The Lion Seeker by Kenneth Bonert

her weep before, never. The sight of it socks him under the heart. He wants to turn away then, to run; but he is also held.
    He thinks of Kaplan the coucher, touching his cheek at the place, saying of Mame,
You can forgive anything
.
    Mame, Mame, Isaac thinks, what is happening to you?
    Â 
    He walks off, a blank wildness in his mind. When he gets back, Mame is sweeping out the workshop. He opens the door and stands there with his pulses throbbing. She looks up. Big eyes, her voice tight: What’s happened?
    â€”Don’t worry, everything’s ukay. Everything’s fine.
    Where are they?
    â€”At shul.
    Then what are you doing here?
    He shrugs at her, shakes his head. The questions drumming in him are impossible to release, not in front of her, this live and watching presence, this mother of his who was just weeping so that her eyes are still a little pink-rimmed and to ask her might break into her heart again and make it bleed more tears. No, he cannot. Still, he tries to force it but his mouth only opens very slightly and only silence comes. He closes it, closes his eyes. Not now, he thinks. Another time, any other time, anytime but now.

5
    TRANSPORT IS RELATED TO CARS , a good business and easy to get into since all you need to start are some wheels. Think how Mr. Jackman began with one cart, not even a horse cart, a pushcart. Yes, trenshport is good: so Mame says, flexing him into a job with Morris Brothers Packers & Movers, Pty. Ltd.
    The Morrises have a compact warehouse on Jeppe Street in town and three battered Chev trucks. One brother, Sol—tall, thin, mellow—runs the warehouse. The oldest, Errol—short, wide, aggressive—rides with the biggest closed truck. The last brother, Dave, is both tall and wide and veers from aggression to calm and back; he goes with the other closed truck. What the Morris brothers are in need of when they hire Isaac is a White for the third Chev, an open flatbed, to deal with the customers and make sure, as Sol puts it, that the bladey coons don’t steal us dry.
    So Isaac rides with four Blacks. He is the boss and they are the boys. Silas, the driver, is a Zulu from Natal with stretched earlobes that dangle and sway like strands of overcooked spaghetti. Morgan, a different kind of Zulu, from Rhodesia, is chubby and rubs some kind of grease into his skin to make it gleam and is always smiling or reading his bible. Hosea is a Shangaan and has welts and dots on his face, clan markings. Fisu is the tallest, the quietest, and is from the mountain kingdom of Basutoland. He always comes to work with a cone-shaped woven hat, and if it’s cold he drapes a bright blue blanket of silken wool over his shoulders. All four wear overalls and long duster jackets stencilled in purple on the back with the words
MORRIS BROS
. Isaac can wear whatever he wants: no more school uniforms.
    During his first month, he is casual about the address that appears on his clipboard one day, a place in Orange Grove. He asks Silas about going there and Silas only shrugs, it’s just another place to him, a White place. But Isaac is trembling, he’s never been that far north, beyond Yeoville, up into the suburbs. Above Orange Grove there sit even richer neighbourhoods, Observatory and Sydenham, and above them, along the overlooking ridge, are the dream places, the Mr. Jackman and Mr. Joel and Mr. Rhodes places, where the masters of gold and diamonds and industries can survey their city below: Westcliff, Parktown, Houghton. Coddled mansions of highest repute. Generators of dreams and magnets of achievement. In his mind a cloud swirl guards the upward pathways into their golden realm.
    Isaac shakes himself back into the now, sitting low in the truck’s passenger seat, this cab of the truck redolent with the tang of Silas’s sweat. Silas has beads hanging from the rearview mirror and his leopard-skin totems and family photos are tucked above the sun visor, his fighting