The Lion Seeker (59 page)

He feels so weak, so dizzy.

—You were gone, Isaac. The chance for that meeting was too. And there wasn't another one.

A near whisper: —What've you done?

Papendropolous shrugs. —I reckon that question's for you my friend.

—What are you doing here now?
Why?

His nose briefly wrinkles. —Came here to get the truth and to tell the truth. That's my brief. Now I can go home.

Isaac steps sideways and the squat man steps with him, his face right in close. Paused at the car door, Papendropolous turns back to say,—Why do you care, Isaac?

—I don't need lectures. I asked a question.

Papendropolous brushes his lips, as if cleaning them for the words: —It was noticed how well you're doing. Told you before once, there are eyes all over. I know what you're coming here for today. That would have been unjust. Now the record is set.

—He did this?

—Of course. It's his money, not so? Be grateful you don't have to pay it back, with interest. And penalties.

Isaac's heart rams at the ribs like a wild trapped thing, a dangerous anger chokes at him, makes his fingers into claws. The man puts a thick forearm against his chest.

—Well who the bladey hell does
he
think he is hey? Who the fuck is
he
anyway? I don't even know who!

Papendropolous winces a little, standing in the jaws of the car door with one foot on the running board, and rubs a spot behind his ear. —Look. He is not the same man he was when you met him. Everyone has changed. I'm not involved in his affairs anymore. Nobody is.

—What does that mean?

—This's a last matter he's asked me to deal with. I came as a favour. I'm otherwise not associated. I don't live out there anymore. Believe me Isaac, he's only interested in trying to set this old wrong right. In the truth. He wanted to know it, and he asked me to deliver it in the right way, to put it to you where it counts. And that's done now. So goodbye.

—Fuck you
. He's just a sick bastard and a shit. The lot a you.

—No. He's changed. Everything there's changed.

—A fucken bastard to do this! You all are!

—We make our own beds, says Papendropolous. Good luck Isaac.

HE STANDS IN FRONT
of the door for a long time. When he was little he stood this way, with a puppy on a string. He knocks. Nobody comes. He knocks harder without effect. Through the window the front room looks empty of life. He goes to the side, the alleyway.

When he turns the corner his father is coming down towards him. His father in a pair of black trousers with a white shirt, no hat. His limping crippled father moving faster than Isaac has ever seen him, his right hand clawing at the brick wall for balance and his right leg swinging almost straight like some great hip-clutched staff, lurching under him as his left arm flails spastically for balance but not only, the motion also seems a kind of ripping assault on the air and the hairs are wild around the oval of his skull. Isaac stops. Six feet away his father also stops, his hand against the wall, and there is spittle at the corners of his mouth and his eyes are huge in his bony face.

—No, he says in English. No. You have to go.

A strange weak feeling, like smoke into the blood, like nerve strings being cut, a slackness. Isaac asks him in a voice that doesn't belong to him what he's talking about. It feels as if his throat is closing.

—You get avay.

This is his mild father, crippled and pious, gently backbent to daily labours, but now and here he is not the same man. Some demon has invaded and transformed. Some manner of shuddering in the neck and eyes that are red-rimmed and moist as if bitten by smoke.

—Tutte, he says. Daddy, what?

—You don't call me Daddy.

And Isaac's distant fading voice (how dizzy he is, how drained!) says,—Why? Why not, Tutte? What is it?

His father advances, clawing with the hand on the bricks.

Isaac shrinks back, backing away down the alley and with every step the weakness grows and he feels it for what it is, that he is becoming a child again, an eight-year-old, a five-year-old. His father keeps shuffling at him, scratching along the wall like some outraged mancrab of a creature, those eyes all wrong in that shuddering face.

—Neyn Tutte. No Daddy.

—You not my son.

—Please don't say that, Daddy please.

—Go. Don't come again.

—What did he say to you? The lawyer.

Abel lunges with a ferocious speed which Isaac would never have believed possible and the side of Isaac's face bursts with a white crack. He staggers. His father has fallen over. He takes a step to help him up but the old man presses himself up off the alley floor and hops at him again.

She would give her life for you. For you!

Isaac backs away.

Blood money! Thief! Murderer!

Clutching his face, numb and faint, Isaac Helger stumbles away. From the alley, from his father, from Doornfontein.

ACROSS THE HARD PAN
of this dry land there scratches a black Humber, a red plume behind; a fat man driving and a thin one beside.
Is it like what it was up there?
No of course: in those white dunes of true desert no thirsting scrub or dirty huddle of mewling sheep could dare to exist, only flies, so far as he could ever tell.
Flies?
Yes they thrive in that parchboned kingdom of their dark lord. We ate them on our bully beef, uncaring, and we killed them with the DDT guns and filled the tin basins like hillocks of piled raisins and burned them with the gasoline and they unfolded their greasy smudges in revenge, the taint of unclean insect death to coat our dreams with mirror eyes, sky towers of humming.
How hot, truly?
Dry air baked like steel plate that radiates from the touch of an oxyacetylene torch flamed bluewhite. Water rations and orders not to drink till direly parched.
Was it unendurable to your wholesome young soul?
It had seemed so but it was paradise in retrospect when later I would but have prayed for the release of the desert.
Is that the nature of blind time?
Of course: all is blind, past comparisons useless to the future. Any life is like the point of a knife slicing into blank time and always bleeding surprises.
Are you satisfied with your weapon?
I'm tired of your questions. Why do you wear a hood? Why does your voice buzz so, why do you sit behind my left shoulder?

 

Isaac wakes and rubs his face. Hugo looks over. —Oright?

—Ja good.

—Just saw a sign said three miles.

Isaac studies the dry land. —Looks all the bladey same to me.

—Looks a bit like it did? Hey? Up there?

Isaac stares at his doughy profile. —Kind of a bladey question is that?

—Why you getting all high horse, it's just a question. Here.

He has an open bottle between his legs; Isaac shakes his head. Now is the time to be only sober and sharp. They have come all this way and here he must not blunt himself with brandy nor with stupid talk.

When they reach the town he finds the one he recalls is gone. All the tin booths of the diamond dealers with their flags are just empty stretches, the canteens and rooming houses, the whores and the corner crowds, all has transmogrified into red dust and been blown off on the flaying wind. Only a few brick buildings stand, and the large one that used to have the sign Orange River Trading Co. on it now looks to be a kind of hotel, from a window of which a man watches down, shirtless and unshaven. They drive through and on.

—Oright gimme a knock, he says.

Bleznik hands him the bottle and he drinks and he wipes his mouth. —I shoulda come by myself, he says.

—Don't insult me, Tiger. Partners are partners.

—Yuh yuh, says Isaac. But there is truth there that his cynicism cannot melt. Hugo has fed and cared for him for two weeks when he might have lain in his dark room and merely died. Hugo who helps him still now, on this, having gotten him what he needs and brought him to where he must be, which has required more than its fair share of guts, this opening up of a channel of meaning for meaningless rage.

 

A little under two hours falls away and they come to the place where there had been the eucalyptuses in that endless line but now it's as if a cosmic dentist has paid a visit with twisting pliers and the land is bare with only gravel dimples to indicate where the great trunks once rooted. They drive alongside this absence to the old archway; but the arch too is gone. The asphalt road is covered in much sand, a little pitted and warped but otherwise intact. As they pass onto it Isaac tells Hugo to stop and he gets out. In a ditch he fishes up some rusted chain, drawing out a splintered piece of wood still attached, with the letters
LEEU
branded on, start of Leeuklip, Lion's Rock. Hugo has rolled down his window, his hat off. —Everything changes hey boyki. He mops with a hanky at his sweating watermelon of a head. —This place also.

Isaac looks at him and can see in his face the gladness. It doesn't irritate him, reckoning he'd be just as relieved if roles were switched. They rumble on but Isaac makes him slow enough that they do not raise a column of dust from the sandy road. Very carefully he steers over cattle grids rusted and caved. —There's nothing, nothing, he keeps saying. Like an incantation that is saving their lives and maybe their lives are indeed being preserved, though by this very decay rather than with anything his mere voice could ever work. When the land starts to rise, Isaac stops him again and gets out with the binoculars. He goes up ahead of the car, bent over, then belly-crawls to a rock at the top. Distant lies the white house and behind it the hilly ground then in far distance the range of low blunt mountains. He checks the sun then slides the binoculars from their case. A mush of blended colours blooms in the glass; he corrects the focus ring till everything hardens sharp and clear, so close-seeming it's as if he might brush the dusty rocks and the dry grass with his fingertips. He tracks to the left, from his angle he comes first across what had been the garages before. Now he sees only a ruin of boards and broken breezeblocks. He runs into white blur and adjusts again and the house jumps at him so sharp-etched in afternoon sun it seems razor cut from the blurred light behind. He sees the windows are gone and the white paint is peeled where it is not blotched with the tapering serpentine marks of bird lime; the front doorway holds no door.

When he takes down the glasses he goes on watching for a time and almost misses the smoke, faint above the hilly country behind. Pale vapours easing to nothingness in the still air. He watches it for some time.

Cloud shadows roll over the vacant khaki earth like the silent passage of sky whales. Some manner of carnivorous bird angles in blue infinity. He worms his way off the lip and side-shuffles bent over back down to the Humber. —Listen man. I want you to wait there for one hour.

—Hey?

—Just listen. An hour, not less. Then drive on to the house. Park there in front when you get there and just wait.

—What you ganna do?

—I'm going by foot, being careful.

—Why, what's it look like, you see em?

He shakes his head. —Man, it's a ghost house, falling a pieces. Ops me that bag hey.

—I knew it would be. So what you being a paranoid for?

—I'm not any paranoid, I just know survival. Give, ops, let's go.

He takes the sack, Santa Claus for paranoid survivors: The four handguns Hugo was able to get—no rifle or shotgun—with sundry clips and loose ammunition. A Luger and heavy Colt forty-five, a little twenty-two darling of an Astra, a Spanish gun made for the purses of ladies from Parktown, with a pearl handle and an engraved frame. And a Webley ex-service revolver. There are some holsters too, one that clips on a belt, one that goes around an ankle, one with straps for the armpit. There's a bayonet in a sheath, wire cutters, tape, strong fishing line, a knobkerrie for breaking heads of the kind Silas would no doubt approve, solid stinkwood with a heavy globe carved out of the top of the staff. A balaclava and a tin of black shoe polish, a canvas satchel folded up, a canteen of water.

There seem to be a lot of nine-mil bullets so he loads the Luger first and its spares, holsters the weapon in his armpit. He loads the Webley and straps it to his ankle. He loads the Colt and the twenty-two. The black Colt is too big for the remaining holster so he leaves it and puts the little gun in one jacket pocket and the knife with the fishing line and the wire cutters in the other. Puts the canteen strap over his shoulder and the binoculars on the other one, ignoring the satchel.

Hugo, watching him, says: —Captain America, ready for action aye-aye. Those rock dassies and bundu sheep won't have a bladey chance, I tell you what.

—One hour, says Isaac, rising. And there's more than sheep down there.

—Hey? You see something?

—Just do like I say.

 

He loops out and marches, bent over on level country, preferring the wrinkles in the earth, the gullies and grasses, or using the little koppies as a screen wherever he can, away from sightlines on the higher ground ahead. He starts to sweat, to blink against it. A man in khaki trousers and a bush jacket, pleated trousers with a broad-brimmed hat, crossing the dusted veld. He comes up on the south side of the house, finds a crag in the land in which to hunker. Oright boychik. He takes off his hat and rubs his hair to let the air in against the wet scalp. Think it right through now, don't go rush like a Stupid. He peers again at it: the roof is in worse shape than he'd seen in the glasses, the thatch pancaked in like a failed soufflé. At this distance he can even make out one encrusted window frame and how bergs of fractured glass still cling inside. Just go around. No. Why not? Cos I don't want to. Then maybe you deserve you getting your arse shot off. Nobody's ganna effing shoot me. Wanna bet, ha. Ja, what I bet is I know exactly where that smoke is coming from. Where he is. And maybe the other ones, the ones you have to worry for.