Lambert comes in from the back. He smiles when he sees what’s going on.
Then Lambert joins in too, wailing like a dog. He knows this game of Treppie’s, and he likes it. It’s a long time since they last played like this. He thinks it’s big fun, this game. If they carry on long and hard enough, then all the dogs will eventually join them. Martha Street’s dogs and the other streets’ dogs, until the dogs are crying all the way to Ontdekkers and beyond.
‘Ag Jesus no, you two, stop this now, just now someone calls the police again and then all hell breaks loose.’ Mol motions to Pop. He must do something.
Leave them, Pop shows with his hands, it’ll pass. That’s the quickest way, with the least pain and misery, is what he means. It’s like a clock’s alarm that you have to let run all the way to the end.
‘Oowhoooeee-oowhoooeee!’ wails Treppie.
‘Oowhoooeee-oowhoooeee!’ cries Lambert.
‘Ee-ee-ee-ee-eeee!’ wails Gerty.
‘Whoof-whoof-whoof-whoeee!’ shouts Toby.
Treppie comes slowly to his feet. Now he pretends he’s holding a microphone, swaying his hips like Elvis. He got a frown on his face like he’s hot for something but he doesn’t know what. Mol thinks she can guess.
He signals with his other hand to Lambert, he must join in. Lambert plays along. He’s also holding a microphone. Now they’re a duet. They’re singing the great sadness of dogs, to the tune of ‘Pass me not, Oh gentle Saviour’, stretching out the notes as far as they can.
It’s like they’re on stage, Mol thinks. Now all they need are some lights.
Treppie and Lambert signal to Mol and Pop to join in.
But they just sit and watch.
Treppie makes as if he’s pulling the microphone cord through his fingers, like he’s got the Elvis’ shakes. Then he pulls the cord out from under his feet, shuffling from one foot to the other.
Up and down the lounge he walks, like that Rolling Stone on TV the other night. He points a long finger up into the air. Lambert stands to one side with his eyes closed. He sways his body as he cries for the gentle Saviour that’s passing him by. His face is turned upwards like he’s waiting for rain on his cheeks after a long drought.
‘Bow-ow-owww-oeee!’ cries Treppie.
‘Wha-owwww-ooeee!’ answers Lambert.
Toby and Gerty provide the accompaniment.
Mol just sits. These two are working themselves up nicely again. Where will it all end tonight? There’s Treppie’s bottle of Klipdrift on the sideboard. Must’ve been at it since late afternoon already. She looks at Pop. No, he doesn’t know either.
But Pop looks like he wants to smile. He lifts his finger to one side, holding his head at an angle. She must listen, outside. She listens.
Oh yes, there goes next door’s woolly-arsed dog. Treppie says it’s a husky who’s got too much pedigree for Triomf. That lot next door also think they’re high and mighty.
Now Mol begins to smile too.
Pop points with his finger to the other side. There go the fish-breeder’s five Malteses.
Well, well. Here we go again.
The Benades have got Triomf in the palm of their hands again.
Treppie goes out the front door, wailing his Saviour song, with Lambert on his heels. Lambert winks at Mol and Pop, they must come too. They go and sit on the edge of the little stoep. It’s almost dark now.
Lambert and Treppie stand on the lawn, with Toby and Gerty between them. They’ve all got their noses up in the air.
Treppie and Lambert push up the revs.
‘Wild dogs!’ says Pop.
‘Jackals and wolves!’ says Mol.
Now all the neighbourhood dogs are crying, big dogs and small dogs, all wailing together.
Each time Treppie and Lambert let out a few nice wails of their own, they cock their heads to one side, and then they listen.
They stand facing each other, and when they start up again, they both take a deep breath, bend their bodies slightly forward, sag down a bit and then, as they take in air for another wail, tilt their necks over backwards, with mouths pouting up into the sky. As if they’re sucking the sound up through their bodies, from deep under the ground, from the hollows of Triomf.
Treppie learnt this game from Old Pop when they still lived in Vrededorp. Shame, Old Pop also just did his best.
Mol remembers, there were just as many dogs on that side.
That’s how Old Pop used to amuse them when he felt jolly. There wasn’t much entertainment in Vrededorp in those days, specially in their house. ‘You’re teaching the children bad things, Lambertus,’ Old Mol always said to their father, but even she couldn’t help smiling a bit.
Of the three of them, only Treppie really caught on how to make the dogs cry.
And now Treppie’s teaching Lambert. The way things are going, it looks like Lambert’s a natural.
Mol gets a funny feeling in her stomach all of a sudden, listening to the dogs crying out there in the dusk, near and far.
They’re in good form now. The dogs are almost at the point where they don’t need Treppie and Lambert any more. They’ve got their own front-criers leading them and giving them the notes, and the others pick them up and run with them, the high notes and the low notes and the ones in the middle.
The sound of dogs crying echoes further and further through the streets. Then, suddenly, on the western side, there’s a barking noise that sounds louder and different.
‘Those must be the pit bulls,’ says Pop.
‘Do you remember when Old Pop used to do this?’ Mol asks.
‘Jaaa,’ says Pop. Pop must be able to hear from her voice what she’s thinking. He always knows what she’s thinking, old Pop.
‘Shame, Pop,’ Mol says. ‘Who will Lambert teach how to make the dogs cry, one day?’
Pop has no answer. Mol picks up Gerty and presses her tightly to her chest.
‘Who, Gerty?’ she asks. ‘Who will Lambert have to teach?’
2. THE WITNESSES
It’s ten o’clock in the morning. Lambert feels hot. It should rain but it won’t. The sun-filter curtains, which he ripped down last night, hang over the pelmet in tatters, where Treppie chucked them afterwards. The window’s open, but the curtains don’t move. Yesterday it wanted to rain but it didn’t. Dust and flies swim around in the broad strip of sun slanting into the room.
Everyone’s in the lounge. It’s Sunday and they’re listening to the Witnesses of Triomf. A Boeing flies overhead and the house trembles. As the plane passes, the Witness who’s reading keeps moving her lips but they can’t hear a word she’s saying. Then the Boeing passes by and they can hear again. It drones further and further away. Must be heading for Jan Smuts.
‘“Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand”.’
Lambert tries not to look at the Witness as she reads. He looks at his hands, at the lines on his palms, his fingers and his three missing fingertips. They got caught in the escalator when he was six years old. He didn’t actually see Treppie doing it, but he’s always known it was Treppie who pushed him. On purpose. Now he lifts his head and looks past the Witness in the pink dress at Treppie. Treppie’s sitting on a beer crate, squinting at the big aerial photo of Jo’burg that hangs from the wall just above Mol’s head. It was on a calendar he brought home with him one day. Must’ve been another thing he got from the Chinese.
‘But it’s last year’s calendar,’ his mother still said. ‘What rubbish is this now?’
‘It’s for the picture,’ Treppie said, ‘so we make no mistake where we live.’ Then he took a hammer out of the toolbox and started banging a nail into the wall.