the other
anties
in Nyongane continued to do what their mothers did and raised their beds.

Gogo blew across the teacup, puffing her black cheeks. When she sipped, her cheeks sank deep. She swallowed and blinked into the cup.

“Up on the hill, there will be no black ghosts.”

“No, Gogo. There won’t.”

“My first night there, I will sleep on the ground. Just to show it.”

“I want to see that.”

“I walked up there yesterday by myself. I sat under a tree. You can look a long way. Even with the men working, it felt quiet. Strange.”

How unlikely that this small woman was huge Juma’s sister. Promise had no siblings; her parents died before that could happen. But if she’d had a brother, he would have been seven feet tall if the difference had stayed the same as it was between Juma and Gogo. Sitting on the bed, just the toes of her boots touching the red floor Khulu had made, Promise took Gogo’s hand. She held it for a long, silent moment before she put the money in it, so Gogo would not have to ask.

Promise passed the orphanage, named
Isipho
, for hope. The building was the largest in the township, built of brick, supported by many world charities who put their names on the sign facing Nyongane’s one paved street. The morning was still early, and the children would be making their cots or lining up for breakfast in the courtyard with tin plates in hand and a cook spooning out oatmeal or powdered eggs. The milk, too, was powdered. Promise carried the cooler into the orphanage’s weedy front yard, to the old swing set.

She set down the cooler before settling into one of the wooden seats. Grabbing the chains, she pushed off. Promise had to lift her legs to fly above the dirt, and in her boots and green uniform, she made the swing set squeak and sway. A white nun she did not know came to ask if Promise could be helped in some way. Promise dragged her feet to stop, but the nun said she could go on, but please be careful. The swings were rusty, there was no money to repair them if something broke. Promise had enough money in her pocket to buy a new playground. She thanked the nun, lifted the cooler, and walked on.

The busyness of the township had waned. Most of the women stayed inside with their chores, the men at work or indolent on plastic chairs. Promise was one of only a few left in the street. She greeted no one and lengthened her strides to be done and on the bus back to the Kruger.

The quick walk, the blocked and breezeless air in Nyongane, these made Promise anxious in a way the bush did not. She didn’t pause outside the door to Bongani’s store but rode the momentum of her nerves across his threshold.

His shop was the third-biggest building in the township, after the orphanage and the school. It was, in fact, several huts fixed together. As Bongani had expanded his
spaza
,
his small convenience store, over the years, he’d swallowed his neighbors. At the scrape of Promise’s heels on the clean concrete floor, Bongani turned from his shelves; from his cans, cheap toys, open bins of beets, potatoes, carrots, and roots; from a barrel of beans, a crate of rice with a scoop in it, an old scale. His dark face was smooth and pleasant, creased beside the eyes. Old Bongani was a shopkeeper, never a man to sling a tool or carry a burden. He’d long been the richest man in the township. He was unmarried, but no one questioned him in this. Before Promise was born, Bongani had killed a man who’d publicly doubted him, or so her grandmother had said.

“Look who is here. My ranger.”

“
Sawubona
, Bongani.”

“Go outside and come in again.”

“That’s foolish.”

“No, I want to see you come into my store.”

“I’m sorry I haven’t visited.”

“Then go outside. Come in. I will consider forgiving you the years you have not come.”

Promise sighed and did as she was asked. Bongani stood tall behind the counter, hands on hips, pleased with her entrance. Promise rested the cooler on the counter between them.

“Welcome, Nomawethu. You’re grown up.”

Bongani had barely changed in the five years since Promise had left the township. He looked well kept and pleased, as if he’d just finished a meal. Perhaps Gogo might have looked like this, full and smooth in her gathering years, if Bongani had won her. Bongani did not have Khulu’s muscles, but seemed to have everything else.

“Thank you.”

“I must tell you. Those are words I should have heard a while ago. I thought you would have come before now. I see you, you know, when you visit. You walk right past my shop. Like I’ve done nothing. Like you owe nothing.”

The gentleness of Bongani’s features faded. His wide eyes narrowed, his lips tucked in. Promise had not come to upset him, but with the opposite intent. She didn’t know what she’d done wrong. She tried to keep her voice soft, but she was an orphan and a ranger and could only do so much.

“What do I owe you?”

“This is a joke, yes?”

“No.”

“Did your Gogo not tell you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I can’t believe I have to tell you. After all these years.”

“The years are gone, Bongani. I am here. Tell me now.”

“You owe me that uniform.”

“That’s . . .” Promise could not complete the sentence, confounded.

“Of course.” Bongani slapped the countertop, not hard but enough to toll the suddenness of his change in manner. “I know why she kept it from you.”

“Kept what?”

“She wanted you to believe it was him.”

“Bongani.”

“It was me. I made the call to SANParks. I got you into the game-ranger program. One slot in twenty, that’s what it was. I paid money to get you on the list. I even bought your first bus ticket. He couldn’t do that for you. I did.” Bongani snorted, an ugly spitting noise.