Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf

by Sonya Hartnett

  “He’s staying with our aunty. He hasn’t got a job yet. He’s looking for a place to live. He phoned yesterday.”

  Satchel nodded. He could hear, in the kitchen, the hiss of mince upon the grill. He spluttered, “There must be plenty of work for a pastry-cook. In the city, I mean. He’ll find something.”

  Chelsea said nothing: her gaze was in her milkshake, which she gave a spiritless stir. She had never been a talker and Satchel knew she was particularly nervous around him. When William had lost his job driving the school bus, the person given the position was Chelsea, and she was perpetually racked with guilt by the fact.

  But Chelsea Piper was a person who seemed doomed to shrink and quail: always aware she was the least endearing of the tribe of Piper children, she had long ago decided that in silence she would find sanctuary and that isolation could protect her from hurt. She had never allowed herself to forgive the blunders of her younger years, determined that the witnesses to her stupidity had neither forgotten nor forgiven. She was twenty-one now, but she was haunted by the teenage girl she had been, a spotty, short and rather ugly girl who had longed for friendship and affection but fell, instead, into an abyss of ridicule.

  Satchel and Chelsea had gone to the same high school, a school in the big town that charged nominal fees but required its students to wear a pallid uniform. Pupils travelled to attend it from many miles away and in winter classes would finish early to let the children of farmers be home before dark. Chelsea was a couple of grades below Satchel and her brother Leroy, but nonetheless Satchel was not unaware of the event which had caused uproar on the day that crushed Chelsea utterly.

  She had been identified as the school’s outcast early, forced to eat her lunches alone and wait until there were no further choices before being grudgingly accepted into a team. She was the girl that other girls passed notes about, the one that made the boys snicker and whisper crude suggestions. Her attempts to join a circle were seen as a slander upon that circle and she was chased away like something infected. Desperate for acceptance and noting that the favoured girls were often given nicknames, she once asked her mother to embroider the word Chels on the front of a windcheater, and she wore this to school on a free dress day. The word gained currency only as a term of mockery.

  She’d weathered a year of Chels by the time she made her final, most monumental error. Satchel was in what would be his last months of schooling and he could only imagine the suffering she endured in the remaining years she spent at the mercy of her classmates. At fourteen her interest was snagged on a noisy, popular, bovine boy who had never looked in her direction but to whom she began to devote every thought. Her mousiness, she decided, blinded him to her existence, and she concocted a plan that would lure his attention if only through the attention of others. It was an idea monstrous in its lack of subtlety but she was young enough to think it would be greeted with amusement and admiration, that the bovine boy would find it enticing.

  She trimmed his image from her class photograph and took the severed head to a shop in the big town that turned pictures into badges. She pinned the badge to her blazer and went, head high, to school.

  It was a day that became legend. Satchel could remember Leroy with his hands pressed to his face, groaning with the anguish of his humiliation. And he could remember Chelsea sitting by herself on the long bus journey home, the badge removed from her blazer but two pinholes like puncture wounds showing in the lapel. He thought she would cry, but she never made a sound.

  Now Chelsea herself drove a bus, a different bus for a different school, and the bovine boy had died when he rammed his car into a tree, and the people with whom she’d been at school had gone their different ways, some to places where they themselves were the ill-treated underclass. But Chelsea Piper never forgot the lesson that she was contemptible, and it seemed that she never would. She’d sucked herself in like a snail, inflicting herself on no one. She remained in the town as if chained to its road: he wondered if she stayed for fear of meeting someone, on a busy street somewhere, who had played a part in the torture that was that terrible day, and finding herself with nowhere familiar to run. Or if she stayed from a simple lack of desire to do anything anymore.

  She was no easy person to talk to and he wished he had not sat down, for Timothy had ducked a glance through the flyscreen straps dangling in the kitchen doorway and seen him at the table. He wouldn’t think to wrap the burger now, but would bring it out on a plate. Satchel watched Chelsea dip a finger in the foam that rimmed the milkshake container and blot clean the chocolate smear. He wondered if she found a peaceful pleasure in her exile: it would be nice, sometimes, to know that no one expected anything from you, no words, no thoughts, no cheerful greeting or enthusiasm. He scouted for a topic to break the stuffy silence: recalling that she liked animals and kept a horse in an agisted paddock, he asked her how it was. She said only, “Good.”

  Timothy dropped a utensil and spat out an irritable word. Chelsea skimmed the straw around the container raspily, keeping her enlarged eyes down. Finally she set the cup aside and dabbed her mouth on the sleeve of her jumper. She considered Satchel blankly and said, “I’m going to train him to barrel race.”

  “That’ll be fun.”

  “He won’t be any good at it. He’s just lazy, that’s why.”

  Timothy arrived with the burger. He put the plate on the table and said, “Five dollars, Satchel.”

  He stood close and wary-eyed while Satchel dug in his pocket and found the money, as if suspecting Satchel had plans for skipping town. He took the coins and stalked morosely back to his kitchen.

  Chelsea made no move to leave, though she had nothing left to keep her in the store, and Satchel became conscious of her watching as he ate. By the third bite it seemed that his teeth were making an inordinately loud, distasteful noise; by the fifth he felt as if her gaze was stripping him naked. He put down the remains of the burger and cleared his throat. “Chelsea,” he said, “have you ever seen a dog running around the mountain? A brown, striped sort of dog?”

  “Joe Rinket has a brindle greyhound. It’s brown, with blackish stripes.”

  “No, not a greyhound. Heavier set, more like a collie. It looked like a stray to me.”

  “Joe Rinket’s greyhound isn’t lost,” she said. “I saw him with it this morning.”

  “You haven’t heard anyone on the bus say their dog has disappeared?”

  Chelsea shook her head, and Satchel felt sufficiently composed to take the final bites. “If there’s a stray dog on the mountain,” she said, “someone will shoot it before long.”

  He nodded, cleaning crumbs off his plate.

  “If there’s one,” she mused, “there’s probably others.”

  He shook his head. “If there was a pack of feral dogs out there, we’d have heard about it. It was on its own, I think.”

  “When did you see it?”

  “The other day – the day Leroy went away. I was getting wood. It cut across a clearing and stopped and stared at me. It was a strange-looking thing.”

  “Strange like how?”

  It would be difficult to explain, so he went to the counter and searched behind it for a pen. He had inherited his father’s minor artistic ability and the animal he drew on a serviette looked right to him. Chelsea, however, glanced at it and laughed. “It’s half a cat and half a dog,” she said.

  “But that’s why it was strange. Its tail was like a cat’s, and so were its ears and the shape of its face. But it had a muzzle like a dog, and it was the size of a dog.”

  “Maybe it was a cat. Feral cats are big.”

  “They don’t have pointy muzzles, no matter how big they are.”

  Chelsea peered at the picture. She said, “You’ve drawn the legs too short, or the body too long.”

  “I’ve drawn it the way I remember it,” he replied, a little testily. “Its body was a bit longer than its legs. And it had big, dark, triangle eyes.”

  “What are these squiggl
es?”

  He took the serviette from her and sketched the stripes on the creature’s back more distinctly. When he returned the drawing she gazed at it for a minute, and then she looked around the shop, as if checking that Timothy was out of sight and they were still alone. She asked, “Where did you say you saw this thing?”

  “At the mountain. Why? Do you recognize it?”

  She didn’t answer immediately: she tipped her head and her thick, lustreless hair bunched around her shoulders. “Maybe,” she said. “Can I keep this picture, Satchel?”

  “If you want it.”

  She tucked the serviette into her pocket and scanned the shop again. Moke was standing at the doorway and whined softly to catch her eye. “Your dog,” she said. “She’s tired of waiting for you.”

  Satchel said, “Yeah, I better go. I’ll see you later, Chelsea. If Leroy rings, tell him I said hello.”

  He left his plate on the counter and went out to the street, forgetting Chelsea instantly to wonder, instead, where to go.

  He walked with Moke towards the mountain because there was nowhere else that beckoned, no other element of the landscape that would overshadow him and let him feel alone. They followed the sealed road that was signposted for tourists and arrived at the picnic area with Moke panting and Satchel’s sleeves pushed up on his arms. The three slat-pine tables were unoccupied and there was no one to be seen, but there were cars parked on the gravel and he could hear the sound of voices calling to each other from the flats well up the mountain. He tacked, with the dog, away from the mass of the volcano and into the spindly wilderness, where leaves and pipes of eucalypt bark and the airy shells of cicadas cracked to pieces under his feet. He wasn’t going anywhere: he was simply keeping away. He didn’t want to go home, knowing what his father’s mood would be, a mood Satchel had pointlessly encouraged on the car journey home from church. He felt sorry for his mother and hoped that she, too, had slipped away from the house, but he guessed she had probably stayed. He might have stayed to help her but she preferred it, if he took himself away. She didn’t want him enduring what he could easily avoid. She wanted her son to feel none of the obligation that had so thoroughly hobbled her own life and when he showed symptoms of doing so anyway, despite all her best teaching, she could become very angry at him.

  Laura had met William at the wedding of some friends, and in his brightest moods William would marvel at the romance of it, two strangers who would spend their lives together meeting at the celebration of exactly such a destiny. Laura was doing her hospital training and William was the son of a farmer, but even then the signs were there that farming life would one day become difficult and William had come to the city to learn a trade that might support him: always a tinkerer, he was going to be a mechanic. They dated for four years and during that time Laura worked as a surgery nurse while William qualified and found employment in a small suburban garage. William, at this time, was slightly less religious than his parents might have hoped he would be, and when Laura became pregnant the couple had to hurry to marry. Laura laughed at Satchel’s expression when she told him this story: “We were going to get married eventually,” she said consolingly. “We didn’t do it because of you.” And Satchel believed her: the fact that they had loved each other was clear from the tales they told. But still, when he felt the weight of his responsibility he knew it was pressing down on him from the distance of that careless day.

  Satchel had not yet been born when William’s widower father died and the family property was set adrift. William’s brother didn’t wish to run it, and neither did William himself. The land was parcelled and sold to neighbours and the brother returned to his house on the coast. Laura, however, had listened to the stories the brothers told of their country boyhood and she agreed with her husband that their own child would benefit from such an unfenced, healthy, barefoot upbringing. They need not be farmers, but they could use the money from a farm to buy a country business, and this they promptly did. They chose the service station in William’s home town, where as a kid William had bought puncture kits for his bicycle and where as a young man he had filled his first car with petrol. The town was five hours’ drive from the city Laura had lived in all her life and, “Weren’t you sad,” Satchel asked his mother, “to leave your family and friends behind?”

  “Oh yes, a bit,” she conceded. “In the early days I was lonely. William already knew everyone, but I was a stranger. I was expecting a baby and I didn’t know anything about babies: I missed my mother. For months, I rang her every day. But, I suppose I would have gone anywhere with William. If he’d wanted to live on another continent, I suppose I would have gone.”

  The petrol station, its little store and its big double garage were bringing in a reasonable amount of money then, and would do so for much longer to come – even years later, when the highway was laid but service stations had yet to be built along it, to the very day William closed the place down, it was making enough to keep them secure. The business came complete with the house and yard and the sheds behind it, and Laura worked to tame and make these buildings homely while William painted his name above the garage and introduced himself to suppliers. She began to make friends when the sheen of her newness rubbed off a little, and she earned respect the day she took a choking child by the heels and smacked it stoutly on the back, ejecting a slimy coin across the room. She called herself a farmer’s wife, though William grew calluses and harvested engine parts, and in time she lost all desire to return to the shoulder-to-shoulder existence that was life in the city.

  Satchel was born in September, in the evening of a cool, dry, windless day. His mother told him he had screwed up his eyes and howled at the sight of her and she had known from this that he would always be a father’s boy. Later he would grow to look like William, with the same big bones and broad, friendly face, his eyes a colour more purple than blue. He would dawdle about the garage while his father worked on cars and for his birthdays he unfailingly requested wrenches and motor-mowers. He seemed dazed the day it occurred to him that a child could have a brother or a sister: he asked his father why he had neither and William had replied, “I wondered that myself, Satchel. I reckon God thinks that people who are given a child like you are not allowed to have another, because that would be greedy.”

  And he had had a happy childhood: it had been long and safe and barefooted, a time he associated with the warbling of magpies and the sight of foxes in the field. It had been as carefree as Laura had hoped it would be. He grew up, and into, a country boy: he knew about traps and crops and drenching and guns, about the meaning of a pinky sky and about tending an orphaned lamb. He grew up an only child, skilled in amusing himself, the sole receiver of his parents’ affection and aware that, one day, his parents would rely solely on him.

  When he went home, much later in the afternoon, he asked his mother, “Where is he?”

  “He’s in his bedroom,” said Laura, “painting. Stay away from him tonight.”

  He opened a can of dog food and scooped spoonfuls of it into Moke’s dented dinner bowl. He took the meal outside to her, changed the water in her drinking tray, and hustled the chickens back to their coop. When he returned to the kitchen he found his mother running water in the sink and said, “You know detergent is bad for your hands.”

  “Satchel,” she said curtly, “what am I supposed to do? This house doesn’t run itself. Someone has to do the dishes. Go and set the table, please. Don’t worry about a plate for William.”

  That night he lay awake, his hands folded behind his head, and heard his father moving quietly through different parts of the house. After midnight, when William finally went to bed, Satchel climbed from under his blankets and walked around the house, switching off the lights in every room.

  The animal stretched, and flashed its tongue around its nose. It stood straight and listened, its ears rotating and flexing to capture every sound. Naturally a nocturnal creature, it was well suited to the pitchness that engulfed it: its
coat did not catch the moonlight and its black eyes and nose absorbed any reflection. Slender and built for prowling, it manoeuvred through the bracken on large, highknuckled paws that touched the ground flat and soundlessly. Its sense of smell was remarkable, inundating it with information. It could detect its browsing prey, advance and dispatch it without giving the victim the chance to even realize it was there.

  It heard the approach of another well before it saw it, but when the other raised its head above the grass and stared at it, the animal gave a short, hoarse yelp and bounded forward through the spikes. For a moment the twin animals spiralled, buffeting each other’s shoulders, feet prancing on the earth. Then they veered and distance was between them immediately; but they trotted into the scrub, one following the other, and stayed near for the rest of the night.

  Gosling called the crew together at lunchtime and told them what they already knew: that they could no longer string out the completion of the job and that there were approximately three more days of work to be done. Then, with the exception of one or two minor tasks, their part in the construction of the Cultural Centre was over. The men looked into their sandwiches thoughtfully, giving the announcement due consideration. “No doubt, in a few months’ time, they’ll be asking us to build them an historical bathroom,” said the foreman, but no one laughed, and Satchel chased off a fly that was buzzing in his face. Gosling looked somewhat stricken and walked rapidly away.

  They were headed back to work, ditching the dregs of last-minute cigarettes, when Gosling called him over. The foreman was sitting in the cab of his truck, sipping coffee from the mug of his flask. Moke wanted to climb in beside him and he shifted his knees to let her pass. “You want to come home with me?” he asked her. “You gorgeous little flirt.”