Roger Smith - Mixed Blood

Finally, the watchman looked up at Burn.

“Well?” Burn asked.

The watchman nodded. “He has spoke.”

The kid woke her, tugging at her arm. Carmen groaned and opened her eyes, immediately feeling the throb in her cheek where the fat bastard had hit her. She ignored the kid, who was whining about his mommy, got out of bed naked, and went across to what was left of her mirror. Jesus, her face looked like shit. The cheek was swollen, with enough colors to make a rainbow look anemic.

She didn’t know what was worse, the throbbing cheek or the spiders that crawled across her skin. She scratched herself, hard enough to draw blood with her chipped fingernails. She needed to score, and fast. But she didn’t have a fucken cent. All of Gatsby’s money was gone, and he had fucked off without leaving her more.

She dressed, trying to tune out the whining of the kid. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, the crying and moaning grating on her frayed nerves, she crushed up half a Mogadon in a teaspoon. She poured what was left of a milk carton into a glass, added the powder, and stirred it until it dissolved.

She handed the glass to the boy. “Drink this.”

He shook his head, his eyes swollen from crying. She got down on her knees, her face level with his. “Matt, you drink it, and I take you to your mommy, okay?”

He looked at her suspiciously. “You promise?”

“Cross my heart.” She made the sign of the cross on her chest, God forgive her, and the kid took a sip of the milk. He grimaced. It was sour. “Only if you drink it all up.”

He forced the rest of the milk down, leaving a mustache of white above his upper lip. Within a minute he was looking woozy. She lay him down on her bed and attacked her wild hair with a brush. Soon she heard the child snoring softly.

Now she had to score.

On her way to the door she passed Uncle Fatty, who was in his usual place on the sofa, communing with a bag of wine, dressed only in his foul underwear.

“I’m coming back now, okay?”

He nodded, staring into space.

She went on the hunt for tik, begging, cajoling, absorbig rejection and insult until she found the retard Conway. She told him more stupid lies about getting him to deal for Rikki, and he eventually made her a globe.

She sucked the smoke into her lungs and found peace. At least for the moment.

As she hurried back toward the ghetto block, Carmen tried to work out how long she’d been gone. She had no idea. What if the fat bastard had come back and taken the kid without leaving her more money? She broke into a run, the tik giving her a burst of raw energy.

She ran up the stairs, unlocked the front door, and went inside. The sofa was empty. She walked through to the bedroom and stopped in the doorway. It took a few moments for her to comprehend what she was seeing.

The American kid lay on the bed, passed out on his back. Uncle Fatty was crouched over him, busy loosening the boy’s pajama pants. His dentures lay on the bed beside the child. The old man turned and looked up at her, a necklace of drool dangling from his toothless gums.

Carmen grabbed the first thing that came to hand, a plaster statuette of the Virgin Mary. She brought the Virgin down on Uncle Fatty’s head, again and again and again, blood spraying across her face and her white T-shirt.

The dead were speaking to Barnard. Whispering to him, a choir of unearthly voices. They were calling his name. He had to fight hard to pull himself away from them, to open his crusted eyes. A blur. Hard sunlight lasered his eyes. He blinked, forced his eyes to focus, and saw the Cape Flats moving by him.

He was in a car. His car. The Ford. In the rear seat, his face pressed up against the side window. Even though the sun was shining and he was covered by a blanket, he was still freezing, shivering. He felt his loose fat shaking like jelly. And he was in agony, every square inch of his body screaming in pain and anguish. His mouth was dry, and his tongue felt as swollen as meat left to rot in the sun.

He tried to move his head. Unspeakable pain burned through his nerve ends as he managed to turn his head and look forward. He heard a voice, the American, speaking from far away, as if through a very long tube.

“He’s awake.”

Barnard looked into that nightmare face, the missing eye, the snakelike scar. The half-breed watchman, staring at him from the front seat. The watchman reached an arm over and forced him back down on the seat. Barnard heard an animal wailing and then realized it was him, a sound of pure agony tearing itself loose from his body.

The half-breed pulled the blanket over his face, and Rudi Barnard could see nothing but the dead.

There was not a day that Fingers Morkel woke without excruciating pain in his missing digits. The fingers that Benny Mongrel had cut off with his knife. As he lay in bed, Fingers lifted his two scarred stumps up to eye level to make certain-yet again-that his fingers really were gone. They were, but they still hurt like fucken hell. Doctors had told him that he was suffering from phantom limb syndrome. That he was experiencing phantom pain.

They made all sorts of smart-ass sggestions: apply heat to the stumps, flex what was left of his hands to improve the circulation. Some white fucker had even told him to imagine that he was exercising the missing fingers. Fingers had imagined he was raising the middle digit of each hand to the asshole doctor, but that hadn’t got rid of the pain or his anger.

The way Fingers dealt with this whole sorry mess was to shove as many drugs down his throat as he could. And to imagine killing Benny Mongrel.

By removing his fingers, Benny Mongrel had deprived him of many pleasures. No longer could he put a gun to some motherfucker’s head, feel his index finger curling around the trigger as he blew him away. No longer could he wrap his hands around some bitch’s throat until he half killed her before he screwed her.

And then there were his monkey nuts. He loved the fucken things so much that he’d previously been known as Peanuts. A nickname he much preferred to the present one that reminded him constantly of what had been inflicted upon him and by whom. He had refused to eat the nuts unshelled. The pleasure had been in cracking open the shell, letting his fingers find the two nuts inside, each in its own little compartment, and bringing them to his lips.

Now if he wanted to eat monkey nuts, he had to get one of his guys to break the shells open for him, and put them in a little pile on a paper plate, so he could grab the plate between his two thumbs and pour the nuts into his mouth. It was humiliating. He was sure his guys laughed about it behind his back, so he had stopped eating monkey nuts.

Benny Mongrel. The way the ugly bastard had walked into the Lotus River tavern last night and sat and stared at him, as if daring him to do something. Like he still had the power he’d had in Pollsmoor. He was nothing on the outside. Fuck all. The only reason Fingers hadn’t had him killed there and then, in the tavern, was out of respect for Llewellyn Hector. He didn’t want to make a mess on Hector’s doorstep.

But that was then. This was a new day.

When he was finished inspecting his stumps, Fingers sat up in bed. The sun baked down on the tin roof of his small house, and he was parched.

“Rashied,” he yelled. After a few seconds a tattooed Mongrel with buzz-cut hair stuck his head into the bedroom. “Bring me some Coke. The whole bottle.”

Rashied went to do his bidding, and Fingers trapped his cell phone with his left thumb, using the right thumb to speed-dial for his messages. He hit speakerphone and listened. There were a couple of messages from girls, which he skipped over, and a message from Leroy, the little punk who sold tik for him, which made him sit up. Something about Gatsby. And Benny Mongrel.