Boyhoodlum

by Anson Cameron

  At one end of the line the drummer, also a fighter, with a bass drum hanging athwart his gut, its shiny red mother-of-pearl frame contrasting with its skins stained dark where the padded stick landed its profound blow calling men to come and fight, taunting them, each beat a dare, an invitation, or a pang of shame. This heavyweight beat the drum once every few seconds while the spruiker shouted down at the crowd through a conical piece of tin, ‘A round or two for a pound or two … Who’ll take a glove? Who’ll take on the Maori Wonder? What about Jimmy Sands, the Cumregunja Marvel? A round or two for a pound or two … come on, you blokes, step up, they said you was a tough town. They said you was a serious town. They said this town had hard men. I’m starting to wonder if the men of bloomin’ Albury aren’t tougher than Shepp men. Who’ll take a glove?’

  Oh, we would fight, all right. Nothing could hold us back. We had all easily imagined the glory of being inside that tent in that ring with the crowd baying while we danced around an opponent making him look a cinematic oaf before chopping him to the floor with some snippet of pugilistic tango that could be enjoyed in memorised slo-mo by connoisseurs evermore.

  The town had good fighters, young men, known men, who walked the streets with a bouncing gait so each step said ‘boxer’. You could tell a fighter as clearly as you could tell a cripple, from a block away. Darcy Ritchie and Gary Austin were said to be future Australian champions, if they didn’t fight the police too often to get a good run at a career.

  Spectators paid two bob to get into the tent. Inside was a crush of beery, sweaty men laughing at nothing. Some were talking too fast and some were stony silent. Everyone was a little afraid of public defeat, of becoming a fallen gladiator, dragged from this arena behind mules. Who’ll take a glove? Who’ll take a glove? Dusty beams of sunlight angling through the tent gave it the feel of a collapsing temple.

  Boys were used on the undercard to get the men fired up for battle. But Jimmy Sharman employed no boy boxers. The boy fights were local against local. Fighters got to keep half the money the spectators threw into the ring. Jimmy kept the other half. Jimmy’s man swept up the change off the canvas and did the count. The better the fight the more money you made. If you went nuts and tried to kill someone the coins rained like gamma rays.

  You only had to step forward with your hand raised to fight. The ref would call you up and then pluck another boy approximately your size from the crowd and the deal was set. ‘Okay,’ I told Stowey. ‘Get up there.’

  For a week leading up to the show we had planned this sting. We were going to put on a fake fight and rake in the dough. Every lunchtime at school we had told our other friends to clear off while we practised feints and pulled punches. We mimed killer combinations of crosses and uppercuts and winced feigned pain, and staggered under hammer blows, a playwright’s rollercoaster battle, each of us alternately on the point of defeat and victory, until the men in our minds were hollering delight and we were knee-deep in coin.

  It never occurred to us that men who made their living fighting, and other men who fought drunk with some frequency, might be able to pick a fix in a moment.

  ‘No. You first,’ he answered me.

  ‘What, are you chicken?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go on, then. I’ll put my hand up after you get in there.’

  ‘Okay.’ Stowey ducked between the men and rolled beneath the bottom rope onto the canvas and onto his feet and began shuffling backwards jabbing and smiling at some phantom in front of him. The crowd laughed and shouted approval at the kid’s bravado. Look who thinks he’s Lionel bloody Rose. Hearing their roar he grinned stupidly wide and began dancing side to side, bending his head this way and that, stretching his neck like he’d seen the big names do on TV Ringside. Unbelievably, he began hissing as he threw jabs at the invisible challenger in front of him. Sss … sss … sss … pneumatic stabs of sound such as the pros gave off.

  I suddenly realised Stowey was a prima donna sent mentally awry by the adoration of massed fans. It was obvious he’d forgotten his role in the fix. He’d gone mad. I began to rethink the day. Was I going to fight some fool who whored himself out for the brief adulation of drunks and cannery workers? I was as good as my word, but … Stowey was veering dangerously off script. Should I honour my contract with a harebrained adventurer like this? No. No, I thought, perhaps not. The deal was off. If the fool was going for glory he could count me out.

  As one of Sharman’s men laced pendulous gloves to the ends of Stowey’s unmuscled arms the ref cast about for a contender. ‘Who’ll take a glove?’

  He bent and asked Stowey’s name. ‘Bruce.’

  ‘Who’ll take on Battling Bruce? Three rounds of fistic fury and half the gratuities to the fighters,’ the ref shouted.

  Well, I would have taken on Battling Bruce if he’d stuck to the plan and not got carried away by fame. But with him hissing like a flyweight taipan and waving at the crowd as if it had travelled miles to see him alone, as if he was some sort of star attraction, then, no. Drunk on the shouts and whistles of the crowd as he had clearly become, I thought he deserved a whipping. I could see the sense in letting the fight go ahead without me.

  In the ring Stowey’s eyes began to dart back and forth like mice do when they hear a certain frequency that precedes a nasty fuck-up. He looked this way and that. Where was I? I’d let the suspense build nicely. I’d let him shadow-box and show his style. It was time for me to enter the ring and show a few moves myself, and then for us to act out our epic. His eyes zigged and zagged across the cheering faces for mine. ‘Camo?’ he called in a stage whisper. ‘Camo?’

  By the time they had his gloves laced Stowey’s eyes had stopped darting. The frightening frequency trilling in his ears had stopped. He knew.

  The ref pointed into the crowd on the far side of the ring. ‘Yes. That boy there. Lift him up here.’ The crowd hoisted Carlin Grey over the ropes and landed him unsmiling in the ring. Carlin Grey was a tough kid from Rumbalara, the war-torn blackfella settlement on the outskirts of town. Carlin Grey had a reputation even in Rumbalara. Disagreements with Carlin ended in a fight and fights with Carlin ended with Carlin standing over you asking how fuckin’ smart you felt now. There would be no fake fight with Carlin Grey. Still, regret is a wasted emotion, so I decided to feel none.

  I figured that, looking on the bright side, and taking the long view, as a wise boy should, Stowey might use this beating as a campaign medal. If Carlin went on to become a famous fighter or criminal, and either or both was likely, then Stowey could, in years to come when news came on the TV that Carlin had KO’ed a Chechnyan middleweight or been arrested in a bank heist, and vision of Carlin wearing handcuffs or a championship belt was shown, then Stowey could puff his chest and casually mention to whoever he was currently loafing alongside that Carlin Grey beat the living shit out of him in Jimmy Sharman’s tent one day. Momentarily, I envied Stowey this fame. I felt a glow of magnanimity that I had given him this lifelong gift. And I even conjectured that somewhere down the track he might be grateful to me. Though grateful wasn’t his normal thing.

  Carlin didn’t dance and showboat. He didn’t throw flashy jabs at thin air. He didn’t hiss like a pro. He stood quietly while they laced on his gloves, watching Stowey with a grimace of mild confusion, as if asking himself what the hell the Stowe kid was doing here in this place of battle that rightly belonged to his end of town, to Rumbalara and his hardscrabble people. Or maybe he was wondering how long Stowey would last, or just where best to hit him and how many times.

  A fighter in a satin robe spanked an upended tin bucket with a tyre lever and the stools were whisked away and the crowd went dead. Carlin Grey walked out with his hands at gut height, head and neck weaving a serpentine hypnosis. This snake-man act might have entranced and befuddled a sharper kid than Stowey. He remained clear-headed. He screamed and charged at Carlin Grey. He used the various quadrants of his skull, his teeth, his knees, his elbows … any point where the Stowe skeleton
rose up to the surface of the Stowe corpus and suggested itself as a weapon was mashed against a vulnerable site on the puzzled reality of Carlin Grey.

  Stowey had rightly guessed berserkness was his only safe exit from this ambush and he went so berserk even Sharman’s fighters, connoisseurs of every type of malignant combat the male brain could conjure, stood back aghast. I was excited and would have barracked, but I was also slightly sad. If the painted champions on the canvas outside were ‘Products of Jimmy Sharman’s Troupe’, then so was Stowey and his berserkness. Stowey had brought the House of Sharman, an institution with a history of courage and fair play, to this new place that smelt of barbarity and shame. At a certain point violence becomes unseemly. Who wants to watch a lunatic hack an albatross with a tomahawk?

  Stowey had a big brother called Peter who walked about town with a large-boned swagger and who would go on to become heavyweight champ of the Victoria Police and earn a fearsome name around Melbourne’s inner suburbs as a street-fighter. Peter once gave a detailed kerbside kicking to a man named Gangitano who people rated as a thug. Peter could ‘go’ as the saying was. To keep Peter at bay Stowey was occasionally forced to go berserk. And he had become well versed in berserkness, how you leapt in and out of it, its pay-off and its power, how its near unbelievability stunned people.

  He was not at all embarrassed to wail and scream like a spaniel caught in a house fire. He beat Carlin Grey from every angle: roared in his ear, bit his arm, stomped on his calf, kicked him in the stomach and ground his forehead on Carlin’s nose like a millstone on a grain of wheat. If his dick was hard I believe he would have thrashed Carlin Grey with that.

  Every so often Carlin would slide a clean shot through Stowey’s martial contortions and snap him sober. Stowey would pause, blink at his options, then shake his head, reject sanity and retreat back into his cocoon of rotor blades and madness.

  The crowd, initially stunned, found voice and found bloodlust and began calling for the head of Carlin Grey. They wanted him to become roadkill on the canvas pronto, using whatever crazy methods Stowey had invented or learnt from maniacs. The crowd around me began to writhe, pushing and leaning and cocking elbows and weaving and ducking its hips this way and that. They were reaching into their pockets for change. Coins began to rain down into the ring and to bounce off the berserk boy and the bewildered boy and to roll in diminishing circles, maybe fifty at a time, and to lie there as a mural of blood-stained canvas and doubloons celebrating the scorched-earth fistic stylings of Battling Bruce Stowe.

  Before the first round was over Carlin Grey fell down dead, possibly the most bamboozled corpse any of us had ever seen. Jesus, I told myself, Stowey’s done it now. He’s killed an indigenous kid using foul means. He will be hanged and his friends vilified and slapped. I began to shuffle toward the tent flap. The ref wrapped Stowey in a bear hug and walked him to his corner. Men who had been howling for this death stood mute, complicit, their colour draining.

  One of Jimmy’s fighters knelt over Carlin and lifted his head and waved something under his nose that brought him alive, blinking and scowling in inquiry. He had no idea what had just happened. The world had accelerated into a whirring feral nonsense that hurt to touch.

  Stowey made three dollars sixty. And on the way out of the tent men who didn’t know him laid hands on his shoulders and nodded at him and puckered their lips like he was something profound.

  Outside he was angry. ‘Shit. Where were you? Why didn’t you put your hand up? Carlin Grey. Carlin Fucking Grey. I might have been killed.’

  ‘Old man Trelfell was in there. He’s a client of Dad’s.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘I can’t afford it getting out I was fighting at Sharman’s. How would that look?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’re lawyers. We don’t fight in tents.’

  ‘Oh, right. I can get beat up because my old man has shops.’

  I nodded. That was about it. When you were involved with the law you had to be careful of your reputation. It was a heavy responsibility for a kid, but it was mine, and I carried it without complaint.

  As we wandered along sideshow alley I ventured a compliment to make up to him. ‘Jesus, you jobbed him. You went … You flipped.’ But Stowey didn’t much want to talk about it. He was embarrassed about using his berserkness in a public place. Like Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie, or Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched, certain magics were forbidden, were unfair, unethical. He thought the berserking of Carlin Grey might become known around town and people would treat him as some sort of hair-trigger froot loop and start baiting him to see him put on a show.

  Five minutes later, standing staring at a canvas sign covered in painted snakes announcing the Pit of Death and daring us to watch the hideous sight of a man climb into a pit containing over a thousand deadly serpents I said, ‘This looks good. Let’s spend our fight money on this?’ It would cost a buck fifty each. Virtually all his fight money.

  ‘Yeah,’ Stowey said. ‘I hate snakes. We gotta see them.’

  Summer weekends we would load up the car and drive up to the Murray River. One Saturday morning I was asked to help pack the Fairlane by carrying a watermelon outside and putting it in the boot. Did I think I could manage that? Manage it! Look, I can hold it with one arm. I was a stringy little kid, but like the Tardis, much bigger on the inside than on the outside. That is, despite all evidence, I believed myself mightier than most men.

  A watermelon was a newly arrived foodstuff; a piquant pioneer years ahead of avocados and mangos, it broke the dual stranglehold of apples and pears on our palates. Watermelons were rare and expensive. To arrive somewhere with a watermelon was to arrive with a plate of larks’ tongues. I was proud to be chosen to carry ours to the car. I hefted it in one stingy arm, ‘Look, Mum. It’s not even heavy.’ (The thing weighed a ton.) Who could know that from a height of one metre a watermelon would self-destruct like a Bond car? The thing hit the linoleum and fairly detonated. A crimson Himalaya of wet flesh bloomed across the kitchen floor. Suddenly stripped of the social glory of arriving with a watermelon, Mum howled.

  And as the sisters came running inside to investigate the howl, to see what I’d stuffed up now, both skidded in the tasty scree and went sliding on their backs across the floor, nearly decapitating themselves under the open dishwasher.

  The Cameron family arrived at the big river marinated in watermelon, reeking of watermelon, but bearing no watermelon. The other kids eyed us off angrily. They weren’t fooled. We ponged of rare fruit. We had obviously pulled off the track just over the horizon and gorged the mythic melon before dabbing our lips clean and appearing with more mundane foodstuffs to share.

  The Murray was a big river then. A wide, suede-coloured stream with its surface writhing with muscular currents and dotted with wavering vortices and each of these marked the grave of a boy like me who had got out of his depth and tried to fight the river instead of go with it. Don’t panic. Go with the river, Dad told us. Don’t ever fight the current. Climb out downstream and walk back. The Barmah Forest was an endless, unexplored wilderness and the gums along the riverbanks stood on great tangles of exposed roots that looked like cages for monsters.

  The Barmah Forest with the Murray winding intestinally through it was the edge of our known world and the cusp of a beguiling nothingness. It was the past. Here it was 1880 all day long. Knives were worn on the hip and guns lay within easy reach along this river. This was the wild world and it was ruled with sumptuous lawlessness by a few of Dad’s war-veteran friends.

  Dad left school in ’44, just too late to fight in the war. He joined the RAAF and slept a year at the MCG being trained in how to stay warm at night using newspaper. But many of the men who came to be his friends had fought in the war. Barrel was one of these.

  The Barrel shack was jigsawed together from found and bartered materials: cement sheet, wood, lino, various unrelated windows, a massive iron stove that burnt wood. Stripy canvas butchers’ b
linds shaded its verandah. It stood on stilts a metre off the ground in close trees just back off its own sandbar. You walked a raised plank path to the dunny out the back in the forest.

  Periodically the whole thing flooded, water inside for weeks on end. But once the mud was sluiced out and the red-bellied black snakes were unwound from the pots and pans and shot out from under the gas fridge, the house was as before, damply wooden. Like a Russian dacha on an endless steppe, it stood alone through winter waiting to be filled with loud summer humans. Sometimes as it stood empty drunks fired bullets through it from passing boats. Bullet holes were easy to patch with wine corks.

  We rise before dawn. Barrel, Lucky, Dad, Guy and me. The pre-dawn is a time of no authority, no law. We cross the beach to Barrel’s boat, fog pressed flat on the water in slow swirls and the kookaburras loosing preambles of laughter. The big Evinrude gurgles alive and the moving air goes cold on the skin. Barrel at the wheel. Barrel always captain, a leader of men. He fought the Japanese in PNG, was bombed and burnt, but recovered to become heavyweight champ of the army as the fleet sailed home.

  I hunker down behind Dad out of the cold air as we cruise upstream to the first springer. Haul the line out dripping and icy on the hands and the carp is still alive, still swimming with a hook large as cutlery through its lip. No cod. ‘Shit. This set looked sure fire, Lucky,’ Lucky says.

  Reverse out and motor upstream and we can see the next springer, a sapling cut and speared into mud and a line leading into the water. ‘Sure fire. Bardi grubs. Sure fire,’ Barrel says. He pulls alongside and I lean over the gunnel to the smoky cold water and pull out the line. A long white grub tied to a hook with a rubber band. ‘Bastard. Maybe they’re off the bite.’

  Then to the net. A gill net. Highly illegal. Untie it from the bank and track its length slowly to the far end, feeding it into the boat hand over hand and with it turtles and yellowbelly and a cod, green and grey and as big as me. Like a dragon, this legendary thing, this fish that I listen to men speak of in low voices and wild surmises like they do about women. Lucky laughs out loud right up and down the river. For the ineluctable joy of this fish. He doesn’t care about getting caught. ‘Sure fire, Lucky. Square bait. Sure fire.’