Andrew Dawson - MiG-23 Broke my Heart

‘No, don’t stop. I’ll take care of it.’ Skeletor looked to Thomas.

‘What?’ Thomas was busy rubbing the pain out of his knee.

‘Get the map out.’

‘Why don’t you?’

Skeletor tapped the passenger window with the tip of his rifle. ‘I’m on watch.’

‘Fine,’ Thomas said. While he was stuck there he may as well have some activity to take his mind off the pink envelope and, more importantly, get Skeletor off his back. He squeezed forward and pulled the lever of the cubby hole. Empty sandwich wrappers, crumpled Coke tins and cigarette boxes, the waste of countless journeys, burst forth, some of it spilling onto Skeletor’s lap.

‘Watch it, surfer boy.’

Handwritten on a cassette half buried in the junk on the floor, Thomas spotted a familiar word, the name of an old friend. ‘Rodriguez,’ he read, picking up the tape and dusting it off. ‘Can we listen to this?’

‘Out of the question,’ Skeletor said. ‘The boy needs to concentrate.’

‘I am not your boy .’ Maxwell grabbed the tape from Thomas and slammed it into the cassette player.

‘I can see I’m going to have to do some disciplining very soon,’ Skeletor said, but was ignored as a drum roll announced the start of I Wonder .

The bass guitar sauntered in, followed, fashionably late, as if it was running on African time, by the guitar, infusing the cab with a melody as chilled than any air-conditioner.

Thomas shifted his attention to Maxwell. ‘Whoever was in here before you must have had good taste, bru. Rodriguez was a serious musician.’ As the man himself started singing, stacking up big questions in a laid-back drawl, Thomas lowered his voice to a reverential hush. ‘He made the ultimate sacrifice.’

‘He gave his money to the poor?’

‘Better.’ Thomas squirmed out from under his companions’ shoulders, lifted a finger to his temple and fired an imaginary bullet. ‘At his last gig he went out with a bang.’

Maxwell didn’t look as impressed as he should have been. His eyes on the road, he said, ‘Why? Why kill yourself if you have a good job?’

‘I never said he was successful – just serious.’

Maxwell shot Thomas a sceptical glance. ‘You sure he did this?’

‘Absolutely.’ Thomas had overheard this piece of Rodriguez folklore so often that it had to be true. He always thought the story added a certain weight to the music, a van Gogh-factor that spoke of an artist prepared to live and die by his work. That was the kind of artist he wanted to be – as soon as he got out of the army.

Maxwell tutted. ‘I would have done something with my money.’

‘He wasn’t in it for the money,’ Thomas said. ‘Just listen to the lyrics, man. They’re really deep.’ Braving Skeletor’s wrath, he leaned over and cranked up the volume as far as it would go.

The song reverberated from window to window, the bottom end distorted by the tinny speakers.

Instead of complaining, Skeletor kept up his vigil, staring out the window for terrorists. Maybe he was enjoying it.

Mouthing along to those unanswered, grown-up questions about love and loneliness, Thomas noticed that Maxwell was sitting back and tapping out the beat on the steering wheel. The barrier had been broken. He had found an ally. They may have been trapped in an oven on wheels, on the way to who knew where, but as long as they shared this psychedelic common ground, everything was going to work out fine. He wasn’t sure whether it was the music or the camaraderie, but Thomas was suddenly visited by goose bumps. They tickled him all the way up his spine, as though he was being cradled by some travelling spirit, maybe even St. Christopher himself, whose medallion his mom used to Prestick to the dashboard for the non-stop argument that was the annual Green family trip to Kruger Park. He smiled at Maxwell.

Maxwell didn’t smile back, but he didn’t stop thumping on the steering wheel either.

Then the music squealed to a halt.

Thomas looked down in time to catch Skeletor with his finger on the Stop/Eject button. He watched, too slow to react, as the tape was ripped from the player and launched out of the window. It went spiralling, as though in slow-motion, through the dusty air, and hung suspended over the road for what seemed like an eon, the longest fraction of a second of Thomas’s life, before it was whipped back into the truck’s slipstream and disappeared completely.

‘What did you do that for?’ Trying to control his shock and anger, Thomas searched in the rear-view mirror for the spot where the tape landed.

‘This isn’t a school disco, surfer boy. We have work to do.’

Maxwell began to slow the truck.

‘Don’t even think about stopping,’ Skeletor said. ‘Or I’ll report you the minute we get back for interfering with our mission.’

The truck sped up.

‘What work do we have to do?’ Thomas shouted, unable to stop himself. ‘As far as I can see, we’re just along for the ride. Maxwell’s the one doing all the work.’

From the pile of cubby-hole rubbish that had settled around his feet, Skeletor found the map and thrust it into Thomas’s hands. ‘Here. Don’t get us lost.’

Thomas glanced at that smug, skull of a face and imagined putting a bullet through the middle of it, right between the eyes. He and Maxwell could bury the body out here in the bush and no-one would ever know what had happened. Then they could listen to Rodriguez and smoke weed and talk about girls and art all they wanted. And to hell with their stupid mission – when they got back to base, in their own good time, they would say they couldn’t find the Colonel. As punishment they might have to run a few extra kilometres, maybe wash dishes for a couple of weeks, but it would be worth it. It cheered him up just thinking about it.

‘What are you smiling about?’ Skeletor growled.

‘Nothing.’

The map unfolded into an A2-sized wall of paper, covering South-West Africa and the southern parts of Angola. German and English place names were peppered across the lower half, Portuguese names sprinkled above, while the rest of it was spiced with elaborate African words that Thomas, despite being born and raised on the continent, didn’t think he would be ever be able to pronounce. From this unwieldy mass of locations, he managed to wrest Mapupa, the nearest town to their destination, but their current location he could only guess at. All he knew, as he folded and unfolded the map, trying to work how best to hold the thing, was that they were somewhere between their base and the border.

‘Which way?’ Maxwell asked at an unmarked junction offering three choices, all leading off into dust and dry bush. They had left the tarred road far behind.

Thomas took an uneducated guess. ‘Straight.’

‘You sure?’

‘Positive,’ he lied. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t know where they were. His military training had focused mainly on shooting, running and bed making, only briefly touching on map reading. And those courses that did involve navigation were so boring that the only way he could endure them was with a good dose of THC in his blood. Actually, he had spent most of his training stoned. School too, now that Thomas thought about it.

After shaking his head, his doubt plain, Maxwell carried on straight.

They continued in this way as the hours flashed by on the digital readout on the dashboard, Thomas directing, Maxwell driving and Skeletor overseeing. Thomas led them, fingers crossed, over a bridge spanning a muddy river, past a metal water tower with goats scrounging at its base for grass shoots and moisture, and near a kraal whose inhabitants waved merrily – until they saw the weapon cocked in Skeletor’s hands. Throughout this, Thomas kept on the lookout for a major river or town, a reliable landmark to link the real world with the flat representation of the map.