The Lion Seeker (44 page)

Carrying his tool box, he takes the tram home.

ALL NIGHT ISAAC HELGER
squeaks around on his cot. He reckons now this is a past failure coming back to get him. He should have handled this monster Oberholzer the first time, after what he did when he moved in here. Gone back after and sorted him. But you left it and now it's ten times worse. He gets up and paces. There's no other way—the man's come looking for him, jamming him in a corner.

He goes into the kitchen and gets a breadknife, the biggest knife they have, serrated and rectangular with a pine handle. He goes on out into the tepid air, the white moonsplash. Walks into the alley with the blade. No light in the window at the back of number forty. Halfway there he stops: time ebbs and nothing changes. He stands that way for maybe half an hour, maybe a full one. Then the back door opens and she comes out. He slips quickly to the side, hunkers down. She should not be here this late according to her old habits which he used to watch with such glazed and drunken avidity. On the other hand he can see in the ambient streetlamp gloom that she has her cigarettes as she always did and she's wearing the same blue nightie with the bunny rabbit slippers that scrape softly on the road as she crosses to the DeSoto. She sits on the running board, her long thighs and pale manly knees sticking up. Lights her cigarette.

Shadowed, the knife close to his chest, Isaac glides against the wall. Now he is close enough to study the waxen pale flabbiness of her flesh, the shoulders as wide as a man's and that face, horse-narrow, squeezed between pillars of straight sandy hair. When she blows smoke it's past her nostrils, bottom lip overlapping the top. She glances his way, he freezes. Her eyes shrink to dots, she flicks back a strand of that straight hair. So white she is, so waxen, as if glommed together out of soft Sabbath candles.

—Hey, she says. Someone there?

Isaac moves off the wall. —Shh, he tells this woman of Oberholzer's. He walks out, hears a faint buzzing from a lamp farther up the alley, the weak yellow glow fractured on the concrete. She doesn't move. He stands over her. Her eyes go up and down, she drags on the cigarette. —Ach, you.

From where he is he can't see the door. The skin down his side is crawling, a part of him imagining Magnus Oberholzer's eyes there, on him. He looks down at her, at the bread knife in his hand. Surprised to see how white the hand is around the handle, bloodless yet steady. He looks at her white throat.

She flicks ash at the knife. —What, you come to have another go at the tires? He told me all about that.

Isaac stands unmoving.

—Be my guest, she says. Her horsehead tossing sideways, the long hair flicking. —Think I care hey, not
my
tires.

As with motion, he has no words for this moment.

—What you staring me out for like that?

He has to crack through his tight throat: a croak, barely.

—What you ganna do?

—Give me a smoke.

She shakes her head.

—Give.

—No. Go buy your own. Then: —Everyone wants something.

—Give it to me.

—Of wat? she says. Afrikaans: Or else what?

He feels his pulses heavy in his neck. —Why?

—Hey?

—Why is he at my work? Why did he come there?

—You the one I should tell thank you that he does.

—Me?

—He was watching you always go off, your nice clean little uniform on, every morning bright early. Gold Reef Panel Beating there on the back all cute. That is what got him to go over there and ask for the job. He didn't like you thinking you better cos you work. All a you people. If you hadden kukked him off, he'd still be lazy at home all day.

—Me?

—Yes you, you. What you deaf also? He only went to work there cos a you.

—Jesus Christ.

—Ach, she says, and drops her cigarette and stands. The tower of her. —Know what? I don't even care what you do to the car. It's not mine this car. Nothing's mine. Go ask my ma-in-law, s'her car, if you want a fight. I don't even care.

She's so tall he is looking up at her, the tip of her slender horse nose. No tits to speak of, just nipples very pointy and clear under the thin blue nightie. A straight body with thick thighs and loose arse. She makes a flicking gesture, as if to send him onto the tires already, standing there with the knife out.

—Go inside call him and I'll wait here for him.

—Magnus? Man he so asleep. He's a working man. A smirk comes with the last words. —Thanks to you, boy.

—I'm not a boy.

—No, she says, her eyes dropping and rising. —I can see that.

She steps in close. Almost touching.

—Your husband, he says, and it's a wheeze, his voice, nothing more. He's such a scum. He's a bastard.

—Oh fuck
you
, she says. What you want here anyway? Hey?

He drops the knife at his side. So close she is. His arm rises slowly, slowly, with the drumming of his hot slow thoughts. It curls up behind her long head. Looking down at him, she smirks again. A toothless lip-pressed smirk. —Oright, she says. Oright. Lez try this. She tucks her cigarettes away somewhere in the nightie. But Yvonne, he thinks somewhere. Yvonne. Her mouth bends down against his. Yvonne doesn't matter, Yvonne is the cause of this, she deserves this.

He opens his mouth and stabs his tongue but she pulls back, a little. Again she brings her mouth in and again when he tries with the tongue she edges back. After a while he stops trying and they stand there, mouth almost to mouth, breathing each other. The pitch of her gradually shifts. Such a big woman: a kind of monster female. He is shocked to feel her wide strong hands gripping his arse. She turns him around to the dark side of the DeSoto away from the house and the streetlamp glow. She undoes his pants, so calm. They puddle to his boots. She pulls down the underwear and his cock snaps out like a bent spring released. She runs one fingernail along the back of it and his legs twitch and quiver. She curls her finger in the pubic hair and pulls until he comes up on his toes and winces. He feels so light and small beside her. She steps back and her hands go up under her nightie. She waddles, steps out of her panties. —Open your mouth, she says. Maak oop. Afrikaans, that language of orders: Open up.

He opens and she stuffs the panties in, past his teeth. —Yes, she says, almost hissing it. Yes, boy. Something seems to pop in Isaac's brain. Like a lightbulb full of sweet liquid. She slaps him and bites his neck then turns around and bends over in front of him, leaning on the car, hiking up the nightie around her belly. The arse is very white and round. She reaches up from under herself and takes hold of his cock. She pulls and he shuffles close with his ankles looped in the puddled trousers. His thing bumps the shadowed space between her white cheeks. She takes her hand back, he can see her straight hair hanging down, hears her spit onto her hand, sees her lick it like a cat. She brings it back, the touch hotslick now as if bleeding. Her long fingers slip over him loosely. She grips and slowly draws him inward, into the shadowed space, inside in, slow. A feeling like being peeled, the skin curling away to expose himself to her, nerve by nerve by nerve. It slips up his spine, shudders in his head, makes his jaw work against the soft wad of panties gripped there. When he feels the crinkly bush of his pubic hairs flatten against her flesh he puts his hands on the buttocks and pulls her apart and towards him and rams her and this is too much: his balls clench up and he spasms into her. She seems to stop, cautious. After a while he goes on. So much wetter now, opening, like a sodden flower to the uncaring sun. Fluid runs out and drips onto his thighs. He works calmly back and forth. Quite numb now but still hard as the steel tools of the shop. He starts to understand more of this: without the peeled feeling of the pleasure to overwhelm him he can think in the experience of it, a small measure of brutality in this detachment. He squeezes her soft white flesh, pinches and slaps it hard. He thumps on her back. It only makes her shudder, raises new sounds. He starts to club hard in her and the pleasure comes back and begins to climb.

Walking back afterwards he feels as he did when once he fell asleep in the Chains Park on Seimert Road and got sunburned all red. Waking up in the baked shell of himself. The shade a blindness after the shattering light, his skin radiating. This has some of that weak emptiness also; it had ended with her shocking him again by reaching up between her legs to jerk herself to a spasm like a man. He had not known it was possible like that, so raw. She told him she could not have babies; the risk hadn't remotely occurred to him. In the backyard he uses the whispering tap to wash his cock and balls in the cold water, over and over. Washing her juices from his privates as he once washed her husband's piss from his face. Dirt from dirt people. It's only then that he realizes he still has her chewed panties between his teeth.

 

In the morning he has an appetite for the French toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar that Mame sets in front of him. As she serves him she is listening to Rively translating the news on the wireless, a report about a big agreement signed now between Stalin and Hitler, the Communists and the Nazis getting into bed together, agreeing not to attack each other, which nobody seems to be able to understand as they're supposed to be such enemies. He tells his sister to send his regards to Comrade Yankel, look at what nice friends these commies are fond of making. For once she doesn't snap back at him but seems quiet and shocked so that he touches her back on the way out.

He whistles in the street. He slept well and the calm and ruthless feeling that he awoke with is still with him. When you make a proper decision. A machine feeling: cold and driving.

It stays in him as he carries his toolbox onto the tram. Someone he knows says hello and he ignores him. Walking up on Marshall Street he can see the front garage door is open knee high and he can hear the sound of banging and the angle grinders, see the flickering whiteness jerking shadows from the oxyacetylene torches.

Inside is the petrol smell, the warmth. He goes across to Miller and Miller looks up. —You need to go talk to boss.

Isaac looks at him. —What now?

—Listen, Isaac, I've just had enough. I don't care what you are. But this is a job.

—What I
am?

Miller turns back to his work. Isaac goes to the office where Labuschagne tells him he is going to fire him. He doesn't want to hear what Isaac has to say. Isaac stands there unwinded, unshocked. Calm in his mood of brutal numbness. Labuschagne says that someone poured a can of pink paint over Isaac's workstation, wrote the word moffie, that bad word of the many bad words that there are for homos. Jack Miller had to clean it up first thing but a lot of the okes already saw. —You know how bad it is for the shop to have this kind of thing. It makes everyone unhappy, ay. I can't have it.

—Oberholzer, Isaac says.

—Hey?

—It's Magnus Oberholzer. Your new mechanic. You know it, I know it, everyone knows.

— . . . He's a good mechanic. What's your proof?

—He hates my guts.

—Why?

—Cos in Doornfontein, long time ago, we had some aggro. It goes back.

Labuschagne rubs his chin. He lights a Van Riebeeck. He does not have to say what Isaac knows: a mechanic, especially a good one, is worth more than any apprentice class A panel beater in this shop or any. So Isaac says,—Am I really finished, Franzie, or what?

Labuschagne clicks his jaw from side to side. —Dunno man. You started so good. I thought you ganna be one a the best. I dunno. He shakes his head. —Ja, nee. Can't have this . . . Alls I can say, uhkay, try to sort it with Magnus. He not such a bad ou hey. Try and sort it with him. Otherwise . . . He shakes his head.

—Otherwise I'm out.

— . . . Sort it oright? Try to go back to how you was before. I'm not ganna fire anyone today oright. But Isaac, it can't go on.

Isaac nods. He knew this himself; he's already decided. He works through the morning in the shell of his resolution. He doesn't have to look over to where Oberholzer is working on a brown six-cylinder Plymouth to feel that presence. When it's almost lunchtime he breaks early—Miller says nothing—and puts a roll of masking tape in his pocket, a handful of panel screws. Some bag dollies, a wedge.

In the toilet stall he strips off his overalls, his shirt. He pulls off a length of tape then pierces a dozen sharp screws through it then tapes it around his neck down over the collarbone, the backs of the short screws cool against his skin. He adds more layers of tape, some criss-crossing, packing it solid. Then he puts his foot up on the toilet and hikes the trousers. He moulds the bags of shot, the dollies, against his shin and tapes them in place. He takes off his boot and fits the wedge at the top of his foot, tapes it there and loosens the bootlaces and pulls the boot back on and tightens the laces over the bulge of the steel pressing up under the tongue. He puts his shirt back on carefully. Pats himself, bounces, to make sure all is firm. The last thing he does is check his pocket under his overalls for the thing that he put there this morning, that he brought with him from home, token of his calmly determined state. He moves it to an outer pocket.

 

Lunchtime is starting, the men peeling slowly away from their jobs, their stations. The clanging and shrieking slowly falling off to voices. Through this, Isaac walks. He stops fifteen feet away from the man who is wiping his huge hands on a rag, sitting on a bench.

He sucks his lungs full: —Oberholzer!

Magnus Oberholzer straightens up, the dense moustache across the wide face, a neck like a tree stump sunk into the pack of the heavy shoulders so wide in the tan overalls, a belly over thick knees. He gives Isaac that smirk of his, the lips prodding forward.

—You been telling people I'm a queer!

—Is that what you are hey. I diden even hear that.