your legs are lopsiiided!” He pretends he can’t hear me, even though I know he can – he keeps glancing my way with his heat-projecting eyes.
Ahead of us, a girl walks into the train of Mama Moon’s glowing indigo dress. She walks like she’s asleep and dreaming. Loon Man calls out to her and she swings around.
“Sindi!” I yell, relieved to have found her, though for a moment my head is a fog of confusion as to how I lost her, if she was lost at all. I want to ask her where she’s been, but she’s focused on Loon Man. The air between them is tense. Sindi’s shoved her hands into her pockets and pushed them wide, so she looks bigger than she is. Looking at Loon Man, bent double, wheezing, hands flapping like dying fish, I wonder why she bothers.
Loon Man’s old. His face has collapsed in the middle like he has no teeth. A thin grey straggle spills from under his sooty trilby and sits unevenly on the shoulders of his trench coat. The coat gives him bulk, but his hands tell me that under it he’s skinny-skinny. Still, he’s tall, and his brogues are polished to a mean shine. What’s a man with nice threads doing walking the highway at night?
As his breath slows, Loon Man straightens up and the years fall off him. I frown, trying to focus on his face. It’s like watching a TV being fine-tuned, the screen warping back and forth. His face shifts through a lifetime – young, old and every age in between – but always his eyes remain the same. Hot cosmic eyes, deep as the moonless sky. His face fixes around sixty, but the shifting has left me dizzy. Loon Man slides a hand into his coat and Sindi cocks her pockets.
He smiles. “My child, I know you’ve got trigger fingers, but you don’t have a trigger. Still, I understand where you’re coming from.” His voice reminds me of Next-Door-Auntie’s boyfriend, too smooth for his mouth. Mama said Next-Door-Auntie’s boyfriend spoke like an American televangelist, and that all preachers were tsotsis, you could tell by the designer suit. I cut narrow eyes at Loon Man, to let him know I’ve got his number.
“I’m not going to hurt you, my child. See?” He pulls out a hip flask that glows in the lunar light like the embers of a dying fire. “Just something to keep warm,” he says, raising the copper flask to his lips. He knocks back a slug, shuts his eyes and shakes his head. His cheeks sound loose. “Church brew. Good stuff, blood of the Lord.” He winks and with a flick of his wrist offers the flask to Sindi. She draws her right hand from her pocket and holds it out.
“That’s fair,” he says, dropping the flask into her palm.
As her fingers close round it, she steps out of his reach. Sindi doesn’t trust men, not even Joe Saviour, whom we’ve known since we were four days old. She sniffs at the neck of the flask. Her nose wrinkles but she takes a sip. It makes her cough. She hacks until she doubles over. The flask tilts in her hand. A drop of Loon Man’s golden brew splashes onto the road. One for the King.
“Watch it, that’s the blood of Jesus.” He snatches the flask as Sindi spits. The snail slides off the toe of his brogue, leaving a glimmering trail.
Sindi holds up her hands. “Sss_asorry, mm_man, sorry.”
She backs away and I watch, wide-eyes, expecting his fist, but he just throws back his head and laughs. He laughs and laughs like it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened, gesturing at his toe with the open flask. He doesn’t spill a drop. At first, Sindi frowns at the sight of Loon Man playing the fool, but after a while his laughing catches and she smiles. I haven’t seen my sisi smile since . . . I can’t remember the last time. I hug my shoulders, wishing he’d stop. His laughing shakes me. It twists the world. It makes me fade and blur.
“Go away!” I scream.
The sudden silence throbs.
“We shouldn’t hang around, my child,” he says, pocketing the flask. “It’s not safe.” As he adjusts the lapels of his coat, the headlights of a passing car catch a copper gleam in his seams. Loon Man is a Believer, a tuned-in follower of the Black Preacher. “Joshua Piepper.” He holds out his hand and fires his name into the night. “First Disciple of the One True Church. Pure of blood, pure of spirit.”
“Loopy loopy Loon Man,” I jeer, motioning circles at the side of my head.
“Sss_aSindisiwe.” My sisi’s fingertips graze his.
He frowns as people do when they notice her stutter for the first time. “Sindisiwe,” he says, looking thoughtful. “Sindisiwe.” He repeats her name as if she and it are two pieces of a puzzle. Before he can fit them together, she turns her back on him and walks away.
“Where are you going, Sindisiwe? Wait. You don’t have to tell me. Looking at you, no offence, you look lost. You’re looking for a family. I’d say you’ve got no one – but seek and ye shall find, the Lord says.
“Tell you a secret,” he says when he catches up to her. “I can read people. It’s a gift. Praise the Lord for it. I look at you and I know, you’re heading for The Ascension. The Ascension of the Mothers for the New Mankind? Am I right? You know what I’m talking about.”
Silence.
“Okay, I understand, you’re nervous. And who could blame you, a young woman can’t know what to expect. You worry that you won’t be good enough. But I’m here to tell you, all God’s creatures are perfect, the Lord made you perfect and you are. Am I right, my child, you want to be saved?” He pauses and pats his heart. It takes me a second to figure out he’s checking for his flask. “Your name means saved. Sindisiwe, it means saved. Did you know that?”
They walk under an overpass. I hurry across the top, reaching the other side just as they emerge.
Loon Man is still jabbering. “I know I met you for a reason. The Lord sent you to me, so I could lead you to salvation. That makes me happy, for that is my purpose. Saving good girls and keeping them pure so they can be the Mothers for the New Mankind. So few untainted souls left in the world, so few.”
He looks up at me and frowns, as if remembering something. “You are pure? I mean, your blood, it’s clean?’ He clears his throat and answers for her: “Of course it is. I can see into people and in you I see a pure heart, pure blood, a pure soul.”
Sindi stops walking. She looks at Loon Man as if she’s only just seen him. “What did you ss_asay?” Her voice crackles like a badly tuned radio.
Joshua Piepper looks at the road. “I’m sorry,” he says, hunching his shoulders to ninety years old. “An old man can put his foot in it. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Sindi narrows her eyes.
“My child, if you’ve got the sickness, don’t worry. The Lord has a plan for us all, have faith . . .” He trails off, sounding disappointed. “The Lord has a plan.”
She kicks the ground. “Before, what did you ss_asay?”
“Before?” He shrugs. “I said you should join our church.”
She shakes her head, her hands balling into fists at her sides.
“Calm down, child. All I said was that you have a pure heart and soul, nothing meant to offend.”
She blinks and the darkness, lifted earlier by his lunatic laughter, comes crashing down. In the faint moonlight I can just make out her eyes. Dead eyes. Colder than broken glass. “Soul.” She exhales the word, so quiet only my twin ears
