‘Wrong guess, Ho,’ he tells the Scot called Cam, and with a reluctant shrug shoots him in the stomach. Ora jumps onto the deck of the crayboat and knocks the crayfisherman down and heaves him overboard where his distressed metabolism sucks for air but gets water. The man at the wheel of the crayboat slams the throttle flat forward and it starts to climb over the Hannah, pressing the Shark Cat into the sea.
On the listing deck of the Hannah a crew member takes up his Weatherby .458 magnum, a rifle built to stop charging elephants in the days they were alive and charging, but brought on board to dissuade what he called ‘marauding sharks’ with what he called ‘its superior submarine penetration’. He starts to fire it up through the hull of the crayboat, taking guesses as to the whereabouts of the crew up there. Huge misshapen chunks of copper-coated lead go splintering through the deck into the sky. The crayfishermen start returning fire down through their deck along the perceived trajectory of these slugs.
A battle rages through the heart of the crayboat as each boat yaws and shivers from the push of the other, with men holding on for balance and shooting just for voice.
It’s not a long battle. Just long enough for the grey-haired, verandah-sat listening types of Lorne to get their heads cocked best ear seaward and ask themselves, ‘What in the name of Heaven is that’ before it stops.
The Hannah is sunk. The police Bell DoubleCondor copter is in the air for three days but no trace is found of her.
The crayboat turns turtle killing the Hannah. It’s found drifting hull-high off Wye River, empty of crew. Police divers go down and in and when they come up they tell how it’s perforated with heavy-calibre shafts of sunlight.
Speculation is both boats have been attacked by pirates. Speculation is also of drug deals. Speculation is also of wildlife smugglers taking cockatoos out of The Otways. Funereal cockatoos worth twenty thousand dollars a pair in endangered species shops in Beverly Hills and in Third World back streets.
But crayfishermen from Barwon Heads to Apollo Bay speculate unanimous. They nod agreement in coastal pubs. They know. It’s beyond just Vietnamese now. It’s Triads. ‘Fucking Triads,’ they say. Impressed. ‘Fucking Triads. Moving in on the crustaceans.’
For most people in Lorne it stays another mystery at sea. They drink on their verandahs after sundown, staring off at the whole black journey of night water, slowly shaking their heads and saying, ‘Just another fucking mystery at sea.’
A KNUCKLEBONER
MY MAN in Wellington is hanging on. Getting deep pain, but refusing to move. Meditating criminal thoughts into a chronic sweat. I ring him every day to see how he’s going, because a unique endorsement like this you have to work on. This could take Radical Ads into the national vocabulary.
The cops have him in a hotel room with the windows taped up. They’re trying to tempt him with salty, laxative morsels from the Tasman. Hors d’oeuvrish things usually eaten by the rich. He screws his nose up at them. He’s only taking broth.
They’ve been tipped off he’s swallowed a condom full of heroin in Bangkok and smuggled it into the country. They have him quarantined in the Hilton, waiting for his bowel movements to prove their information correct. He’s gone on a hunger strike to protest his innocence. Hanging on. Fifteen days in that room so far. His intestines stilled by will into a long hibernation.
The papers in NZ are starting to side with him — calling it torture. Bookmakers are laying odds on his surrender.
I make contact with him long-distance. Get through the cops by telling them it’s his brother calling from Oz. He agrees with me it’s an Ultraride he’s swallowed. He says we can have his endorsement if he gets through this unjailed. A real bonus for a mock-subversive product like ours. I strike a deal with him. Every extra day he lasts adds three thousand dollars to his contract. If he makes a month he has proved the durability of our product so well he gets a percentage of sales. His face on billboards. The probable slogan under his smirk saying: ‘Ultraride. Cross new borders … safely.’ Me breaking new advertising ground.
His voice is strained. ‘I’ve got deep pain,’ he tells me. ‘I’m sweating like a pig. I think a month is beyond me. Maybe I’ll die. With no dignity … among laughing cops.’
‘You can’t die doing what you’re doing,’ I tell him. ‘You can only go up on billboards.’ I leave him resolute and sworn-off intestinal kinetics.
I’m nipple deep in spa when Ruth warns me.
All we know about him is he’s my grandfather. The man who posted me coconuts from Queensland.
I know, I say. With the stamps right on the husk. Exotic.
The rest is all in the hearsay area, she says. Innocent until proven guilty.
Grandpa until proven Nazi, I say into the boiling water.
Because I’m not sure this innocent-until-proven-guilty thing that goes off all right in wider society is any principle to bring into your living room alongside a five-year-old. You might sit a war criminal on your sofa with such a principle.
Ruth goes for the train while I compete with Gameboy for Dan’s attention. He’s hunched fetal, thumbs flexing, deep in the machine.
Ruth’s grandpa will be tired from travelling all the way from Mount Isa, I say. So don’t ask him to play any games. And don’t be scared of him because he’s old and ugly and doesn’t speak English too good. And don’t climb on him.
I’m not scared, he says through teeth as he bludgeons minute shadows. I’m Super Ninja fifty-two thousand.
My son is as good as his word. Though the old man who moves into our spare room is accentuated Slavic and big-eared with the years, Dan shows no fear. Tells him he smells funny and he has see-through skin. Uses his superannuated bones like a set of monkey-bars.
Ruth is the old man’s only living relative. And though she’s never met him before, she feels an obligation. The coconuts. Her mother’s stories of him on the ship, telling her fantastic inaccurate tales of Australia. His posted Christmas presents, always three years too young for her, but covered in exotic postmarks.
She accompanies him to court every day for these things. For blood. And compassion. And stubbornness, at seeing the number of legal minds and European memories staring him down. Experts in their fields. She makes a point of reaching for his hand and pumping it a few times whenever someone’s vile reminiscence begins cascading down out of the witness stand.
I habitually run the TV of an afternoon while I work, waiting for any new advertisement of mine to show. But now, lately, I have an ear cocked for certain words and phrases. ‘War criminal. Crimes against humanity. Hermann. Poland. Alleged.’
Any of these catch my attention and let me know court has adjourned and Ruth and Hermann are pushing their way, arm-in-arm and over-dignified down the sandstone steps through a frenzy of shoulder-sat cameras. Ruth has given him the run of my ties because he has none of his own. Each day he comes down the steps in a different tie, and as it emerges from the push of cameramen I remember who gave it to me and when and why.
While I reminisce there’s a voice-over about things he might have done. Evidence given.
Most days they show an overblown 1943 photo of the Hermann they want. With severe hair and cheekbones and vast ear potential. I stare at it hard. Some days I can age it right into the face of the man in our apartment. Some days the trick eludes me. Different gene pool altogether. We need to get some computer technology applied to this photo to see if we can age this young zealot into Ruth’s grandfather or not.
I’m speculating that sitting Dan down to dinner with what might be one of the all-time evil bastards could be a sin in itself, given what some have said about evil being infectious as disease, and when Dan downs his cutlery and starts to go for his food with his hands it’s like the first sign of the corruption I’ve been expecting.
I put his fork back in his left and his knife in his right. ‘Use the cutlery, Dan. Or there’ll be trouble.’ Ruth gets another bottle of wine from the fridge. I pull the cork for Hermann, whose hand
s are too rheumatic to get a grip. He joins in the conversation. Deep coughs and shallow commiserations for me about Brereton being outed on video evidence.
‘Pity no video in my case,’ he jokes. The weakness of my smile moves him back to Hawthorn’s chances in the finals, him seeing I’m unhappy discussing his troubles.
He only talks of today’s events, this old man. Between coughs he’s a current affairs specialist. The only octagenarian I’ve met whose ‘now’ is more real than his ‘then’.
He works hard at it. Even when he’s silent his eyes never rest. Moving from Ruth to Dan to me to the TV to his meal to the clock to the window. Without stopping on anything. Never risking stillness. Never coming to rest on that spot on every wall that you can blear into a love-affair long gone or a fight you won unfairly in state school or a dog you ran over without stopping or a beautiful girl you just missed … or a wife you didn’t. Or any bad memory from the whole run of misdeed stretching back to your birth.
And why he never comes to rest on that spot on every wall is that maybe that spot becomes the bludgeoning of the pigtailed and the raping of mothers for him. Mothers who’ve dropped a breast out of their blouse the way a duck will drop a wing to lure danger from its young. Evidence given.
The moving eyes and the moving mind. Never stopping long enough to focus on anything gross. I used those eyes myself when I was cheating on Helen with that first Italian girl. Which was nowhere near as big as the Italian girl’s cheat, which was on God.
I used to get headaches from eye strain then. My doctor called them my Mediterranean migraines and prescribed fidelity. But the guilt went before the lust and my eyes relaxed on their own. Not this old man’s eyes. His eyes are likely dodging Polish incidents. And they’re as fit as anchovies. Fifty years of darting away from forming shapes.
Dan is watching the storey-high strip of space out the window for a football to start peaking in it from down in the alley. Which will be one of his friends, trying to lure him out for kick-to-kick. The Sherrin begins to loop up into view during dessert. The sharp parabola of a lonely boy, kicking to himself. I let Dan go. Soon we hear cries of ‘Aablett’ and ‘Duunstaal’ echoing below.
Ruth crosses the room to brew coffee.
‘Grandpa wants to tell you something,’ she says. ‘Go on, Grandpa. He’ll listen.’
‘I want to tell you my war,’ he says. His palms are flat on the formica at full stretch.
‘You don’t need to,’ I tell him. ‘Ruth and I don’t care. We love the “until-proven-guilty” thing.’
He waits for that to fade. ‘I was knuckleboner in war,’ he says. He crooks his right index finger into trigger-pulling shape and flexes it in and out. ‘I grind communist to knucklebone with machine-gun. Shoot them thousand mile to Moscow. Shoot them thousand mile to Berlin.’ He sounds sad about having to back up to Berlin. Not about anything else. ‘Knuckleboner,’ he says. ‘Machinegunner.’ He nods, remembering.
He’s sly. He could have given me some twist about being a shepherd boy off with his flock in the mountains while all the world went crazy. But no. He tells me he dealt death on a grand scale. A knuckleboner, not an assassin of the ungunned the prepubescent and the bewildered. A knuckleboner. A killer of killers. With this story he even explains the moving eyes.
But I keep seeing courtroom sketches of old women with scarves pressed to their mouths with one hand and their eyes swimming as they cling tight to the witness box with the other hand. Too many old women for him to have gone to Moscow.
We hear Dan running up the stairs and we stop talking. He comes into the room yelling the footy is up on top of Ng’s sweatshop.
‘It’s a shirt factory, not a sweatshop. I’ll get Mr Ng to let us up on his roof tomorrow. Go and do your teeth.’ He starts an argument I ignore. They’re not his permanent teeth, so I don’t defend them. I turn to Hermann. ‘Let’s drop the knuckleboning talk, Hermann,’ I say. ‘We presume innocence here.’
After this Hermann watches the TV where all the movement is done for him. Ruth goes up onto the roof, and when I have Dan in bed I follow her. She has her easel set up overlooking the Dandenongs and she’s folding yellows into each other across her palette. Tonight she is starting on the eastern quadrant. Waiting for the stars to come out over the city lights. She’s drinking from a bottle of wine and has her legs wrapped in rugs while she waits and thinks about what she can bring out of the stars.
She maintains hope on the encouragement of friends and stories of Van Gogh only ever selling the one. We love each other very much, so I make the payments on everything while I wait for her optimism or her art to break.
She’s only twenty-six. Drunk most nights from trying to drink alongside me. All my friends are giving up the grog. When they were taking it up I was a sucker for peer pressure. Now I’m the island they say no man is. I take the bottle from her.
She’s silent with only the city glow on her face giving her crying away.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.
‘He’s not guilty, you know. Really innocent.’
‘Let’s wait and see.’
‘You know what I mean. In truth. Not in court. Christ. All we need is twelve of you and he’s convicted.’
‘Your grandkids are not your peers, Ruth. Maybe you’ve got a blown perspective. Posted coconuts etcetera.’
She’s pretty wild about that. She comes out of her chair with rugs unwinding wide. ‘Oh, bullshit,’ she shouts. ‘The size of the crime has blown your perspective. Well I know the size of the crime, too. Don’t insult my imagination. I see how evil this shit is.’
‘I’m not insulting you. I’m undecided about his story is all.’
‘I’m not so sure you are. And I don’t want you standing there looking at him saying, “We presume innocence here”, as if you’ve founded some new colony for the self-righteous. Because, if anything, you’ve got self-righteousness working the other way, heading in the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” direction.’ A lot of arguments choke off her speech and she picks up her rugs and begins to look around at the sky.
‘Fuck it,’ she says. ‘Why do they bother hunting down old men?’
‘Because not to hurts too much,’ I say. ‘And because the young ones got away.’
On my man in Wellington’s twenty-fifth day I ring him early. He says the cops are losing patience. They’ve tightened his belt to the last notch. They’re offering him a mixed-grill as we speak. Slapping his face with rump. Calling him Gandhi.
‘Gandhi?’ I say. ‘Gandhi was never on billboards. Let alone in men’s magazines. Be brave,’ I tell him. ‘How long can they hold a man on no evidence? Hang on.’
Later the same day Hermann gets himself prominent in the afternoon paper. During the morning session his defence counsel breaks an agreement with him by saying, ‘My client is no killer.’ Hermann jumps to his feet and says, ‘Is not true, You Honour. I kill many men.’ And lets that echo off the beech panelling and then follows it with, ‘Communists.’ The middle sentence becomes a headline. There is an artist’s sketch of him, big eared with age and parody and with a finger raised wagging at the reds.
We’re deep into the morning when the shouting wakes me on Saturday. Ruth is breathing heavily from the night’s drinking and painting. There’s green on her fingers, which means she’s added something invented and significant to her night sky.
The shouting is football noises. The sounds of kick-to-kick from down in the alley. At one end I hear Dan’s inevitable ‘Duunstaal.’ Or sometimes just ‘Duuns …’ as he spills the mark and has to kill his elation. At the other end is a man’s voice I don’t know. Rising into a long cry of ‘Heeteer’.
‘Duunstaall.’ Silence. ‘Heeteer.’ Over and over. And I can’t place this Heeteer in any league team. This is the sort of dull that gets my hangover out of bed on Saturday.
I go to the window. Down in the alley Dan is kicking with Hermann who is risking a terminal ankle on the bluestone. They’re standing about f
our metres apart. At this range even Dan has to pull his kicks. But this is the old man’s maximum punt.
Dan gathers, lines up and kicks into him. He clutches the ball to his rodent-boned chest and the cry that was ‘Heeteer’ clears into ‘Hiitleer’. Hitler. From down the alley somewhere. Some commentator is yelling ‘Hitler’ every time Hermann marks the ball. As if the rover-built dictator has risen from the dead and is hovering over the pack to take screamers. And people are laughing down there. Sniggers volumed right up. Dan and Hermann ignoring the heckle like three-hundred gamers.
I get into the alley as fast as I can. Naked down three steps at a time. I take the ball out of Hermann’s arms. He watches with his false teeth hung.
‘Inside now, Dan,’ I say. He’s mute-immovable by his old man naked in the great outdoors. ‘Now,’ I yell loud enough for echo and to tip him to real significance.
Hermann points down the alley to the voice and says, ‘Is not good to run.’
‘Dan’s five, Hermann. Learning the fucking alphabet.’ The hair on my back is risen. Maybe he’d get a laugh out of me trying to explain to Dan who Hitler played for. Maybe he’s already explained.
With the word out that a war crimes defendant is shacked up with us I have no choice but to move Dan out. I can’t allow the possibility of him being exposed to this man’s probable inhumanity to man. Or to the neighbours. Though I’ve got to admit he’s been good to Dan. Always Gameboying or footballing on demand.
I don’t want to send Dan to his mother. Because I know her defacto Ross is deep into a new slab every day and is ugly about getting there. Three of his incisors are rotted to stumps and he has duck-shooting expeditions circled on his calendar. He treats Dan like a spaniel with potential to learn a beer-fetching trick. But the case against him isn’t six million clues strong and he’s not headlining in atrocity.
So I make Dan help me pack his case. He doesn’t want to go. Cries me into real guilt. Helen claims he unleashes the same tragic scene when he’s leaving her. I doubt it.
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