"See that guy?” Belchie asked. Pete’s eyes immediately found the towering figure of the devil, shaking hands with a few of the church elders. He wondered why Belchie was pointing him out. Did Rudie say something? Did everyone know? Pete rubbed his itchy right eye.
“Rudie?” Barend said.
“Yes, Rudie. I heard he shot one of his boys and buried him somewhere on his farm.” Belchie’s protuberant eyes seemed to grow with each passing moment, both in size and bulge, and his eyebrows were raised high on his forehead. The breeze passing through the open window tugged at his thick bronze-coloured hair.
“Ag; come on, there’s always some story about that guy. No one believes it any more.” Barend shook his head and moved away from the window. Pete slipped away from the window too and sat down, relieved that this was not what he had feared.
“This is no story.” Frown lines cut furrows across Belchie’s forehead. “I overheard some of the elders talk. That’s why they’re chatting to him now.” Belchie looked out of the window as if that would somehow affirm his statement.
“No, china, this is just like the time when he returned from Angola and people said he won some sort of medal for bravery, supposedly because he singlehandedly killed twenty terrorists with his bare hands. No one has ever seen that medal or read anything about it in the papers,” Barend said.
“Well, I believe it. My brother was with him at school until Standard Eight and he said the guy is a psycho. He once caught a pigeon and ripped its head off in front of a few Standard Six girls, just for a laugh,” Belchie said.
“Bullshit,” Barend replied.
“Okay, then tell me why he hardly ever comes to church, but today all the elders are talking to him? Hell, even the dominee is with him now. Check for yourself.” He motioned out of the window and Barend’s curiosity got the better of him. Pete remained seated.
Belchie and Barend stared out of the window for quite some time, trying to read the body language of the elders, the dominee and, most importantly, Rudie.
Belchie tapped Barend on the shoulder and gestured that they should sit down again. Barend followed his lead, but still had more than just a slight hint of scepticism about him for his classmate’s story.
Belchie leaned forward, waving Barend and Pete closer, then peered over his shoulders as if someone might overhear. He sat on the edge of his seat, waited for Barend and Pete to do the same, their heads close to one another. Pete didn’t know why he was doing this. All he wanted to do was sit in the corner and wish away time until he was alone again.
“The thing is—” Belchie whispered, rolling his teeth over his bottom lip and taking a quick peek over his shoulder again. He suddenly squinted, a seriousness about him. He wiggled his finger at the other two. “What I’m about to say stays between us, hey?” When he didn’t get a response, he half-cleared his throat, looked towards the window and then back to the others. “I could go to prison because I know this,” he said as if he was wholly convinced by his statement.
Barend threw his head back, made a loud puffing sound with his lips and shook his head.
“Genuine,” Belchie whispered, but Barend had had enough. He was just about to get up, with Pete grateful to follow suit, when Belchie said, “Listen, listen. If I didn’t hear this from a reliable source, I wouldn’t believe it myself.”
The look of unbelief remained on Barend’s face, but he sat down again, though this time folding his arms across his chest and sitting back, not leaning forward. Pete looked around him, thinking of some way to escape this. He did not know what Belchie had heard, but he didn’t like the sound of it. Just one ridiculous rumour could ruin him. His life over. For a fleeting moment he wondered if he should just walk out, go home, sleep until he was eighteen and could leave town. But he didn’t.
Belchie tilted his head sideways, pouted his mouth and whispered, “My brother told me.” He started nodding, as if that would make his statement true. “My brother knows; he is well connected. He hears all the stories when they drink at the Duchens over the weekends.”
“I wouldn’t believe a single thing that comes out of that place,” Barend said. “That is the dodgiest bar in, like, a thirty-kilometre radius.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Belchie said with great conviction. “That is the place where the miners, the farmers and some of the people from Dannhauser go to drink. All the stories in one place.”
Barend sighed, looking very disinterested in the conversation. “The farmers and the miners hate each other; they don’t drink together.”
“Why do you think there are fights there every weekend?” Belchie countered. “There are only two bars in the area, the Iscor Club in Durnacol – where only the people from the mine drink, you wouldn’t find a farmer within a kilometre of that place – and Duchens. So where do you think the miners who don’t want to drink with their foremen, shift bosses and the engineers go to drink? Where do farmers and people from Dannhauser go?” Belchie spread his hands. “There is only one place: Duchens.”
Barend looked disappointed at himself for being drawn into this conversation. He glanced at Pete, but Pete was sitting hunched over, staring at the brown carpet. “Okay, okay, fine,” Barend surrendered. “What is this big secret then?”
“Well, you are not going to believe this,” Belchie said.
Barend grunted. “Just get on with it, for crying out loud, man.”
Belchie started to laugh but swallowed it a moment later when he realised Barend wasn’t joking. Belchie was whispering again, barely audible, hunching forward even more. “Rudie,” Belchie thumbed towards the window, “likes to drink jungle juice, if you know what I mean?”
Barend looked fed up with Belchie and his story. “What?” he asked.
“Jungle juice,” Belchie said, slightly louder.
“What the hell is that?” Barend sat with his back arched, peering down at Belchie.
“Jeez, you guys are so wet behind the ears, you need to get out more,” Belchie said with a disgruntled shake of his head. “Jungle juice is—” he peeked over his shoulder again, “when a white guy goes fishing in a black pond.”
“Are you saying Rudie screws black chicks?”
“Uh-huh.” Belchie nodded and tipped his tongue against his bottom lip.
“Utter rubbish!” exclaimed Barend.
“It’s true,” Belchie retorted. “It started when he was in the war in Angola. Apparently a lot of guys did it, but Rudie got a taste for it. Now he likes to dip his dipstick deep into the oil.”
Barend made a vibrating sound with his lips and rolled his eyes.
Belchie wasn’t finished. “From what I heard, he has a thing for one of the maids on his farm. He goes to her khaya every time he has the urge. Let off some steam, you know.”
“Have you been drinking?” Barend asked.
“Listen, listen,” Belchie was desperate to keep Barend in the conversation; he could see he was really losing him now. “The guys at Duchens told my brother this maid who he was banging—”
“You mean raping,” Pete said. It was an inner thought that somehow crossed his lips. He was just as shocked as Belchie and Barend by his utterance; he had been completely quiet up until that moment.
The word “rape” lingered in his thoughts. His mind took him back to that warm January evening when Sarita was assaulted–violated. Even though they had miraculously stopped Rudie from committing physical rape, by that point he had surely already scarred her for life. And what makes it worse is knowing that nothing in this world could bother Rudie less. Because to him, Sarita wasn’t a human being. She was merely an object to quench his insatiable, deranged thirst. A wrapper to rip apart and cast aside once everything inside was devoured.
Belchie seemed to have lost the thread of his story, um-ing and ah-ing for a few seconds before his brain cast Pete’s interjection aside. “Yeah, whatever. The point is, she is married, and her husband was so fed up that he told some of the other workers that he was going to–” Belchie made a whistling sound while dragging his finger across his throat, “make sure Rudie didn’t touch his little woman again.” Belchie threw his hands up in the air. “It looks like Rudie got to him first. That is the oke who apparently got smoked. Now Rudie can drink as much jungle juice as he wants without some black standing in his way.”
Barend looked like he was about to say something, but Belchie beat him to it. “My brother says Rudie has this old revolver, that his grandad gave him, and he, like, sleeps with it; it’s like his wife or something. I bet you that was the murder weapon. If I was the police, I would check that out. And for splinters around his house.”
“Splinters?” Barend asked, more drawn into the story than he would have liked to let on.
“Yeah, you know, because boys have wooden brains. If Rudie blasted him through the head, there would be splinters everywhere.” Belchie burst out laughing, enjoying his joke immensely. Barend chuckled along, more at Belchie than the joke.
Barend got up and walked to the window, studying the scene below, but not sticking his head out.
“Well, there is a nervousness about Rudie. But that doesn’t mean a thing. Maybe he’s just embarrassed because the dominee asked him why he wasn’t in church more,” Barend said.
“Think what you want, I only know what I heard,” Belchie said.
Barend pursed the corner of his mouth and raised an eyebrow. “So, your theory is that the elders and the dominee are helping him to cover up a murder, and what? Rape? Sex with a black?”
“Did I say that? Maybe they also heard the rumours and want to get to the matter of the truth.”
“Truth of the matter,” Barend corrected him like he had done so many times before. “And you said it, china: rumours, that’s all it is! Freakin’ rumours. They make that head of yours overheat.”
“Aren’t you curious? What if it’s the truth? What if this kind of thing happens all the time and he is like a serial killer or something with a massive graveyard on top of a mountain?”
“I think you might have watched one too many of those dodgy horror movies you like so much.” Barend walked back towards his chair.
“When he dumps you in a shallow grave, don’t come crying to me,” Belchie said, waving his finger in Barend’s face. “Check, Rudie’s dad has joined them. Things are going to kick off now.” Belchie almost hit his head against the windowpane as he tried to get a better view.
“Uncle Rutger?” Once again Barend’s curiosity got the better of him and he joined Belchie at the window.
“Yes, check. I tell you what, not many people scare me, but that guy, Uncle Rutger, jeez, he’ll make me leave skid marks all over my Superman underpants,” Belchie said.
“He looks exactly like the devil from the Children’s Bible, just bigger and balder,” Barend chipped in.
“I heard he once slapped one of his boys so hard that his skull shattered. To this day it looks like his face is going to slide off his head.”
“There you go again. Where do you get all this stuff? Is there some secret club you go to where people talk shit all night? S.T.B., the Shit Talkers’ Brigade?” Barend enjoyed his joke and turned to Pete for affirmation.
Pete sat quietly. He could see the two were talking, but their chatter was just a jumbled collection of sounds. Only when he heard the word “boys” did he feel a pinch in the back of his neck. He stared at a small crack in the corner of the stained-glass window. It was slowly growing; every week he could see the crack reaching further into the window, like cancer where death was inching closer.
“What do you think about this rumour, china?” Barend asked Pete.
Time must have passed, Pete didn’t know how long, his mind was still wholly occupied by the crack in the window.
“Did you step on your tongue or something?” Belchie added.
“Huh?” Pete said.
Barend turned to Belchie, head shaking. “Swallow your tongue! China, you must seriously sue your teachers. I don’t know what they’re teaching you at Donkey Tech.” Then he shook off the thought and returned his attention to Pete. “The rumour about Rudie? Good morning!” Barend looked at Belchie and the pair of them shook their heads.
“I don’t know anything about that guy.” Pete felt an immediate stabbing pain in his heart; he had lied to Barend again. To his face.
“In small towns, no one can keep secrets. If he did it, it’s just a matter of time before everyone knows. Mark my words,” Belchie said.
The other kids walked into the room, followed by Uncle Willie. Everyone took their places and Belchie snuck one last peek out of the window. Uncle Willie opened with a prayer, but Pete’s mind could only repeat Belchie’s words over and over again: “Just a matter of time before everyone knows. Mark my words. Just a matter of time before everyone knows. Mark my words.”