Roger Smith - Mixed Blood

Jack Burn stood on the deck of the house high above Cape Town watching the sun drown itself in the ocean. The wind was coming up again, the southeaster that reminded Burn of the Santa Anas back home. A wind that made a furnace of the night, set nerves jangling, and got the cops and emergency teams caught up in people’s bad choices.

Burn heard the growl of the car without mufflers as it came to a sliding stop. The percussive whump of bass bins bulging out gangsta rap. Not the usual soundtrack of this elite white neighborhood on the slopes of Signal Hill. The car reversed at high speed and stopped again, close by. The engine died, and the rap was silenced in mid- muthahfuckah. Burn looked down at the street, but he couldn’t see the car from this angle.

Susan watched him from inside the house, the glass doors open onto the deck.

“Come and eat.” She turned and disappeared into the gloom.

Burn went inside and switched on the lights. The house was clean, hard-edged, and modern. Very much like the German rich kid who had rented it to them for six months while he went home to Stuttgart to watch his father die.

Susan carried the fillet from the kitchen, moving with that backward-leaning, splay-footed waddle of the heavily pregnant. She was beautiful. Small, blonde, with a face that stubbornly refused to admit to being twenty-eight. Aside from the huge belly, she looked exactly as she had seven years ago. He remembered the instant he first saw her, the feeling of the breath being squeezed from his lungs, his head dizzy with the knowledge that he was going to marry her. And he did, not six months later, laughing off the difference in their ages.

Susan looked the same, but she wasn’t. Her lightness was gone, her easy laugh a memory. Lately she’d seemed to be in constant communion with her unborn child. That’s how she referred to it, as her child. Her daughter. As if Burn and Matt were another species, outside of this exclusive club of two.

Burn sliced into the fillet with a carving knife, and blood pooled on the cutting board. Perfect. Rare, the way they all liked it. Matt lay on his belly in front of the plasma TV watching the Cartoon Network. Just like home.

“Hey, get over here and eat,” Burn said.

Matt was about to protest; then he thought better of it and came across to the table, dressed only in a pair of baggy shorts. He was four, blond like his mother but with some early trace of his father’s frame.

Susan was seated, piling salad onto their plates. She didn’t look at Matt. “Go and wash your hands.”

“They’re not dirty,” he said as he clambered up onto a chair. He held his hands out for her to inspect. She ignored him. It wasn’t intentional; it was just as if she wasn’t tuned to his frequency anymore. As if her son reminded her too much of his father.

Burn tried to get Susan’s eye, to somehow draw her back to them. But she stared down at her plate.

“Listen to your mother,” he said gently, and Matt took off for the bathroom, sliding on his bare feet.

Burn was carving the fillet when the two brown men came in off the deck. They both carried guns, pointed action-movie style at right angles. From the way they were laughing, he knew they were cooked on speed.

The night the trouble came, Benny Mongrel was watching them, the American family, out on the deck of the house next door. The guy drinking wine, glimpses of the blonde woman, the kid running between the deck and the house, the sliding door open onto the hot summer night. A snapshot of a world Benny Mongrel had never known.

He had been in and out of jail since he was fourteen. He wasn’t sure, but he guessed he was turning forty. That’s what his ID said, anyway. When he was paroled from Pollsmoor Prison last year after serving a sixteen-year stretch, he swore he wasn’t going back. No matter what.

So that’s why he was pulling the night shift on the building site as a watchman. The pay was a joke, but with his face and the crude prison tattoos carved into his gaunt brown body he was lucky to get a job. They gave him a rubber baton and a black uniform that was too big. And they gave him a dog. Bessie. A mongrel like him, part rottweiler, part German shepherd. She was old, she stank, her hips were finished, and she slept most of the time, but she was the only thing that Benny Mongrel had ever loved.

Benny Mongrel and Bessie were up on the top floor of the new house, the roof open to the stars, when he heard the car. It was tuned loud the way they did out on the Cape Flats. He walked to the edge of the balcony and looked down. A red early-nineties BMW-3 series sped down the road toward him, way too fast. The driver hit the brakes just below where Benny Mongrel stood, and the fat tires found builder’s sand and the car fishtailed before stopping. The BMW reversed until it was level with the entrance to the building site. The wheelman cut the engine and the hip-hop died.

Everything went very quiet. Benny Mongrel could hear Bessie wheezing as she slept. He could hear the pinging of the BMW’s cooling engine. He was tense. He was aware of that old feeling he knew so well.

Benny Mongrel stood watching, invisible, as the two men got out of the car. He saw enough of them in the streetlight, caps on backward, baggy clothes, the Stars and Stripes on the back of the tall man’s jacket, to recognize members of the Americans gang, the biggest on the Cape Flats.

His natural enemy.

He was ready for them. He put the baton aside and slid the knife from where it waited in his pocket. He eased the blade open. If they came up here, they would see their mothers.

But they were going toward the house next door. Benny Mongrel watched as the tall one boosted his buddy up, the shorty pulling himself onto the deck like a monkey. Then he was reaching a hand down to the other guy. Benny Mongrel couldn’t see them from where he stood, but he knew the American family would be eating at the table, the sliding door open to the night.

He closed the knife and slipped it back into his pocket.

Welcome to Cape Town.

Susan had her back to the men. She saw the look on Burn’s face and turned. She didn’t have time to scream. The one closest to her, the short one, got a hand over her mouth and a gun to her head.

“S’trues fuck, bitch, you shut up, or I’ll fucken shoot you.” The hard, guttural accent. The man’s skinny arms were covered in gang tattoos.

The tall man was round the table, waving his gun at Burn.

Burn put the carving knife down and lifted his hands off the table, in plain view. He tried to keep his voice calm. “Okay, we don’t want any trouble. We’ll give you whatever you want.”

“You got that right. Where you from?” asked the man coming at Burn. He was as lanky as a basketball player.

“We’re American,” said Burn.

The short one was laughing. “So are we.”

“Ja, we all Americans here. Like a big flipping happy family, hey?” The tall man nudged Burn with the muzzle of the gun, positioning himself behind the chair to Burn’s right.

The short one pulled Susan to her feet. “Oh, we got a mommy here.”

Burn watched as the man slid his hand under Susan’s dress, grabbing at her crotch and squeezing. He saw her eyes close.

It was coincidence, pure and simple.

Somebody had told Faried Adams that his girlfriend, Bonita, was selling her ass in Sea Point, when she was supposed to be visiting her mommy in the hospital. Faried hadn’t minded that she was hooking again, but he’d absolutely minded that she wasn’t giving him any of the money. He wanted to catch the bitch on the job.

So lanky Faried went and banged on the door of his short-ass buddy Ricardo Fortune. Rikki lived in one of those ghetto blocks in Paradise Park where washing sagged from lines strung across walkways and the stairways stank of piss. Rikki had a car. But he also had a wife, Carmen, who moaned like a pig about everything. Which is why Rikki smacked her all the time. Faried would do the same; in fact that bitch Bonita was gonna get a black eye tonight, too. If she was lucky.