THE JUNGLY, TANGLY BUNDU Zane and Jamani and I spend our days exploring is no Oxford. Once we go beyond the fence, caracals or jackals may slink out of the tall grass. A boomslang may drop out of a tree and fang us dead.
I have an assegai, a javelin from my father’s Pretoria school days. Zane and Jamani have catties. Jamani is so skilled with a cattie he can pot weavers off the telegraph wires. But my father gets cross if Zane or I kill weavers.
– You don’t find something beautiful in the world often enough to kill it, he says.
Starlings we may kill. That is another thing.
My mother, being a woman, does not see that killing pesky starlings is not the same as killing weavers. My father laughs at her, and we boys do too. My mother is funny that way. She believes flowers have feelings, and ears. Sometimes she sings to them, or leaves the radio on for them when she is out. She forbids Zane and me to hammer nails into the old jacaranda, as if it might bleed.
Zane and Jamani and I discover the skeleton of a dog down a dry well in the forest. Patches of hair still cling to the bones.
When we tell Jonas, he says:
– That dog was the box dog of the young baas.
I wonder if the dead skeleton down the shaft, the shadow of the Box I loved, heard me calling his name when I searched far and wide. Maybe his yelps fell just short of my dull, human ears.
Beyond the well, deeper in the forest, Zane and Jamani and I find an abandoned motorcar, stripped of wheels and seats and doors. Lizards and scorpions skitter through its rust husk. The windshield is cracked, but still in place. We stone the glass and it fans into cobwebbed veins before caving in. Then we stone the headlamps. A motorcar that once whizzed along the open road, heading somewhere, is now an eyeless, dented shell, abandoned in the bundu.
I imagine James Dean’s head flying through the windshield of his Spyder. While Zane and Jamani pick up broken glass, play-play diamonds, my yellow daydream-haze fades. I see bits of glass as bits of glass. The javelin is just a javelin, no assegai.