The Lion Seeker (16 page)

They get out to find not that much visible damage, surprisingly, aside from the dented fender that popped the bonnet. But when Hugo tries to start up there's a dead click. Isaac has a look: stones and little rocks kicked up by their tires have gotten into the engine compartment. A battery wire's been severed, but what's more seriously wrong is the rock jammed against the pulley behind the radiator and the missing fan belt. Isaac cups a hand over his eyes and scans the road, a hundred yards back he sees shredded parts of the belt.

—You know what's the matter?

—We could start it but the battery would run down. That's if the engine doesn't start melting first.

—We hitch, says Bleznik. Already getting his jacket from the back.

—Just calm hey, says Isaac. Lemme think.

—I gotta—

—I know. Get to a telephone. Believe me, I know.

—Whatta you tryna say?

—I'm not trying nothing. I don't have to.

Hugo waves a finger at him. —Hey, junior. Don't forget who is who.

—Man, look at you. Hopping like your undies is on fire. Christ, it's only a horse race.

—Only a . . . ? . . . Gach!

Hugo starts marching, his jacket over his shoulder, his shadow a slimmer longer form he never quite manages to stomp with those bear-swaying strides. Isaac calls after him but Hugo just flaps the jacket like an angered tail.

Isaac comes back to the engine in the fading light. He uses a tire iron to lever the rock out. Needs something to get that fan belt working. He stands there chewing his knuckle then he makes a search of the Opel and finds silk stockings on the floor in the back, no doubt property of some most well-satisfied Transvaal house-wife, kissed on the neck at six p.m. after half a bottle of the good stuff. Twisted, the stockings make a strong and flexible line and he loops it round the pulleys and knots it tight. The severed battery wire is an easy fix by rebraiding the copper and sealing it with a loop of Miracle Glow. When he starts up it seems to hold fine. He picks Hugo up half a mile down the lonely road. Not a single vehicle has passed them. When Isaac pulls over and Hugo reaches for the door, Isaac eases the Opel away. Hugo stands there in his shirt sleeves with one fist on his washtub waist.

Isaac leans across to the window. —I drive from now on hey.

Hugo glares for a solid minute. —You got some chutzpah, junior.

—Oright then. Meet you in Vekklesdorp. Best a luck.

Hugo shakes his head and advances; again Isaac lets the car trickle away. This happens twice more before Hugo says,—Oright, oright, you little shit. You can be driver.

—Ten fingers on your Jewish Torah?

—Nine and a half.

—I'm serious.

—Oright, oright.

—Say it.

—Little shit. Fine. Ten fingers on the Torah I promise you can drive.

—Tank you, tank you, my baas.

Once he's in the passenger seat he starts laughing. What a little chuleriuh, he says. What a cholera, crafty and fatal as a germ. What an operator. He laughs harder when Isaac explains what he's used for the temporary repair. The female is a giver of many gifts. He wants to know how come Isaac knows how to do such things and Isaac tells him about Silas and Morgan and Fisu in the Morris Brothers days, how he learned from watching them and their dexterous means of repair on that aged Chev truck, adapting whatever they had.

They make it in time to Vekklesdorp but by then the engine is making freshly problematic noises. Hugo gets his phone call in and that night he holds a light for Isaac while Isaac works on the Opel with borrowed tools. In the field behind the bed and breakfast there are a number of wrecks—rusted vehicles on bricks or crumpled on the raw earth. Isaac's seen similar everywhere in this countryside. Now they sneak across and Isaac strips some motor parts: a crankshaft pulley and a functional fan belt. Again Hugo holds the light while Isaac like some surgeon of rust transplants the belt and pulley into the Opel. A little past midnight the engine runs smoothly as it ever had.

Hugo pulls out a bottle of Bell's Scotch and they sit on the back steps and pass it back and forth with grease-blackened fingers; they light cigarettes under a sky so festering with southern stars it seems gummy in places with their globbed radiance.

—Listen, Hugo, I know it's none a my business hey, but wanna ask you something. You're an oke can sell anyone on anything right. So how comes it that you and me are shifting little lots of shiny tape to farmers in the middle of the bladey platteland?

Hugo palms the bottle, examines his heels on the step below. —My friend, you hit on the question of my life. I been close, Tiger. I've repped some top lines. Industrials. Real estate. But there always comes the twist.

—The twist.

—Ja, the twist. The bladey twist. Hugo shakes his vast head methodically.

—Right.

—Maybe I did play with money I shouldn't have. A little bit. Maybe old Blezzy shoulda saved some more here and there. But you can see how I am now.

—How you are now.

—I mean, a little bit of the ponies, nothing.

—Right.

—But I been up, Tiger, don't you worry. I've had so much it'd take me a week to count. But people, they don't always appreciate. People can be blind sometimes, you know. Then always comes that twist.

—The twist, Isaac says.

—Ja, the twist. Again shakes the watermelon of Hugo's lugubrious head. Infinities of sadness in the motions. —The bladey twist gets in the works. They like to cut me at the knees just when I get going, the bastards. But old Blezzy always fall shiny side up hey. Old Blezzy's like those stars.

He points with the top of the bottle. —No, you can't put Blezzy's shine out, and you can't pull him down. Blezzy always shoots up to the tops. And now, Tiger, I can tell you I am finished with repping other people's lines. I want my own operation, the toes to the nose. This is what I'm looking for with our Miracle Glow.

—Oh ja, you've got a piece of this firm?

His hand wiggles. —You could say.

—Right.

—Our own operation, Hugo tells him, and cradles the back of Isaac's neck with his warm palm. Hey boyki? Hey? All the way.

—All the way, says Isaac, taking the bottle back.

 

Early next day they hit the general store, a certain Mr. Shapiro. Then they do an interview at the
Vekklesdorp Weekblad
and gun off into the dry countryside. They find their true momentum by mid-morning and Hugo seems high as a wheeling kite, closing deal after deal like a pool shark sinking balls.

It's shaping to be their biggest day yet when they join a farmer for commiseration over the killing drought and a field lunch of fat links of boerewors piled on mielie pap—the fluffy maize meal boiled up like mashed potatoes and covered in grease and onions. Hugo asks the Boer about the old cars and rusted trucks parked behind the barn. The Boer says it's too much trouble and expense to have them towed, the nearest scrap dealer is miles off.

When they're back on the road with Isaac driving and loving the feel of the Opel's steering wheel in his right hand, the breeze smoothing his left elbow out the window tangy with the nip of farm dung off the bright sun-washed fields, Hugo says: —There could be something hey. Could be something.

—What?

—All these old skedonks hey, these junkers you see everywhere. They are full a parts you can use, like we did last night.

—Oh ja.

—There's bladey good chop in the motor game. You could buy up those kaputniks for nothing. Pull out the good parts, sell off the scrap. Make hell of a good chop.

—What you talking the motor game? says Isaac.
This
is our operation, isn't it? Miracle Glow.

Hugo pokes his lip out with the tip of his tongue. —Ja man, sure. Absolutely.

For a second there Isaac wants to ask about the order slip he saw, some address in Durban. But he lets the second pass.

—Ja, but the motor game, says Hugo. It's something hey. Something.

 

Late afternoon in the semi-tropical hills they turn off onto a farm road. A tinroof house with silos behind. They have to hold handkerchiefs to their faces to combat waves of stench.

In the farmhouse sleeps an aged Boer in his chair with a bottle in his lap, his cheeks so deeply lined they resemble the marrows of bones split open and left to dry in wind and sun. Intestines and organs fill a basin under flies. More guts overslop buckets. Staring pig heads wait on the table for some nameless fate. Pig corpses dangle from chains. Blood has dried on the walls. Hugo tries to wake the man but gets only snores. A wind outside grows sharp and brings with it more of the fetid rotstink of manure plus the faintest sounds of penned animals squealing. The room grows dark and cool and Hugo grimaces and swears with much fervour.

Isaac says through his hanky: —Whatzit man?

Hugo runs out and Isaac follows, happy to flee the deathmeat horror. Crows flap from a coming storm front. Hugo stands panting by the Opel. As Isaac comes up, Hugo gapes at the blackening sky, the rushing clouds. Yells: —Fu-uuuuck!

Isaac looks: just Lowveld clouds, fat-bellied with the weight of the water they bear, black as deep bruises. The wind is strong enough to pry loose even some strands of Hugo's plastered hair and they beat and flail from his round skull like broken wires. He appears now to try to whip at the stomachs of the black clouds with the hat in one hand and a pudgy fist formed out of the other.

—What's wrong? Isaac shouts into the lifting wind.

—What kind of a bladey stuffing drought is this?

—Hey?

—It's not supposed to be this way!

Isaac squints upwards. —What's a matter, is it the lightning hey? You afraid of—

—Just get in the bladey stuffing car, man.

Isaac doesn't even try to argue over driving rights: Hugo bangs his head jumping in behind the wheel. They bounce hard back to the main road. Isaac reminds him that he's already laid off his bets today, at that railway station after lunch. No need to hurry. But it's not the bets, not this time; something else has gripped Hugo Bleznik. He has turned them in the wrong direction, heading back to Vekklesdorp. Accelerator flat.

—You'll kill us this time, Isaac says calmly. And then a bit later: —What happened to shining up hey? Where's all the shine gone, tigerman?

Hugo is grim and rocking behind the wheel, both hands squeezing hard. He has the window down and more than once he sticks his head out, looking straight up.

—We ganna die, says Isaac. We so ganna die.

The only thing he sees that he can do is grab at the wheel, but that would not be wise. Strange sounds are wheezing out of Hugo, like he's on a toilet at war with constipation. Now and then he hisses the same phrase:
Always the twist, always the bladey stuffing twist
. The rear window shows a sky overtaken by the blotting thunderheads, mute and massive as mountains suspended.

 

It's well past dark when they tear into Vekklesdorp. Hugo guns straight for the general store. —Might still catch the bladey bugger, he says, still bowed forward over the wheel, clenched on it like a monkey to a lifebuoy in a flood. Might still be in there locking up and counting all his bladey boodle.

But the shop is dark, closed. The sign above the door says
SHAPIRO TRADING LTD. FOR THE SHARPEST DEALS IN TOWN
!! It's like before when they were here, but now all the letters have been taped over with Miracle Glow and so they shine with a soft swamp-gas green.

—Oh wow, Isaac says. That is
nice
.

—Fuck
shit
, shouts Hugo. He dredges a canting, squealing U-turn out of the Opel. There's a man in a railways uniform at the station; Hugo gets out and runs to him. Isaac watches them talk, the railway man pointing as plump drops of rain start to burst on the dusted windshield.

—Jeez
us
man Hugo, Isaac says when he gets back. Have you gone mental for real or what?

But Hugo isn't answering, Hugo is driving, swerving them through the little town and hunting for a street it seems by process of rapid elimination. They find it soon enough—not too many streets in Vekklesdorp—and then the right number. A wide bungalow with a big lawn and a garage in front. Hugo runs over the rubbish bin on the driveway and parks on the lawn. When they get out the droplets are coming faster and Hugo swears with much viciousness. Isaac runs after him up the path to the front door where Hugo bangs hard with the flat of his fist.

Lights come on; a dog woofs.

—Hey man, Isaac says, panting. You ganna get us shot dead here man.

—Never mind.

—Never
mind?

An unfriendly male voice behind the door desires to know who the bladey hell it is and who the bladey stuffing hell they think that they are.

—It's Bleznik, Shapiro. I put goods on consignment. Open up. We in a hurry.

—Hey who? Hey? What? Who? The rep?

—Ja, Hugo Bleznik. Ja the rep. Consignment. Open up.

—What the hell you doing here the house past eleven a clock the stuffing night, you mad?

Yes, Isaac thinks. Fair questions.

—Open up, says Bleznik. Open up, you gunif. You tryna swindle us our goods.

—Jesus, Hugo, Isaac says.

—What? says the voice. What you says to me?

—Open up is what. I says open up.

The door moves back, a chain stretched across a crack of light. Half of Shapiro's face hovers, worried. —Ach, what you people want here? You mad in your heads or something? You drunk?

—We want the money for our goods, Shapiro. That's what, finished and klaar. Over and out.

—That shiny tape?

—Miracle Glow!

—Okay, so come to the shop tomorrow, meshugena.

—No, Shapiro. Now. We on the move. And you not ganna rook us, Shapiro. I know your game.

—Hey?

—Give us our money!

—Bladey hell, Shapiro says, looking to Isaac. What's a matter with your da? Has he gone sick?