The Man in the Shed

by Lloyd Jones

  ‘She was always a busy woman. Your mother.’

  ‘When there was a war on.’

  ‘Nicaragua,’ Harley laughed. ‘Remember that?’

  ‘Nicaragua what?’ asked Andrea, and Pete said he would tell her later.

  ‘Well, that’s the factory, then,’ Harley said.

  Andrea turned around to Pete. She smiled and rolled her eyes.

  Back on the highway they caught up to the traffic and slowed right down. Harley wound down the window and could hear the strain of the wine bus up ahead trying to hold its place.

  The clock on the dash said one-ten. Harley felt more relaxed. He wouldn’t bother with the back route. He would drive straight into town and drop the kids off there. He would pick up Easterman and get back to the shop for the wine bus. He was happily dozing in the slow traffic when Andrea piped up.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?’

  ‘I’m eighty-five kilograms,’ Harley said, and from the back Pete laughed. Andrea smiled out the side window—she shook her head, then she turned back to Harley with a broader, goofier smile.

  ‘Okay,’ Harley said. He was going to be a real bore and ask each of them what they planned on doing when they had finished up with university.

  Andrea turned around to Pete.

  ‘You go first.’

  ‘Andrea wants to go to America,’ he said. ‘New York. That’s right, isn’t it, Andrea?’

  ‘Pete wants to go to Australia. Yawn. Excuse me. And work on a shrimp boat.’

  The traffic started to move then. The cars in single file moved around the wine bus. Harley managed a quick glance but didn’t recognise the driver. Although it might have been Alun Richards. It could have been Alun just wearing sunglasses. He hit the gas and the car shot ahead.

  Andrea fell back in her seat. They got round the bus and fell into line, and Andrea picked up that strand of hair with her fingers again, and twirled it.

  Harley apologised. ‘I’m sorry. You were going to ask me a question.’

  ‘It was nothing really,’ she said. ‘I suppose I just want a stimulating life.’

  ‘It’s a state of mind,’ Pete said.

  ‘That’s true, too,’ said Harley. But at that moment he had seen in his rear mirror the bus turn off the highway for Owens Bush.

  He looked at his watch and couldn’t figure out where the bus was headed.

  Harley slowed the car onto the shoulder and, finally, made his mind up to stop. The top of the bus could be seen moving across the paddocks, then disappeared altogether, on a diagonal line into the earth.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ asked Andrea. Harley didn’t reply. He was aware the girl was exchanging anxious looks with her boyfriend.

  He turned the car around and shot up the highway and took Owens Bush Road. Usually Alun would take the tourists to Sunkist Orchards, Millars Vineyard and Winery, and move on from there.

  He asked Pete and Andrea if they could see anything. Forking off left and right were plenty of farm roads the bus could have taken.

  ‘Is that what we’re looking for? A bus?’ said Andrea. ‘I don’t believe this. Now we’re looking for a bus?’ She turned around to giggle at Pete.

  Harley braked and the car slid in the gravel and came to rest. The heat. The dust and splattered yellow gorse flowers gathered outside the window. It was ‘sit and wait’ air. He got out of the car and climbed onto the hood, and up onto Easterman’s rooftop to scan the surrounding farmland. He could see the winery. The front yard was bare. The same front yard where he might expect to have seen a good number of Americans—middle-aged couples, the women with dead-looking hair and the men with leather moneybelts and sunglasses, their bored gazes staring across empty paddocks.

  They drove in silence. The girl was back to calling him ‘Mr Harley’. She said she was sorry about the bus. She hadn’t meant to laugh.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Harley.

  Here they were on the back route, passing the spot where Easterman had pulled over to get into his Prince suit. Up on Hilltops Road they passed the place where he and Rex Kirby had discovered the ute in the corn fields. He could hear Pete telling Andrea, ‘Billy Terrell was killed there.’ He was saying that once, years ago, he and Billy Terrell had built a tree fort together.

  They came into the main-road traffic. Harley heard the girl breathe more easily.

  She said, ‘Well, that was interesting.’

  ‘It’s a quiet place,’ Pete said.

  Harley didn’t say anything.

  ‘You’ve been very kind, Mr Harley,’ Andrea said. ‘I’m sorry I said that about the bus.’

  Harley could see by the look on the girl’s face she was worried about whether there was still a job.

  They got caught by the light, so Harley asked the girl what the question was she had wanted to ask.

  ‘Oh that …’ And she reached for the strand of hair. ‘It’s not important. I was wondering if you ever thought you would end up living here? See, it’s a dumb question.’

  ‘No,’ Harley said. ‘Never.’

  A few minutes later, through the glass of the antiques store, he could see his wife dusting the World War One helmets. There was nobody else in the store. Harley said he would drop them off here. He had a quick errand to do. ‘Go and say hi to Giddy,’ he said to Pete. He looked back in the window and met his wife’s questioning glance. She was looking at Easterman’s car. He doubted she knew the Commodore was Easterman’s. But she would want to know whose car it was, and what he was doing in it.

  He watched Pete and Andrea enter the store, about to tell Giddy of his offer of part-time work which the store could not afford. Harley held up his hand to indicate he would be five more minutes, and pulled back into the traffic. He turned by the tea rooms. Bryan Gill was standing in the doorway shielding his eyes and gazing up the road for the bus. In the window his wife straightened up the table-cloths, making small last-minute adjustments. Harley was wondering what Easterman would say to him, whether there would be a story, and this time if he would want to hear it.

  still lives

  The traffic is backed as far as I can see. One shiny car top after another. Now and then an opportunist darts into a gap. Youth. We say it with a sad shake of the head, a roll of the eyes. The predicted wind has failed to arrive. The hills. The riffs of quiet cloud. We are all waiting. It is hot so everyone has their windows down. Everyone is tuned to a different radio station. In the midst of the rock-station hysteria comes a violin, delicate, insistent. Gunfire and bomb explosions burst from a news bulletin. Now some canned laughter: Hey, I’m just an ordinary guy. No, really. There are jingles for ads. It is hard to tell them apart from the pop jingles, which is what advertisers like, of course, as well as, presumably, the US State Department, which has just admitted to a policy of disseminating false information, spraying it out there like weed killer to burn off trails to the truth or maybe flush out a mad man, an assassin, a hijacker. The noises of the world are no longer reliable.

  The driver of the van in front of me gets out to try to see where the hold-up is. He stands on the toes of his work boots. His shoulders drop and he turns, looking pissed off, in my direction. He is definitely on the wrong side of glamour—long hair, whiskered growth, a rock star’s mo, faded blue overalls. I imagine he got stuck somewhere along the line. I watch him dig around in the back of his van, then he turns and, finding my face in the windscreen, he holds up a beer can and points to it. Shall I? I can’t decide. Shall I? Shall I? Looks like I will. I get out of the car. Turns out his name is Frank. He’s a furniture polisher. The beer has been in the back of the van a bit long, but hey, this is better than frying in a line of cars that aren’t going anywhere. While we stand there drinking, the driver behind me gets out of his car and walks sweatily towards us. He wants to know if he can borrow a mobile. His battery is out. He’s late for a meeting and needs to send word. I give him mine. He turns away but we can hear him clearly. He very definitely sounds m
iddle-management. The way he talks up the problem. For the benefit of the other motorists there’s a bit of posturing. His gestures are unequivocal. He cuts the air with his hand. He signs off with a Latin thrust of hand-in-the-air. He hands me back the mobile, and without any hesitation at all accepts a can of beer from Frank. What a day, he says. ‘Crazy,’ he says. ‘Absolutely crazy.’ His name is Graham—office systems. He says what that is but neither Frank nor I follow up with a question. We sip our beer and watch the traffic shuffle up one place in the outside lane.

  Soon—well, we are onto our second beers by this time—a banged-up Subaru nudges forward. We raise our beer cans above our leery faces but our buffoonery barely registers with the man. His hands are stuck to the steering wheel as though he might be going somewhere. I don’t know why he can’t just abandon ship and slip out for one of Frank’s beers. We are all giving him jeering looks when his body slumps forward. Frank looks at me, and strokes his moustache. Graham calls out to him, ‘Hey fella. Oi.’ He taps on the passenger-side window. Nothing. He opens the door and leans in. Then he stands up and quietly closes the door after him. We watch him straighten a tie, watch him draw a deep breath. He says, ‘We have a dead man here.’

  The traffic in our lane shuffles forward. The traffic banked up behind has just seen that fresh land opening up in front of Frank’s van and they start honking their horns.

  So what we do is this. We push the dead man’s car to the side of the road in front of Frank’s van. I jump in my car and follow Frank up onto the shoulder. Graham parks behind me. We get out of our vehicles. Horns are blaring at us, at the dead man’s car holding things up. I try to copy Graham’s look of complete indifference. I notice Frank attempting the same. Neither of us are as convincing as Graham. He appears to be genuinely unmoved by the horn-blowing. We wonder what we should do next; there are obvious options and responsibilities, such as phoning the police or an ambulance, but is there any point just yet while the traffic is banked up? We can’t leave the dead man there on his own. So we pile into the banged-up Subaru. Frank sits in the front with the dead man. I sit in the back with Graham, all stomach and short knees. We talk about what to do. There’s not a lot we can do. We are stuck. Frank has a sound point though. We should try to find out the man’s name. Now Graham mutters negatively about tampering with dead bodies. Frank turns around to see what I think of that. Actually, I don’t have a problem. We’re not going to rob the man. We just need to know who he is. Then what happens is this: the man’s mobile phone rings. It’s on his person—possibly in the jacket pocket. Frank lets it ring. He waits for the sound of a voicemail message, then he plunges his hand into the dead man’s pocket. He’s clearly over the consultative thing. He retrieves the message and holds the phone up for me and Graham to listen to a woman who is obviously pissed off. ‘I waited for you by the gate. I can’t wait any longer. Katie’s show begins in ten minutes. I can see her and the other kids looking around for me. In case you’ve forgotten we’re at the park entrance.’ In a more facetious voice she names the park, reminds the dead man, Joe (we have a name at last), what city this is, the country and hemisphere, and what time he is expected. ‘Just where the hell are you, Joe?’ According to the time on the dash he is ten minutes late.

  Well, a few minutes later the traffic begins to move. We move Joe into the passenger side of the back seat. Along the way there are some funny looks from passing motorists. Joe doesn’t look too good. I’ve leant him against the door in the back, his head against the window. He’s not a good colour. He looks mildly angered by something, perhaps slow service in a restaurant, something of that order. Graham and me park our cars on the shoulder behind Frank’s van, then we cram back into Joe’s car and continue on into town.

  Frank drives, mindful of the speed limit. We find the park. There’s the gated entrance the woman spoke of; we drive to the circular green at the end. There’s some sort of nativity play happening down in the dell. Kids with cardboard swords, in costume, a gold crown here and there. The parents are standing around in a semi-circle. The women are talking to each other behind their hands. One or two of the men are nearly falling over with boredom.

  I’m last out of the car. I make sure I bang the door shut, and a woman—in a light summery cotton dress, a bob of dark hair—turns and looks in our direction, at first without much interest, perhaps just to see where the noise came from. But now we see the mystery catch in her face. She knows that car. She doesn’t know us, of course. The questions line up to be answered. Who are these strange men driving up to her daughter’s nativity play in Joe’s car? Who are we? Why are we here? And where is her husband? Where is Joe? This is the moment Frank steps away from the back window.

  the waiting room

  She watched television at odd times of the day then complained that she felt ‘caught out’ if I happened to pop home early. She slept late. We argued over silly things. I knew what was the matter. And she did, too. We were travelling north, that time, into bright clear skies. It was late January and a drought on the east coast of the island had split the hills open. The slightest breeze gave rise to a dust cloud, and where we pitched our tent you could smell the earth on the caked Manawatu riverbed. I thought the great outdoors might turn things around for her and, I suppose, us. We read and spent a lot of time walking the dry riverbed. I had walked ahead this particular afternoon, imagining divorce, a new life, a new woman perhaps, and a new house, street, suburb. Suddenly I remembered Kath. I turned around and found her crouched over, parting driftwood and dry reed, clearing the way either side of a massive claw-mark in the mud.

  The next day scientists from the National Museum’s Natural History Unit cut out the block of mud with the footprint of Dinornis robustus. Television arrived and interviewed Kath on-site. The rest of the holiday was spent combing the riverbed for more footprints.

  Home again, and Kath received an invitation from the Natural History Unit to inspect her Dinornis footprint. That night she brought home a book on moa. One of its more surprising photographic plates featured the great British anatomist Sir Richard Owen standing next to the skeleton of the towering bird he named Dinornis novaezelandiae (prodigious or surprising bird).

  For a number of years a copy of this photograph—of the skeleton from Tiger Hill in Otago and the anatomist in his rumpled academic robe—has sat on the mantelpiece next to the photograph of Kath and me whitewater-rafting.

  As far as a skeleton is able to, the moa impresses as a rather benign creature. I think it has to do with the kindly tilt of its head in contrast to Sir Richard’s grumpiness. Furthermore I suspect the photographer has asked Sir Richard to place his hand on the hip of the Dinornis. Probably it is the professor’s first contact with a photographer. His mouth shows a wry amusement at the unaccustomed bullying. His left hand is placed familiarly as I mentioned before; and the photographer has achieved something disturbingly conjugal. I can think of no better word than ‘gratitude’ to describe the slight tilt of the moa’s head.

  The photograph of the skeleton and the anatomist was the first thing I packed away for this trip.

  Then, as the ferry nosed out the heads to the strait, I took out the photograph. The white peaks of the Southern Alps rose above the approaching landfall and, as I looked from one to the other, the Dinornis and the view seemed to be clues from two different worlds.

  I struck up a conversation with a young blonde woman. A large Canadian flag was sewn onto her backpack. She said she was headed for the lakes. She had flown into Auckland two days earlier. She hoped to be out of here by the end of the week. Queensland beckoned. She had been writing on the back of a postcard while the ferry, newly painted in Mediterranean-white, glided over still blue seas. Whenever the opportunity arose I stole glances at her tanned legs. In June they were like out-of-season fruit.

  She asked if I was headed for home. No? You’re travelling too—hey, and she groped towards the awkward business of asking whether I was travelling by car. The Subaru was in the
garage at home. We intended to walk. I signalled to Kath through the salted windows of the saloon. She was bent over her maps, contemplating the red arrows showing the moa’s southern path to extinction. Kath’s masters paper described the locomotive speeds of various moa. An excerpt had even made the Royal Society Journal.

  The Canadian swallowed her disappointment and smiled politely. Kath had come out on deck and so I joined her by the rail. The sun appeared and people carrying their beer glasses began to line the deck. Kath smiled at the approaching landfall. She took my hand in her own, and I set to worrying about the high hopes she had for this trip. The last I saw of the Canadian was coming off the gangway. I happened to look up and catch a shock of blonde hair in the passenger’s side of a red sports car.

  Half an hour later the Blenheim bus dropped us off at the railway crossing at Tuamarina. A man in the cheese factory said it would be quicker if we continued along the highway another two miles. The way we were headed was longer, less traffic, less chance of a lift, but we liked the sound of Blind Creek Road.

  We arrived at the coast in an hour and a half, and walked the next four days.

  The coastline, as we began to discover, was a bit of a tease. One point was succeeded by the next one, and we never stopped wondering what lay around that point which of course was just another point, and so on and so on. Meanwhile there were things to look at and examine. Here is a dead seagull. A dead seal. A blue plastic Skeggs fish crate washed ashore. A broken toilet seat. A whiskey bottle. A gin bottle. These bits and pieces stuck with me rather avidly. The same with the erosion north of the Awatere River that has left farm fences suspended over gulches like trapeze wire; the massive shingle platforms of former high tide boundaries; the doorless outhouse tied to the earth in the manner of a tepee. Everything seems so relevant at the start of a journey.

  The White Bluffs we had seen from the ferry were suddenly above us. The sun went behind a cloud and we ran laughing beneath the soft, grey papa cliffs to beat the incoming tide. We ran on until we reached the next point—and rounding it, we saw Cape Campbell. It seemed a great distance off, and the intervening coastline looked to have been dealt to with a meat cleaver. On our map the distance from White Bluffs to Cape Campbell was no more than half an inch, but it wasn’t until the following afternoon that we reached the lighthouse.