The Lion Seeker by Kenneth Bonert Page A

sticks (just in case) point out from under his seat and a tuneless whistling leaks steadily through his bottom teeth like a function of his driving. The rest of them sway and jounce on the open flatbed behind. Isaac watches the brown grasses and the low red-rock quartz-glinting koppies on Observatory Ridge to the south as they turn off Harrow Road and onto Raleigh Street which turns into Rockey Street, up past the place where the tram cars turn around, then up to Louis Botha Avenue and then east and north.
    New territory.
    Â 
    Orange Grove is absence: no shops, no pedestrian life. A silence strung between garden walls and jacaranda trees that line the road like pillars, their flowers tiny trumpets in regal purple. Their target house has a roof of overlapping clay tiles instead of sheet metal and bars against burglary at every window shaped into leaves and stems. Wealth needs bars: he hadn’t imagined this detail, nor that the bars could themselves be made into decorative symbols to signify the goods they protected. He stalks around with hands on his hips, a little hunched, ferocious in his feelings so that the want in him is almost like a kind of anger.
This
is the only cure for Mame’s secret tears. Forget old man Kaplan and useless buried events, papers in a cashbox. Forward, only forward.
    Such workdays bleed into months that themselves stretch out and Isaac learns his job well. Talk sweetly with the wives who are the hoverers as they pack, but make sure to take very thorough notes and have them signed; it is the husbands who will ring back later to complain of damage, to make their accusations of theft. This is what is called experience. Mame is much satisfied by his growth; Tutte only wants to know—baffling—if he’s enjoying himself. Such irrelevancy slides beneath his understanding and he can only shrug. Rively has taken the school’s maths prize, the first girl ever.
    One day in Hillbrow there is no wife but a plump divorcée. It’s a flat in one of the tall blocks with Englishy names, this one called Willow House. He keeps looking at this woman in a way that she has to pretend not to notice while the boys take the boxes out and down the service elevator. When the job is done he accepts her invitation for a cup of tea even though they are running late. He comes down some forty-five minutes later feeling glazed, knowing how oddly his face must loom, afloat on the cloud of astonishment that’s replaced everything below the neck.
    Silas is napping stretched over both seats with a newspaper over his face and Hosea, Morgan and Fisu are smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and sitting on the curb, Morgan looking down at the open bible across his lap.
    â€”Oright, Isaac says, gruff. Lez go. Haven’t got all day.
    Silas sits up. —Baasie, he says. Little boss. —Baasie, was that
tea
very nice?
    They are all looking at him, expectant.
    â€”Was it
sweet
tea? Fisu asks, holding in a grin with twitching lips.
    â€”Maybe, Silas says, maybe my baas, he spill some.
    Isaac looks down. His fly unbuttoned, bright flecks of lipstick on the shirt, half of it still untucked. When he looks up he can’t stop the spread of his own grin and they all thunder into eye-watering laughter, beautiful deep African laughter, wild as rain. They clap their hands, beat their feet and shake with the glee of it. Ten minutes later Silas is still repeating the word
tea
to himself and shaking his head, wiping a fingertip under each eye as he drives, till finally Isaac has to tell him behave yourself. But he’s not truly in the mood to put much vim behind the words, his mind so full of the new revelations of the flesh. That touching and licking, the undoing of the clothing in that raw tumble to the bedroom. No speaking, only animal pleas. Teeth on skin and what a woman’s mouth can be, so hot and wet and savage. The furnace of it around his thing, the marine tang of her taste, and then the final