Roger Smith - Mixed Blood

It would have to be now.

“Fuck you, you black bastard!” The voice was loud, angry, and drunk.

Burn spun around in his seat. A big Mercedes, brand-new, was parked behind him. The driver, a beefy white man in his fifties, was out of the vehicle. He had just shoved a uniformed cop away from him. “Keep your fucking hands off me!”

Cops were converging on the drunk, battling to subdue him.

The cop who had stopped Burn waved a hand, gesturing for Burn to drive on, before he ran over to join his colleagues in the brawl.

Burn’s hands were shaking as he started the car. He drove away slowly. The last glimpse he had of the drunkupt sis the big man was thrown to the ground, three cops wrestling him into handcuffs.

“I owe you a drink, pal,” Burn said quietly as he headed down to the freeway.

Burn drove along the N2 toward the airport. Even though it was way past midnight, the road was busy, taillights streaming away like fireflies in the dark. He kept to the speed limit as kamikaze taxi drivers from the Flats rattled past him in their battered minibuses, jammed full of faceless workers on their way home from the late shift.

Burn checked on Matt in the rearview mirror. His son was asleep, strapped into his car seat, his blond hair a halo in passing headlights.

Mean houses and shacks sprawled on either side of the freeway as Burn left Table Mountain behind. The Cape Flats. Where more people died of violence every day than in your average war zone. Where children disappeared and their violated bodies were found in boxes under neighbor’s beds. Where the dispossessed had their hungry eyes fixed on the rich man’s playground around the mountain.

Burn understood enough about Cape Town to know that the dead men in the back of his Jeep were coloreds from out here on the Flats.

When he had arrived in Cape Town, Burn, like most foreigners, had assumed that it was all black and white in South Africa. But things were more complex, of course, in the country that invented apartheid. He had learned that more than half the population of the city, mostly living out on the desolate Flats, were colored. And colored in South Africa didn’t mean what it did in the States. These were brown people of mixed race, a blend of tribal Africans, European settlers, and their slaves from Asia.

So he had killed two colored men. The tattoos he’d seen on their bodies branded them as gangsters. He knew that dead bodies out on the Flats were commonplace, not even rating a mention in the newspapers. He was going to drive out past the airport and dump them in the veld and hope that if they were found, they would be seen as the by-product of a gangland killing.

Just another night in Cape Town.

Burn took the airport exit and almost immediately swung onto a back road, leaving other cars behind. Within minutes he was driving along a dark and deserted road beside the far runways, a stretch of open ground between him and the nearest small houses.

He checked his mirrors. No cars. He turned the Jeep off the road, bumping his way along until a patch of windswept scrub hid his car from both road and houses. This would have to do.

Burn killed his headlights and got out, carrying a flashlight.

The veld was deserted, littered with junk blown in by the wind, but there was no sign of any human presence. Burn checked that Matt was still asleep before he swung up the rear door of the Jeep.

He lifted the tarpaulin and reached down and grabbed the bigger of the two bodies, letting it fall to the sand like a mummy wrapped in black garbage bags. He dragged the body until it was partly hidden by a clump of bushes. He came back for the second one and left the small man lying a distance away from his dead friend.

Burn checked that the only signs of his presence were the faint tracks the ep had left in the dust. The southeaster was picking up again and would wipe the sand clean by the time he was back on the road.

Matt woke up as Burn climbed back into the car. “Daddy?”

Burn leaned between the seats and took his son’s small hand. “I’m here, Matty.”

“When we going home?”

“Right now.”

“Home to Barney?”

Barney was the Labrador they had left behind when they fled their home in Los Angeles. Matt had loved that dog.

“No, not to Barney,” Burn said. “We’ll get you another dog, I promise.”

“I want Barney.” Now Matt was crying.

The tears of his son, coming after all that had happened that night, pushed Burn close to his edge. He had to fight to stay focused and withdraw his hand, start the car, and head back to the road.

Matt cried himself to sleep as they drove.

Most nights Benny Mongrel dozed on the top floor of the house, sitting beside Bessie under the stars. But that night he couldn’t. He kept on playing the scene over in his head, the American gangsters climbing up into that house like monkeys. And not coming back.

For the first time he looked forward to being picked up at dawn.

When the Sniper Security truck rattled up just before 6:00 a.m., Benny Mongrel waited downstairs with Bessie. He helped her up onto the back and sat down on the bench, Bessie beside him. The truck bumped down the mountain and skirted downtown Cape Town. It was too early for rush hour, so the driver sped through the city streets, away from Table Mountain and its fleecy cloth of cloud. Soon they were in an area of run-down factories and cramped houses that hunched against the railway line.

There were four other night watchmen in the truck. Benny Mongrel ignored them. He had made no friends at Sniper Security. Life had taught him that if you worry about other people, you forget to look after yourself.

Benny Mongrel had lived by his wits since he was an hour old, thrown onto a garbage dump and left to die, his tiny naked body still covered in afterbirth. Some survival instinct had forced him to cry out into the night, and to carry on crying into the gray and drizzly dawn as a ragged band of homeless people mined the acres of garbage for anything of use.

He cried until a homeless woman reached down and pulled him from a pile of rotting bones and fish heads and lifted him to her breast. And then he never cried again. Ever.

So began Benny Mongrel’s procession through orphanages and poorhouses. Some unknown petty official had given him the name Benjamin Niemand. Benjamin Nobody.

By the time he was ten Benny Niemand lived on the streets. He was twelve when he approached a group of Mongrels who were hanging outside a shebeen in Lotus River, eyeing a band of Americans chatting up girls across the road. Benny Niemand walked straight up to the Mongrel leader, Chippies, and told him he wanted to join their gang.

They all laughed at him, and Chippies, half in jest, handed him a long-bladed knife and pointed toward the group of Americans. “See that one with the hat on?”

Benny Niemand saw a thickset man of thirty, heavily tattooed, leaning against a building as he pulled a girl toward him. Benny nodded.

“Show him his mother and you can be a Mongrel.” Chippies laughed, exposing his missing front teeth, expecting the boy to hand the knife back.

Instead Benny Niemand walked across the road, the knife held close against his leg. The tattooed American had walked the girl into a doorway, and his hand was moving between her legs. Benny Niemand tapped him on the back with the hand that wasn’t holding the knife.

The American spun on him. “What you want?”

“To show you your mother,” Benny said, and slipped the knife between the American’s ribs. He pulled the knife out, watched the dying man slump to his knees, heard the screams of the girl, and calmly walked back to where the Mongrels stood. He handed the knife to the leader.

From then on he was Benny Mongrel. He lived by his wits, and he developed an almost infallible sixth sense. He knew when trouble was coming.