Bump in the Road

The boy is on holiday. He and his younger sister spend the mid-winter June 1994 holiday around their suburban house outside of Johannesburg. They have light brown hair and brown eyes, and their skin is dusted with freckles. Both of their parents work, and the maid is supposed to be watching them, but mostly she sits and drinks tea with the gardener in the courtyard behind the kitchen. The boy and his sister spend their time watching movies or riding their bikes around the half-acre lot. A path has formed in the grass where they ride around the house.
Sometimes his parents give him money to get a video and snacks for him and his sister to enjoy. Today, his sister is baking cookies, so he rides alone to the shopping center in his neighborhood. High walls topped with barbed or electrified wire, sometimes both, surround the houses that line the streets. They all have electric gates, and the intercoms are their only connection with the world outside the fence. A few men walk around the neighborhood, looking for work. Smoke rises from fields on the horizon, the dry winter makes the grass burn fast.
On his way to the shops the boy cuts across the corner of an empty lot. He knows he shouldn’t do that, it’s not safe to be 10 years old and riding a bicycle alone these days, and leaving the street only makes it worse. But he has to, there is a pile of dirt in the lot that beckons him, and he has to. He pedals as fast as he can and the wheels on his bicycle leave the ground at the top of the pile. For a moment everything comes together, and his happiness swells. As he lands he veers off the path and into the dry grass that grows tall on either side. There are burnt patches here and there; the drought makes any discarded bottle or thrown cigarette incendiary. He quickly corrects his course, but too late. As he coasts toward the street the ride becomes bumpier, and he stops. His tires are pin-cushioned with thorns, the many-pointed ones that grow in patches around where he lives. The boy gets off the bike and begins to push, with the air of one who has had many similar experiences. He hears laughter. There is a group of young men sitting in the shade of the only tree on the lot. He sees them; they are talking about him in a language he can’t yet understand, although he is learning it in school. One of them is staring at him from beneath the brim of a floppy white fisherman’s hat. The look in his eyes scares the boy. He jogs back onto the street and down and around the corner, and he doesn’t stop until he reaches the parking lot of the shopping center.
He takes his time in the video store, looking at titles he has seen and at ones that look interesting. At the grocery store he buys a bar of chocolate and a carton of orange juice for himself and one of milk for his sister.
When he leans down to unlock his bike he hangs the shopping bag from the handlebars and fiddles with the inline combination lock. He freezes at the sound of a group walking past behind him. A quick glance affirms that the young men from the empty lot have made their way (followed him?) to the shops, and they go to sit on a low wall around a planter in the parking lot. There are others there, they sit and wait for work, drinking fermented milk drinks and smoking cigarettes. The boy’s mother calls them tsotsis. They are angry young men that drop out of school and go into the formerly white-only areas looking for work. They live in squatter camps, whole neighborhoods made of corrugated iron, cardboard, and billboard sign panels. He asked her once why they are so angry. She says: because of the government.
The young man in the white fisherman’s hat is the center of the group now. He is laughing and answering questions from the others, and every once in a while he glances furtively at the boy, who pretends not to notice and feels safer here at the shopping center with people all around. He walks his bike slowly through the parking lot, looking back to see if they are following him. The group seems indifferent to him, but as soon as he turns out of sight, he starts jogging again, and only stops after turning onto the street that intersects with his own.
Now that he is away from them, he slows down and starts dreaming, dawdling, a child who has to go somewhere but not at a specific time. He stomps his feet on the street, raising clouds of the yellow dust that covers his white shoes. He pushes his bike by holding the seat, steering by leaning it left or right. He watches the deflated tires flop on the road. It is winter, but the sun can still be hot in the day, and he takes off his jersey and ties it around the frame of the bike. On his way home, he passes the tennis courts. On Saturdays, he plays there as part of the club. There is a playground next to the courts; the main attraction is a long metal slide into beach sand. It is hidden from the road by a high dirt embankment, put up by the club for privacy. Now it is too private, and children don’t go there alone. The boy loves to play tennis, and he wishes his sister would start playing so they could practice together.
He thinks these things as he walks, oblivious to the world around him. The road he is on runs the length of the neighborhood, from the highway that leads into the city to the road that divides the houses from fields owned by the city. As he reaches the intersection of the road adjacent to his own, the dog in the yard of the house on the corner starts barking. He always does this, and the boy is not concerned. The dog looks like a mix between a Bull Mastiff and a Ridgeback, a type not uncommon in Southern Africa.
“Oh shut up, you bugger” the boy says to the dog, and hurries past the house. The dog follows him behind the fence, growling and barking. He hears footsteps behind him, turns. The young man in the white floppy hat grabs the back wheel of his bike. He came from the park. His face is angular, black eyes glitter, his mouth curls in a rictus of hate, and he is strong. The boy pushes the bike forward, trapping the young man’s fingers between the frame and the spokes. He yells, lunges and misses. The boy lets go of the bike and steps back. Once the young man frees his hand, the boy darts in to grab his bike and tries to run. This time, the young man’s fist connects with his jaw, and the boy falls to the ground, stunned.
When he comes to, the young man in the white fisherman’s hat is trying to pedal the bike down the road. It doesn’t work, so he jumps off and starts pushing. The boy looks around and sees the shopping bag split open, the chocolate, drinks, and videotape scattered across the road. Rage fills him, and his eyes tear and his vision blurs. He picks up the cartons of milk and orange juice and runs after his bike and the young man, stopping twice to hurl the cartons at him, missing both times.
“You bastard! Come back here!” He adds a few words his mother doesn’t approve of, screaming at the top of his lungs. There are two men walking up the other side of the road, now coming abreast of the young man with the bike.
“Help me, please!” the boy yells.
“No, little boy, we will not help you,” one of the men calls, while the other laughs. They understand what the young man is doing, and do not interfere.
Sobbing now, the adrenaline and shock wearing off, the boy runs from house to house, intercom to intercom, mashing the buttons and running on when nobody answers. In the middle of the day, nobody is around here, nobody who will help him at least. Finally a woman answers.
“What is it, what’s going on?” she asks.
“My bike, the man in the white hat has stolen my bike.” He says, speaking into the crackling box outside the gate.
The woman gasps, and the electric gate swings open. When she comes out of the house, he is sitting on the grass, shaking.
“Where is he, what man took your bike?” she asks.
“He went down that way, toward the camp near the N2,” he says. “He’s wearing a floppy white fisherman’s hat.”
“Come, let’s go look for him, you can show me what he looks like.” The woman’s lips are white, she holds him tight as they walk to her car. The electric gate swings closed behind them as they pull onto the road and head towards the camp. The young man has gone quite far, but Courtney yells out when he sees him. This street is short, running between the sides of houses, no escape but forward or backward.
“That’s him? That’s your bike?” the woman asks as she accelerates.
“Yes,” he says.
“Ok, hold on.”
The young man is walking on the road, but steps onto the grass verge when he hears the car’s engine behind him, and glances back. Seeing the boy leaning out of the window, he drops the bike and starts running. The boy expects that the woman will stop at his bike, that is all he wants, but she keeps going, closer and closer to the young man.
“What are you doing?” he asks her, gripping the sides of his seat.
“This one’s going to jail,” she says. “I’m sick and tired of it. How old are you?”
“I’m ten, eleven in November – but how are you going to catch him?”
The woman doesn’t answer, and they’re on him. The car catches his left leg, and he spins and falls in the street, and doesn’t get up. He lies silently shaking. One of his shoes lies far ahead of him. The woman calls the police on her car phone and they are there in minutes. They take the boy to the squad car, a BMW 3 series painted yellow with blue stripes, and he sits in the back. The woman explains what happened, the police tie his bike to the top of their car. The boy knows the young man needs to go to the hospital, but he is pushed into the small trunk of the BMW instead. On the drive back to his house, the boy and the young man are only separated by the seat back, and the boy hears the young man groaning in the back, and winces every time they hit a bump in the road. The police show him the young man one more time, to verify his identity. His agonized face is still in his mind: the eyes still glittering hatred. The police give him information for his parents and leave for the woman’s house. He stands at his gate for a long time, leaning on his bike. It is getting dark when he steps up and presses the intercom button and his sister opens the gate and lets him in. He doesn’t put his bike away. He leaves it just inside the gate, hidden from the street behind the wall that is topped with barbed wire and electric fencing.