Two Wolves

by Tristan Bancks

  ‘I d’know,’ Ben said. ‘Don’t talk about food.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘I d’know. Mars.’

  ‘I like Milky Ways,’ she said. ‘Dogs or cats?’

  ‘I’ve never eaten either.’

  Olive laughed. ‘For a pet!’

  Ben sighed loudly. ‘Cats.’

  ‘I like dogs. Lego or TV?’ Olive asked.

  ‘Be quiet,’ Ben said.

  ‘I like Lego,’ she said. ‘You can do heaps more than just watch it. Do you like James or Gus better?’

  ‘Neither. I like them both. I miss those guys. I even miss school.’

  They walked on, absorbed in the bubbling and stirring of the stream, the sunlight in dappled patches all around.

  ‘Do you think Uncle Chris knew?’ Ben asked. He had been thinking about this a lot.

  Olive pulled her thumb out of her mouth. ‘He gave Dad the bag of money. And that dumb car.’

  ‘Dad always said Uncle Chris was dodgy.’

  ‘And now Dad’s dodgy too,’ she said.

  Ben looked down at the bag of money. He had taken the money and run with it. What did that say about him?

  A camera flash. That’s how it looked at first. A bright flash a long way off. But then the wind came too, and he sat up, looking into the tall trees around him. The clouds moved quickly against the dead black sky, all lit up for a moment and then gone again. The lightning was mainly upstream. Olive had worked out that upstream was west, over the mountains. Then came the rumble and the wind answered it, flurrying around him and whistling ice into his bones.

  He looked down to Olive, who was lit in fits by the flickering white light. She rubbed her nose in a tired way and cuddled into herself for warmth, then jammed her thumb back into her mouth. Ben wished that he was a seven-year-old thumb-sucker lying by a creek, eyes closed, three-quarters asleep, not knowing.

  Rush of water, dark of night, wink of lightning, ominous roar, tremble of body, whirling wind. And fear. Terrible fear.

  Choices.

  Ben had to believe he had choices even now, when it seemed he had none. His mind was foggy. How could he have been so stupid not to build a shelter when it was light? They had walked and walked till it was too late and the darkness had rushed to cover the sky. It had rained two nights since they had left home. The night they had been locked in the cabin and back in the motel, Rest Haven. Flickering fluoro lights and bedbugs. Ben would have done anything to be lying on those bedbug-ridden couch cushions now.

  The first drop of rain landed on his scalp, and it was cold. His arms felt the big, biting splats and soon he settled down into a deep shiver. It shook low and heavy through his bones like a train through a mountain tunnel. Hips, knees, ankles, wrists, elbows, shoulders, toes, fingers. That’s where it bit worst.

  ‘Shelter,’ he whispered. He needed to find some but he couldn’t leave Olive here by the creek. What shelter would he find? A cave? Not likely. And the fig trees were a long way downstream now. At the edge of the creek here there were just tall, naked palm trees and lantana.

  The sky snarled and the wind picked up and the rainforest all around hissed and warned him not to enter. But he would. Had to. He stood, shouldered his backpack, and picked up Olive and Bonzo the rabbit and the bag of money. Lightning lit Bonzo’s eye and it reminded Ben of the rabbit on the chopping stump.

  Ben stepped to another rock, heading up the bank, and the bag fell away from him. One of the handles tore and, in the flickering light, he saw four wads of cash fall through the broken zip. He panicked, even though he could not care less about the money now.

  He put Olive down and bumped her head on a rock and still she did not wake. He reached down and grabbed at one of the piles of cash on the rock and it slipped into a crack. It fell into the water and floated off down the creek in the flashing white light. Fifty thousand dollars, he thought. It meant nothing. It could have been fifty cents.

  He stuffed three piles of money back into the bag and left it on the creek bank as the rain began to teem. He picked Olive up and he left the money there for now. The rain roared in his ears and thunder made the ground quake beneath his feet as he ran. He was so cold. Bushes slashed at him. He went on like this for five minutes. His muscles ate themselves, no food-energy to burn.

  The dark outline of a giant tree, not a fig, loomed ahead, rising like a giant mushroom cloud in a blast of white lightning. Olive had pointed one of these trees out in the day as they forced their way upstream. He rested her against the trunk, still asleep. He ran out through the rain. He gathered fern fronds and anything soft that he could find and he ran back beneath the tree and made a bed for Olive. He laid her on it.

  Rain still pelted through the tree canopy so he gathered branches from the ground around them. The pain of exhaustion sawed through him. Ben tried to erect something like a teepee over Olive. He put four, seven, ten sticks up into a cone shape as she slept. He used his knife to cut fern fronds and wove them through the sticks, trying to protect her from the wind.

  The money flickered into his mind but still he left it beside the creek. For all he cared it could fall in and float away. He collapsed under the tree, shivering, and the rain ran rivers down his face.

  Things will get better, he thought. This is as bad as it gets. As sleep gripped him, he had the feeling of melting down into the earth. There was no difference between him and the ground and the trees and the rain and the creek. All one.

  Scratched, bruised, tired, dehydrated, vomiting. That was how Ben found himself as the talons of first light scraped his eyelids. Lying on a flat rock on the edge of the fast-moving creek, using the bag of money as a pillow. Litres of water taking leave of his stomach.

  Mosquitoes had woken him an hour before dawn. With the storm gone, he had been drawn to the creek. He’d vomited and fallen asleep on the rock, too delirious to worry about Olive back at the tree.

  ‘You okay, Thunderbolt?’ said a croaky voice behind him.

  ‘Yep,’ Ben said, his throat acid.

  ‘Why did you move me?’

  ‘Storm.’

  ‘I was sick in the night too,’ she said.

  Ben felt it rise up in him again. He leaned over the edge of the rock and dry-retched, body tingling, trying to force whatever it was out of him. Nothing would come.

  Olive squatted and rested a hand on his back. ‘Are we going to die?’

  He splashed his face and looked upstream through the wall of water dripping from his brow. Exhausted, light-headed, still cold.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to die. But we need to eat. It’s been two and a half days.’ Ben looked at her. She had thick, dark rings under her eyes. Her nose was snotty. She was skinny and dirty and weak-looking. It was Ben’s fault.

  That morning they ate whatever they could find. They couldn’t hold out any longer.

  They foraged and gathered. They worked out which things looked less likely to kill them – grass, flowers, plant bulbs. Olive nibbled leaves and Ben found a fat white witchetty grub buried in the soil beneath a rotting log. The feel of it in his mouth made him grimace but the flavour was nutty and good. He dug deeper into the soil and found two more. They leaked brown water over his fingers but he ate them quickly, crunching through the skin to the soft, gooey stuff inside. Olive would not try them. She ate the crisp, juicy tips of fern fronds instead, nibbling at them like a pink-eyed rabbit, holding her nose to block the taste. ‘This is hor-ri-ble.’

  They heard a helicopter in the distance and Ben willed it toward them but they could not see it through the trees and, after a few minutes, the sound deserted them. The disappointment kicked him in the ribs.

  They made slow progress, slower as the morning wore on. They argued and Olive refused to walk. She complained of stomach pains. It was hard to know if it was the creek water or the strange foods. Ben carr
ied the money tucked under his arm now that the strap had broken. It was awkward and heavy and it blistered his side.

  The money.

  Ben had always figured rich people were the very best kind. Lucky and smart and good-looking and happy.

  ‘He’s got six properties!’ Dad would say about some guy he had met at a barbecue. ‘He says the secret is to never sell one before you buy the next. And never get a loan. The banks are the enemy.’

  ‘Right,’ Mum would say in the car on the way home. ‘And how are we going to do that?’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Dad would say.

  ‘Okay.’

  Ben believed Dad when he said things like that, even if Mum did not. He knew that Dad would come through in the end. Sometimes Dad would take Ben aside and tell him how rich they were going to be and how big his new business venture was and that a bloke he knew at the pub had made heaps on it. ‘It’s a good product,’ he would say. ‘You have to believe in the product if you want others to believe in it.’

  ‘Definitely,’ Ben would say in a really interested way that made them both feel good. This was before Dad had bought the wreckers. When he was still hopeful.

  One time Dad was selling a cleaning product that could shine silver better than any other product in the whole world. He showed Ben by shining a 1992 ten-cent piece till it looked new. Ben could not believe how good it was and he knew that people were going to buy crates of it. Who wouldn’t want coins that shiny?

  But they didn’t.

  ‘People are idiots,’ Dad told him.

  Now Ben had $932,300. Fifty thousand had washed away. But he did not feel smart or lucky or good-looking or happy like the rich people in his imagination.

  That afternoon Olive went downhill fast. Diarrhoea at first, then Ben noticed a spotty rash on her arms and face. She vomited and cried and eventually she could not walk any more. Ben carried her on his back with his backpack, his legs weak and buckling, the bag of money grating against the weeping blister on his side.

  At some stage Ben noticed that he had stopped speaking to himself. His mind, usually roaring with thoughts and ideas, flatlined, leaving just a deep, grim determination to make it to the cabin. But soon the sun hid behind the hills and the forest turned to shade. Olive did not speak or move now, a dead weight on his back. Just two little koala claws clutching his shoulders. And Bonzo the rabbit hanging limply from her fist. Even Bonzo did not look hopeful.

  Ben stopped every ten minutes or so to check on her, to search for her pulse, open her eyelids, to speak to her. He felt that awful brick-in-the-belly fear. Twilight fell into night and he stopped and shook her gently and he said her name and spoke to her as though the words would heal her somehow. But they did not and she would not take creek water or any of the roots or crispy fern frond tips.

  ‘Olive, please wake up,’ he said into the murky dark.

  He called out to the forest, screamed for help for nearly an hour, but his voice fell on nothing and no one. There were only the animals and he was sure they would help if they could. But they could not.

  Grey light crawled into the sky and Ben came to from a deep, eyes-wide-open doze. He looked down at Olive, who was lying across his lap, limp.

  ‘Olive?’ he said.

  He shook her gently.

  ‘Olive, it’s day.’

  She didn’t seem to care. He watched her chest but he couldn’t see it moving in the gloom. He put his fingers to her neck and found no pulse. Dread shot through him even though he knew that he often had trouble finding his own pulse – and he was alive. He pressed his fingers under the other side of her jaw and at last he felt the deep throb of her life against his skin and he had never been more thankful for anything.

  He looked around.

  Today, he thought, and as the word came to him through the grey of early morning, he saw the silhouette of a pine tree.

  Ben had not seen a pine tree in days.

  He leapt from boulder to boulder, sloshed into the creek, Olive on his back. On the far side of the creek, trees gave way to the beginning of the rock wall that he knew from his days at the cabin. He laughed. It was an unhinged laughter that he had not heard from himself before.

  ‘This is it!’ he said to Olive. Her cold, grubby cheek was pressed flat to his shoulderblade. She did not respond. ‘This is it.’

  Ben stumble-ran for ten minutes in the shallows as the creek wandered deeper into the pine forest. His knees cried in pain. He could hear the waterfall. It was drawing him upstream, like a fish on a line. Soon he saw a rough dirt path beside the creek and he made good time then.

  Ben thought of the police helicopter and he wished he had not been so stupid, had not hidden from the police and almost killed his sister. As he climbed the hill, past where Dad had shot the rabbit, he called out, ‘Hello!’

  Birds.

  ‘HELLO!’ he screamed.

  He could feel the weight of the money rubbing at the raw place under his arm. He would hand it over if the police were there. He would tell them everything. He made it into the clearing and he looked around and he almost cried.

  The police were not there and his parents were not there and the car was gone and the door of the cabin hung open. He dropped the money, lurched and swayed to the door, broken from the climb, Olive still on his back. It was mostly empty inside, cleared out apart from the furniture. How long had it been since he was here? Three days, he was pretty sure.

  He laid Olive on the workbench, the bench that he had been standing on when he discovered the bag of money in the roof. He cried then. He didn’t care what Dad would say any more. He cried so hard for his little sister and for his maybe-dead parents and for himself and for the whole state of the world. He cried because he knew that he and Olive would get out of this alive and because, from here on, life would have no certainty.

  Outside, the birds heard him cry and the frogs stopped and listened and the trees stood darkly against the morning sky.

  The creek flowed on.

  Mangled steel. That’s what he dreamed of as he lay on his side on the cold timber floor that night. The wrecking yard. Piles of mashed metal. Carnage. Other people’s problems. When someone took their eye off the road for a moment to adjust the volume and got T-boned by a semitrailer or they ran a red light and mistimed it and hit a motorbike, that’s where Dad came in. Other people’s bad luck: he fed off it. He would race out there in the tow truck, pick up the car, come back, hack it up, sell it off, or crush it. He was a wrecker. That’s what he did. He wrecked stuff. Mum helped. Cars, trucks, motorbikes, Ben’s life, their family. Themselves. They wrecked themselves and they left Ben and Olive to deal with the mess.

  And now where were they?

  His eyes flicked open. It was dark. They had slept the entire day away. Ben hadn’t had the energy to get Olive up to the main road. Not yet.

  Olive lay next to him, sleeping on the torn canvas camp bed against the wall. He sat up and looked at her still, pale face and listened to her breathing.

  Earlier in the day, they had eaten from a plastic bin bag in the corner of the cabin, food thrown out on that final night. Food from a bin was like a royal feast when you hadn’t eaten real food in days. A third of a tin of apricots, the can of spray cream and an ancient tin of baked beans in the back of the scary cupboard at the rear of the cabin. But the cupboard wasn’t scary any more. He was no longer afraid of the dark or of night noises.

  He had given Olive small sips of water from a half-empty bottle he’d pulled out of the bin bag. She took it in drops. He fed her beans. She’d had two mouthfuls before falling into a deep sleep, breathing short, shallow breaths.

  Ben had to think. The decisions he made were important. No more bad choices. It was black-dark and he did not know what the time was. His body ached with cold. He grabbed his backpack, stood, went to the table. Moonlight leaked from the window onto th
e work surface. He sat on the table, legs crossed, and pulled out his damp notebook and pencil. He wrote down what he thought might happen once they made it back to Nan’s:

  – Mum and Dad alive. Head out on the run again.

  – Mum and Dad alive. In jail. Live with Nan or sent somewhere else.

  – Mum and Dad dead. Live with Nan.

  – Mum and Dad dead. Get sent somewhere else.

  Ben read his list. He had never liked multiple-choice tests. His eyes circled back to the words ‘Mum and Dad dead’. He could not believe he had written them.

  ‘Not dead,’ he said to himself. ‘Parents don’t just die.’

  But parents don’t just steal millions of dollars either. Only they do.

  Ben needed to be careful. Needed to make a good choice. Would he become a wrecker, too? His parents were criminals, so he must be more likely to become one. Like father, like son. Did he have a choice or was it written in his DNA?

  He turned to the bag of money, which was in the corner nearest the door. Broken zip, one handle snapped. Damaged and pathetic. An idea occurred to him. Something he would not write down. Could never write down or tell anyone except, one day, Olive. He would keep it locked in the vault of his own thoughts where no one could steal it. He sat there for a very long time watching the money, turning the idea over in his mind, twisting himself inside out.

  Could he do it? Was it right? Did ‘right’ matter any more?

  Eventually he stood from the table. He walked across the room, bare feet on floorboards, to the yawning cupboard at the back. He reached into the blackness of it and he took out a shovel.

  Ben held his arm out straight and stuck his thumb up the way he had seen it done in old movies. He had a feeling that people didn’t use the thumb any more. Where Ben came from people did not hitchhike.

  Olive lay at his feet in the sandstone gravel of the roadside, her head on his bare, blistered foot, eyes closed, saying nothing. That was the thing that worried him most: Olive not speaking.