DEATH OF THE UNO
By about eleven I'd had enough. I had to escape to find some shade. I drove east along the beachfront and scoured the area for a likely spot where I could pull over; but all I saw were hot carparks and crowded shopping centres. The traffic snarled around me, gnawing at my frayed nerves, and the glare coming off the sea lanced constantly into my skull. The Uno sounded awful when I slowed down, but once I got a bit of speed going it settled into a sort of ragged rhythm. The freeway to Durban suddenly opened up in front of me and without thinking I slotted into it. I felt huge relief to just be driving on the open road again - even if it was in a car that might explode at any second. I felt bad about leaving Brian behind, but I figured he would understand when I gave him a call on my cell later.
I barreled past Grahamstown, my nerves plugged into every farting backfire and squeak the Uno made. I barely registered the passing scenery as the tar unreeled between my white knuckles in a sort of tense tunnel vision. Now and then there would be a bowel twisting clunk as some loose part got sucked into moving parts. The Uno would lurch and the engine would bind and cut off, swooping silently, with me palpitating sickly behind the wheel, towards the bottom of a grim ravine. At the last moment, as I was trundling to a stop in the dip and four or five ragged black men were emerging helpfully from the bushes, the engine spat the part out, the freed parts clunked back into motion, and the Uno crawled up into daylight again.
After this had happened a few times I began to feel charmed: not for me the frettings and faffings of normal folk. Just sommer put foot, it'll all work out! I slowed down going through King William's town and saw smoke bellowing out of the exhaust in white clouds, where it had been wispy before. Not good. Africans on the roadside pointed at me and laughed, 'Aish! Too much smoke!' I was tempted to hunt down a mechanic. But after discovering I was the only white man in town I put my head down and aimed for the horizon again. In a perverse sort of way I was actually enjoying this. I was living on the edge!
This feeling lasted until the Uno actually did die, suddenly and completely, on top of a lonely hill in the middle of nowhere. The next town on my CNA map read Gomka, which didn't sound promising. I was either in the Transkei or right on the border of it. There was no dramatic implosion or heart-rending death rattle when the Uno died. It was like pushing a donkey until its heart bursts. The engine just stopped in mid beat and never started again.
It was now almost four. I left the Uno partially in the shadow of cold stone quarried walls, where the road sliced through the top of the hill, and walked down into a green sunlit valley. At the bottom, amazingly, I found a dirt road concealed behind a row of trees which led to a large, homely looking stone farmhouse. I free-wheeled the Uno down the hill and parked it at the entrance to this dirt road. Then I walked with Spud and stood at the peeling wooden gate of the house, trying to spot any dogs before I knocked on the closed door. There was an overturned red tricycle on the front porch but the shuttered windows were closed and blank looking. Behind me someone coughed politely and an old black farmhand came silently onto the road from an adjoining field. He informed me more with hand gestures than with his limited English that the Baas had taken the family to East London for the weekend. If I waited Dennis, the other Baas, would be home around five.
Dennis was a retired old gent in his seventies who rented a small cottage on the farm. He was small and slim, with sharp, weathered features and brown sun blotches on his cheekbones.
He'd been out doing his monthly shopping. I helped carry the grocery packets from his bakkie to the cottage. His stroppy brown and white fox terrier fussed around our legs, so to be I took Spud back to the Uno and left him there looking aggrieved, his snout protruding from the half open window.
I looked in Derek's Yellow Pages and used his landline to phone a towing company in East London. Five hundred rand for a tow-in. Fine. After the day's drive I felt surrealistically detached from everyday concerns like money. Dennis made me tea and showed me photographs of his kids and his dead wife. He had grown up in this area, and I suppose he'd come back to quietly see out his days here. In his neat but sparsely furnished lounge there was no tv. An old radio-turntable combo with a walnut veneer droned the news from a local radio station. The only books I saw were a row of green, hard-backed Reader's Digest Condensed Novels on a chipboard shelf on the wall. After tea we said our goodbyes. He went up to the farmhouse to feed the cats and dogs and I walked to the Uno to await the tow-truck.
Half an hour later there was still no sign of it. Derek wandered down and we stood in the twilight together. He invited me to stay the night if the truck didn't arrive. He said it casually, but I sensed beneath this his lonely isolation and his need for company. I was ready to accept, because the driver of the truck kept phoning his control room for directions. The control room in turn kept calling my cell, which I kept handing to Derek so he could say, "No! You get to Gomka and then turn left - left - at the big yellowwood.' It somehow felt perfectly natural that this truck should be careening around every country back road except ours. Because of the valley we were in night came quickly. Just as the last bit of light was bleeding from the sky the truck roared up with its lights blazing. Not just any truck mind you. An eighteen wheeler behemoth that you could have stuck a crane on. Three coloured men leapt out and went to work. A ramp with what looked like an eighty degree slant was extended from the back of the truck. A cable was hooked to the front of the Uno and Spud and I were asked to take our seats. Then, the cable twanging dangerously, we were winched up.
At the top the coloured men did some sort of strapping around the wheels that felt extremely perfunctory. Wait a second! I wanted to yell. Are you sure that's going to hold? But there was no time for these questions. They clambered noisily up into the front cabin while I waved nervously at Derek. He waved back, laughing.
As we got going Spud took one look out the window and curled up miserably on his seat, sensing death. Whenever a car passed us on the narrow potholed road into East London I saw upturned, laughing faces. This didn't happpen too often though, because the driver fucking floored it. Every now and then, after a really vicious pothole say, or a curve that came out of the dark too quickly - as curves do when you're humping along at 140 kph in a big truck on a narrow, winding road - every now and then one of his mates turned to look back to see if we were still there. Aay Jan, we lost the white oke on the last bend ... This was a very good time to have a stout; but after weeks of dedicated daily drunkeness I was fresh out.
To add to my well-being, since the Uno was pulled down on its suspension every bump we went over was transmitted to my arse with enough force to slam my head into the roof. Even when I got wise to this it kept happening. I'd be peering in an exhausted dwaal at the last flicker of flaming orange on the horizon, thinking, Ooh, isn't that prett - thwock! Each time it took a while to prize my head out of my shoulders, cursing miserably, while Spud flicked me reproachful looks from the ball he'd curled himself into on his seat.
I barreled past Grahamstown, my nerves plugged into every farting backfire and squeak the Uno made. I barely registered the passing scenery as the tar unreeled between my white knuckles in a sort of tense tunnel vision. Now and then there would be a bowel twisting clunk as some loose part got sucked into moving parts. The Uno would lurch and the engine would bind and cut off, swooping silently, with me palpitating sickly behind the wheel, towards the bottom of a grim ravine. At the last moment, as I was trundling to a stop in the dip and four or five ragged black men were emerging helpfully from the bushes, the engine spat the part out, the freed parts clunked back into motion, and the Uno crawled up into daylight again.
After this had happened a few times I began to feel charmed: not for me the frettings and faffings of normal folk. Just sommer put foot, it'll all work out! I slowed down going through King William's town and saw smoke bellowing out of the exhaust in white clouds, where it had been wispy before. Not good. Africans on the roadside pointed at me and laughed, 'Aish! Too much smoke!' I was tempted to hunt down a mechanic. But after discovering I was the only white man in town I put my head down and aimed for the horizon again. In a perverse sort of way I was actually enjoying this. I was living on the edge!
This feeling lasted until the Uno actually did die, suddenly and completely, on top of a lonely hill in the middle of nowhere. The next town on my CNA map read Gomka, which didn't sound promising. I was either in the Transkei or right on the border of it. There was no dramatic implosion or heart-rending death rattle when the Uno died. It was like pushing a donkey until its heart bursts. The engine just stopped in mid beat and never started again.
It was now almost four. I left the Uno partially in the shadow of cold stone quarried walls, where the road sliced through the top of the hill, and walked down into a green sunlit valley. At the bottom, amazingly, I found a dirt road concealed behind a row of trees which led to a large, homely looking stone farmhouse. I free-wheeled the Uno down the hill and parked it at the entrance to this dirt road. Then I walked with Spud and stood at the peeling wooden gate of the house, trying to spot any dogs before I knocked on the closed door. There was an overturned red tricycle on the front porch but the shuttered windows were closed and blank looking. Behind me someone coughed politely and an old black farmhand came silently onto the road from an adjoining field. He informed me more with hand gestures than with his limited English that the Baas had taken the family to East London for the weekend. If I waited Dennis, the other Baas, would be home around five.
Dennis was a retired old gent in his seventies who rented a small cottage on the farm. He was small and slim, with sharp, weathered features and brown sun blotches on his cheekbones.
He'd been out doing his monthly shopping. I helped carry the grocery packets from his bakkie to the cottage. His stroppy brown and white fox terrier fussed around our legs, so to be I took Spud back to the Uno and left him there looking aggrieved, his snout protruding from the half open window.
I looked in Derek's Yellow Pages and used his landline to phone a towing company in East London. Five hundred rand for a tow-in. Fine. After the day's drive I felt surrealistically detached from everyday concerns like money. Dennis made me tea and showed me photographs of his kids and his dead wife. He had grown up in this area, and I suppose he'd come back to quietly see out his days here. In his neat but sparsely furnished lounge there was no tv. An old radio-turntable combo with a walnut veneer droned the news from a local radio station. The only books I saw were a row of green, hard-backed Reader's Digest Condensed Novels on a chipboard shelf on the wall. After tea we said our goodbyes. He went up to the farmhouse to feed the cats and dogs and I walked to the Uno to await the tow-truck.
Half an hour later there was still no sign of it. Derek wandered down and we stood in the twilight together. He invited me to stay the night if the truck didn't arrive. He said it casually, but I sensed beneath this his lonely isolation and his need for company. I was ready to accept, because the driver of the truck kept phoning his control room for directions. The control room in turn kept calling my cell, which I kept handing to Derek so he could say, "No! You get to Gomka and then turn left - left - at the big yellowwood.' It somehow felt perfectly natural that this truck should be careening around every country back road except ours. Because of the valley we were in night came quickly. Just as the last bit of light was bleeding from the sky the truck roared up with its lights blazing. Not just any truck mind you. An eighteen wheeler behemoth that you could have stuck a crane on. Three coloured men leapt out and went to work. A ramp with what looked like an eighty degree slant was extended from the back of the truck. A cable was hooked to the front of the Uno and Spud and I were asked to take our seats. Then, the cable twanging dangerously, we were winched up.
At the top the coloured men did some sort of strapping around the wheels that felt extremely perfunctory. Wait a second! I wanted to yell. Are you sure that's going to hold? But there was no time for these questions. They clambered noisily up into the front cabin while I waved nervously at Derek. He waved back, laughing.
As we got going Spud took one look out the window and curled up miserably on his seat, sensing death. Whenever a car passed us on the narrow potholed road into East London I saw upturned, laughing faces. This didn't happpen too often though, because the driver fucking floored it. Every now and then, after a really vicious pothole say, or a curve that came out of the dark too quickly - as curves do when you're humping along at 140 kph in a big truck on a narrow, winding road - every now and then one of his mates turned to look back to see if we were still there. Aay Jan, we lost the white oke on the last bend ... This was a very good time to have a stout; but after weeks of dedicated daily drunkeness I was fresh out.
To add to my well-being, since the Uno was pulled down on its suspension every bump we went over was transmitted to my arse with enough force to slam my head into the roof. Even when I got wise to this it kept happening. I'd be peering in an exhausted dwaal at the last flicker of flaming orange on the horizon, thinking, Ooh, isn't that prett - thwock! Each time it took a while to prize my head out of my shoulders, cursing miserably, while Spud flicked me reproachful looks from the ball he'd curled himself into on his seat.
posted by Krisstoffel at 7:03 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home