Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf

by Sonya Hartnett

  “When has he ever hurt me? You go outside! Go on, out of my sight! My God, Satchel, what do you think you’ve achieved? Out! Out!”

  He let her push him to the doorway and through it, and he watched her grab a tea towel from the rail and press it into William’s face. William was moaning and sliding his limbs about the floor. She garbled comforting words to him and, catching sight of her son, hissed, “Go, I told you. Go and cool down. I’m very angry with you, Satchel.”

  He stepped off the side of the veranda and stood staring across the yard; the chickens were still caged in their coop and he went over to open the gate for them. They trundled past his ankles and waddled briskly to the orchard, to pluck from the soft earth there the shoots that had broken through overnight. Then he walked down the driveway, past the house and the petrol pumps and the big, worn-out, pointless service-station sign, and headed into town.

  In the main street he passed people who smiled and nodded at him, who stopped in the expectation that he would stop too, as he usually would do, and gazed after him in surprise when he kept up his pace. No one mentioned the school bus, and if they had done so he would not have cared. He wouldn’t have bothered to explain. He walked on, past Timothy like a raven in his doorway and past the board outside the firehouse that judged the likelihood of bushfire to be low. He kept walking, never veering from the shoulder of the road, past the signpost to the cemetery and through the shade of the mill, and soon his coat became too hot for him, but he did not stop to take it off. Banks of gravel crumbled under his feet and made him slide; he stepped over solid waves of mud sloughed up by careering cars. A van slowed alongside him and he shook his head at the raised eyebrows of the driver, for he did not want a ride.

  When he arrived at the station wagon he saw the key was still in the ignition and that the back seat, where Moke had been, was stained with browning blood. He sat behind the steering-wheel and tried the key but the engine merely grizzled and he let it go silent. He thought about leaving his coat in the car but the weather had been changeable lately and if it started to rain he would need the coat’s protection, be grateful for its warmth and bulk. He had no idea how long his mother intended him to stay away, but he would go home only when he decided to. He might not wait until her mood was better and William’s nose had been snuffled clean, or he might wait much longer than that. He took the keys, locked up the wagon and resumed his journey.

  He had never walked the unmarked track to the mountain and when he did so he saw things he never noticed from the car – small forests of greenhood orchids, the flattened and tatty corpse of a possum, midges swarming the air above a cloudy pungent puddle, brick-red mushrooms of tuft fungus growing at the base of trees, clustered as if for a family portrait. He saw tyre patterns preserved in the sun-dried mud and recognized them as belonging to the wagon. He touched them with the toe of his boot and they disintegrated easily.

  It took over an hour to reach the clearing and when he got there he lay down on a flat shelf of the mountain, tucked his feet beneath his coat and a hand against his face, and was asleep as soon as his eyes were closed.

  He woke into blazing daylight and pushed himself up on one arm, fumbling to remember who he was and where he was and what he might be doing. His movement spooked a flock of scarlet-beaked finches from the depths of the grass and they twirled into the sky, piping fractiously. His eyes followed them as they dispersed into the trees: he thought he had heard their cheeping in his dreams but could no longer remember having slept. His head hurt, and his bones were sore where they had pressed against the volcano. He was hungry, and the knuckles that had connected with the ridge of William’s eye socket were reluctant to move.

  He sat up and dangled his legs over the edge of the shelving. The sun was at the peak of its low-slung winter ellipse and he knew he must have slept for a couple of hours. He flopped down again, hoping he might go back to sleep, but his eyes would not stay shut and blinked open at the slightest sound, finally roaming the clearing of their own free will. He sighed, and got to his feet. The redgums creaked as a breeze rushed through them but to Satchel it sounded as if they had made a bet among themselves that had just been won: he could not stay as still as they, having one place on the earth was not enough for him. He bundled his coat into a ball and crammed it into the rock, jumped from the shelf and began to walk the base of the volcano. When he found a place that seemed to offer purchase for his fingers and furrows for his toes, he began to climb.

  Satchel had climbed the mountain before, but not very often. He saw the mountain every day, and because he had been born and reared in its overhang it had never been a thing of great interest or attraction to him. He had a couple of cousins and when they were young they had been sent here for a holiday and he had climbed the mountain with them, keeping to the tame and painted tourist path. He had been alarmed and rather thrilled when one of them had gazed down at the dot that was her family’s car and, realizing how far she had come, begun to thrash and howl. She’d been carried to the ground by William, where she collapsed in a huddle and dug her nails into the dirt. Now Satchel chose a route that was unmarked and had possibly never been climbed before and he expected the mountain to throw him off at any moment, shaking him away like a beast that feels the feet of a fly tickling a sensitive spot. He would not be angry if that happened: he would return to the ground and find another beginning and start the climb over. He told the volcano that he had nothing better to do, that he had the afternoon to reach the summit and that he had patience, he would not be easily deterred. He climbed, hedging one foot past the other, stretching his arms and exploring the region above his head with his fingertips. The rock was cold when it touched him, and water was pooled in pockmarks on its hide. Sometimes, not often, serious climbers came to the mountain, bringing with them pulleys and colourful expensive ropes. They chose routes they judged intractable. They hammered pikes into fissures and the tinny clink of metal upon metal could be heard for miles, if the climber had climbed high enough. A climber had fallen once, years ago. His expensive ropes had not saved him and he’d fallen like a bird dropped dead in the sky. He had been an old man who looked younger when he returned to earth.

  Satchel paused to breathe, his feet wobbling on a quiver of stone. He pressed an ear against the rock, fancying to think there would be something to hear. There were caves in the mountain and most of them quickly narrowed impassably, but a torch shone through the gap sometimes lit up huge caverns beyond, and tunnels and caves beyond these. Something very small and lithe might make it through those tunnels, something that thrived in a darkness as thick as space, but Satchel heard nothing, no rustling, nothing to say he wasn’t absolutely alone. He looked down at the drop below him: he was high enough to hurt himself if he fell, and he could not see the dents in the rock that had let him come so far. He scratched his forehead against the mountain and probed for a foothold.

  Eventually he came to a place that was sloped enough to let him sit and rest, his knees pulled up tight in front of him to prevent him from sliding. He did not let himself look at the scenery: he wanted to see it from the top. Instead he looked at where he was going and saw the mountain was bunched and jumbled, a rocky jigsaw that had been mangled in a temper. Great knobby broods of hardened lava reared from the surface and moss, oozing liquid, was plastered in their shadows. Here and there were thin outposts of greenery, weeds that had fallen here as seeds and landed, with luck, in pockets of topsoil blown in from the farmlands. The rest of his climb would be easier and Satchel was disappointed, but he saw he had a long way to go yet and this was pleasing. He pushed his sleeves above his elbows and rested for a few minutes more.

  He reached the summit on his hands and soaked knees, the slant of the volcano forcing him into the humbled position. His jeans were scraped and his palms were burning and at one point he had paused to take off his shirt and let it flutter down the side of the mountain. He had thought, too late, of the danger of having it snag in the canopy of a tree, but it
did not do so: it drifted against the rock and tumbled airily to the ground, landing in a pile in the grass. He wore, now, a ragged t-shirt that changed colour as his skin dampened, for the afternoon was warm and heat was attracted to the volcano, which sucked it in like a lizard or a snake. Once he actually saw a lizard, a dart of quicksilver that dashed from his path and, out of reach, craned its head to look at him, its flesh pulsing in the dip behind its forelegs. Then it flashed away, disappearing completely although there was nothing that might hide it, no slit or convenient hollow. It vanished, a magician.

  At the summit he sprawled on his back, staring for a time at the blueness of the sky. He looked at the sun and felt its hypnotic lull, averting his eyes before it could capture and sear them. He spread his arms wide, his fingers bending from the mountain’s surface, and allowed himself to recover. He would have liked to sleep here, in this safe lonely place on top of his world, but he was no longer tired, he couldn’t even yawn.

  He sat up and studied all he could see laid before him, the scrub that surrounded the base of the mountain, the fields that eased up and fell gently as they made their way closer to the mass as if the mountain stood surrounded by a worshipping, undulating crowd. The mountain was a benign ruler now, but what a different landscape it must have been when the volcano was active, a scorching despot that drooled fire when it spoke, and spat blazingly. The crowd would have cringed, the air must have shaken with the roaring, crashing, rivening sound of the tyrant’s eruptions, and rubble would have rained on everything for miles around, rocks slamming craters out of the earth, trees smashing and exploding. Apart from the occasional boulder standing inexplicably in a paddock, it was difficult, now, to see any remnant of those lawless days.

  Satchel got to his feet and could see further: he could trace the dark slash of the old road all the way to his town. He could see the green arena of the cricket ground and the spire of the wooden church, and he could see the roofs of some shops. They were tiny from here, smaller than his smallest fingernail. A meek, faltering little town, with no reason to exist any more, hated more and more deeply by each new generation born into it, a town that didn’t need a name and one day would not have one. It was waiting for people to move on, to give up on it, or to die. It would not, then, become a ghost town, because its buildings would be soon pulled down. Already there was talk of demolishing the flour mills, for no apparent reason.

  He turned and began walking, his hands ready to save him if he tripped on the uncertain surface. The summit of the volcano was huge, a landscape in itself. Small mountains sprouted here, and arched bridges of stone. There were niches and alcoves and gullies deep enough to climb into, and there were channels that became rivers in the rain. From no point on the summit could a far edge be seen: one had to choose a direction and take it, without knowing when the perimeter would again be met. Everything but the moss was grey, or some shade of sooty black; when the summer sun came and scorched this place the moss would soon match its surroundings, turning brown and scabby and finally grey before crumbling and blowing away.

  All day he had refused to think about what had been happening to him, refusing to think while events rearranged his existence before his eyes, but he felt calmer now, safer in the refuge that the mountain’s crown allowed. If he stayed here, with the breeze tossing his hair and flicking the hem of his t-shirt, nothing more could happen to him, and no one would come to speak to him. Satchel sat down, splaying his legs in front of him, and leaned back on his arms.

  Whatever Moke needed doing would have been done to her by now and he hoped she was sleeping soundly, the blood cleaned away from her, Joshua’s vigilant eyes on the rightened rise and fall of her chest. Satchel would not consider the chance that she had not survived the operation: she was strong and healthy, and she wanted to live. He knew she was alive – he would feel it, if things were otherwise, he would hear it in the wind and sense it in his bones. She was alive, and he missed her. She seemed to have been gone a long time. She was a naughty dog and she had changed his life now, twice.

  He plucked away a strand of hair that had swept into his mouth and hunched forward, shielding his face from the wind. The rock had left images of itself in his palms and he rubbed his hands together but the indented impressions remained. By tomorrow he would know if Gosling had secured the job for him and Satchel did not know what he was going to do if the big foreman had failed. He did not know what he would tell Joshua, how he could explain the things that had happened to him, how exactly his intentions had gone wrong. And if Gosling had managed to get him the job, Satchel would be gone from here in a few days, travelling up the coast into a land of cyclones and sea and the overweight weather of the tropics. Laura would be happy, Leroy would be envious and Gosling would be proud, but the thought made Satchel queasy. He would be going to a place of strangers, he’d know no one he passed on the streets. The ocean would surround him and water was not a thing he knew. He rolled a stone beneath his boot, rattling it across the bumpy surface, thinking. It seemed suddenly clear that Laura and William had incarcerated him in this place, as everyone had warned him they would do. Laura spoke to him of escaping and let him think he stayed because he wanted to, but all the while she had been drawing the bars around him tighter and now he was wary of strangers, and vexed by thoughts of elsewhere.

  He was glad he had hit William, and that this had horrified Laura. He didn’t care what William said to him when he went home. He would look askance at his father’s puffy face and there would be silence then. There had been a second, back there in the kitchen, when Satchel had genuinely believed that William was moving with violence towards Laura, but that second had passed, and Satchel had seen he was wrong. He’d hit his father anyway, and he wasn’t sorry. Laura could say whatever she liked, but William had deserved it. He’d been asking for it for years. If Gosling got the job for him, Satchel would pack and leave gladly. He would do the job he had to do and then he would buy himself a fishing boat, spend his days on the waves. Moke would be there: he’d have her put on a train and sent up to him because he wasn’t coming back himself, once he’d finally got away. He’d have Moke and a boat and the ocean and when mountains rose before him then, they would take the shape of whales.

  Satchel sniffed, and rubbed his eyes. The breeze was making them water, and making his nose run. For a moment he had felt powerful in anger but the feeling drained out of him, leaving him slump-shouldered with a mute throbbing pain behind the eyes. He tossed his head defiantly, but still he felt shipwrecked. There would be hours of daylight before this day ended.

  The day crawled. He wondered if anyone else was feeling the sluggishness of time. He thought about going to the tame side of the mountain and watching any tourists there but the idea seemed somehow pathetic. The information building had tables where visitors could have coffee and he was passingly tempted to go there, somewhere out of the wind, but he would make a curious sight for the tourists, dirty and sweaty as he was, and the lady who ran the place would soon harry him away. He could go, instead, to Gosling’s house, but Gosling would ask him questions and Satchel was in no mood for the unrelenting domesticity that encircled the foreman. He could go to see Chelsea, who would not ask him anything – rather, Satchel would be forced to do the talking, wringing out his anxiety to the person least able to help him, and end up feeling like a fool. And so he chose to do none of these things, resigning himself to staying alone.

  He climbed down the mountain on one of the easier slopes and had to walk for a long time before he arrived where he’d begun and found his shirt rumpled in the grass. He shook it out and slipped it on and kept walking until he reached the shelf where he’d left his coat. He folded it into a pillow and stretched out on the ledge. The clearing was pinging with the sound of bellbirds talking to each other and he tried to search them out but could not find them. He never found them: he had no idea what a bellbird actually looked like. The sky had grown dimmer and the sun was smothered behind a battalion of cloud. It was lat
e in the afternoon, he guessed, and much cooler now. Satchel wriggled until he was as comfortable as the ledge was going to let him be, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again it was early evening and mosquitoes were biting his wrist.

  He jumped from the ledge and tramped into the clearing, shrugging on his coat as he went and turning up its collar. Bark and leaves broke crisply beneath him every time he set a foot down. He was not going home until the night was black and the stars were out but already the moon was there, an opaque white sphere set into an ashen sky. He was hungry and his stomach made a mournful, complaining noise.

  The redgums around the clearing were empty because birds didn’t roost here, they simply passed through, and it was quiet enough to hear the shuffle of his coat against his calves. When he stopped and listened carefully he heard the zoom of a vehicle on the highway and it was the only thing that spoiled the feeling that civilization had ended while he slept and his was the only history left to record. He smiled at the thought of how much easier that would make it for him to greet the following morning.

  What rebelliousness he had talked into himself at the peak of the mountain was gone, and carved out in its place was an echoing sense of misery. Satchel had refused, all his life, to feel sorry for himself, and he mostly believed he had nothing to feel sorry about, but his life now seemed devastated by the happenings of a sole, endless, catastrophic day. It amazed him to realise how precarious his happiness must have been, that a handful of events, strung together almost randomly, could raze it to the ground. When he came to the chopping stump he pressed his fingers into the gouges left by the chainsaw and thought about his past differently: if he tried, he could fit together the pieces that linked everything into a train that led from this moment, standing here, to that moment, weeks ago, when the chainsaw had juddered in his grip and chips of wood had gone flying. Maybe nothing was ever random and maybe, if he tried harder, he could link into the train every minute of his life, all of them leading in the one direction that found him standing in the clearing and shrinking from his future. He rubbed his face and sat down alongside the cracked relic of the long-vanished tree. The tree had been gone for longer than Satchel had been alive, but it must have stood for hundreds of years before that because the stump it left was massive, as broad as a table. Once it had been respectable to slay a mighty tree and he wondered if it was under this bravado that the redgum met its fate or if it had been cut for its own good, before it toppled and brought down with it an acre of its children.