The Lion Seeker (33 page)

—Wait, says Isaac. We missing the last thing.

—What?

—The name.

—It's Bleznik Motors. That's what it is.

—No. That's what it's
been
. We change it now. Write down this: Lion Motors.

—Lion Motors?

—That's right.

Bleznik opens his mouth but Isaac makes a fist. —I'm not debating here man. That's the name.

—Jeez,
what
has crawled up your arse lately? I seriously wanna know the answer.

—That's the name, says Isaac. Ukay?
Lion
. Lion Motors.

Hugo rubs his chin, tilts his eyes to the ceiling, makes a humming noise. —You know, actually, it's not all that bad . . . Lion Motors . . . Our prices
roar
the loudest.

—Right, says Isaac.

—Lion Motors. King of the automotive jungle . . . Lion Motors. We take quote a whole pride of pride in our work unquote. You get it? Whole lotta
pride
.

—Ja, oright, Hugo. Calm yourself.

Hugo lifts the brimming cap. —Here's to an operation that's all our own.

—To Lion Motors.

—L'chaim, you little shit.

—L'chaim, you old bastard.

 

That night Isaac drives back home in a Citroën organized for him by Hugo. He rushes to Newtown before closing where he picks up a suit, getting nine and a half percent off the sale price from Hugo's man, a tailor called Katz, for a shiny double-breasted number, a beauty worthy of Bogart. At home he spit-shines his pinching shul shoes and smears down his springy orange locks with Vitalis hair tonic. The cut on his cheek has healed to a scratch, nothing. He makes it to The Castle only forty-five minutes late, which is a miracle considering all the work he got done out at the Reformatory that day. (In truth he could have gone on working right through to Sunday morning yet would hardly have begun to dent the monstrous task ahead, this business already starting to loom now in his mind like some granite mountain that has to be dug out of their way with a pick and shovel, one swing at a time and by him alone.)

The Castle at night: it pricks with fortress lights. At the top, moths quiver in the scented garden. A submerged light makes the swimming pool into a lapping ultramarine gem and there are other lights that make emerald caves in the great trees down in the terraced spaces. The Cruel Duke comes to the doors with a brandy snifter and a bow tie. Isaac is led to a lounge he must pretend never to have seen before.

The Mad Queen waits, the crags of her face smeared full of white paste, her painted lips like strings of raw meat. Yet her odd posture seems to invite perusal of a beauty that is absent if it ever was there at all, the way she lifts her chin and gives her profile, the wrinkled folds of her neck shifting, her loose-skinned arms stretching out as her bracelets chime. Isaac sits opposite and is offered a brandy. While he's accepting the drink, Queen asks him if he's really sure he wants to take Yvonne out. —She's a most temperamental girl.

Duke asks where they're going, what he's driving. They ask him about being a mechanic. Queen comes back to Yvonne, saying she was a mercurial child, whatever the word means, probably not good. Saying she goes through phases, changes her mind easily as the wind. Now she's interested in boys from Doornfontein. After she says this she lifts up her painted-on eyebrows.

Isaac looks at her. —What does that mean? he says to her slowly. Jewish boys? Is that what you're saying, Jewish? He keeps looking at her until she looks away. He can sense Duke is about to say something but is hesitating, and then there are quick footsteps in the corridor and Isaac swallows his drink and stands tall.

 

Her smell fills the car. Jasmine and lemon and whatever it is underneath that is the fresh young smell of her clean soft skin. It's hard to drive when all he wants to do is look at her. She's wearing a dark blue satiny dress with a half-circle at the top that shows her collarbones. He takes them to Hillbrow and makes her close her eyes. She has to hold his arm on the street and even tottering downstairs into the music she must still not open. He's got the same table reserved for them and only once they're sitting there does he allow her to look around.

He waits to see if he has made a mistake. For about a minute it seems it could go either way, and then she shakes her head and slaps his shoulder and he knows it'll be all right. —Wicked! she says.

—Give me a kiss, he says.

So they dine in the very spot where Isaac burned poor Wayne's hair off, what a shame that was (ha ha) and then they dance to the jazz, Isaac doing his best not to stomp on her pretty high-heeled shoes, coming up on his toes now and then so he doesn't look too much shorter than her.

Afterwards over drinks he tells her,—Member how you all treated me like the bladey waiter?

—We weren't
that
bad.

—Yes you were. You know you were.

She giggles. They've had a lot to drink. —Was I terrible?

—You're bad, you're bad.

—I need improving don't I, Izey.

—Yes you need improving. Give me your mouth and let me improve it. Give it to me. There's it, you're better now, you're almost a good girl . . . 

He leaves a big tip when they go. Nobody could ever mistake him for a waiter now. Nobody ever will again. Men are looking at her. Let them look. She's my jewel. All mine.

SO ISAAC FALLS INTO THE RHYTHM
and intensity of the new working days. He spends the mornings and afternoons of every weekday under the patient tutelage of Jack Miller at Gold Reef Panel Beating and then, skipping drinks at the Great Britain Hotel afterwards, he rushes to the Reformatory where he'll put in another four or five hours. On weekends he's up early to be at the Reformatory before sunrise and often he'll stay over there through Saturday night and go on working Sunday on six hours' sleep. Meanwhile Hugo attends to the paperwork and the creditors, endlessly daydreaming new ideas, some inventive, some plain insane, and it's on Isaac to vet them for practicality, to talk him back down to cool earth when he gets too hot in his airy excitements. It starts to make him better understand why Hugo needs him: Hugo has charm and energy but lacks tenacity; Isaac has the blunt force of will and manual talents to see things through. He senses how Hugo gains peace of mind by his stabilizing presence. With things at the Reformatory solidly anchored, the nitty-gritty taken care of and no bothering questions to niggle at him, Hugo is freed up for the road, the easy dealings that reel in the contracts. A good partnership, then, as is the one with Jack Miller at the workshop where Isaac's metalworking skills are every day becoming further refined. If he starts in the morning with his body stiff and reluctant, he finds that so long as he keeps his mind on his task like a wrench tight around a nut then a trick will gradually be worked and the tiredness will crack and fall away and comes instead a lightness and a soaring inside. Hard work of the right kind seems to give him more vitality, not less; though at the end of the day when he sinks into the hot bath full of Epsom salts that Mame always has ready for him, his muscles dissolve like liquid off his bones, and later on his cot he falls without pause into black and dreamless slumbers that seem to eclipse barely a minute before the morning light is nudging him awake.

Seeing Yvonne also refreshes him. He sleeps in a storage shed through most of every lunch break at the panel beating shop, save for Wednesdays when he visits Yvonne at The Castle (illicitly), returning again on one or two Saturday nights a month (licitly) in the borrowed Citroën that has become his own de facto automobile, to pick her up perhaps not exactly with parental blessing, yet undeniably in their full and unimpeding regard. He takes her to bioscopes and to dance halls. Takes her for walks and buys her ice cream and good suppers. He, Isaac Helger, owner of dense orange hair and bat ears, freckles and crimped lips—he's the one who takes her, no other. Out there in public where she holds his arm. They kiss and talk and touch. This is now to him an official courtship and the sweet knowledge of it clings to him like strands of honey all the time.

 

One of his first acts at the Reformatory is to have a professional sign put up—simple and large, black and white: LION MOTORS—and also to see that a proper gate is put in place. Hugo is skeptical—they're just ganna rip them off—but Isaac insists on using their new electrical hookup for bright spotlights he positions above the gates. Thinking (as he so often does) of his cousin Avrom he buys a shotgun that he takes to firing off from the rooftop each night, in the direction of the squatter camp. He leaves this shotgun with the albino watchman, with instructions to blast at anything, animal or mineral, that wanders into the bright lights. It seems to work until the albino disappears along with the weapon, never to be heard from again. Meanwhile one of the trucks has been stolen (by the driver, they learn) and another driver gets into a post-prandial accident and is so drunk that he can barely slur his own name when the police show up.

—Hugo, says Isaac. We got some staffing issues, man.

—What you talking, we a hundred and ten percent.

—What happened to a hundred twenty?

—Never mind the staff, junior.

—Hugo, wherejoo find these people, prison? They a bunch of tsotsis and gunovim, man. And there's too many. I'm taking over staffing.

Hugo grumbles but not very seriously; they both know Isaac understands the boys better, he can speak their language and he's worked with them ever since his first job at Morris Brothers, which is exactly where he drives that same evening. He parks down the street from the warehouse and gets out when he sees Silas leaving. Silas who cost him his job, ja, but only because he was loyal to his boss, a loyalty that Isaac as a boss now himself has come to appreciate. Ja, solid reliable Silas whom the others respect and look up to, who puts the interests of the owners first.

Silas looks ready to bolt when he sees Isaac waiting for him, but Isaac calms him, apologizes for what happened with that punch last time, then makes a straightforward offer of cash and lots more to come. When Silas hesitates Isaac drives him out to the Reformatory to have a look around, then he turns Hugo and his charm loose on him. Afterwards, Isaac promises Silas he won't be just a driver or mechanic, he'll also be the yard boss over all the others. In fact, he'll be the one who helps Isaac find new staff.

Silas touches one of his long dangling earlobes; he hawks and spits on the dirt.

—The baas, he is good for offer me. But why for you wanting?

—I trust you, Silas. Then he shakes a fist, grins. —And cos you know and I know what will happen if you ever try to stuff me around.

Silas nods gravely, fingering the other lobe.

 

The next week Silas Mabuza joins Lion Motors and Isaac fires the remainder of those hired by Hugo. Silas brings with him some of the old faces from Morris, including Fisu and Hosea, plus a halfton flatbed bakkie full of relatives from Zululand. These Zulus arrive with a more than generous supply of fighting sticks, shields and knobkerries, and some of them quickly form a corps of watchmen under the command of Silas's second cousin Nangi. They deal most effectively with the squatter camp marauders on their first night. They turn off the spotlights and wait in a ditch. Isaac stays around to observe. The lights come on as they spring their ambush in classical Zulu style, an enveloping charge resembling the horns of a bull. Shields, yells, walloping sticks. It nets them a half-dozen prisoners too slow to escape shrilling into the night. Nangi brings them into the yard where they must, in his words,
get lots and lots of good medicines
. These dosages raise a chorus of howls and afterwards the would-be marauders limp slowly off homeward, taking word of the new order at the Reformatory, so that Isaac becomes fairly confident that Lion Motors will be pilfered no more.

 

A bisel oon a bisel vert a foler shisel: Little bits fill the bowl, a favourite saying of Mame's that rings in him like a striking panel hammer through these burgeoning months of 1939. The wrecks flow into the building then overflow into the yard, piling up in stacks on the baked earth. Wrecks start to arrive by rail, testament to the stretch of Hugo's wandering ambition. With the others, Silas and Isaac work hard to strip the parts from the scrap and to keep the trucks running on schedule. This bond of labour bolts a trust so implicit between them that he gives Silas all of the wages in cash to distribute each week. Upstairs the floor space disappears under engines, generators, starters, radiators, differentials, gearboxes, brake drums, tires, batteries, doors and on and on. The spread of this is a stimulant to his mind: for once the fresh idea jumps out of his mouth and not Hugo's. Grudgingly, Hugo accedes. They empty the big room to cleanse and paint it, to install panes in the windows. On their return, parts are grouped like to like and Hugo's desk is made a cash counter as an ad goes into the
Star
. The next weekend they open for retail business and the size of the crowd shocks them both. Counting the takings at the end of that first day, Hugo shakes his great head. —Nice, but if we sat on these parts, in a year's time they'd be worth double, triple.

—If there's a war.

—Oh, there'll be a war. I can smell it.

Isaac grunts, torquing his face to ugliness. —Ja, we'll see about that. Anyway, we got the contracts right? There's plenny more where those came from and meanwhile you can keep our creditors happy for another week.

It goes on that way: if the business was constipated before Isaac joined it, these weekend sales become a regular dose of laxative, loosing the cash flow for Hugo to keep his little numbers juggling on his calendar. But they also are careful to store a portion of the stripped parts away for future sales. While outside, the wrecks continue to pile. Tires make a dark pyramid as high as the second floor. Isaac starts to talk about renting a crusher so that they can squeeze the scrap metal into steel cubes for storage.