The Man Behind the Gun Arushi Raina

The Man Behind the Gun
Arushi Raina

He likes returning to a neat bed, not a woman. There never really was a woman besides his grandmother, his gogo, a fine talkative lady, popular with her neighbors. She presides over his fortunes, the shells of cars and ghosts of them, parked alongside the shack. A queen. But then she knows how to preside; she was once the daughter of a chief. The children of hers that were left, after all the protests and the protest-funerals, sickened and died. Now there is just one man in her house, with no family to come.

Eight in the evening, after he has eaten his gogo’s dinner, Tatenda slips his fingers under the mattress and takes out the gun. He loads it and shifts the barrel back. A heavy, familiar click. He straightens the blanket across the thin foam mattress. Then once more. Since he was eighteen, since the time Tata Mandela came to power, Tatenda has practiced stealing cars. Now he is thirty-five, Mandela is dead. He has perfected his routine.

Even though Tatenda does not have a woman, people tell him he is a handsome man. He has small slanted eyes under a large forehead, a forehead worthy of army generals, emperors. When he was a child he toppled under its weight. But he has learned to carry it now. It gives him seriousness that can be read as sincerity in desperate moments. Once, after he’d taken an old white lady’s heirloom ring, she’d taken courage from looking at his forehead and asked: Why do you do this? And he’d said, it was his living, his job. And the old lady believed him because it was true.

Tatenda picks up his faded Nike Just Do It sports bag. Inside: tape, garbage bags, scissors, gloves, the ends of woolen stockings with holes cut for eyes. He walks out of his shack through the township; the gun is a comforting weight against his thigh, as he walks on the packed mud between his neighbors’ homes. Behind him, his partner comes: a short, lighter-skinned man, a Zulu like Tatenda, but born in the country. Together, they have stolen many cars. But Tatenda’s partner wants more than this: he talks about places he will never go, meals he will never eat. His partner dreams of living in a brick house every night. Now the house has a balcony and a jacuzzi. The partner says, one day, Tatenda, I will invite you to this house of mine. Tatenda never replies. His partner will never understand that Tatenda has no desire to leave this place, for all the fine houses he has seen. His partner will never understand the sacred permanence of corrugated metal sheets, because he was not conceived and born under them. Tatenda is thinking of getting rid of his partner, even after so many cars. His partner doesn’t know this.

In the evenings when they set out for their jobs, there is no one there to greet them or watch them go. Tatenda has learned to like the temporary quiet of eight-thirty, the lack of curiosity from his neighbors as dinner is eaten. Thousands of camp stoves burn, shuttered behind walls of scrap metal and brick. The smells are rancid and warm and he is glad to be reminded, again, of his gogo’s recent meal.

People only come when they drive back with the job done. They make their children ask questions. They like to see money and hear about the car and turn away when their curiosity is satisfied. Tatenda’s partner feels the injustice of this and gets into fights. Money spills from his pockets as he flays his fists. He tells lies about the cars they took. A Toyota will become a Lexus. He is a hot-blooded, unreliable young man. This job is not a living for him, it is a happenstance. Money runs through his fingers in days, and he is back at Tatenda’s door, urging them to go on another job. The partner thinks it is like plucking fruit from a tree—a tree that is always in season.

Even to his neighbors, the job is a simple thing. They say Tatenda and his partner choose cars like picking injured deer from the herd. But the process of hijacking is delicate, complex. Tatenda doesn’t always choose the injured deer. Often he chooses his next car based on his recent memories, which have become a kind of lottery. He will pick out a combination he hasn’t seen in a while. Most recently, he has had the middle-aged man, the college students, the two old ladies who told him they were sisters.

They are coming closer to the city. Up on their hills, the buildings give off a dull glitter. Below, the cars circle them like beads in a heavy necklace. This time Tatenda chooses a man with a woman. The simple, classic combination. Their Mercedes is silver and perfect.

In the silent car with the radio turned off, Tatenda can hear his partner suck on his lip. “Mercedes C Class. V8. 5.5 litres. At least hundred thousand,” his partner tells him, even though Tatenda has taught him this language, the rapid black market calculations. It is a fickle dictionary and his partner has learned it fast, forgotten his teacher.

The man in the driver’s seat has an unusually round head. The wife’s hair is blonde, the shape of it like the outline of a bell. The backs of the man and woman’s heads don’t move throughout the ride. This is the sort of man that looks at the road, not his wife. Maybe a careful man.

The car turns into a smaller road. Its wheels roll gently to a street with tall, alien trees that obscure the moon. The houses are all in the Tuscan style, with elaborate, empty balconies and textured beige paint. There are no people on this street, and the other houses with their high walls will not see what happens next.

The car slows in front of a tall gate. Under the lights, the painted wrought-iron tips of the gate burn gold. There is no guard house, and the gates open when the car stops in front of it. Probably by remote. Good. All the gate cameras will pick up is a 6.2 black man and 5.6 black man with covered faces. Tatenda stops the car. The only thing he has to worry about is the panic button—when pressed, it will call a team of privately trained guards in minutes. His partner is already at the driver’s window, gun against the glass. This is a simple language the man in the car will understand. Lower your window. By the time Tatenda walks up to the front of the car, the window is lowered.

“Please. We don’t want any trouble,” the man says. Tatenda leans into the window. The man’s mouth trembles, and the spit on the bottom of his pink heavy lip moves too. Tatenda sees, next to the man and under the handbrake, the remote to the gate. He knows it includes a panic button, and even though his partner looks confident, Tatenda doesn’t trust that the man hasn’t pressed it. They have, at most, five minutes. Then the guards will arrive.  

“Get out,” Tatenda says. The car doors open on either side. The man gets out of the car first. The lights by the house gates shine down on him. They show how his skin hangs on his face in small fat pouches. His lips make a shadow on his chin.

The woman has still not come out, so Tatenda goes to the other side of the car. “Out,” he says, the gun in her face. The woman is bent over as she comes out. She is older than he had thought, with bleached yellow hair. She blinks, and her hands sample the air nervously, tracing shapes that don’t exist. When Tatenda puts a gun against her temple he sees that she is not so old. The skin is clear, tightened against the bones. It is hard to tell. Her eyes are outlined with blue liner, so thick that the grey-blue pupils look unnatural. She looks at Tatenda slowly, as if she cannot tell what he is.

He takes the woman’s bag. Her long painted nails release her clasp willingly. The bag smells of rust and perfume; inside, she has a small wallet, a necklace, a phone. They make a metallic sound as they fall in the tool bag. There are also pill bottles, earbuds and a blue plastic figurine. He tilts it in the light. The toy has small, precise teeth marks. The woman gives a small gurgling sound in the back of her throat. It is an ugly sound, the sound of a woman choking herself. The man doesn’t turn to look at the woman. Maybe he hasn’t heard this sound even though Tatenda has, and his partner has too.

Tatenda drops the toy back into the bag. Behind the woman, in the deep heavy leather of the car, is an empty car seat.

His partner has already collected the wallet, the remote, the cellphone from the man. But the man now hesitates over handing over the car keys. They are standing under the light and Tatenda’s gun is against the woman’s head and the man’s fingers are clenched around the keys and nobody moves.

“Hurry up,” Tatenda says.

Still the man does nothing. His mouth is still trembling. He looks at the place where the gun presses into his wife’s head with glazed fascination.

Tatenda pushes the gun deeper into the woman’s skull. Through the gun, he can feel the bone of the woman’s temple gently resist the cold circle surface of the gun. Still the woman makes no sound. And the man stares and stares and Tatenda pushes the gun deeper into the woman’s forehead until she is nearly unconscious. Tatenda might have to kill one of them.

Only a minute or two left. The woman’s body is still crouched forward; her weak eyes look up at him but don’t plead for life. They are too far away. But slowly, they come closer and closer as the pain reaches her. She opens her mouth, says nothing.

Then the man drops the key into Tatenda’s partner’s hand. His partner laughs happily. Even though Tatenda has told him not to laugh during jobs. Tatenda takes the keys and gets into the new car. The last he sees of the man and woman are their backs. The man walks ahead and the woman trails behind him. Their walk up the driveway to their large dark house is slow and clumsy. His partner climbs into the other car. They drive away fast.

Under his hands, Tatenda has two hundred thousand rand. As he drives, he feels the heat and smell of the man and the woman still in the car. The man’s sweat, the woman’s perfume. Under the perfume, nothing.

They must celebrate, his partner says, a drink, but not in the township, no, in the rich part of town where this car belongs. His partner says that parking the car here, next to other expensive cars, is the best place to let the car cool off for the next couple of hours.

“You’re crazy,” Tatenda says.

“Am I?” his partner says. There is a new challenge in his voice.

Tatenda says a change in plans means mistakes. But there is something desperate in his partner’s eye. His body is a barrier. He won’t be refused now.

They take off their balaclavas and leave them in the car. They walk into the restaurant. There is a painting of large red lips on the wall. They take a table under it. His partner keeps talking and talking, much louder than the others in the restaurant but Tatenda can only hear the other people. Tatenda sits down and looks at the lips; the small opening inside the lips is a strange mixture of yellow and green that he doesn’t understand.

The woman’s mouth had been paler than this, looser. She had nice teeth—teeth that had survived.

“See?” his partner is trying to say. “See? This is nice.” Tatenda can see the spots on his nose, black spots, darker than the rest of the skin, accumulated from years under the sun watering dying crops. “Bhuti—.” His partner leans forward. “This is something bigger than the other robberies you have taken me. Bigger. S-Class. Iphone 4.” And now he giggles loudly so the rest of the restaurant can hear him, know that he is not from here.

A black girl comes and drops menus on the table. She smells of chemicals. Too many smells here, of leather, perfume, cheese. Her eyes flick from Tatenda to his partner. It is as if she knows what they are.

“The man,” Tatenda says finally, as the smell is gone, as he finds a way to stop worrying about all the other men at the other tables with their gold rings and wine glasses, looking at him. “He didn’t want to give us the car keys.”

His partner laughs. “Yes, bhuti, yes. But we took them.”

“He wanted me to hurt her. He waited for me to do it.”

“Bhuti, he gave the keys in the end. That is what matters.”

“Bhuti,” Tatenda says in a quiet, angry voice. “You don’t understand anything.” And it is as he is saying this he sees that his partner’s eyes, after all this time, drop from Tatenda’s in shame. Respect is given where it is owed, and men like his partner are finally put, irreversibly, in their place.

His partner’s eyes drop to Tatenda’s hands which are on the gleaming white of the restaurant table, hands which are still wearing the black hijacking gloves that smell like the inside of the woman’s handbag.

~

Arushi Raina writes short and long fiction. She grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has also lived in Nigeria, Egypt, the UK and India. Her recently released debut novel, When Morning Comes, follows four very different teens in apartheid South Africa, in moments before an uprising that would change it forever. She studied English and Economics at Vassar College in New York, and currently lives and works in Vancouver, B.C. When she’s not writing, she enjoys travel, long car rides, and impassioned arguments.

Connie Lynn is a Mauritian architecture student in London, with a particular interest in photography and sketching. Light and shadows greatly inspire her, just like anything that relates to (!?) music and culture.