The Lion Seeker (60 page)

He hunkers again and takes off his hat. Think it through. See what could happen; try remember what it was before and think what it'll be again.

After a time he takes out the twenty-two and holds it next to the hat and looks at both. Then he fits the little pistol into the sunken crown of the hat and puts the hat back on. Feels strange but it'll do. Let them call you a paranoid maniac after you walk out, fine by me. Can call me Kobus stuffing van der Merwe for all I stuffing care, long as I'm breathing. He looks over the edge and has a drink of water then goes on, the binoculars and canteen knocking together on their straps till he separates them.

 

The house in its Cape Dutch silhouette throws a block shadow forward away from the angle of the sun, the beautiful clear-scorching light of Africa. A shadow illusion of wholeness that beckons then degenerates, like nearing a woman with long hair from across a bar who looks beautiful and young but reveals herself to be more aged and haggard with every step closer.

Isaac sees the innards of broken walls, beams slanted to the ground. The thing entire as if kneeling in slowed motion back to earth like a headshot elephant. How resentful nature is, fierce in its destructions of anything that would try to rise and assert a shape first made in the mind of man, that would so dare.

He has to duck to enter. Bird wings slap in the overhead tangle of gloom slatted with breaks of sky glare; powder dribbles of thatch crust, splinters and rust everywhere. A steadier cooing as he goes, glints of outraged avian eyes blackly tracking him. The smell is moulder as of wet towels rotten and more faintly of woodsmoke and char. Floorboards all prised away, doors too. A shape scuttles left, rat or sand snake. He stops and tries to fit his memory of the staircase and grand room but feels all turned around in this cavern weirdness of crumbling things. Farther to the back, more light: guano as thick as carpet, a blackened firepit, yellow dried pages of some torn book and scattered green curls of broken bottle glass, ropy dried turds, some tin cans rustsplotched, jagged.

Curiously the rear door is still there, the brasswork long thieved but the door propped without hinges. He hovers there then reaches for the Luger then his hand stops. Don't depend on Nazi iron: the ill luck it might bestow. He bends and takes out the Webley instead. He climbs through a side window with care and goes forward bentover down the sandy semi-grassed slope to where the garages and living quarters for the men had been. Those he remembers in the car with the rifles and the bats at their feet.

It's deader than any doornail, mate. All this playing soldier for nothing but the lizards. Stupid. Maybe. He has that survivor nerve, and it keeps sounding in him like the alarm note of some plucked instrument overtaut.

He pokes his foot in the rubble and looks up. Those wisps of smoke over the near hills are no longer. He puts the revolver back in the ankle holster and marches on.

The light is tending to late afternoon green. Vast spaces of open veld. Distantly some flat-topped trees with leaves dark putrescent green in coloration, and closer in are the thorn bushes the Afrikaners call wait-a-bits for the way they like to hook a thorn in your shirt like some detaining finger urging you to linger. He passes the tall red pillars of anthills harder than any concrete. The flutter of a weaver bird near a nest shaped like a calabash. The male builds it for the female who'll peck it to shreds if it's not up to snuff according to the standards of her taste. A cicada starts to buzz that mind-drilling shrill in a grass thicket shoulder high. He wonders if there are baboons in this country. Strutting friends of the hills with scimitar teeth. But it's not the animals he's armed himself against.

The rhythm of picked steps in the gift of utter silence, motion of breath and rasping soles. It's not as if he has to call up the place in his head to find the way. He goes bodily, drawn. Finds the donga and climbs down to the salt white sand and follows it, along where once water, soft mystery, somehow cleaved this stony earth. Ahead the donga kinks left. He relaxes and his arms swing. When he comes to the turn there's a quick sharp whistle behind and above his left shoulder.

A VOICE SAYS
: —Jay man, you got yourself a licence or what?

He knows by the Coloured accent who it is before he starts to turn.

—Slowly slowly, says the voice.

He lifts his arms. —Can I turn round?

—What is it you scheme you are doing here?

Isaac pivots gently. —What licence?

—Trespass licence, meneer, says the man he knows is called Andre but cannot locate on the rock face. Seeing him only when he speaks again: —Big ears. Remember me?

Isaac nods. —Long time.

Andre comes off the ledge from his squatting: a lean hunkered man with splayed knees and a rifle in one hand, stock nestled in the hip, brown trousers and veldskoene and dark denim shirt with sleeves rolled up the forearms. The last time he had a suit and a homburg, now he wears a slouch hat of stained leather and there's grey in the curls that show under it. But the flat yellowed wrinkled face with those Asiatic eyes, the wide high cheekbones that speak of the blood of the Khoi or even San people, is still the very same.

As is the quicksilver motion of his slipping down. Isaac's heart pulses hard. His body now too remembering, how it was that day long ago when Andre stepped out and back and seemed only to touch that knifeman on the neck and how that gentleman fell and snored in the dust, his wrist like a wishbone for Andre's twisting heel.

Andre is lanky, lean of neck and more wrinkled there too, and as he crosses to hands-up Isaac, Isaac sees he's got a kit bag with a strap slung crosswise from the shoulder. He says: —This time is no visiting. Youse going to have to bugger straight off and not come back, hear.

—I hear, says Isaac. How'd you know I was in here? Been tracking me hey?

Andre snorts. —My mate, I diden need no track. You come in like elephants through a glass factory.

The man saying this with his hard eyes on Isaac all the time and his smooth strides bringing him in with the rifle levelled from the hip: a professional of violence, probably his whole life. Ja, but I been through a few things myself. A few little twists and turns that'd make the rest of his hottentot hair turn just as grey to even think of.

He's stopped in front of him, easy, telling Isaac as he once before did to put both his arms out. The same procedures a man will use, the tricks he stays with always if they work.

Isaac's arms rise and Andre keeps the rifle on him and pats with the free hand, draws out the Luger and whistles, tucks it into his belt at the kidney. —The other one, he says. Where that revolver hiding?

—Been watching me also hey?

—What you think? You not the only one with binocs.

—Why you still here man? Watching out for the man?

—There's no man, he's long gone.

—Then why'd you say visiting? Before.

He makes a clicking noise, his left hand busy at the back of Isaac's belt then starts to pat the thighs, to move down, squatting. —Don't be too clever for your own self, he says. Alls you do is turn round jump in that black car and you and your friend go back to Joburg. There's nothing here. Only me. And what is this?

His hand on the ankle holster. Isaac says:
—Don't you fucken move
.

Andre looks slowly up at him, calm. Isaac holding the twenty-two on his eye, hammer back. The rifle barrel is off to Isaac's left. —You quick, ja, says Isaac. But I wouldn't I was you. Put it down flat and turn round slow.

Andre appears to be studying not the little Astra barrel maybe four inches from his face but Isaac's eyes behind them. Reading them. Maybe there comes a little touch of hurt into his own.

—I wouldn't, says Isaac.

—Where'd that little stukkie come out from?

—My hat.

Chh: a guttural snort of a laugh. —His
hat
. I like that one. Man pulls rabbits.

—Put it down now.

—That what you been doing hey. Magician? All these years?

—I changed, says Isaac. You know I'll do it like nothing. Out here.

—Nothing changes. Was what you always was.

—Hu-uh.

—You just never knew it yet.

—Kuk. Things change. Lookit this place. You.

—Same underneath, says Andre. Just more true now.

—Put it fucken down, Andre. I'm serious. I'm asking last time for your sake.

—Man I wasn't ganna hurt you.

—I won't either. Why would I? I'm not here for you.

—I'm the only one there is here.

—Andre.

He nods very slowly, sets the rifle down to his right and Isaac steps on it without looking and Andre smiles faintly, sadly, and turns. Isaac tells him to lie flat, arms out, and he goes on his belly and stretches. Such long arms: a sallow bloodbone crucifix of a man on the white sand.

Isaac takes back the Luger, then gets his knife out and cuts the kit bag strap and takes it off him and throws it to one side.

—You didn't have to do that man. That's a good bag that.

—I'll get you nother one. You just don't bladey move one tick.

He steps away with the rifle—a Mauser, bolt-action—on the side where he can't be seen and tells him again not to move then puts down the rifle and makes a loop of slip knot on one short length of fishing line and picks up the rifle and comes back and makes him cross his wrists behind him. He snares the wrists and pulls it tight, keeps the rifle's muzzle pressed between the shoulder blades and, one-handed, winds more snare around the loop then tucks it between the wrists and underneath and draws it out, stepping back with the short length of it.

—You don't have to do all this, jong. You got the guns.

Isaac tells him get up.

—Careful you don't skiet me on accident.

—Don't you worry, says Isaac. I was in the war.

—Oh you were hey, says Andre. Well now that make me feel so much better.

 

A last turn and they go on and the dead end is there a few hundred feet ahead, the circling amphitheatre of natural stone as he remembers it, with one section of sheet rock to the left, pinkish in the light, rising at a shallow angle to a crest above, thin bands of differing colours undulating through its ancient grain. Isaac stops, jerking on the snare line to draw Andre up. He whispers: —Better tell me what's over the hump.

Andre's shoulders move. —There's nothing.

—Think I'm a Stupid?

There's a bark and Isaac looks up to see an orange short-haired dog with long legs and good muscles, a Rhodesian Ridgeback or a Boerboel, looks like. It barks again: hoarse echoing.

Isaac swears. —Nothing hey?

Andre whistles three quick times. The dog runs in, its tail beating like a lady's fan and tongue flopping. —Ah voetsak! hisses Isaac. Piss off, you chuzesa hoont.

—What you call him now?

—What he is. A chuzesa hoont.

—What that mean?

—Means he's a dirty thing like a pig and I might have to put him down in a minute.

—Ach don't do that man. That's only Chester. Just lemme sort him.

Isaac considers then steps back, tells Andre to kneel. Chester comes to him to receive soothing noises and awkward caresses from a lowered cheek and chin. Isaac steps on the snare line, slings the rifle, takes out more fishing line, starts to knot a new snare. Andre glances back. —You'll hurt him with that.

—Don't look at me.

—No man just leave him, he's harmless.

—And we get over there with him barking more and I get my head shot right off, congratulations.

—Nobody ganna shoot you man.

—Then who's there?

—Nobody.

Isaac has finished the loop of the snare. He clicks his tongue and the dog looks at him.

—Ach don't man, please.

—Like you just leave your dog behind. Like he wouldn't come with if there was nobody down there. Here Chester. Here.

—Ja-no, uhkay, there is, says Andre. There's someone.

Isaac waits.

— . . . Is only him. I promise you. Jus him.

—What's he doing there?

—You'll see. Things is different.

—If you here, the others must be also.

Andre shakes his head. —The olden days is long finished, if you haven't noticed.

—But not for you.

—Mister, he says. Alls I do is keeps a lookout for him now. He doesn't want nothing to do with anyone anymore, nothing.

—So what you looking out for?

—Maybe there's troublemakers don't like to forget, think they still like to want to find him. I deals with them if they do come.

—Like me, says Isaac, and grins to himself like a bared skull. He watches the ridge, considering. —Just him and you hey.

—Ja, that's the truth. Man, what you doing here? Are you here to hurt him? What for, man? He—

Isaac brings the rifle up. —Oright, stand. Let's go.

They go on again with Isaac holding the snare line behind the bound wrists, keeping the rifle on his spine. As they climb Chester runs circles, barking a little. There's cover to the left at the top—a column of reddish rock rising like a tree trunk—that Isaac steers him into. When they're in the shade of it, Isaac waits, watching the dog settle out on the ridge, sitting flat-arsed to cock its head to a scratching back paw behind the ear.

Isaac eases one eye past the edge of the rock. More of the thin upright rocks stand like trees sparse on the gradient. At the base of the crater there squats the great yellow mass with the vertical crack running three-quarters of its length to make uneven halves that once reminded him of mating elephants though he knows that it's called Lion's Rock. Before when he was brought here the land was bare of all but grit and wind and orange sunlight; but now built against this rock of the lion is an abode of sorts, a small hut made of corrugated metal with a slanted roof jabbing up the snub of a jagged-rimmed chimney. From the left of this hut there stretches a slant of canvas to tent poles, mosquito netting hangs to the ground and enclosed in it Isaac can see the backs of children sitting in two rows on the ground. He watches and makes out the legs of an adult near the front. He looks past the tent to where there is a windmill up on the higher ground of the far slope. A pipe runs to a tin-walled reservoir sunk at the base. A little farther along is a Ford truck.