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He limped to the refrigerator, which was also about half the size of the one he’d had up in the States. Even though the flat was tiny, he was panting by the time he got there. He’d never win a footrace, not after the Lizards had shot him in the leg and in the chest during the fighting in Colorado. He supposed he was lucky nobody’d amputated that leg. He would have been a lot more certain had keeping it not meant living in pain every day of his life since.
One way or another, he did what he could to ease that pain. He took a Lion Lager out of the icebox and popped off the lid with a churchkey. At the hiss, Penny called, “Bring me one of those, too, will you?”
“Okay,” he answered. His Texas drawl contrasted with her harsh, flat Kansas tone. Here in South Africa, they both sounded funny. He opened another beer and carried it out to Penny, who was sitting on a sofa that had seen better days.
She took it with a murmur of thanks, then lifted it in salute. “Mud in your eye,” she said, and drank. She was a brassy blonde of about forty, a few years younger than Rance. Sometimes, she still looked like the farm girl he’d first met during the fighting. More often, though, a lot more often, she seemed hard as nails.
With a sardonic glint in her blue eyes, she raised the beer bottle again. “And here’s to South Africa, goddammit.”
“Oh, shut up,” Auerbach said wearily. It was hot in the flat; late February was summer down here. Not too humid, though-the climate was more like Los Angeles’ than Fort Worth’s.
Auerbach sank down on the sofa beside her. He grunted; his leg didn’t like going from standing to sitting. It liked going from sitting to standing even less. He took a pull at his Lion, then smacked his lips. “They do make pretty good beer here. I’ll give ’em that.”
“Hot damn,” Penny said, even more sarcastically than before. She waved her bottle around. “Aren’t you glad we came?”
“Well, that depends.” Thanks to the bullet he’d taken in the shoulder and lung, Rance’s voice was a rasping croak. He lit a cigarette. Every doctor he’d ever seen told him he was crazy for smoking, but nobody told him how to quit. After another sip, he went on, “It beats spending the rest of my life in a Lizard hoosegow-or a German one, for that matter. It beats going back to the USA, too, on account of your ginger-smuggling buddies want you dead for stiffing ’em and me for plugging the first two bastards they sent after you.”
He had to pause and pant a little. He couldn’t give speeches, not these days-he didn’t have the wind for it. While he was reinflating, Penny said, “You still think it beats Australia?”
If she hadn’t burst back into his life, on the run from the dealers she’d cheated, he would still be back in Fort Worth… doing what? He knew what: getting drunk, collecting pension checks, and playing nickel-ante poker with the other ruined men down at the American Legion hall. He coughed a couple of times, which also hurt. “Yeah, it still beats Australia,” he answered at last. “The Lizards wouldn’t have been happy shipping us there-as far as they’re concerned, it’s theirs. And even if they did do it, they’d have their eye turrets on us every second of the day and night.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I know, I know.” Penny plucked the pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and lit one herself. She smoked it in short, savage puffs, and then, when it was hardly more than a butt, aimed the glowing coal at him like the business end of a pistol. “But when you asked ’em to send us here, Mr. Smart Guy, you didn’t know it was gonna be nigger heaven, did you?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” Auerbach answered querulously. “How the hell was I supposed to know that? White men ran things here before the fighting. I knew that much. Tell me you heard a whole hell of a lot about South Africa in the news since the Lizards took it over. Go on. I dare you.”
Penny didn’t say anything. She stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one.
Rance used that pause to take a swig from the Lion Lager and to draw a couple of breaths. He went on, “I guess it makes sense, the way they did what they did. They don’t give a damn about white men and black men. And there are more blacks than whites here, and the whites are the ones who fought ’em hardest, and so-”
“So it’s nigger heaven.” Penny rolled her eyes. “You know what? Till the Lizards came, I never even saw a nigger-not for real, I mean, only in the movies. Weren’t any where I grew up. I didn’t figure it’d be like this when we came here.”
“Neither did I,” Auerbach admitted. “How could I have? You wanted to go to a place where people speak English as much as I did. That didn’t leave us a whole lot of choice, not to anywhere the Lizards were willing to send us.”
“Some people speak English-a lot fewer than I thought.” Penny aimed that second cigarette at Rance, too. “And a lot fewer than you thought, too, and you can’t tell me any different about that, either. At least in the United States, the colored people can talk with you. And they mostly know their place, too.” She got up from the sofa and walked quickly to the window of the third-floor flat. The stairs were hell on Rance’s bad leg, but he couldn’t do anything about that. Staring out onto Hanover Street, the main drag of Cape Town’s disreputable District Six, Penny gestured to him. “Come over here.”
Though his leg felt as if he’d jabbed a hot iron into it, Rance rose and limped to the window. He looked down and saw a trim figure in a khaki uniform and a cap like the ones British officers wore. The man had a bayoneted rifle slung on his back. “What did you get me up for?” he asked. “I’ve seen Potlako on his beat plenty of times before.”
“He’s a cop,” Penny said. “He’s black as the ace of spades, and he’s a cop. Almost all the cops in Cape Town are black as the ace of spades.”
“He’s a pretty good cop, too, by what I’ve seen,” Rance said, which made Penny give him a furious look. Ignoring it, he went on, “The Lizards aren’t stupid. They tried playing blacks against whites in the USA, too, but it didn’t work out so well there. A lot more smokes than white men here, and I guess the South Africans treated ’em worse than we did our colored fellows. So they’re happy as you please, working for the Lizards.”
“Sure they are. You just bet they are,” Penny snarled. “And now they treat us like we was niggers, and I tell you something, Rance Auerbach: I don’t like it for hell.”
Auerbach limped into the kitchen, opened another beer, and went back to the couch. “I don’t like it, either, but I don’t know what I can do about it. If you can’t stand it any more, I bet the Lizards would fly you back to the States after all. By now, they’ve probably figured out you’d last about twenty minutes after you got off the plane. That’d suit ’em fine, I bet.”
She put her hands on her hips, looking, for a moment, like a furious schoolgirl. She sounded like one, too, when she wailed, “Look what you got me into!”
He was sipping from the Lion Lager. He started to laugh, and choked, and sprayed beer out his nose, and generally came closer to drowning than he ever had in his life. When he could talk again-which took a little while-he said, “Who called me out of the blue after more than fifteen years? Whose fault was it that I shot th
ose two nasty bastards? Whose fault was it that I ended up in a Lizard jail for running ginger down into Mexico, or in a Nazi jail for trying to get Pierre the damn Turd to quit running it out of Marseille? You know anybody who fills that bill?”
By the time he got through, he was speaking in a rasping whisper, that being as much air as he could force out of his ravaged lungs. He waited to see how Penny would take a little plain home truth thrown in her face. Sometimes she went off like a rocket. Sometimes…
He thought she was going to ignite here. She started to: he saw that. Then, all at once, she laughed instead. She laughed as hard as she would have raged if she’d stayed furious. “Oh, you got me, God damn you,” she said, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her checked cotton blouse. “You got me good there. Okay, I had a little something to do with getting you into things, too.”
“Just a little something, yeah,” Rance agreed.
Penny got herself a fresh beer, too, then came over and sat down beside him, so close they rubbed together. She swigged, set down the bottle, and leaned over to look into his face from a distance of about four inches. “Haven’t I done my best to make it up to you?” she asked, and ran her tongue over her lips.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Rance said evenly.
For a second, he thought he’d blown it and made her angry. But, to his relief, she decided to laugh again. “Well, then, I’ll just have to show you, won’t I?” she said, and brought her mouth down onto his. She tasted of beer and cigarette smoke, but he did, too, so that was all right.
The kiss went on and on. Auerbach brought up his hand and tangled his fingers in her yellow hair so she couldn’t pull back. Finally, he was the one who had to break away. It was either that or quit breathing altogether. She let his hand slide down to the back of her neck, where he started undoing the buttons on the blouse.
“Aren’t you a sneak?” she said, as if she’d never expected he would do any such thing. She took matters into her own hands, yanking the blouse off over her head. He undid her bra and grabbed for her breasts; she still had a hell of a nice pair. When she laughed this time, it was down deep in her throat.
