Boyhoodlum

by Anson Cameron

  And something not. I could still see him wink and that wink involved a smile and that smile was mine to keep … even now. I could smell the tobacco smoke on his breath as he called me ‘Tiger’. Maybe by talking it back and forward one of us would stumble on the sense, the lesson, which surely lay behind wild teenagers and young death. We rode by the tree and pointed out the scars on the bark to kids who didn’t know. ‘He was going to teach me how to steal cars,’ I told them.

  It couldn’t have been true. The cop with the .38. Shooting that good. It’s likely Benny just took the corner too fast. Drunk? High? Scared, certainly. Cops in pursuit, his soft hands gripping the wheel. Anyway, he died in a roll-over fireball without ever seeing the world from any place near as lofty as respectability or adulthood. And you couldn’t speak about him in front of Debbie without her jaw shaking and her eyes filling with tears. I’d look away and just let her cry before I caught it myself. If she was going to bawl over Benny Zambrano, well, that was the girl she was.

  Langdo was dinking me out to the golf club on his bike to hunt for the eggs of the rainbow bee-eater for my collection. A lot of the local kids raided bird nests and collected eggs and traded and bartered their way to fine collections. Mine was famed above others. Held in trays under glass in squared-off sections on cotton wool were the eggs of over a hundred species of birds, ranging in size from emu and wedge-tailed eagle, to the pardalote and the welcome swallow, eggs as small as pearls.

  Only old Mr Vagg’s collection was better, and he had been collecting for eighty years. My eggs were mostly collected by Guy and bequeathed to me when he went away to boarding school. He had been a daredevil, thief and black-market trader in the pursuit of exotic eggs. He would ride further from town than other kids, climb higher trees, scale cliffs, and even break into houses and extract rare jewels from other collections. It wasn’t uncommon to see him up a tree clinging to a limb at dizzying heights, ducking as he was swooped by a hawk as he raided its nest, his sisters and me standing beneath, our opinions divided on whether death or miraculous resurrection awaited if he fell.

  Despite his wily and fearless accumulation, we still didn’t have a rainbow bee-eater egg. They were a rare bird, beautifully coloured, masterful aviators – they appeared from the north in spring and were gone by winter. Over summer they lived out in the sandhills by the Shepparton Golf Club, digging tunnels for their nests in the sand cliffs there. We would hollow out footholds and climb the cliffs and press flat-bellied against the sand and reach down the tunnels, hoping to find a clutch of tiny eggs rather than a coiled tiger snake full of tiny eggs.

  I was a heavy-handed kid. It was impossible for me to make a hole in each end of a marble-sized egg and blow out its liquid innards without crushing the shell. But Langdo was nimble of finger, a maker of things, while I was a wrecker. I was already forming my arguments that he blow the eggs and hand them over to me. It made sense that such a rare and beautiful egg be in my avian reliquary, rather than in his paltry shoebox as part of his mundane collection.

  If we got a few eggs and Langdo successfully blew them we could trade with other boys for eggs we didn’t have. They were tiny, but being rare had enormous currency. A rainbow bee-eater’s egg was worth two magpies and a kookaburra, or a spur-winged plover and a white-barred honeyeater, a dollar bird and a mudlark. We could, if things went well today, enrich ourselves.

  We pedalled along under a blue sky, the Goulburn River and her gums on our left and the red sandhills in the distance getting bigger. Out on those sandhills was also the town cemetery. Easy digging in the sand and above the regular river floods. My people, immigrants from the British Isles, lay there under unadorned basalt headstones, just names and dates and family connections and every now and then one rose into the melodramatic heights to mention the deceased had been DEARLY BELOVED. These were the monumental incarnations of a puritan aesthetic. I’d go there and stare at them. They weren’t much. They must have been small, shy people.

  Then I’d wander into the newer areas of the cemetery and find the Italians and Greeks shouting at God through megaphonic family crypts made of shiny black marble and decorated with cherubim and seraphim and saints and alabaster Jesus and busty Virgins Mary in legion. They were patterned in gold, and some had photos of the pop-eyed deceased on them, fading beneath beautiful bubbles of glass. They were awe-inspiring. Each grave, each mausoleum, was a work of art and a thundering demand on God’s time and attention.

  When Dad took us out there, to those lovely sandhills with their peppercorn trees, he’d point out this or that relative who’d been gathered in by their creator, and I’d feel ashamed and wonder how on Earth my people were going to get heard by God while surrounded by this Mediterranean crescendo of architectural splendour?

  I’d just shake my head. My great aunts and uncles and great-grandparents and theirs must all be still queuing in purgatory like the sorriest peasants trying to get to see an opera while Greeks and Italians who set out for the show way after they did whizz past flashing season tickets. The Mediterranean immigrants were the only people in our valley spending on public art.

  Most Sundays, about mid-afternoon, Dad would announce, ‘Righto, we’re going for a Sunday Drive.’ As though a Sunday Drive was a known and legitimate activity performed by all happy families. But I didn’t know anyone else who went for a Sunday Drive or anyone who even knew what one was. Sometimes we were busy and truly didn’t want to go, and sometimes we did want to go, but by duty we always complained and whined. ‘Do we have to?’ ‘Why?’ ‘It’s a waste of petrol.’ ‘It’s a waste of time.’ ‘There’s nothing to see.’

  We owned a Galaxie 500, a coffee-coloured car hauled by a five-litre V8 that rumbled like a bootlegger’s getaway. Dad would drive and Mum would sit in the front and Debbie and Vicki and I would spread ourselves across the rear bench seat. You could sit seven or eight kids across that seat and sometimes we took our friends. At first they didn’t want to go. They couldn’t see the point of driving around without a destination. But after they’d been once they queued up and begged to be able to come. Langdo and his sister Leanne and Pigsy would pile in the car with us, because the Cameron Sunday Drive included a dark thrill that dare not speak its name, a secret raison d’etre never mentioned, a slightly off-colour side to the trip that, if spoken out loud, would have seemed wrong.

  Dad would drive a circuitous route through the inner streets of Shepparton pointing out this and that to us kids. And making provocatively banal observations, keeping us waiting, while we tried to be patient, to ride out the masquerade. He and Mum made coded remarks to each other, ‘Hmmm … Clarry’s VW outside the Thomson place again.’ ‘Oh, just look at the Higgins’ lawn.’ These were observations about adultery and drunkenness, if you knew what you were listening for. We would crawl through the Housing Commission estates and blackfella slums, noses on the glass to see how all the worst kind of people lived.

  The Sunday Drive turned out to be a most explorative and expansive experience, rich with gossip, culture and landscape. No one flew anywhere, then. France was found in a book. Indonesia wasn’t. The Sunday Drive was our Grand Tour.

  We would cruise the town. But everyone knew where we were heading. And soon Langdo, bubbling with his usual impatience, would burst out, ‘Come on, Mr Cameron. What about the wogs’ eagles?’

  ‘Immigrants, Langdo,’ Dad would correct him. ‘Not “wogs”.’ And he’d point the Galaxie toward the edge of town, to the orchards where the eagles and lions waited. Out there, in acres of fruit trees, monetarily-emancipated Mediterraneans had built brick palaces and surrounded them with cement critters: vultures, stallions, lions atop gateposts, eagles perched on pillars …

  Inside every Italian was a Medici who, freed by pear money, became a patron to a Michelangelo working in cement and cliché. Thus each Varapodio or Villani was soon keeper of his own stone menagerie, a job lot of noble beasts frozen in the act of defending a small orchard.

  For us the pay-off of an o
therwise boring Sunday Drive was ogling and guffawing at this cut-rate Renaissance. We’d motor from one palace to the next as Dad pointed out fresh affronts. ‘Balboni’s added two lions. He’s got Nelson covered now.’ ‘Good God. Is that a rug rat mauling a mastiff, or Romulus having lunch?’ As with Picasso, this art brought more pleasure to its delighted detractors than its defenders.

  We Cameron children being an amalgam of unpretentious peoples – Scot, Paddy and Pom, a cocktail of dour bloods running in our veins – nothing in our world and nothing in our knowledge of the wider world and nothing in our imaginations was as racially hubristic, civically antagonistic, tastelessly ostentatious, or just plain un-Australian, as a cement eagle with its wings unfurled and given a lick of gold paint. These Italians, these Greeks, these Albanians … what type of crazy people were they? If their statues symbolised rich histories, then we didn’t know it.

  We would roll about on the Galaxie’s back seat in stitches, Langdo’s laughter flipping him like a landed carp. But as we drove back to town our jibes and hilarity died out into silence and a hollow mood. How could people be so wrong? Why would God persist with such eccentric folk? Why didn’t he straighten them out?

  We began to feel shame for these crazy immigrants, even sorry for them. Dad enjoyed our eventual confusion as much as our initial hilarity. He never wanted life’s paradoxes cleared up.

  ‘Mr Cameron …’ Langdo would ask quietly, ‘why do they do it?’

  ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison, Langdo.’

  ‘But, no, Mr Cameron, them wogs …’

  ‘Immigrants, Langdo.’

  ‘Them immigrants, Mr Cameron … is Walt Disney their King?’

  Riding out for the rainbow bee-eater, on top of another sandhill ahead of us an old Turk lived by himself in a colossal wooden wreck-house. Mr Suleiman was a brown-skinned little man who grew the best spinach and silverbeet in the district.

  He was the only Turk in our world, as far as I knew. It must have been hard being the sole agent of your race and culture. If you sin you blacken your people. But Mr Sooly’s spinach was faultless and he enjoyed as much respect as faultless spinach can deliver. And as little respect as a gatherer of excrement deserves.

  For Mr Sooly, world’s only Turk, spinach magician and sand-hill genie, was also a collector of dung, regularly seen behind the livestock of neighbouring farmers with a scoop and a smile. Once, when Ashton’s Circus was in town, I saw him wheeling home a barrow holding a stacked pyramid of cantaloupe-sized elephant droppings. This exotic treasure was freshly taken, and Mr Sooly was wreathed in aromatic steam, whistling and shaking his head at his luck as he trundled along, imagining the magic this mammoth muck would work on his garden.

  I liked Mr Sooly. He came to our back door every week smelling of old sweat and newly turned earth and carrying boxes of sandy greens keeping his eyes lowered in the presence of my handsome mother and flashing me a broken smile.

  But then, when I was eight, with Anzac Day looming, our teacher Miss Robertson foisted a potted Gallipoli on us, and it was revealed Mr Sooly had defeated us while we were trying to invade him for his own good. Miss Robertson showed us sepia photos of the wounded disembarking in Sydney. Shit. That little creep Sooly. Hadn’t we praised his silverbeet and allowed him free rein with the faeces of our quadrupeds? I was gobsmacked at his treachery: he accepts our elephant turd with a smile and gives us The Nek in payment.

  It was not uncommon then, and it is not now, for the children of veterans to pursue dead wars locally. And we couldn’t forgive this Gallipoli thing. So on Anzac eve a posse of boys set out for revenge. We left our houses via windows and met in town and crept out of town and up the moonlit sandhill through the weeds past scarecrows Frankensteined from our own fathers’ fashion faux pas.

  When we got amongst Mr Sooly’s veggies we stomped his spinach, kicking hanks of it high against the stars. We whipped his silverbeet with wire. Then, looking at the house, I saw Mr Sooly’s moonlit face at a windowpane. He was not angry, frightened, amazed or sad. He was quietly watching, blank faced, as five small vandals mangled his crop. It was as if he had expected the slaughter. Positively known it was coming. Perhaps this happened every Anzac Day. Maybe he raised a sacrificial harvest each autumn so kids could use it to avenge Gallipoli.

  I would rather he loosed a couple of barrels of quail shot at us than bear witness like this. It would have made more sense for a desperate war criminal to go for the gun and maim brave children than to surrender so meekly.

  I went home fast through the moon-bright back alleys, up the grapevine and across the slatted roof and in through the flywire to bed, where I stared at Mr Sooly’s staring face for hours.

  What makes a man migrate to the land of his enemy? Perhaps he was a variety of Turk not getting a fair shake at home. Maybe he admired what he saw of those men down there in their slouch hats as he rained Hell on them at Gallipoli. Maybe some convoluted strain of guilt led him to feed us greens, to heal us after he’d wounded us. Or … maybe he wasn’t even a Turk.

  I was always deep in the house invisible when he delivered our veggies after that. I’d hear Mum talking to him, his politeness bordering on chivalry, ‘Missus Camern, I not agree such lady carry such. Is big heavy. No, no. Lady is Lady. Sooly put box on kitchen table.’

  From then on I thought of Mr Sooly around Anzac Day every year. Albanian? Pole? Bulgarian? I imagined, like any farmer sensing the cold coming on, he made preparations. Noting the town kids getting a little meaner and seeing schemes starting to bubble behind their eyes, he’d know the day was coming and he’d dig in manure and mosey up and down the rows with his great riveted watering can until he had a bumper crop for us to take our revenge on. I figured it was a tithe he paid annually to a freshly raised army of children. After this crop, for the rest of the year, all the greenery he could grow was his. Australia must have seemed a beautiful place then.

  This day, this day of the rainbow bee-eater, heading past Sooly’s tumbledown house, I turned my face away – one more site of shame. As I perched side-saddle on the crossbar of Langdo’s bike, I took shots with my shanghai at cars as they overtook us.

  The stones cracked against them and whined away sweetly as ricochets in a Western. The people in the cars were mostly old lawn bowlers heading out to their club for the Saturday afternoon pennant. Sometimes a driver and his wife would pull over to see what had happened. Stout and slow and dressed in white they’d walk around their cars, him scratching his head and crouching and squinting at the duco here and there. She’d be telling him the engine had exploded because he was driving too fast, or the steering had buckled because of his waggling it side to side incessantly like he thought he was Jack Brabham. ‘The engine didn’t explode, Jeannie. I think a stone flicked up.’

  With the shanghai hidden up the front of my shirt we’d ride past smiling and say something nonsensical like, ‘Beware the seven heberpants.’

  ‘What did he say? What did that boy say?’

  It was the type of workaday malfeasance that kept us amused on a long bike ride. A balancing act and an exhibition of mobile marksmanship and mischief visited on vulnerable civilians. I saw us as a couple of Comanches on a war pony firing arrows from beneath its belly at pilgrims in covered wagons.

  The cars, coming from behind, couldn’t see the shanghai, nor could I see them until they passed. A car roared up alongside and you just had to blast it before it was out of range. You had to shoot into the space it was going to be before you even identified it.

  This is how I hit the metallic green HR Holden with P plates and a fox tail tied on the aerial and louvre blinds on the back window, driven by a sharpie with a blond mullet, high-rolled sleeves and an unlikely law-and-order outlook. Given time to consider, it was a dangerously young, hotted-up ride. But things happened fast. The HR swooped past us and I shot reflexively into the space it was heading and the pebble described a white tracer through the blue day and hit its side mirror and ricocheted insi
de and hit the driver. I saw his head lurch sideways like he was miming a presidential assassination.

  Langdo was incredulous. ‘An HR with a fox tail?’ he whispered. Why the hell had I shot an HR with a fox tail? Here we were amusing ourselves frightening lawn bowlers, inflicting a modicum of vehicular damage and an afternoon of lingering confusion upon geriatrics, the sort of harmless fun that couldn’t really bring us to grief … and I’d gone and attacked a sharpie.

  The HR slewed onto the road shoulder throwing gravel and boiling dust and the sharpie jumped out. He was toweringly young and strong and he ran at us with his elbows high and grabbed the bike by the handlebars with both hands as if he were bulldogging a steer. Then he rubbed at a red welt on his neck. Langdo steadied us with his feet on the ground and said, ‘Hey.’ I was still perched on the crossbar, hunched to hide the shanghai. The sharpie lifted my shirt and pulled it out. ‘You shot me.’ He shook the bike and I fell off the crossbar onto my back on the bitumen without making a sound.

  To this vengeful sharpie I must have looked like any other eight year old. He was going to teach me a lesson I’d never forget. A major lesson in picking the wrong guy, or doing the wrong thing. Maybe both. ‘What are your names?’ He let go the bike and grabbed a handful of Langdo’s t-shirt. ‘Steven Newman.’ ‘Norm Almond.’ They were friends from school. We gave their names to enraged authorities routinely. They were probably being pinched shoplifting at that moment and giving ours.

  I thought of bolting, but this guy was taut and primed and out here with no cover he would run me down. I was spastic with fear anyway and maybe I couldn’t get my legs started and would just convulse a few steps before collapsing in a cowardly heap, having compounded my sins by trying to escape.