The panel knows, like I know, that something has gone high, wide and awry inside Bernie’s head to make him go after Furnace with an ice-pick. It’s the sort of job everyone wished someone else had the balls to do. And little Bernie has a mind full of fraud and fear, so some valve inside it must have blown to swell his genitalia for the job.
The popular view is that Bernie had finally had enough of Furnace’s bastardisation. But I know better than this. I know he’s got a chronic case of my own problem. Like me, Bernie dreams about the woman who strips for us on her balcony across the street every third Monday. But his dreams would have all the extra power a victim’s dreams usually do. His late night thoughts would be a fairy-tale, I reckon. She’d be the damsel in distress. He’d be the knight in the armour. And guess who the dragon would be, Eva Braun on its scaly chest. In his melodramatic, late-night mind’s eye, Bernie rescues her from Furnace Dwyer. Of course he also makes her orgasm with the scream of a jump-jet. But the rescue would be the important part to Bernie. The standing up from his table in a cafe or the standing up from his stool in a bar or the standing up from his seat in a train, when no one else would stand up, and the saying, loud enough to reach above cafe hum or above bar hubbub or above track-rattle, ‘Take your hands off the lady, pal,’ and the watching of the swallows tattooed either side of Furnace’s oesophagus as they deepen blue in his skin leaching pale with cowardice.
And he’s dreamed this dream so long and hard he’s dreamed himself into a contract he can’t get out of. And when he finds Furnace is about to walk he has to honour the contract. That’s the way I see it. Nothing else explains the foolhardiness of his act.
But if I was to tell the panel of inquiry about the woman Bernie had dreamed himself into protecting they’d cancel our Monday strip shows quick smart. And as hard on us as they are, these strip shows, we’re addicted to them. So the hard, bent boys are right to make me tell lies.
The visiting room in C Block is cream coloured above head height, but from there down it’s skin-oil yellowed. A long thin room partitioned down its length. We sit at a bench, sealed from the unconvicted by steel plate below and by steel mesh and glass above. The glass has wire running through it that dices our loved-ones like carrots. The diced loved-ones are partitioned from each other for privacy. But on our side of the glass the bench runs away uninterrupted. I rub my elbows against ink-webbed elbows. So when I whisper the sweet nothings through the mesh they are the sort of wishy-washy-ready-for-public-airing sweet nothings. Never anything with enough tang to be repeated in the exercise yard or the shower block … or to someone else’s loved-one next week. It frustrates the wife, but she’s not brushing the spider-webbed elbows of the hard, bent boys while she tries to talk up her end of our own, unique something special.
Today I’m only half listening to the diced wife. Something about our son Angus dropping applied mathematics at school. He’s apparently lost faith in maths since the figures failed me.
‘Got a real thing for the humanities out of your trouble,’ she says. Her frock is puckering below her collar bones and I crane my neck for some diced cleavage.
Next to me Andy Howson, who’s taking a break from armed robbery, is rabbiting-on to the de-facto about how the prison chaplain is making more sense than he did last year. He wonders if the chaplain has lifted his game or if his guard is dropping with age. He wonders which one of them has found religion. He keeps wondering, but can’t muster much enthusiasm for the de-facto today.
Somewhere further down the line disbelief is raising someone’s voice. ‘Brian Wallace? Brian Wallace? That toe-rag Brian Wallace? How could you get that horny?’ But even this promising brouhaha doesn’t interest us much today.
The truth about today is, we are distracted by the domestic tragedy Bernie has lined up for us. The prison authorities take no stock of privacy, and Bernie, sitting right there next to Andy Howson half way down the line of fifteen, is going to have to explain to his wife, in front of us all, the extra years he’s earnt himself by whacking the standover ace. And we revel in this sort of domestic cut-up. We know how it’ll go. All the explanation and the emotion and the gesture will get sliced through the mesh and diced through the glass and will be reassembled in a ham-handed way on the far side, until after about five minutes of this both parties are so confused they don’t know what part of the conversation belongs to them and what part belongs to the party on the far side of the glass mesh. And suddenly hate is the only communicable emotion, because it’s brief and it can get through the wire barrier clear and uncut. Many marriages are diced up through this glass. It’s the most vicious theatre in town.
Bernie knows this. He’s waiting. His hands won’t keep still, nervously thatching his temple fluff over his waxy dome. It glows strong ginger against his bloodless skin. His body is shaking in waves. I’ve never seen him so afraid of anything, and he’s been virtuosic with fear since they first threw him in here. But now he looks as if his bowels might get the better of him.
We’ve never seen Bernie’s wife. She doesn’t visit, so we know she’s not rabid keen on him. But we recognise his symptoms and know she must be a real hell of a thing. Big warder of a woman, the like of which might make prison enjoyable by comparison. The undisputed keeper of the family jewels.
As I watch him shake I start to lose my appetite for the humiliation of Bernie. Then again, a woman as hard as she must be you don’t need. So I’m glad it’s just about over for them.
My wife and I swap about five minutes of chat. She talks about things I can no longer see. I talk about things she doesn’t ever want to see. It’s all we have for subject matter.
Then, as she’s showing me, hand to hand, how long our Angus’s hair has grown, a no-holds-barred beautiful woman steps up to the glass. And I see what Bernie is afraid of Us.
This is a woman we’ve all looked up to. A woman we’ve been sleeping with for too long. Finally come down from her balcony. And she’s come down from her balcony wearing Bernie’s wedding ring. And that would make her Bernie’s wife. And all the hard-grafted, condom-shrunk wads of cash we’ve been firing up onto her balcony for so long would have been landing smack bang in Bernie’s pocket.
All conversations, even the promising one about the toe-rag Brian Wallace, have died. Bernie looks up and down the line of cheated faces that stretch away either side of him on the convicted side of the glass.
‘A nest-egg, boys. Me and the little woman, we were just building a nest-egg is all.’ And he’s crying like a fool. And the boys, tax-cheats included, go cuckoo.
NICE SHOOTIN’, COWBOY
FOUR OF us are waiting in Cormac’s Falcon inside a five-mile circumference of cicada scream. Heat you can hear. The sun has moved off my and Zara’s chests and down into our laps, hot enough to weld thigh to seat.
‘How many?’ Alf asks.
‘Three or four,’ I say.
‘Twenty-something,’ says Cormac.
Alf says he will give us time to reconsider.
‘Twenty-five,’ says Cormac.
‘Only a handful,’ I say.
‘Wrong,’ says Alf. ‘The answer is none. No babies were taken from Kooris round here.’
‘Shit. That’s worth mentioning, Alf,’ Cormac says. ‘Like none of my family were ever taken by that river? Not one. Down there.’ He levels his beer down at the slow yellow curve of Doherty’s Bend. ‘Interesting stat, eh?’
‘Point is,’ says Alf, ‘by guessing, you’re admitting the possibility. No one’s guessing the haul of white kids taken.’
‘You possibility queen,’ Cormac says. ‘The shit you might have gone through if you actually had to go through it.’
‘It’s shit we knew about. And that’s going through it some way,’ says Alf.
‘Types of kids Corm’s old dear was having no one was rushing to confiscate. With Barnum and Bailey no longer a market force,’ I say. ‘Though God knows she probably wished some authority would hog a few.’
Cormac draws b
reath to defend his petty crim half-brothers and runaway sister but is silenced by Zara’s drugged sobs from the back seat where she is awake in a glass-eyed smile.
‘Kid hogs. Belle pigs,’ she says.
Belle is a name she came up with only yesterday. Saying it out of the blue, by itself, ‘Belle’, with no other words around it. And then sneaking looks at us from the corners of her eyes to see what the name did to us.
‘Give her a drink,’ I say. ‘Settle her down.’
She hears and tilts her head back and opens her mouth. Alf hangs the cask of wine over her hard up against the roof and presses the button and it fires into her mouth until it fills and runs down her neck in yellow veins.
Her metabolism is fronting four counts of Valium, three hash cookies and a half bladder of wine because she’s had second thoughts about this. Name attaching thoughts. Belle thoughts. And Alf and me have decided her first thoughts will be her third thoughts soon and will be her real, long-run thoughts. And her first thinking, her dream, has always been to be Our Own Janis Joplin. Not a mother and, knowing Alf, probably a single one after the first night of tooth trouble.
So we’re taking her through her second thoughts in a beautiful haze of the cheapest substances. Until she can get to a state where she sees the importance of being Our Janice again.
She’s sobbing, with a whacked smile reforming after every sob showing she can’t remember what it was about. And bobbing her head, likely to a tune she’s written in at the Country Women’s Freedom Centre when she’s been high on indignity and surrounded by women affirming.
The Country Women’s Freedom Centre only becoming the Country Women’s Freedom Centre when Zara, the lithest of the women affirming, put a ladder on the front of the disused Mechanics Institute and climbed up to the parapet where the compass was carved into the sandstone and painted their sign over it in red. The female symbol, a circle with a cross hanging off it, bursting out of chains.
There was a furore about that. A small town furore about people using unauthorised paint for unwanted movements. Zara went defiant. Got a headline by saying she wasn’t going to get surrounded by formica like her mother. Meaning she wasn’t going to be kept barefoot and in the kitchen, I suppose. The strange thing being our mother left for Melbourne when Zara was three and I was seven. So if she was surrounded by formica she was surrounded by it in someone else’s kitchen we didn’t know about. Zara wrote a song about the furore and the formica, but she couldn’t sing it anywhere rural because it had the word ‘labia’ in it.
Alf and Zara have been out of town on a nine month tour of pubs and gestation. Lying low from us while she’s grown big from him. Alf singing too. And now believing he’s The Voice Of A Culture Just Heard From. Which is what the Deniliquin Courier said he was after he and Zara half-filled the Civic Centre of that town when they passed through it in May.
‘They get ten more minutes,’ I say. ‘Then we’re out of here.’
But we’re anchored into a deal. We wait. After twenty-five minutes a Galaxy 500 with foreign dust thick on it pulls into the clearing and stops with its cloud drifting on out over the river. It brings its own silence. A hole in the cicada scream that stands the hairs on my neck.
This all being done by phone until now it’s a shock for me to see I recognise the people in the Galaxy. They’re what we have for Gypsies. Sideshow people.
The man who tells you, ‘Nice Shootin’, Cowboy’ and the woman who barks into the passing crowd ‘High Powered … High Powered’. The couple who run the shooting gallery that rolls into town every year with The Show. The owners of the fluke-dented metal silhouette ducks I shot at one weekend a year until I was fourteen.
Every rifle on their stand having a five to ten degree profit margin bent into the barrel that takes at least two weekends to suss out. So them always having two summers profit on you before you got your hands on one of their prizes. Him always saying ‘Nice shootin’, cowboy’, as he hands it over. Even if the shooter is a girl. Nice shootin’, cowboy.
In the summer I was fourteen and started winning their prizes, I was newly going with Diane Gebhardt who had a strong TV-learned lust for stuffed Disney things. Or not for the things themselves but for being given them, especially in a crowd. After they were given they were only bed-sat spare-room inhabitants at her house.
Me, shooting well, knowing to lead the duck by five inches and having already handed her a stuffed Dumbo and a loosely inflated Mickey. The Nice Shootin’, Cowboy man leans across with a Taiwan-sewn Goofy and pushes it into my chest and whispers, ‘Nice shootin’, cowboy. Now fuck off.’
He doesn’t recognise me now. Me being only one of thousands of nicely shot cowboys he has told to fuck off over the years. But it was the one ‘Nice shootin’, cowboy. Now fuck off’ ever whispered to me. Just loud enough for Diane to hear. And for me to see the wreck I’d made of us by being too scared of his rotted teeth and breath and tattoos to answer back.
Me not having shot pressed metal ducks after that summer, but always hearing the ‘High Powered, High Powered’ bark from the woman as I passed eyes-front along sideshow alley from the Octopus to the Matterhorn.
It’s November. The Show is here again.
We sit in the waking cicada scream, not knowing who makes the moves in a situation like this. Finally, I decide Cormac does. ‘Take them the article,’ I say.
‘Me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shit.’
He lifts the baby off the back seat between Alf and Zara, who tilts her head back and opens her mouth again, thinking he’s picked up the cask.
Alf is singing a Koori song. Or likely it’s no more than a Koori noise, to fool me and Cormac into thinking he’s an insider on some huge fix of the races of this planet and the souls of the people in them. A fix Cormac and me, progress-sped, capital-lusted and white-skinned, can’t get near. From our first window-breaking run-in with the cops through all these years to now we’ve listened to this whenever Alf is under the gun. We don’t even ask now.
Cormac takes the baby and its bag of worldly possessions over to the Galaxy. He leans in the driver’s window, close to the man, and hands over the baby. I see finger-pointing from the woman and palms-up end-of-tether from Cormac. Negotiations. For a deal already in concrete. Cormac snatches the baby out of the Galaxy and comes back to our car and gets in with it crying about the snatch.
‘The kid’s black,’ he says. He takes a drink from his can. ‘You never told them it wasn’t white.’
Alf stops singing. I look at the baby. Whimper pink.
‘This is bullshit. How black are you, Alf?’ I turn to look at him.
‘Mum was half,’ he says softly.
‘So that’s you point-two-five. And Zara’s white. So the kid’s point-something-a-shitload-less-than-that. This is over price. It’s a grab for discount.’
I get out of our car and go over to the Galaxy. I open the door behind the Nice Shootin’, Cowboy man and sit on the back seat.
‘Complications?’ I ask.
He turns, twitching, dodging his line-of-sight around fast vines of Drum smoke off his lip. His sleeves are rolled tight onto thin biceps, showing old tattoos down to his knuckles. It’s occurring to me a man old enough for his tatts to have smudged illegible is too old to be a first-time father.
She nods at me. She’s huge. Spilling out of her bucket-seat on all sides from the lifelong temptation of fairy-floss and brandy-snap and donut and waffle and hot dog stands erected around her wherever they stopped their van in the dust up and down the Eastern states.
‘This is how I see it,’ I say. ‘You state what you want up front or you’re buggered every time. I stated I wanted five grand. You stated you wanted a baby with no legal strings and no Indian-giving mother attached. And that’s what I’m offering. I been severe about getting on top of the Indian-giving mother thing from the start. Look over there.’ They look over at Zara who’s smiling and nodding as if to jazz. Them not knowing Cormac’s car ha
s no music and her nod is to drugs.
‘The mother,’ I say. ‘Happy and set on the deal. But nobody said anything about any racial prejudice or anything else specific on the wish list.’
‘You never said black,’ the High Powered woman says.
‘This is a ninety-seven percentile on the height scale girl. Fifty per cent weight. Ninety-seven height. Fuck colour. That’s supermodel dimensions. You knock this back and you’ll likely end up with something short-arsed from the Philippines.’
The High Powered woman picks a piece of Twistie bag off the floor and starts slicing it between her teeth dislodging stuck snacks in a showy ignore of me.
The Nice Shootin’, Cowboy man blows smoke over the back of the seat.
‘Don’t blow smoke at me, pal. I’m asthmatic and pissed off,’ I explain.
‘Fuck are we going to do with a black baby?’ he asks, flicking his burning roily out into the total fire ban.
‘Raise it,’ I say. ‘You don’t get discount for colour with me. I got too many Koori mates to give it.’ Actually I’ve got one, but he’s obvious and menacing in the Falcon like the tip of an iceberg. ‘I’ll leave the kid in a church or a Westfield before I come down from our agreed five.’
The woman is still picking her teeth, but her eyes look like they’re about to push tears out over the bulge of her cheeks.
‘I’ll leave you to talk,’ I say.
Cormac hands me a can as I lower myself behind the wheel in a grimace of thigh burn, the anger of it crossing over into my thoughts on them.
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