Free Dust Devils by Roger Smith Page B

weekend?" Sipho glanced across at her.
    She nodded. He saw her expression and said nothing more.
    "When are you going home?" she asked.
    "In two days. I'm just here to finish my project. I don't think I will be coming back. I'm needed in the city."
    Sunday's heart sank. She hardly knew this boy, but the idea of not seeing him again was too much to bear. As if all hope would leave with him. Before she could stop herself she spoke. "Take me with you to Durban. Please."
    He was staring at her. "Are you serious?"
    "Yes. If I marry this man my life will be over. Please, Sipho."
    "But what will you do in Durban? It's not like here."
    "I'll do whatever I need to do. Please. I beg of you."
    He put his hand on hers for a second. "I will be here in two days. Same time. If you still want to go, you can come with me. If you change your mind, that's okay."
    "I won't change my mind."
    They were at the main road. Sunday wished they could turn right and drive out of the valley now. Drive to Durban and a new life. But he stopped the car and she climbed out.
    "You're sure of this?" Sipho asked.
    "I'm sure."
    He waved and pulled away, and she watched as the red road swallowed the little car.

 
    Driving. No idea where. Or for how long. Dell lay under the blanket, hearing the tires on the blacktop. They had left the town behind. No more bleating horns and yelling taxi drivers. The car was out on the open road, moving at a constant speed.
    The man in the rear didn't speak again but it was his father. For sure. Dell could smell him. The same smell that had come from the clothes that hung in the bedroom closet of the house he grew up in, heavy with nicotine and booze and something indefinable. The smell of his father. He and his mother left behind in Durban while Goodbread was away killing people. First in Vietnam, and then in a bush war that had brought the superpowers to the ass-end of Africa, lured by Angolan oil.
    Goodbread had been part of the CIA's covert "black ops" in Angola until Jimmy Carter had pulled them out. Then he'd joined up with the South Africans, who had their own reasons for trying to bring Marxist Angola down.
    Dell lay feeling the vibration of the car but hearing the chatter of a helicopter, back in 1988, in the rear of a South African Air Force Puma, fighting nausea, watching the chopper's shadow skim the yellow dunes of the Namib desert. The seats had been removed and Dell sat on the floor, his head throbbing with stale booze and avgas.
    Two South African crewmen upfront and five men in the rear with Dell. An Angolan with one empty eye socket. A feral looking Afrikaner. A child-size bushman as wrinkled as a tortoise. A Cuban prisoner of war. And Earl Robert Goodbread.
    Since midnight, when Dell – up in South West Africa reporting on the last days of the bush war – had run into his father in a beer hall in Windhoek, he'd heard Bobby Goodbread holding forth in Portuguese, German and Afrikaans.
    "Languages are like goddam viruses, boy. I just pick them up," Goodbread had told him on one of the rare occasions he'd been home when Dell was a kid.
    And now he was speaking Spanish to the Cuban MiG pilot who had been shot down and paraded before the media in Windhoek. The Cuban sat with his back to the chopper door, staring into his lap, his hands cuffed before him. Goodbread, wearing faded brown fatigues, crouched beside him. At fifty he was tanned and muscular, good looking in a craggy Clint Eastwood way. White teeth exposed in a fuck you grin.
    Dell caught the word " niños " above the smack of the rotors. This got the Cuban looking up and he nodded, mumbled in Spanish. Dell thought he heard " dos ." The prisoner held his cuffed hands level with his head, then a little higher, showing the height of his two kids. Trying out an uncertain smile. He was dark-haired, with an almost pretty face. Bruised around the left eye.
    Goodbread said something and pointed at Dell. The Cuban said in English, "This is your son?"
    " Si, "