Underdogs: Three Novels

by Markus Zusak

  “It’s me,” I tell her. “It’s Cameron.”

  “Don’t lie,” she responds. “Don’t lie, Dad,” and saliva falls to the skin above her red top, hitting her through the heart. Her jeans cut into her hips, slicing them up. It surprises me that they don’t draw blood. Same with her heels. Her shoes leave bite marks in her ankles. My sister.

  “Don’t lie,” she says one more time, so I stop.

  I stop lying and say, “Okay Sarah, it’s me, Dad. We’re puttin’ you into bed.” And to my surprise, Sarah manages to stand up and limp to her room. I get her shoes off, just in time before they sever her feet.

  She mumbles.

  Words tumble from her mouth as I sit down on the floor, against her bed.

  “I’m sick,” she says, “of gettin’ shattered.” She goes on and on, until slowly, she falls.

  Asleep.

  A sleep, I think. It’ll do her good.

  Her last words are, “Thanks Dad … I mean, thanks, Cam.” Then her hand trips onto my shoulder. It stays. I smile as slightly as a person can smile when they sit, cold, cramped, and crumpled in his sister’s room when she’s just come home with alcoholic veins, bones, and breath.

  Sitting next to Sarah’s bed, I think about what’s happening with her. I wonder why she’s doing this to herself. Is she lonely? I ask. Unhappy? Afraid? It would be nice if I could say I understand, but that would not be right. No, it wouldn’t be, because I just don’t know. It would be like asking why Rube and I go down to the dog track. It’s not because we’re ill-adjusted or we don’t fit in or anything like that. It just is. We go to the track. Sarah’s getting drunk. She did have a boyfriend once, but he went.

  Stop, I tell myself. Stop thinking about that. But somehow I can’t. Even when I try to think of other things, I just get on to thinking about the other members of my family.

  Dad the plumber, who had an accident at work a few months ago and lost all of his jobs. Sure, insurance paid for his injuries, but now he’s just plain out of wor from it.

  Mrs. Wolfe — working hard cleaning people’s houses and just got a new job at the hospital.

  Steve — working and waiting and dying to leave home.

  Then Rube and me — the juveniles. “Cam?”

  Sarah’s voice swims to me on a stream of bourbon, Coke, and some other cocktail that drowns the room. “Cam.”

  “Cam’ron.” Then sleep. Then Rube.

  He arrives and mutters out a “Huh.”

  “Can y’ flush the toilet?” I ask him. He does it. I hear it, rising and falling like the blowhole down south.

  At six, I get up and return to Rube’s and my room.

  I could kiss Sarah’s cheek as I leave, but I don’t. Instead, I trounce my hair with my hand, giving up on it in the end — it’s bound to stick up. In all directions.

  When I get up for real, around seven o’clock, I check on Sarah one last time, just to make sure she hasn’t made herself a superstar and choked on her own vomit. She hasn’t, but her room’s a shocker. The smell is of:

  Juice.

  Smoke.

  Hangover.

  And Sarah lying there, caked in it.

  Daylight shoots through her window.

  I walk.

  Out.

  Sunday.

  I get breakfast, wearing trackies and a T-shirt. I’m barefoot. I watch the end of Rage with the volume turned completely down. Then there’s a business show that wears a suit and tie and a fake hankie in its pocket.

  “Cam.”

  It’s Steve.

  “Steve,” I nod, and that’s about all we’ll say to each other for the entire day. Saying each other’s name is the way he and I say hello. He always leaves the house early, including on Sundays. He’s here but he’s not. He’ll go to see his friends or go fishing or just disappear. He’ll leave the city if he wants. Go down south, where the water’s clean and a person passing by will acknowledge you. Not that Steve cares about being acknowledged. He works, he waits. That’s all. That’s Steve. He offers Mum and Dad to pay more than his board so they can stay ahead, but they won’t take it.

  Too proud.

  Too stubborn.

  Dad says we’ll manage and that some work is just around the corner. But t never ends. It stretches and continues, and Mum drives herself into the ground.

  “Thanks.”

  The day echoes past and that’s what Sarah says to me in the evening when I finally see her again. She comes into the lounge room just before dinner.

  “I mean it,” she tells me softly, and there is something in her eyes that makes me think of The Old Man and the Sea, and how the old man’s patched sail looks like the flag of permanent defeat. That’s what Sarah’s eyes look like. The color of defeat chokes her pupils, even though her nod and smile and uncomfortable sitting motion on the couch indicate that she is not finished yet. She will just carry on, like all of us.

  Smile stubborn.

  Smile with instinct, then lick your wounds in the darkest of dark corners. Trace the scars back to your own fingers and remember them.

  At dinner, Rube comes in late, just before Steve.

  This is how the Wolfe family looks at the table:

  Our mother, eating politely.

  Dad, feeding burnt sausage into his mouth but tasting unemployment. His face has healed from the busted pipe that smashed his jaw and ripped open his face. Yes, the injury has healed nicely, at least on the outside of his skin.

  Sarah, concentrating on keeping it all down. Me, watching everyone else.

  Rube, swallowing more and more and smiling at something, even though we have an extra dirty piece of business to cater for very soon.

  It’s Dad who brings it into the foreground.

  “Well?” he says when we’re done. He looks at Rube and me.

  Well what?

  “Well what?” Rube asks, but both of us know what we have to do. It’s just, we’ve got an agreement with one of our neighbors that we’ll walk his dog for him, twice a week. Sundays and Wednesdays. Let’s just say that most of our neighbors think that Rube and me are kind of hoodlums. So to get in the good graces of Keith, the neighbor on our left (who we disturb the most), it was decided that we would walk his dog for him, since he doesn’t get much time to do it himself. It was our mother’s idea, of course, and we complied. We’re many things, Rube and me, but I don’t think we’re difficult or lazy.

  So as the ritual goes, Rube and I grab our jackets and walk out.

  The catch is, the dog’s a fluffy midget thing called Miffy. Bloody Miffy, for God’s sake. What a name. He’s a Pomeranian and he’s a dead-set embarrassment to walk. So we wait till it gets dark. Then we go next door and Rube hits the highest note in his voice and calls, “Oh Miffy! Miffy!” He grins. “Come to Uncle Rube,” and the fluffy embarrassment machine comes prancing toward us like a damned ballerina. I promise you when we’re walking that dog and see someone we know, we pull our hoods over our heads and look the other way. I mean, there’s only so much guys like us can get away with. Walking a Pomeranian that goes by the name of Miffy is not one of them. Think about it. There’s street. Rubbish. Traffic. People yelling at each other over the top of their TVs. Heavy metallers and gang-looking guys slouching past … and then there are these two juvenile idiots walking a ball of fluff down the road.

  It’s out of hand.

  That’s what it is.

  Disgraceful.

  “A dis-grace,” says Rube.

  Even tonight, when Miffy’s in a good mood.

  Miffy. Miffy.

  The more I say it to myself the more it makes me laugh. The Pomeranian from hell. Watch out, or Miffy’ll get you. Well, he’s got us all right.

  We go out.

  We walk him.

  We discuss it.

  “Slaves are what we are, mate,” is Rube’s conclusion. We stop. Look at the dog. Carry on. “Look at us. You, me, an’ Miffy here, and …” His voice trails off.

  “What?”

&nb
sp; “Nothin’.”

  “What?”

  He gives in easily, because he wanted to all along.

  At our gate upon our return, Rube looks me in the eye and says, “I was talkin’ to my mate Jeff today and he reckons people’re talkin’ about Sarah.”

  “Sayin’ what?”

  “Sayin’ she’s been gettin’ round. Gettin’ drunk and gettin’ around a bit.”

  Did he just say what I thought he said? Getting around? He did.

  He did, and soon, it will alter the life of my brother Rube. It will put him in a boxing ring. It’ll make a heap of girls notice him. It’ll make him successful.

  It will drag me with him, and all it will take to start it all is one incident. It’s an incident in which he beats the hell out of a guy in school who calls Sarah something pretty ordinary.

  For now, though, we stand at our gate.

  Rube, Miffy, and me.

  “We’re wolves,” is the last piece of conversation. “Wolves are up higher on the ladder for sure. They oughta eat Pomeranians, not walk ‘em.”

  Yet, we

  Never agree to walk your neighbor’s midget dog. Take my word for it.

  You’ll be sorry.

  “Hey Rube.”

  “What? The light’s off this time.”

  “You reckon it’s true what people are sayin’?”

  “Reckon what’s true?”

  “You know — about Sarah.”

  “I d’know. But if I hear someone sayin’ anything about her, I’m gonna nail ‘em. I’m gonna kill ‘em.”

  “Y’ think so?”

  “I wouldn’t say it otherwise.”

  And sure enough, he nearly does.

  CHAPTER 3

  Rube smashes the guy, with bloody fists and trampling eyes, but first, this:

  Our dad’s been out of work now for nearly five months. I realize that I’ve mentioned it before, but I should really explain exactly how it came to be. What happened is that he was working on a site out in the suburbs, when some guy turned on the water pressure too early. A pipe busted and my dad caught the shrapnel, flush in the face.

  Busted head.

  Broken jaw.

  Lots of stitches.

  Plenty of wires.

  Sure, he’s like all fathers, my dad. My old man. He’s okay. He’s hard.

  He’s sadistic-like. That is, if he’s in the mood. Generally though, he’s just a human guy with a dog’s last name and I feel for him at the moment. He’s half a man, because it seems that when a man can’t work and when his wife and kids earn all the money, a man becomes half a man. It’s just the way it is. Hands grow pale. Heartbeat gets stale.

  One thing I must say again, though, is that Dad wouldn’t allow Steve or even Sarah to pay a single bill. Just their usual board. Even as he says his regular “No, no, it’s okay,” you can see where he’s been ripped apart. You can see where the shadow opens the flesh and grabs his spirit by the throat. Often, I remember working with him on Saturdays. He’d tell me off and swear when I screwed something up, but he would tell me I did something decently as well. It would be short, to the point.

  We are working people.

  Work.

  Struggle

  Even laugh about it sometimes. None of us are winners. We’re survivors.

  We are wolves, which are wild dogs, and this is our place in the city. We are small and our house is small on our small urban street. We can see the city and the train line and it’s beautiful in its own dangerous way. Dangerous because it’s shared and taken and fought for.

  That’s the best way I can put it, and thinking about it, when I walk past the tiny houses on our street, I wonder about the stories inside them. I wonder hard, because houses must have walls and rooftops for a reason. My only query is the windows. Why do they have windows? Is it to let a glimpse of the world in? Or for us to see out? Our own place is small perhaps, but when your old man is eaten by his own shadow, you realize that maybe in every house, something so savage and sad and brilliant is standing up, without the world even seeing it.

  Maybe that’s what these pages of words are about.

  Bringing the world to the window.

  “It’s okay,” Mum says one night. I hear her from my bed as she and Dad discuss paying the bills. I can picture them at the kitchen table, because many things are fought, won, and lost in the kitchen at our place.

  Dad replies, “I don’t understand it — I used to have three months’ work ahead of me, but since …” His voice trails off. I imagine his feet, his jeaned legs, and the scar that angles down the side of his face and onto his throat. His fingers hold each other gently, entwining, making a single fist against the table.

  He’s wounded.

  He’s desperate — which makes his next move pretty understandable, even if it can’t be condoned. It’s door to door. Door to dead-set door.

  “Well, I’ve tried advertising in the papers.” He raises his voice in the kitchen again. It’s the next Saturday. “I’ve tried everything, so I decided to knock on doors and work cheap. Fix what needs fixin’.” While my mother places a chipped mug of coffee in front of him. All she does is stand there, and it’s Rube, Sarah, and me that watch.

  The next weekend it gets worse, because Rube and I actually see him. We see him as he returns from someone’s front gate and we can tell he’s copped another rejection. It’s strange. Strange to look at him, when just a matter of months ago our father was tough and hard and wouldn’t give us an inch. (Not that he does now. It’s just a different feeling, that’s all.) He was brutal in his fairness. Cruel in his judgments. Harder than necessary for our own good. He had dirty hands and cash in his pocket and sweat in his armpits.

  Rube reminds me of something as we stand there by the street, making sure we don’t let him see us.

  He says, “Remember when we was kids?”

  “Were kids.”

  “Shut up, will y’?”

  “Okay.”

  We walk to a trashed, scabby shop on Elizabeth Street that closed down years ago. Rube continues to talk. It’s gray sky again, with blue holes shot through the cloud-blankets. We sit, against a wall, under a bolted-up window.

  Rube says, “I remember when we were younger and Dad built a new fence, because the old one was collapsing. I was about ten and you were nine, and the old man was out in the yard, from first light to sunset.” Rube brings his knees up to his throat. His jeans cushion his chin, and the bullet holes in the sky widen. I look through them, at what Rube speaks of.

  I remember that time quite clearly — how at the end of a day, when sun was melting back into horizon, Dad turned to us with some nails in his hand and said, “Fellas, these nails here are magic. They’re magic nails.” And the next day, we woke to the sound of a pounding hammer and we believed it. We believed those nails were magic, and maybe they still are now, because they take us back, to that sound. That pounding sound. They take us back to our father as he was: a vision of tall, bent-over strength, with a tough, hard smile and wire-curly hair. There was the slight stoop of his shoulders and his dirty shirt. Eyes of height … There was a contentment to him — an air of control, of all-rightness that sat down and hammered in the wake of a tangerine sky, or in that gradual twilight of slight rain, when water fell like tiny splinters from the clouds. He was our father then, not a human.

  “Now he’s,” I answer Rube, “just too real, y’ know?” Not much else to say when you’ve just seen the man knock on doors.

  Real.

  Reel from it. Half a man, but. Still human.

  “The bastard,” Rube laughs, and I laugh with him, as it seems like the only logical thing to do. “We’re gonna cop a hidin’ for this at school, ay.”

  “You’re right.”

  You must understand that we know he’s doing his door-knocking in our own district, which means people in school are getting closer and closer to whipping us with remarks. They’ll find out all right, and Rube and I will go down heavily. It’s
just the way it is.

  Dad, doors, shame, and in the meantime, Sarah has been out late again.

  Three nights.

  Three drunken hazes.

  Two throw-ups.

  Then it happens.

  At school.

  “Hey Wolfe. Wolfe!” “What?”

  “Your old man came knockin’ at our door on the weekend, lookin’ for work. Me mum told him he’s too useless to even let him near our pipes.”

  Rube laughs.

  “Hey Wolfe, I can get your dad a paper run if you want. He could use the pocket money, ay.” Rube smiles.

  “Hey Wolfe, when’s your old man gonna get the dole?”

  Rube stares.

  “Hey Wolfe, you might have to leave school and get a job, boy. Y’ family could use the extra money.” Rube rubs his teeth together. Then.

  It happens.

  The one comment that does it:

  “Hey Wolfe, if your family needs the money so bad, your sister should take up whoring. She gets around a bit anyway, I hear….”

  Rube.

  Rube.

  “Rube!” I shout, running. Too late.

  Far too late, because Rube has the guy.

  His fingers get bloody from the guy’s teeth. His fist hacks through him. Left hand only at first, but it’s over and the guy doesn’t have a chance. Hardly anyone sees it. Hardly anyone knows, but Rube is standing there. Punches fall fast from his shoulder and land on the guy’s face. When they hit him, they pull him apart. They spread out. His legs buckle. He falls. He hits the concrete.

  Rube stands and his eyes tread all over the guy.

  I stand next to him.

  He speaks.

  “I don’t like this guy very much.” A sigh. “He won’t get back up. Not in a hurry.” He’s standing in the guy’s eyes, and the last thing he says is, “No one calls my sister a prostitute, slut, whore, or anything else you please to call it.” His hair is lifted by the wind, and sun reflects from his face. His tough, scrawny frame is growing good hard flesh by the second, and he smiles. A handful of people have seen what has happened now, and the word is beginning to travel.