The Lion Seeker by Kenneth Bonert Page B

soft-wet engulfment as he kept expecting her to stop him, so utterly mysterious and complete. She hooked her nails into the meat of his buttocks like some carnivore. He hunted her salty sweat with the point of his tongue in the wrinkles of her armpit. Woman. The sound she made at the end. A heat forge of desire that almost scared him, dissolving into her, draining.
    Yes Da, I am enjoying myself very much at work nowadays, thank you very much for asking. I surely am.
    For some months after that infamous incident he feels the eyes of his boys on him every time he chats with the lady of the house. Even though now he can look at these women in a truly knowing way there is never a repeat performance and gradually he realizes how lucky he’d been. Once or twice he thinks he is getting similar signals but he can’t believe, truly, that a married woman would do such things (or that his rough looks and short wiry body would be enough to tempt her into such sin), stopping him from trying. Each time on those occasions Silas in his uncanny way is ready with a fresh comment.
    â€”No biscuit tea time today, my baasie.
    â€”Shut up hey will you Silas.
    That big smile so bright in his square face. —Sorry sorry my baas.
    â€”Qhuba! Isaac will say in Zulu. Drive. Clicking his tongue on his palate at the first syllable, getting the pronunciation exactly right, for he’s learning more of Silas’s language all the time, fascinated by the sound of it and discovering an aptitude for languages in himself out here in the practical world where words are useful things, real as tools, as opposed to the drone noise in the constraints of a brick classroom. (Also he hates it when Silas speaks to other boys and he can’t understand—he doesn’t want to be some Stupid getting mocked to his face like any ignorant umlungu, any other Whitey.)
    Mame asks him what he’s learning and when he has nothing to say, Mame has suggestions.
    Don’t stand still. You been nearly a year already. Time goes like water. Remember always that you’re working for more, to be on your own in business. To buy a big house one day. Don’t sit on your tochus too comfortable. Open your eyes.
    He opens his eyes and a scheme comes to him. He shares it with Mame and she bakes him an apple strudel in honour of its brilliance.
    Next day on the way back to the warehouse with the truck unloaded he tells Silas to pull over at that Native bus stop: a sign on a pole near which Blacks have patiently massed with their goods and their infants. For a tickey a head—a penny less than bus fare—he lets them pile on and taxis them into town. He splits these takings half and half with his boys; overly generous, ja, but he’s becoming quite fond of the buggers.
    So this taxiing becomes a regular little earner for them, a secret that binds them all.
    Â 
    His father has technical questions about the work. It’s real work, he tells Abel, snapping a little. But inside he knows he does not do the real part of the work and can sense the judgment in his father’s questions. For Abel, work belongs to the worker, like a prayer to the worshipper (to do a
properly job
is his highest English compliment). What your work produces is what you are. But Isaac mostly stands around watching his boys do the lifting and the carrying, moving endless White goods from one spacious household to another, disassembling and reassembling White lives. He knows that his mother will say the bladerfools are the ones who break their backs like donkeys day in and out, sweating for a pittance with not a chance of advancement while the Clever is the one who makes the profit and sits on a nice clean office chair. But watching how hard his boys work—how they shake with the sweat-dark canvas straps looped around their wrists and under the edges of heavy awkward things (cabinets, beds, ovens, iceboxes), slowly up and down that steep ramp off the truck all day—he