Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf

by Sonya Hartnett

  “I’ll come to the station and see you off.”

  “No – don’t. I think Mum wants it to be just her and Dad and the kids.”

  “Oh.”

  “…No offence.”

  “No.”

  “I mean, you’re like family, but still. You know – mothers—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Satchel. “I’ve got things I’m supposed to do.”

  Leroy nodded. He glanced at the suitcase and back at his friend. “I’ll send you a postcard,” he repeated.

  Satchel straightened, his cold shirt touching his skin. “Well,” he said, “I’ll get out of your way.”

  Leroy stood up quickly. “Look after yourself, Satch,” he said. “Don’t forget me.”

  It seemed to Satchel a strange thing to say: they had known one another all their lives, for over twenty years. “No,” he answered, “I won’t.”

  “Drop in and visit Mum sometimes. She’d like that. She likes you.”

  “All right.”

  They stood and stared shyly at each other, Leroy shorter than Satchel, more wiry and much fairer, the two of them like a cream cat beside a dark dog. “Say hello to your mum and dad,” said Leroy, and then, “Oh, shit, that just reminded me.”

  He took from his desk a fold of dollars, a brand-new twenty and two wan fainted tens, and handed them to Satchel. “That’s for the work your dad did on the washing machine. Mum asked me to give it to you.”

  “Don’t worry about it—”

  “No, no, take it—”

  “You keep it, you’ll need it later—”

  “You need it now,” Leroy said tersely. “Take it, Satch, don’t be stupid.”

  So Satchel took the notes, and put them in his pocket. They glanced once more at each other and Leroy said, “Well, I’ll see you around.”

  They shook hands, and smiled awkwardly, and Satchel said, “Take care, Lee.”

  Leroy did not follow him from the house. Jessica was still standing aimlessly in the garden, in almost the same spot. She turned her head to watch him get into his car but she did not move when he lifted a hand to wave goodbye.

  Moke pushed past the flyscreen door and flew at him, the slashing of her fringed tail swinging her whole body into spirals. Her circular golden eyes were fixed on him as she leapt again and again to get close to his face. She was a crossbred creature with a shaggy red-fox coat and four feathery white paws, but she was so clever and he knew her so well that he hardly ever thought of her as an animal and when she did something peculiar to dogs he could be surprised, and slightly disappointed. Five years ago his mother had given Moke to Satchel as a present on his eighteenth birthday, a red squirming puppy that she’d bought from a farmer and brought home on the seat of her car. The O’Rye family had never kept pets and at the time it had seemed a bleak judgment on their future, that his mother should think he was in need of a dog.

  Moke followed him into the kitchen, where Satchel’s father was sitting at the table with the newspaper flat out in front of him and his nose hovering close to the words. William’s eyesight was fading but he would not concede he needed glasses. He lifted his head as his son crossed the room to hang his coat on its peg: he had blue crescent eyes in a broad kindly face, and his black hair spiked out from his skull in a way that reminded Satchel of how the grass grew from the ground. “Cup of tea?” he asked, and, “Why are you so dirty?”

  Satchel sat as his father stood. “The chainsaw is broken.”

  “Broken?”

  “I couldn’t get it to work.”

  William picked up the kitchen clock and brought it close to his face. “I won’t have time to fix it today.”

  “Why not? What are you doing?”

  “Things,” his father answered evasively. “Lots of things.”

  “There’s a stack of timber in the back of the wagon. It has to be cut up.”

  His father turned to him, grinning brilliantly, his blue eyes twinkling. “You brought home logs?” he chirped. “Whole entire tree-trunks?”

  Satchel did not smile. “They need cutting, Dad.”

  William shrugged and turned his attention to the teapot. Satchel slumped on his elbows. On the table were signs that, in his absence, his mother had returned from work and had some breakfast before going to bed for a few hours. Satchel sighed, and looked down at his dog. “Where was Moke this morning?” he asked. “I couldn’t find her. Was she locked in your room?”

  “Moke and I went out for a walk. A brisk long walk.”

  “At six in the morning?”

  “Earlier than that. Around five, more like it. Mokey and me.”

  “I called her,” said Satchel. “I looked for her. You should have told me you were taking her out.”

  “Why? Is it against the law now, to take the dog for a walk? Against Satchel O’Rye’s law?”

  Satchel said nothing. His father dropped the lid of the teapot and it clattered loudly in the sink. “Now see,” he said crossly, “see what you made me do? You’ll wake your mother, Satchel.”

  Satchel looked at his hands, at the grease grubbed under his nails. William had let the fire wane to orange coals and the air near the floor was tinged with coolness. “Please try to look at the chainsaw, Dad,” he muttered. “Today. I need it fixed today.”

  “I’ll see. I’ll try. I’ll try to find the time.”

  Satchel closed his eyes, felt relief from a weariness he didn’t know he suffered. The sound of a car horn blaring made him open them again. Moke’s ears shot upright and she looked towards the door. William was pouring the tea and he pretended he hadn’t heard the sound. He set the cup before his son and resumed his seat. “Newspapers,” he said lightly. “There’s never anything new in them.”

  The horn sounded a second time, and Moke cast a glance at Satchel.

  “The errors of mankind,” said Satchel’s father, “are repeated over and over. Always have been, always will. Look in your history books, you’ll find the same old story. People never learn.”

  Satchel could hear the engine of the car idling. On the scarlet surface of his tea floated three small ant-like leaves.

  “There’s nothing new under the sun,” stated William. “What we need is a new sun, perhaps.”

  The car horn flared again and Satchel said, “It’ll wake Mum.”

  His father was suddenly galvanized: he reared from his chair and marched through the house to the front door. Satchel took his cup and followed him, Moke scrambling at his heels. His father had crossed the veranda and was stopped in the centre of the stained concrete yard by the time his son caught up with him. There was a long, low-set car stretched between the petrol pumps. “What do you want?” William called to its occupants.

  “Petrol,” said the passenger. He’d lowered his window just slightly, keeping the chilliness out. The window was tinted and only his eyes could be clearly seen.

  “We’re closed.”

  The passenger leaned to the driver and they exchanged some words Satchel could not hear. The passenger’s eyes appeared at the window once more.

  “You don’t have to open the place,” he said. “All we need is petrol.”

  “No,” said William.

  The passenger’s eyes ducked away as he consulted the driver. Satchel sipped his tea. The petrol pumps had ceased working long ago, their underground supply tanks ringing hollow. The rickety building that had once been the office had junk scattered on its shelving and a cash register whose drawer was a nursery for spiders; its glass doors were linked at the handles by a sturdy length of chain. The petrol station appeared, to Satchel, so stark and obviously derelict that he wondered what terrible place these travellers had come from, that they could mistake the place for operational.

  As he thought it, they seemed to realize it. The passenger’s voice was raucous when he spoke again. “What can we get here, then?” he asked. “Can we get a Coke? Can we get air? You got any air?”

  William rocked slightly, his weak gaze drifting
. The passenger stared at him, and at Satchel, for a moment or two. “We need petrol,” he insisted.

  “Not here.”

  “Can you tell us where, then? Can you at least do that?”

  His tone made Moke twitchy and she took a taut step nearer the car. “Get back on the highway,” Satchel told the travellers. “There’s a service station not far from where you turned off. You’ll make it there all right.”

  The passenger’s eyes switched to him. “If you’re going to have a petrol station,” he said, “you should at least sell goddamned petrol.”

  William’s lip jerked; he and his son watched the car pull away, spinning up splatters of clammy dirt from the earth that lined the road. “Maybe that’s something I can do tomorrow,” Satchel suggested. “I could pull down that old building. The office. People wouldn’t stop here then, maybe.”

  “It’s not the building’s fault,” William said curtly. He turned and went back to the house. Moke stayed by Satchel’s side, staring along the road where the car had disappeared, her body braced against the lingering urge to bark. Satchel walked to the office and peered through its doors, at the racks of dusty shelving, at the counter behind which his father had once worked. It would only take a few hours to knock the whole thing down.

  In the house he changed his clothes for overalls, his boots for a pair with steel in their toes. He shaved his face and brushed his teeth and hair. He took Leroy’s money from his shirt pocket and trod quietly along the hall. His mother’s door was closed, but he turned the knob and looked into the room. She lay bundled in the middle of the old double bed, the blankets hardly bothered by her size. Her son tiptoed across the room and placed the notes beneath the base of the bedside lamp. His mother opened her eyes and looked at him and he knew she was the one he got it from, the ability to wake and be aware of everything.

  “Dad fixed the Pipers’ washing machine,” he whispered, his words coming out foggy because the bedroom was achingly cold, the air painful to breathe. “That’s forty dollars there. I’m going to work, but I’ll be home for dinner.”

  She tipped her head, a vague wonky nod. Satchel went to his own room to get another blanket and when he returned to drape it over her she had gone back to sleep. He closed her door behind him and wished he could lock it – not lock her in, but lock other things out.

  William was sitting in the same kitchen chair, studying the same page of the paper. Satchel took wood from the box and arranged the pieces in the fireplace, prodding the coals around them. William watched from the corners of his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was full of the spleen that the scene outside had brewed in him. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “You know.”

  “Speak politely to your father, Satchel.”

  “I’m going to help Gosling.”

  William’s mouth curled. Satchel knew he would have an opinion and knew what it would be, so he didn’t wait to hear it: he caught for his coat and snapped his fingers for his dog. He didn’t stop to unload the branches and stack them beside the house, but climbed into the car and pumped the accelerator hard and hopefully. For once the wagon started without argument and he was grateful, and as he drove through the town and slung the car onto the highway he felt refreshed and revived, as if his day had finally begun, and would get better from now.

  The animal lay flopped in its rocky hollow, its eyes reduced to black slivers in the smudging of white. It would not wake for the rest of the day, not even when the birds were at their most piercing and the trees shook with their weight. It had tracked the wallaby with saintly patience, tapping every instinct intently. Once or twice it had dropped to its haunches, hardly touching itself to the earth, and was up again instantly, resuming its measured trot. For some time the wallaby had not realized it was being shadowed, but when it did so it had veered away from the foot of the mountain, away from the obstacles of rocks and trees and from the shelterless hunting ground that was the volcano itself. It had made for barren country, trusting in its speed and the tangle of grasses to eventually deter its pursuer from the chase. The animal, knowing its quarry, had also known the likelihood of the tactic. Well into the morning it had kept up its pace, always out of reach of the keen marsupial eyes, always just on the periphery of the still keener ears. The wallaby could not outrun its hunter, for the animal would not race; the wallaby could not rest a moment, because the animal did not stop. It panicked when it understood this, and its fear made it dash erratically: it went close to the highway and the animal trotted for a distance on the edge of this open, perilous path. It swerved into cover when it felt a vibration through the pitch and found the wallaby frozen there, resigned.

  So the animal slept for the remainder of the day, undisturbed by flies that landed on its paws, deaf to the daytime sounds.

  The highway always reminded him of something young and hare-brained, something aware of its size but not of its strength: it was like a colt bucking around a paddock, flash and damaging. He could still remember a time when the highway didn’t exist, and the raised harried voices that had greeted the plans for its creation. His town lay bunched against a road that led to a larger town, but the highway was designed to bypass his town, and a hundred small towns like it, completely. Instead, it whipped straight from the city to the big town and on to other big towns, cutting off the little towns from the flow of the traffic as if little towns insulted it and it only had eyes for things as indelicate as itself. The road that curved through his town was now referred to as the Old Road, while the highway, laid a decade past, was New. And no one travelled the old, meandering, narrower road unless their car was faltering, or they needed the facilities in the public park, or they were deliberately taking in the sights and finding there was nothing to see.

  His town had a name, a proper name that could be found on maps. But the people who lived there were sunk by the dislocation that the new road had caused, by the feeling that they and their town were no longer of any necessity: they lived on the old road now, and their town had no further need of a distinguishing name. In their words they used its true name, but in their thoughts they called it little. On maps it was the smallest speck that a place could be, a mark the size a pin would leave if its tip was dipped in ink.

  The big town was twenty minutes’ drive along the highway, a place churned up in the gold rush and with its feet sunk in gold ever since; it seemed to grow and grow and Satchel worried that one day he would look from his bedroom window and see the approach of its chimneys and flags. While the little town grew gaunt, while businesses failed and families moved away, the big town had swelled on a diet of cars that had boomed down the highway without stops or divergence, on money that had not been sapped by the humble shops that clung to obstinate existence in minor settlements everywhere. The gardeners in the big town grew fuchsias, which they planted along their fence lines and tended with great care: these plants were not normal, but had a tall single stem and a mass of froth and greenery spurting from the top. To hem the plants to this strange, unnatural design, the gardeners regularly nipped off buds that sprouted on the length of the willowy stem. These fuchsias reminded Satchel of the highway, of the huge town it invested its might into feeding, of the fated little towns that had grown in the wrong place. His mother said it was the fashion for people to prune their plants this way, but Satchel wondered if they weren’t growing some idol to the bitumen deity that sustained them, a celebration of their status as a chosen people.

  It was to the big town that he’d come to learn to be a carpenter, catching the bus that coursed six times daily along the old road, taking farmers to the movies and teenagers to the department stores, taking Satchel to the school that taught him a trade. And it was to the big town he returned when there was work that let him use his skill, when Gosling would phone and say there was room enough for him on the crew, work for a month or a week or a day. Gosling had grown up in the little town, had been a brotherless boy when William had been a tolerant teenager who’d dropped spa
re change in the younger’s hand, and now Gosling was pleased to sling Satchel a job whenever he could do so, when the other workers wouldn’t object to the presence of a ring-in who needed the money.

  The building was almost finished, and when Satchel arrived he saw men crawling about on the unfleshed parts of its skeleton: the men had been at work since dawn and any observer would think they were working conscientiously, but they were not. Gosling had them on go-slow, stringing the job out as long as he could. The foreman wandered over as Satchel parked his car and Moke jumped out the window to greet him, as though she understood that this was a man she should charm. Gosling was a wide, careful, painstakingly decent man, his brow much furrowed with the weight of his own world and those of others that he adopted as his own, but he made no comment about Satchel being late. The work could not be stalled for much longer without suspicion being aroused and it seemed that now the entire concept annoyed him. “Cultural Centre,” he snarled. “This place already has a tourist centre and a history centre and a bloody replica mining village, and now it wants a cultural centre. What are they going to put in it? What have they got left to put in the thing?”

  Satchel squared his hands on his hips and together they considered the structure. Gosling knew what was going in it, and he’d previously had words to say about that, too. When it was finished there would be a souvenir shop and a bush-tucker restaurant, but these things were to be secondary to a collection of Koori artefacts. Gosling had said, “The people who built this town booted out the Aborigines. Give us your land, they said, and get the hell out. Take your sticks and boomerangs with you. If you come back, we’ll shoot you. All changed now, though. Now it’s look at this, look at that, this is genuine and original, it’ll be fifty dollars thanks. Hypocrisy, that’s what this is. Hypocrisy.”

  He said the word again now: “Hypocrisy.”