The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

14

Boaz-Jachin sat down in the layby and marked on his map the place where the lorry driver had left him.

He was still sitting there thinking about the lorry driver when a little red convertible with its top down pulled up, playing music. The number plates were foreign and the driver was a deeply tanned handsome woman of about the same age as his mother.

The woman smiled with very white teeth and opened the door. Boaz-Jachin got in. ‘Where are you going?’ she said in English.

‘To the seaport,’ said Boaz-Jachin speaking English carefully. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Different places,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you to the port.’ She swung the little red car smoothly out into the road.

Boaz-Jachin, since his encounter with the lorry driver, felt as if his former peaceful state of not knowing anything about people had been peeled from him like the rind from an orange. He doubted that it could be put back. As he sat beside the blonde woman it seemed to him that people’s stories were all written on their faces for anyone to read. Perhaps, he thought, he might now be able to converse also with animals, trees, stones. The lion came back to him briefly, like a memory from earliest childhood, then was gone. He felt guilty because he had made the lorry driver cry.

He looked at the blonde woman. She seemed to carry her womanhood the way men on the docks carried baling hooks on one shoulder — shiny, pointed, sharp.

The wind rushed by, blowing their hair. The music was being played by a tape machine. When one side was finished the woman turned over the cassette and there was new music. The music was smooth and full, and it sounded like the marvellous cocktail bars in films where unattainablelooking women and suave violent men understood each other immediately by a look.

Boaz-Jachin knew the blonde woman’s story as if she had told him everything. She had been married several times, and was now a wealthy divorcée. She, like the lorry driver, was looking for new faces coming out into the world. She too would want him to be something to her for a little while on the road between the past and the future.

There would be a hotel or a motel on the road, the little red car would pull up and stop, and she would look at him as the film stars looked, with her delicate eyebrows raised, without a word.

The room would be cool and dark, with slitted sunlight coming through the blinds. Ice would tinkle in glasses. She would speak low and huskily, with her lips against his ear. There would be room service, hushed, respectful, and envious — some young man a year or two older than he.

She would be artful and tigerish, would please him in ways unknown to him before, and he would give to her because it was unfair always to take without giving. He would be her stranger, and she his. He would appease the hungry ghost of the lorry driver by his generosity to this woman. It would cost him a few days — she would not want to part with him quickly — but they would both be enriched by it.

Boaz-Jachin thought of the parts of her body that might not be tanned by the sun, how the scent of her flesh would be and the taste of her. He was getting an erection, and crossed his legs discreetly.

Afterwards she would offer him money. He would not accept it of course, although he needed money very badly. On the other hand, he asked himself, was there any difference morally between that and taking money for playing the guitar and singing?

The wind lessened, the music was louder, the car stopped. Boaz-Jachin looked all around for a hotel or motel but saw none. There was a road going off to the right.

‘I just remembered,’ said the woman, ‘I have to turn off here. I’d better drop you now.’

Boaz-Jachin picked up his guitar and his rucksack and got out. The woman closed the door, locked it.

‘When a boy your age looks at me the way I think you were looking at me,’ she said, ‘then one of us is in bad shape. Either I shouldn’t think that way or you shouldn’t look that way.’

The little red car pulled away, playing music, going straight ahead towards the seaport.