The Lion Seeker by Kenneth Bonert

Author:Kenneth Bonert [Bonert, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 9780547898049
Google: TfL8AAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0547898045
Goodreads: 17165925
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

27

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

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