The Lion Seeker by Kenneth Bonert Read Free Book Online Page A

When the sun makes the cars hot enough to sizzle spit, his iced bottles beaded with the sweat of their own coldness begin to sell themselves even at a steep markup. Farther down are the Black boys in their rags pushing copies of the
Star
or the
Rand Daily Mail
as they always have; he’s making more cash from his col’drinks in a day than they will see in a month, if that, the Stupids. He smiles at them sometimes and they smile back. He starts to think of hiring a few, of expanding . . . 
    The next week the police charge him for non-possession of a municipal street vendor’s permit and his (and Mame’s) dreams of building a col’drink empire are crushed.
    That night another argument in his parents’ room: Tutte saying he’s too old for this nonsense, he has to be studying seriously now, high school. Mame saying not everyone is like you and can sit all day like a stone. Tutte saying if he wants a good job he better learn to.
    Mame makes a guttural sound: Guch! A job! He is more than a job!
    Rively shakes her head at Isaac, the two of them listening at the door, her mouth a funnel of twisting pity. She’s not wrong: all during this time he’s been failing his first year at Athens Boys High School out in Bez Valley (a good White government school, picked for its disciplinary reputation, full of mostly yoks, English Christians, and a few like him from emigrant backgrounds), and he started off already more than a year behind the others. But he can’t change; classroom is prison. All those bluh bluh sums and bluh bluh numbers and Greek and Latin names, flower parts and bluh Shakespeare bladey blah.
    Nights he sleeps as always on the same folding cot that’s unfolded in the workshop at the end of every day, only now he rolls onto his belly and presses his hard prick against the canvas, grinding it there while he thinks of women’s bodies. His own has matured fast into first manhood and the bush of red hair at the base of his thing is a thick clump now. If only there were girls at school—it might make it all worth it, he might have a reason more than his father to stay there, to endure.
    The following year, 1935, when Isaac turns sixteen, he finds he has surprised himself by managing to scrape through to standard seven where there are a new set of teachers waiting for him. One of them is a woman. She teaches History and English and her name is Jacqueline Winterbourne. Miss not missus. She is not too tall, with black hair and glasses. Not too busty, quite flat really, and she wears a short skirt and the skin of her knees and her fine arms and upper chest is very pale, as if she’s been powdered. He can make out the dark puckers of her nipples through that thin blouse, the lines of her bra. He sees too how her slender torso swells wide at the hips. How beautifully wide and full the bum is, how it jiggles a little when she writes things on the blackboard.
    He sits frozen, dry-mouthed, staring. His groin throbs almost painfully. His young heart beats hard, transfixed without mercy.
    Â 
    In the classroom under the tinted photograph of King George V with his frosted beard and walrus moustaches, Miss Winterbourne tells them how this wonderful country, the Union of South Africa, belongs to us all. We are her citizens and her caretakers. The Almighty has entrusted us with the sacred responsibility to look after her diamonds and her gold, her giraffes and elephants, her mountains and rivers and all of her many quaint Native tribes.
    Unfortunately, all through our history we have been divided into two races. The one mostly bad and the other all good. The good ones are Englishmen (like everyone here in this class), and the mostly bad ones, of course, are the Afrikaners. There was a big war at the turn of the century and we the English gave the Afrikaners a good thumping; but being English gentlemen, we let them back up to run things (don’t ask me why, Miss