Брайс Кортни - The Power of One

‘You know why he’s called Jackhammer, Peekay?’

‘What’s a jackhammer, Hoppie?’

‘A jackhammer is used in the mines to drill into rock, it weighs one hundred and thirty pounds. Two Kaffirs work a jackhammer, one holds the end and the other the middle as they drill into the sides of a mine shaft. I’m telling you, it’s blêrrie hard work for two big Kaffirs. Well, Smit is called Jackhammer because, if he wants, he can hold a jackhammer in place on his own pushing against it with his stomach and holding it in both hands. What do you think that would do to his stomach muscles? I’m telling you, hitting that big gorilla in the solar plexus all night would be like fighting a brick wall.’

‘I know,’ I said excitedly, ‘you keep it coming all night into the face until you close his eye, then he tries to defend against what he can’t see and in goes the left, pow, pow, pow until the other eye starts to close. Then whammo!’

Hoppie rose from the table and looked down at me in surprise. ‘Where did you hear that?’ he exclaimed.

‘You told me, Hoppie. It’s right, isn’t it? That’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it?’

‘Shhhhh… you’ll tell everyone my fight plan, Peekay! My, my, you’re the clever one,’ he said as I followed him from the dining hall.

‘You didn’t say what happened to Jack Sharkey?’

‘Who?’

‘In the heat when Joe Louis fought him and drank all the water?’

‘Oh, Joe knocked him out, I forget what round.’

Bokkie and Nels picked us up in a one-ton truck which had South African Railways, Gravelotte painted on the door. Nels and I sat in the back and Hoppie sat in the front with Bokkie. In the back with me was a small suitcase Hoppie had packed with his boxing boots and red pants made of a lovely shiny material and a blue dressing gown. Hoppie was very proud of his gown and he had held it up to show me the ‘Kid Louis’ embroidered in running writing on the back.

‘You know the lady in the café in Tzaneen, the young one?’

‘The pretty one?’ I asked, knowing all along whom he meant.

‘Ja, she’s really pretty, isn’t she? Well, she done this with her own hands.’

‘Is she your nooi ? Are you going to marry her, Hoppie?’

‘Ag man, with the war and all that, who knows.’ He had walked over to the dressing table and taken the brown envelope from the top drawer. He tapped the corner of the envelope into the palm of his open hand. ‘These are my call-up papers. They were waiting for me when we got in today. I have to go and fight in the war, Peekay. A man can’t go asking someone to marry him and then go off to a war, it’s not fair.’

I was stunned. How could Hoppie be as nice as he was and fight for Adolf Hitler? If he had got his call-up papers that must mean that Adolf Hitler had arrived and Hoppie would join the Judge in the army that was going to march all the Rooineks, including me, into the sea.

‘Has Hitler arrived already?’ I asked in a fearful voice.

‘No, thank God,’ Hoppie said absently, ‘we’re going to have to fight the bastard before he gets here.’ He looked up and must have seen the distress on my face. ‘What’s the matter, little boetie?’

I told Hoppie about Hitler coming and marching all the Rooineks right over the Lebombo mountains into the sea and how happy all the Afrikaners would be because the Rooineks had killed twenty-six thousand women and children with black water fever and dysentery.

Hoppie came over to me and, kneeling down so that his head was almost the same height as my own, he clasped me to his chest. ‘You poor little bastard.’ He held me tight and safe. Then he took me by the shoulders and held me at arm’s length, looking me straight in the eyes. ‘I’m not going to say the English haven’t got a lot to answer for, Peekay, because they have, but that’s past history, man. You can’t go feeding your hate on the past, it’s not natural. Hitler is a bad, bad man and we’ve got to go and fight him so you can grow up and be welterweight champion of the world. But first we’ve got to go and fight the big gorilla who called me a Kaffir lover. I tell you what, we’ll use Jackhammer Smit as a warm-up for that bastard Hitler. Okay by you?’

We had a good laugh and he told me to hurry up and put my tackies on and he’d show me how to tie the laces like a fighter.

The sudden sound of a motor horn outside made Hoppie jump up. He put the dressing gown in the suitcase with his other things. ‘Let’s go, champ, that’s Bokkie and Nels.’

‘Wait a minute, Hoppie. I nearly forgot my suckers.’ I hurriedly retrieved them from my suitcase.

The rugby field was on the edge of town, down a dusty road. By the time we arrived I could taste the dust in my mouth. We parked the ute with all the other cars and trucks under a stand of large old blue gums, their palomino trunks shredded with strips of grey bark. In the centre of the football field the men from the railway workshop had built a boxing ring that stood about four feet from the ground. The miners, who were responsible for the electrics, had rigged two huge lights on wire which stretched from four poles, each one set into the ground some ten feet from each corner of the ring.

Huge tin shades were fitted over the lights and in the gathering dusk the light spilled down so that it was like daylight in the ring. Hundreds of moths and flying insects spun and danced about the lights, tiny planets orbiting erratically around two brilliant artificial suns. The stands, which were really a series of stepped or tiered benches each about twenty feet long and twelve high, were arranged in a large circle around the ring. It meant everyone had a ringside seat. There looked to be about two thousand men packing the stands, while underneath them, looking through the legs of the seated whites, the Africans stood or crouched, trying to get a view of the ring as best they could.

Bokkie and Nels led us to a large tent, on the side flaps of which was stencilled Property of Murchison Consolidated Mines Limited. We entered to find Jackhammer Smit, his seconds and four other men, three of them ordinary size and one of them not much bigger than me. Hoppie whispered that they were the judges and that, ‘the dwarf is the referee’. I was fascinated by the tiny little man with the large bald head. ‘He may look silly, man. But take it from me, he knows his onions,’ Hoppie confided.

Jackhammer Smit had already changed into black shiny boxing shorts and soft black boxing boots. In the confines of the tent, lit by two hurricane lamps which cast a bluish light, he seemed bigger than ever. As we’d entered he’d turned to talk to one of his seconds. My heart sank, Hoppie was right, I had seen his stomach muscles as he had turned, they looked like plaited rope and his shoulders seemed to loom over the smaller men.

‘This is one big sonofabitch, Peekay,’ Hoppie said. ‘Moses was still blubbing in the bullrushes the last time he weighed in as a light-heavy.’ He clipped open his small suitcase, and taking off his shorts and shirt he quickly slipped on a jock strap. He looked tough, tightly put together, good knotting around the shoulders and tapered to the waist, his legs slight but strong. He slipped on his shiny red shorts and sat down on the grass of the tent floor to put on his socks and boxing boots.

Jackhammer Smit now stood in the opposite corner of the tent facing us, with the light behind him. He looked black and huge and he kept banging his right fist into the palm of his left hand. It was like a metronome, a solid, regular smacking sound that seemed to fill the tent.

The referee, who only came halfway up Jackhammer Smit’s legs, called the two boxers together. I wondered if all dwarfs had such deep voices. He asked them if they wanted to glove up in the tent or in the ring.