James Mcclure - Snake

“Zondi, I like this.”

“Where are these persons most commonly seen, boss? At the back of the stores where the rubbish is. How close does anyone look at them? Not close. It can make you feel ashamed inside, but you have not the money for the whole world. What if I tell you a young man tonight identified Mpeta as such a scavenger outside the butcher shop?”

“Man, man, man!”

“There is more; you wait. To double-check, I went first to the station commandant, and he says they have had no prisoner answering the same description in regard to height and so on. In truth, I think they are giving these men an easy time these days. To double-double-check, I saw three people at the scenes of other incidents, who now remember such a man, wearing big bandages on his arms, who they have not seen again. One said he didn’t notice dogs, so why ask such a strange question?”

Zondi stifled a yawn and squeezed his eyes shut once to clear them. The tar ahead widened, forked, narrowed, swept in through the gates of the township and ended abruptly behind the superintendent’s office in a judder of potholed dirt. Then the trees gave out, too; there were just the endless rows of two-roomed Monopoly houses to show by their juxtaposition where the tracks lay. Kramer found he still counted each passing row carefully. A door opened and closed quickly across the way as they stopped outside 2137.

“There are sixteen in that place,” Zondi said, smiling. “They think old Mr. Tchor-tchor is paying them a visit.”

Kramer winced at the evocative name for the bustling superintendent, and muttered, “But what are your thoughts?”

“Exactly that, boss-a lookout. These stores are not white stores with a padlock on the back, but places where the children run in and out, boys forget to close doors, men go and stand in them for the sun. So there is this danger, if you do a raid, that someone will come in the back entrance and see you. But if you put a lookout there, who can beg from those that may wish to enter, then it is safe. That man can just run away by himself.”

“Huh! Half-baked, man.”

“Maybe, boss, but the yeast is blood.”

Candlelight came to warm the window of 2137, drawing Zondi’s hand to the door handle. His stomach rumbled.

“Bloody cannibal,” said Kramer.

And drove away confident that the whole thing could be reshaped in the morning-along with a few destinies, if need be. Fatigue has its own euphoria.

Thursday’s child was a great improvement on the rest of the week. Piet was out shooting with his new air rifle before the sun was properly up.

“Just listen to that,” the Widow Fourie said, as Kramer brought in their coffee and sat on the edge of the bed.

Another swinging bottle burst at the end of its string in the old barn.

“How was he last night?” asked Kramer, whom nothing could have wakened.

“Got much more sleep, but still a bad dream now and then during the early part. I wish you’d listen so I had your opinion.”

Kramer pretended to leave the room and she threw a pillow at him.

“You tell me, then,” he said, stretching out, already fully dressed, beside her.

A praying mantis on the windowsill crossed from one side to the other.

“Well, it’s these books.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You see, the more I read them, the more I think Piet has got Oedipus.”

“Hoo!”

“No, you wait. Doctors aren’t always right!”

“Okay, okay. You’ve got all morning until eight o’clock.”

The Widow Fourie tucked the pillow back behind her head and looked up at the high, old-fashioned ceiling with its plaster trimmings, just like a wedding cake, and tried to find the right words.

“It’s like this: Piet was at the age when it happened-y’know?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s what the books call becoming fixated by a trauma event. Bereavement is all you need for it to happen. Now, it was natural at that age for Piet to be jealous of-y’know.”

“His dad.”

“Ja, and it was also natural he should want rid of Pop with death wishes and the like.”

“Mmmm.”

“You haven’t heard all this before, because it’s a new part I found in The Rib Cage. It says that the child realizes that if his father found out how he feels, then there would be big trouble. That the father would punish the son-which is easy to do because he’s so much bigger. The kiddie mixes two things, you see, this pash for his mum and this fear his dad will cut off his-y’know “

“ Tondo? ”

“Hell, the words Mickey teaches you!”

“That’s right, blame a poor kaffir,” he said, nudging her.

“Tromp, seriously, man, listen to my reasoning. So, in the classic examples, the kiddie tries to be very nice to his dad, to sort of make up for wanting him dead. They say you can see this in a normal boy when he switches over to worshiping his dad at a later stage.”

“So if he gets stuck at this point, he develops a phony attitude of liking his dad while really he-”

“Hey! We’re talking about Piet here, so that’s beside the point.”

“Piet,” affirmed Kramer.

“And you know what I think is the matter with him? He thinks he’s a murderer!”

The coffee spilled hot down Kramer’s shirt as he sat bolt upright.

“What bloody nonsense is this?”

“And that’s why you have an effect on him the doctors are always talking about. They don’t understand it, but I do. Piet knows who you catch-and what happens to them in Pretoria.”

“You mean…?” Kramer went over and stripped off the stained shirt, replacing it with another taken from his suitcase in the wardrobe. Then he turned on her.

“You listen,” he said. “I read those books, I saw the ideas on psychopaths. I’ll accept all this crap for a moment just to point out to you that they said the important years were up to five. For those years, was there any messing around with Piet? Didn’t you have him by your side the whole time? Didn’t you hug him and teach him his empathy and everything? You told me yourself you only got a girl when you had to go out to work after he died. Before then, Piet had-”

The Widow Fourie was staring open-mouthed at him.

“Isn’t that what you mean, then?” he said, coming over and taking her empty cup from her.

“I never said my Piet was a psychopath!”

“ Ach, they go together! Oedipus and early-”

“Only in the case of the psychopath himself, you damn fool! Please listen! ”

“Fine,” said Kramer, banging the cup down on her dressing table. “Piet thinks he’s a murderer. Who did he kill?”

“His-his own Pop.”

“ Yirra! ”

“See it from his point of view! He’s little and he’s wishing his dad dead so he can have me to himself-and what happens? His dad dies! What else would a kid think? You know how their heads are full of magic? How they can have friends that are just imaginary? Take strange fears? What’s so unlikely then that at night he thinks the curtains are moving because his pa’s spook is coming back to…”

Kramer slowly buttoned his shirt, did the cuffs, and slid up the knot in his tie.

“You’re right-it was ghosts which were scaring Piet the other night when I went through to his room,” he admitted, adding with a wry smile, “That’s why I got him the gun to shoot them with.”

The colonel brooded over the feature page of the Gazette, which had the headline SNAKES AND ADDERS bannered across it, and a blurb that read: “Snakes kill 35,000 humans a year-one such victim died tragically in Trekkersburg this week. But fangs ain’t always what they seem, writes K. Madison, our Special Science Correspondent.”

Then came the usual whispers, sharp knock, and cheery greetings that began the press call every day at eight-thirty.