*
Sam tucked his knees under his chin, and turned from you to stare at the highway. The weather report said the rain was localized along the coast and it would be dry in the mountains. You would follow a road that, while longer and slower than the coastal highway, would take you up into the interior, away from wherever Bernard had been going. A backtrack and then a sharp turn north, over passes, heading towards your destination, which was at least twelve hours’ drive — but surely more in those days, in that truck, say sixteen hours to Ladybrand if you were lucky, and what then? There would be roadblocks long before you got anywhere near there. You thought it strange there had been none already, but put your faith in providence, knowing its unreliability.
You knew a town where you might stop for the night without attracting attention. In the dark, it would be easy to masquerade as Sam’s mother, even if your hair was fair and his dark. Lightning filled the sky behind you as the truck laboured up into the pass that would take you over the mountains and out of the storm. Oudtshoorn, the first town after the Outeniquas, was at least an hour away, waiting flat and feathery against the red soils of the valley.
Near the top of the pass you left the rain behind and were high enough to look back on the dark mass of cloud. Where the rain fell the earth looked black.
‘I want to go home,’ Sam whined.
‘Where is home?’
‘Woodstock.’ Frame and plaster houses, their paint flaking, with curtains made from old sheets in floral patterns, all faded from the low-swung sun. Inside, there would be the ubiquitous collapsing picture rails, holding cheap frames with family photos or pastel illustrations of gods and saints, mimeographed prayers, disembodied heads torn from dolls or icons, suspended in effigy over oily beds pushed against stained and cracking walls whose paper or paint had begun to disintegrate from the floor up, new continents forming in exposed plaster, glaciers pushing up from the warped floorboards. It was a place of houses inhabited but already half-abandoned by people only partially there.
‘But do you have a home any more?’ you asked, unable to say, I’ve killed the man who gave you a home, any home you have has been lost. ‘Do you have any grandparents?’
‘I have an aunt.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘Somewhere. Away.’
‘Away where?’
‘In the Karoo.’
You were trying to concentrate on the hairpin turns that forced the truck into a jack-knife waltz with the precipice. At each corner you blew the truck’s horn, terrified you might surprise a vehicle coming from the opposite direction. ‘Do you know the name of the place?’
Sam clutched at the door handle, bracing himself against the erratic movement of the truck. Beaufort West, he said, across the Little Karoo and beyond the Swartberge, black mountains that reveal their reddish-brownness only once you are on top of them. It was on your route, the one you were inventing as you went. There was luck in this, or perhaps no more than coincidence.
You decided to push on, grinding down into the valley and racing past Oudtshoorn, then rising again into the fertile ribbon of land south of the black mountains. You stopped for petrol near Kango, breathed the cool dry air and bought sandwiches and biltong from the shop. The two of you paused to eat, feeling for a moment like an ordinary mother and son on a holiday excursion to drive the seven passes on that dirt road made by convicts. And then it was time to go. Night was brisk and total, and you took the truck up the unpaved road of the pass, the lights picking out the precipice edge. Going slowly, you prayed to your body to make deliberate movements, be alert, know the curve of the road by instinct, sense how it would bend, know where it would end, because the slightest wrong movement, a flick of the wheel too far to the left, even a whisper too much acceleration, and it would be tickets for both of you. You could not look at Sam in those minutes. Time wound into a single moment of tension that unspun itself into all the years of your life. Your muscles ached, your head throbbed; Sam’s breathing drummed in your ears and the higher the truck climbed the more aware you became of the burden you had taken upon yourself by your own actions. He had become yours, you his.
(But how can we say that? You say in your last notebook, He is mine for now, I his, it has been silently agreed. We have not asked him. How can we presume to know his thoughts, to assume his consent?)
At the top, where the mountains levelled off, you relaxed for a moment, exhaled the breaths you had been holding, knew you would have to stop, realizing it would be suicide to navigate the hairpin turns winding across and out of those mountains at night. A stand of pines in the landscape of low shrubs and grasses reared up, darker against the sky, concealing a campsite with rudimentary facilities. You half-remembered it from our family holiday, when the four of us drove the passes in a state of anxious wonder.
A campfire was visible amongst the trees and you decided to take the risk. Keeping to yourselves, you would sleep in the truck. There were chemical toilets at the edge of the site, a hundred metres from the campfire, against which you could see a figure hunching. Waiting by the outhouse, you scanned the darkness for noises and movement, listening to Sam urinating and vomiting and the boom of an eagle owl, hoot HOOT, hoot HOOT, hoot HOOT. You called to Sam through the unit’s blue plastic wall.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes,’ his voice was wet and choked.
‘Do you need help?’ you asked, turning your back on the campfire.
‘No.’
It had the suddenness of an attack, the man appearing out of the night, silent, standing beside you, his head shaved, glistening, eyes pale and metallic in the dark. ‘Howzit?’ he said, casually offering his hand.
‘Hello.’
‘Are you okay?’ the man asked.
‘We’re fine. The boy’s sick.’
‘Shame. I have some medicine if you need it.’
‘That’s very kind.’
‘I’ll go get it. Wait here.’
You did not know whether to trust him, and were deciding to leave when a second man appeared, as tawny and fair as the other was hard and dark. A jackal and a lion. The first man returned with a bottle of tablets. ‘Do you have water? Good. He should take only one now, and then another in the morning if he’s not better. I’ll give you four,’ he said, handing over half what he had. ‘You can get others tomorrow if you need. You’re driving through the pass tonight?’