H1VE

It is a beautiful fall day, late in February, and the air is thick with the fires burning on the mountain. Red illuminated at night, eerie and dancing, nourished heartily by the Cape Doctor, it casts a pall on the entire city.

Somebody threw a cigarette. Some tourist.

James sets forth from the mall at Centersquare, two overstuffed white plastic bags full of groceries in hand, towards the taxi stands. The heat glues his shirt to his flesh, and he wipes the stinging sweat from his brow with his free hand.

He loves it; the boiling air and sharp, tight breaths. Every smell is an alien revelation in his senses. The sounds, the languages, eight million plus people crammed in and crazy from the heat.

The old, beaten, garish multi-colored mini-bus’, perhaps a dozen in all, cue up along the street and into a small dusty field.

Many are named, painted graffitti above the windshield, psychedelic; names like Freedom Bus, Natural Mystic, and Love Machine.

Color is celebrated here. The brighter, more visually jarring and odd, the better. Pink is a very popular color for the men.

Music blares from the fleet, making one gigantic cacaphony of dissonance, booming reggae and pop music mingled with the blaring horns and loud, boisterous voices.

`This is the sounds of the Agora. Ancient. I am in Rome. I am Christian, I am lion.’

He makes his way out to the stand, keeping his head down, trying to remain as low-key and invisible as possible. Frankly impossible, to be honest.

Bad things happen at these stands. Drugs and weapons, money and women. Anything is for sale. Any price, money speaks the Devil’s own tongue in this place of darkness.

James approaches, the drivers whistling and waving at him, calling out to him. Everyone stares, all the time.

Annoying habit, the whistling. Makes one feel more canine than human.

He chooses his particular bus as much for the driver as the vehicle, though road-worthines is certainly a critical factor. Some of the rust buckets look like they would need a push to get started. Some of the drivers look scary, tight, and scheming.

“Ahhh… he thinks, spotting a particular driver, “He’s a big man. Overweigh. Obviously not starving, and he is smilling and laughing with a few of the other drivers.”

These were all good signs. They make eye contact, and the driver points at his ride. Bright green, red, and yellow, looking like it was painted by a blind drunkard caught in epileptic spasms, pumping out it’s Bob Marley music at a slightly lower volume than the others in the area. Jah Rastafari.

James nods at the big man.

`Oh well, at least it looks like it runs.’

The driver yells booming

over the din, when they get just barely within earshot. His voice is a low, jovial throb, almost singsong, cutting through the din.

“Ah, my friend. You have been shopping, I see.”

James smiles at him. `Yup.’  He looks the driver over, fresh ironed blue dress shirt, black trousers, and cheap black plastic sandals holding his fat sausage toes. His hair, starting to grey at the temples, is cut tight to his skull, gelled or waxed or just plain damp with sweat.

“Well, come then, you can ride up front with me.”

His accent is thick, Nigerian, almost guteral, but his inflection remains jovial and open.

James climbs into the front seat, throwing the two plastic bags onto the floor,and thanks the driver for holding and shutting the door for him.

He instinctualy feels for the seatbelt, and sighs when he finds none. Not on the benches in the three rows of dusty, taped-together seats behind him. Not even in the driver’s seat.

The driver climbs into his bus with a slight wheeze, pulling his rotund stomach under the steering wheel, and turns the blaring music down several notches.

`Everywhere is war…’

He turns to James, peering above the counterfeit designer sunglasses he has retrieved from the glovebox and popped onto his chubby face.

“Okay man, where you want to go now?”

“Mardell Street…”

The driver shakes his head vigourosly, laughing.

“Sure man, sure. Only a small distance. Ten minutes.”

James nods back, friendly.

“Yes. Just before Little Brooklyn. Mardell Appartments.”

“ Sure, sure. No problem. Only two Rand.”

`It’s a’ war…’

The driver lurches from the cracked old curb, shuddering out into the hectic motorway running past the mall, the old microvan spewing it’s sick slick oily clouds of purple diesel exhaust. No shoulder checks, no signals, just go, go, go. Blind faith.

He turns the music back up, nodding his head. He has to yell to be heard.

“You are visiting, no?”

“No. I’ve lived here for a few years.”

“Where you from?”

James bellows his reply, and the big man laughs loudly, patting his head. He whistles, as if his passenger had said he’d just arrived from Neptune.

“Whoa…very far away.”

`I like this guy,’ James decides, and relaxes into his seat a little. The bullish façade of toughness needed to exist on a day-to-day footing here is exhausting indeed.

Never, never let one’s guard down is the basic idiom for survival.

Never give an inch or allow a weakness.

The bus weaves through the traffic in some mad kamikazee dash for the destination, the driver mostly driving with one hand, his right arm hanging out the window waving to potential fares.

Thankfully, no one returns the wave, or responds to the whistles. The cabbies are notorious for slamming on the brakes and putting the lives of everyone inside in direct peril to cut across four lanes of busy asphalt to pick someone up. Usually these taxis are packed with ten, twelve, fourteen people, jammed in and chock-a-block in their own sweat like sardines. Horrible crashes, multiple fatalities, and public outrage do nothing to stem the insanity of these drivers. There are simply no police. Or, put more to the real, the police do nothing about the situation. It was a pleasure to be in a mostly-empty cab.

A luxury.

`War in the East… ’

The driver taps his fingers on the old, cracked black steering wheel in time with the music. The engine sputters and burps, stressing as the cab reaches eighty kilometers an hour. The wind alone rushing through the open windows is deafening in itself. So very refreshing.

“What is your name?” He bellows. James tells him.

“Ah, Jim. It is good to meet you man. I am Gift.”

James nods, grinning. The name Gift is a relatively popular name, yet far more common for a female than a male.

It took James a while to get used to the names.

Pepsi, Levi, Porsche, Dockrat.

Surnames to celebrate concepts they can’t even begin to understand.

Coffee, Christmas, Audi, Easter.

Naming firstborns after devils.

James looks around the cab, through the cracked windshield, at the endless rows of unsightly concrete rushing by them. Barbed-wire and mean old dogs, fences with broken glass and iron spikes set into the concrete tops, humanity hanging out the windows and porches, amidst the symbols and grafitti and debris; lazing, arguing, bickering, dancing, laughing.

Wasps in burning nests.

`War in the West…’

“How long you here Jim? Maybe I can give you my mobile number, if you take the taxi often. You call.”

“Oh, sure. (James nods) Yeah, I think that’d be fine.”

The driver reaches into the pocket of his dark blue dress shirt, pulling out his slightly crumpled card, and hands it over with a wink.

“My number is on there.”

“Thanks, Gift.”

James studies the card, rolling it over in his fingertips. Cheap yellowed paper, cheap, barely legible black ink…people at home would laugh at this business card. Here, one can’t help but be impressed.

Gift M’belo. Driver. Charioteer.

`War up North…’

“I don’t take too many taxi’s, though.”

The driver turns to James, scrutinizing him, his pudgy cheeks puffed into a scowl. It is almost comical.

“How do you get around then? (he pauses, then answers his own query with a proud grin) Ah, you have your own car.”

“No”

He lies. He has a tiny little red five speed Ford. It would be stolen in a heartbeat if he were to park it anywhere near the mall.

The driver scratches his head.

“You take the bus then? How you get there just now?”

“ I walked.”

It was truth.

He holds the driver’s astonished, unbelieving gaze for several moments.

`Damn rights I did, Buddy.’

“You walked?”

“Yup, I walked. I always walk.”

James looks down at the bags of food, realizing one had turned sideways spilling potatoes, mango, and Milo onto the floor around his feet. They roll around in the dirt and grime with every manic lane change. Strange that he didn’t notice.

“Unless I have groceries.”

The driver looks him in the eyes, still expecting this to be some weird foreigners confusing idea of a joke, if not a bald-faced lie. His gaze is returned, held fiercly in all the righteous convictions of a man being honest.

He believes James after a moment. He thinks James is perhaps slightly touched in the head, and speaks softer now, more in confidance. A bit nervous, suddenly caught unsure of this stranger in his taxi.

“I sure as Hell wouldn’t walk that far. Not here.” He waves his pudgy hand out the window emphasizing the surroundings, as if they needed to be pointed out. “ In fact, I wouldn’t even walk five blocks. (he laughs loudly, belly jiggling) No way man!”

`War down South…’

James bends down to collect the spilled groceries, and stuffs them back into the plastic bag. He hears a loud horn blaring by, and looks up to see a beat-up old white taxi pass madly on his side of the vehicle, and cut in front of his speeding ride, narrowly missing the front fender by a foot or two. The other taxi must have been going one hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, at least. It passed them so quickly, almost in a blur of chrome and ashen peeling paint.

Still not much more than a couple carlengths in front of them, the other cabbie applies the brakes fiercely, screeching tires smouldering white melted smoke. Other vehicles swerve out of the way, honking and waving arms angrily.

The suddenly out of control cab James finds himself in swerves right, braking madly, and runs at the ditch head-on, bouncing over the curb, taking a large chunk of concrete with it in a plume of grey dust. It pinballs viciously down the incline, perhaps a five foot drop in all, but fairly steep. They begin to slide sideways once they are level on the dry yellow grasses that line the ditch. A powerpole rushes at them, then blurs by, almost to James as if in slow motion, and he leans towards the driver as it passes inches from the left side of the bus. Inches from destroying him. They are both dead silent, their breaths clamped in their lungs, reacting on autopilot and instinct. Darwinian seconds, time flowing in some strange liquid, no life passing in front of their eyes, it is all now. As in NOW!

They slide to a halt, perhaps thirty yards further down the ditch, in clouds of brown dust and grass, turned sideways facing the fences and buildings. The front tire of the old bus is riding on it’s ugly, brown-rusted metal rim, all rubber having disintegrated upon contact with the curb, leaving black twisted tendril strips strewn down the bank. Steam puffs out of the over-labored engine, shrouding them in a light fog. It chugs to a stall and overheats and comes to it’s end hissing.

James hears another engine race towards them, growing louder and louder, and then finally quiet again. A moment’s peace afforded, he looks his arms and hand over. Bruised for certain. Sore. No blood though. The top of his head hurts. Might have banged it on the roof. Can’t remember. He breathes deeply. Catches his breath and realizes he has survived something, an imminent terrible wreck, at least, virtually unscathed.

He hears muffled cursing, foreign tongues yelling and screaming, growing ever nearer. The cars stop honking. There is a strange silence, except for the voices.

He looks over at the driver, confused. The big man is putting his hands up in front of his face. For a moment, James thinks he is praying.

A flash of dark steel behind the big man, a face, twisted with rage, blurred, babbling, mad. A snapshot in James’ mind stills the frame, just for one quick pulse. The shape. The man, a small man, and the small man’s eyes staring through his  bony face.

Gazing at James. Smiling through patchy beard.

A rumble, like a mountain walking, a footstep from God.

BOOM!

Something bites James’ right eye, stinging, confusing.

Sweat splashes him, like a bucket of water.

Something sweat-like. Slippery. Hard bits, chunks of something.

Something is in his mouth, metallic and warm.

He looks over at the big man. Darkness. White light.

`I’m blind…’

He begins to vomit uncontroled, lurching to get the door of the cab opened, struggling to grasp the door-handle.

`Must get out. Must get out. Must get out…’

He is panicking. Rubs at the pain on his brow.

Blood. A lot of blood. A river.

He throws up again, all over his shirt and shorts, all over the scarlet streaked windshield and dashboard.

`Must get out. Must get out. Must get out….’

The rusty old door gives way, creaking open. James throws his body out onto the grass as if on fire, and bends in half, retching down onto his sandals.

Blood runs into his eye, stinging. His white shirt is drenched dark

scarlet.

He sees a dark blur to his left. Somebody running frantically.

An engine revs.

Gone.

Somebody’s gone.

`Must get away.Must get away. Must get away…’

He begins to sprint. Away from the wrecked taxi. Away from the scene, and the danger of the scene.Nothing moves there anymore. It is frozen. He runs with the focus of an Olympian. Towards his apartment. People are loud again, yelling, screaming, hooting and hollering.

He runs the entire way, not even stopping when he throws up. Not even turning his head. He just wants to be in his own place, behind his security gates, behind his locked doors. He wants to be back home. Back to the known. His thoughts reel, bombarding him in the heavy fall of his own footsteps.

Shower. Bathroom. Lock. Door. Naked.

Clean.

Clean. Water. Hot water and soap.

He jabs the key into the security door, frantic, and throws it open, charging through the front courtyard and into the mezzanine, taking the steps up to his flat three at a time.

He hears a miserable moaning whimper in the quiet echo of the white tile stairway, and realizes it is originating from himself. He barely takes notice of it above his own labored breathing, burping out inside rough asthsmatic gasps. Dime-sized drops of blood, like paint beneath a canvas, follow his steps up, step-for-step, dotting the stairs, glowing rude upon the sallow tiles.

He bursts through his front door, and falls onto the low shag rug inside the entrance, pushing his face down into the cool fibers, kicking the door shut with his foot.

His hand is clenched iron rigid. He looks at it. It’s red.

He looks at it as if it is something else. Not his own body, his own limb pulled inches from his face.

He looks at it like he looks at a table through the window of some café he is passing.

`Hmm…there’s a table.’  No shock, no confusion.

Just simply a damned table.

`Hmm…there’s an arm, and a curled claw.’

Shock. Who’s arm? Who’s hand?

`It is my hand. Hmm…funny. I don’t feel anything .’

Confusion

`There is something inside my fist.’

James unclenches his frozen fingers, one at a time, prying them loose and open with his left hand. With his properly working hand.

With HIS hand.

Something falls from his stained, upturned palm, on his strange right hand. He stares at it. Through the tears he just this instant realizes are there at all. Through the stinging blood.

A blurry, crumpled ball.

A crumpled, rose-colored ball of paper.

A shitty, cheap crumpled-up business card.

Gift M’belo.

James lets out a moan, forced out of his body. An elephant steps between his shoulder blades. He vomits the last bit of fluid out through the cramping pain in his stomach, that last little yellow bitter bile, like albumen, sour and speckled with red, and passes out in it, feeling it’s strange liquid warmth against his cheek.