Bird North and Other Stories

by Breton Dukes

  ‘Candice,’ he said, looking over at the Asian woman.

  ‘That’s our possum,’ said the large man. ‘He usually starts around lunch time. Must have slept in today.’

  The noise stopped and then started. The fisherman was looking at Candice. She was still ravelling her hair. The under parts of her arms were smooth and white. The noise from the animal got louder like it was seeking something to shatter. Candice looked at the fisherman. Water dripped from his beard. He shaped her name with his mouth. She smiled like a model on a toothpaste advertisement and then went side on and looked at him over her shoulder. The noise stopped and the girls ran back to their pool. Each footfall was like a little clod on the concrete. Bubbles came up through the water by the larger man. ‘Pardie,’ he said. Then he looked at Ryan. ‘If you two are brothers then you’re going to be an uncle too.’

  Ryan nodded. He wanted to watch Candice.

  ‘He knows that,’ said Dirk. ‘He knows that’s coming.’

  The fisherman smiled and then closed his eyes.

  Candice had stepped out of the warm pool and was standing by the cubby holes. When she reached for her bag the muscles in the backs of legs went taut like she was wearing high-heeled shoes.

  Thinking about stopping

  Gary wiped down the last table, checked the lock on the front door, took a beer from the fridge behind the bar, walked across the dining room, through the swing door, through the clean and now quiet kitchen, and out the back door to where Lee and Bruce were sitting on upturned milk crates. Lee gestured at the crate Gary used when they were waiting for service. Gary shook his head. ‘Gotta get home,’ he said, opening his beer and drinking most of it off.

  ‘Pussy,’ said Lee.

  ‘It’s his missus,’ Bruce said, still in his apron and the boat-shaped hat he claimed kept the sweat out of his eyes. ‘She has her needs.’

  ‘And what would you know about that?’ said Lee.

  Bruce straightened his big body and smiled in a way that suggested though he knew plenty, he wouldn’t be sharing any secrets tonight.

  ‘Rick’s away for a few days,’ Lee said, looking back at Gary. ‘I’ve got his truck and dogs.’

  Bruce finished his beer and stood. Then, as if a pole driven into the concrete was also temporarily embedded in his forehead, he walked a tight circle.

  ‘We should call IHC,’ said Lee, watching Bruce finish his rotation.

  Bruce screwed the lid off another beer and sat down. ‘You won’t be catching me in any forest.’

  Gary smiled. ‘But Bruce, we’d be looking for pigs.’

  ‘Yeah Bruce, and anyway, who says you’re invited?’ said Lee.

  Gary put down his empty. ‘Right,’ he said.

  ‘The morning,’ said Lee.

  Gary made an ambiguous gesture and started up the narrow road that accessed the rear of the restaurant, a Chinese takeaway, a store that sold the paua-shell teaspoons and stuffed kiwis the tourists went for, and the real estate agency above which he lived with Tania. He’d been working at a bar in Queenstown when they met. Jailbait, Bruce crowed the afternoon they’d watched her walk past the restaurant. It wasn’t that bad, but she was young: friends with the earth, honest, and game in bed, with a new thing for comments that suggested she believed, one hundred percent, in the sustainability of their relationship.

  The week she’d been offered a job guiding on the Milford Track there’d been some trouble at the bar. A skinhead had come in as Gary was trying to close. He’d smashed a carafe and pissed on the fire. Gary had lost it, booting the man in the balls before dragging him out of the bar and onto the road. The next day three men in a Cortina were parked outside Gary’s flat. Despite all the women, Gary had never had a handle on love – what he’d always had a handle on was when to get out of town.

  He went up the external stairway and quietly through the door. Tania was in her underwear on top of the bed – her black hair like ink across the pillow. On the bench, beside the little sink, there was a fan of notes: yen and a few US dollars. She liked him to bank their tips every day and, so she could trace the rise in their fortunes, to get a printout of their savings account at the end of the week. It suited Gary. Having a lot of cash around had never been a good idea.

  He folded his apron over a chair and took off his T-shirt, shorts, and sports shoes. It was just him and the boss at the front of house. Waiting tables, doing the bar, making coffee. It was as much an endurance event as a job. Not that he minded – he’d always worked hard, but always in cities, in places he could relax after a shift. Pills, pubs, clubs, weed, and acid – Gary was serious about partying. Age hadn’t changed that; he’d never expected it to. But Te Anau was for lone Italians and their ten-speeds in tents by the lake, Taiwanese on buses for Milford Sound, Americans in loud, matching belly-bags. For Gary its cupboards were bare: nowhere to party, no one to party with. Tania would have a spliff and some wine with him on her day off, but she was always tired and the more they saved, and the more realistic buying a house-bus appeared, the hornier for money she became.

  He sat on the bed. Her tanned shoulders showed the placement of the straps on the pack she carried. Her thighs, where he rested his hand, showed even clearer lines; up to her groin was milk-white and downy. She smiled and said something low, then, still smiling, rolled away from him. Gary reached under the bed for the canister of pills. He put one in his mouth and went to the sink where he swallowed it with a handful of water. Back at the bed he lay down beside her. There was the ceiling, the warm air in the gap between the ceiling and the iron roof, the iron roof, and above that, punched out with planets, moons and stars, hooding quiet old Eastern Southland, the night sky. Down the road Lee started singing Bruce the Warehouse jingle. Then there were those two.

  Lee was one of the rare cooks who calmed under pressure. Afterwards though, especially when he was drinking, he’d ride Bruce hard. His favourite angle was to tell him to go back to Invercargill – that he knew people at the Warehouse or Pak ’n Save who could get him a job. Gary had stayed back at the end of a few shifts, but it was all Lee doing variations on that stupid jingle or Lee gooning, mimicking the people who push the trolley-trains around the supermarket carparks. Bruce never gave much back. At his most animated he might shout, ‘No, Lee. No, you’re wrong about that,’ but mostly he’d laugh a short unhappy laugh – Gary heard it now as he closed his eyes – make his all-knowing face and, no matter how drunk, do his little rotation between beers.

  Gary woke as Tania left the room. There were her footsteps on the metal stairs and then the fading sound of them on the access road. A bus used its airbrakes. A tourist plane or helicopter flew over. Then there was quiet. Gary got out of bed, went to the window, and split the curtain. Now she was on the pavement beside the main road – walking briskly with her usual bounce, as if about to start skipping. There was a shop awning and she disappeared. He let go of the curtain. Under the sink, at the bottom of a soup pot, there was a pencil case. In the case there were cigarette papers, a pipe, a lighter, and a half full coin-bag of buds. In a corner of the coin-bag there was a neatly folded cigarette paper – inside was his last tab of acid. He fished it out and put it on the sink next to the foreign dollars and the ATM card for the house-bus account. He wet the gum on the cigarette paper and looked at the card, then, before lying on the bed and lighting the joint, he stashed the card and acid in his wallet.

  Lee had asked him hunting one other time. It was the week after Gary started at the restaurant and, other than don’t fuck with my kitchen old man, the invitation was the first thing said between them. They’d driven out towards Mossburn with Lee’s dog in the back. It was fawn with a pink nose and, despite being the animal’s first hunt, Lee had high hopes – mightn’t look like it, he’d mumbled, but he’s got a mean streak. After that Lee talked about his trip to the Gold Coast at the end of the tourist season (Coronas by the pool, wet titty contests), then, as they’d turned down a long forestry road and after Gary lit a thin joi
nt, Lee had really opened up, telling Gary about his and his brother’s hunting successes, about his brother’s dogs (killing machines), about one dog in particular (the top dog, Ken), that by a bloody miracle had survived a ten-metre fall when the boar it had by the ear went off a cliff, and that since then always ate the bailed pig’s back door – if you don’t get there fast enough it’ll look like the pig’s been sat in a food processor.

  They’d cut Lee’s dog loose and watched as it went into the forest, not as if it were a hunting machine, but as if it were a visitor to a new town, a town which posed no threat and was best appreciated at an amble, the sort of town about which a man would say, I could stay and put down some roots. Here, I could really make a fresh start.

  One hour passed and then another. Nothing happened. Lee started playing with a tomahawk, throwing it with two hands at the trees and making war with his hand over his mouth. Gary made a pillow of his jersey and found a place beside the road. Stared at through the gaps in his fingers the tips of the young pines seemed embedded in the sky. He’d woken up when the dog came back. It had narrow eyes and a pregnant belly. ‘Bloody thing’s been eating possums,’ Lee said, grabbing the animal by the collar and looking at Gary as if the hunt’s failure were his fault.

  . . .

  The second hunt, however, was already going differently. This time, despite what Lee had said the night before, Bruce was there, waiting on the road out of town with a rugby sock filled with oranges. ‘For half-time,’ he’d said, squeezing into the back of the truck.

  ‘Freak,’ said Lee, and then, ‘Hurry up.’ Aside from that, Lee had been quiet for the rest of the drive, busying himself with the stereo, the air-conditioning, the placement of the rear-vision mirror – as if instead of his brother’s truck he was piloting an assault helicopter.

  Enjoying the quiet, Gary spent the drive watching the white line trace down the state highway, thinking first of the red thread implanted in Band-Aids, then, as he smelt Bruce’s oranges, of a Goan morning: two woman – short bare arms, white aprons and thick, black hair made into buns on their heads – had entered his room with sweet tea and cut fruit, and while he’d eaten, staring out across the Arabian sea, they’d made his bed, snapping starched sheets and communicating with each other in the gentle way of birds just before dawn.

  And unlike that first hunt, as soon they turned onto the forestry road, the dogs (there were three, including the ashy, broad-jawed Ken) started whining and then barking and then banging into their cages, so that all three men stared out at the forest that was Christmas-tree-green.

  Lee stopped the truck and they got out. ‘Watch yourselves,’ he said, when he opened the cage doors.

  The dogs – mouths suddenly serene – went like hell off the truck and down the road, then, at different intervals, and like a search party, they threaded the forest.

  Gary climbed onto the bed of the truck and tried to watch, but the trees were recently pruned and the rows between them were clotted with drifts of branches. He took out his wallet and looked for the acid, and, as he did, the dogs’ barking, which had started as scattered and deep, shifted – as if now the dogs were all together aboard a scooter – to frantic and focussed.

  ‘They’re on to something,’ said Lee.

  Forgetting the acid, Gary got down from the truck and started towards the forest. ‘Wait on, they haven’t bailed it yet,’ said Lee in the calm manner he used when orders were piling up.

  Gary stopped and the three of them stood together and listened. Nearby there was the ticking sound of the truck’s cooling engine, while from the forest the barking started to echo, as if whatever deal was going down was going down in a squash court or a bike-shed. Lee tipped forward on his toes. Bruce changed the fruit from one hand to the other causing the hooped sock to pendulate. Then to seal it – in a short break in the barking – there came a rapid panic of squeals.

  Lee nodded at the forest. ‘That’s it,’ he said, and off he went.

  Gary followed. Making an alley between the trees, there was a downward section of clear ground, a flattening, and then a drift of branches. Lee ran across to the next row and disappeared, while, with head back and limbs pumping, Gary went straight down. His feet jarred as he hit the flat section, but it didn’t cost him much and he arrived at the first drift with good speed. He went over in an equine leap with his arms forward and his legs back, landing, sliding, and rotating on a canopy of small branches and needles, so that he was again able to notice the way the tips of the trees appeared to be embedded in the sky, but with the barking a little louder this was no time for noticing, and he righted himself and bounded at and then hurdled another drift, a lower one, and onto even steeper ground (it was more like falling than running) he landed in, rather than went over, the next drift that was deep and broad, like a pool maybe, or a web, like a web of long, thin, needly branches, and the only way to go was to activate all his large as well as small muscle groups, swimming, jiving and flailing as if he were aboard some fitness or martial arts machine that consisted of phalanx after phalanx of obstacles coming at all angles and on all planes, and out of that drift there was a section of uphill and while he scaled that – shooting his arms like the Bionic man – he heard behind him a crashing sound he presumed was Bruce, and then, ahead, there was another drift and this time he made a sweeping turn on the periphery thinking maybe there’d be a passage, but there was none, just dense green and loggy brown and so he veered, as if attached to the dogs’ even louder barking, into the drift, and again he was up to his neck in foliage – under other circumstances he might have stopped and enjoyed the coolness and the piney smell and the sighing wind – but he didn’t stop, he went up as if climbing a ladder, then after a dive and a roll he was out the other side and accounting for another downward section, then a flat section, and then another section of steep uphill where he really started to feel buggered, and he made a weak scissor kick and a half-hearted barrel roll so that in the next drift he ended wrong way up and, at first, high on the cut branches, then, like a drip on the windscreen, he dribbled into the guts of the drift and stopped.

  His eyes gently bulged and blood ran to his face. A brushy sort of branch wagged between his legs. He heard Bruce approaching, huffing and sneezing, as if he’d inhaled something juicy. It was enough for Gary to give it hell one more time, and turning his lower body into an eggbeater and then an outboard motor he got himself down through the branches, onto the earth that was cool and damp, and then through the woody barricade and into open ground where there was another uphill section, and a different barking (it was nearer but thinner, as if more than one of the dogs had found something else to do) and ahead the living forest changed into a stand of dead trees that were like witches’ hands and that made a swathe atop a verge, a dead forest and verge that Gary went through and up without stopping, without thinking about stopping, and where, once he got to the top, prickled, sweaty and breathing in tattered, heart pounding gasps, he finally got a view of the action.

  The dogs and the brown pig were in what resembled an overgrown skateboarding bowl – sloping walls of rock and, punctuated with flattened or broken witch’s hands, a mud floor. The pig was big – had all three dogs been strapped together it would still have been bigger. It had its face against one of the rock walls. One of its legs was shaped in a strange way as if broken while the other kicked back at Ken who was hitting into the pig’s rear in the way of a spring lamb. The other dogs were nipping at the face, barking, and zipping from one side of the animal to the other as if seeking their own entrance point.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Bruce, coming up beside Gary. He sneezed once and then twice. ‘Hay fever –’ he started to say.

  ‘Look,’ said Gary.

  Lee was on the other side of the sump. He had a knife. ‘Get out of it Ken,’ he shouted, scrambling down the rocks.

  Ken stayed put – all you could see was his ash-coloured rear and the exclamation mark his short stiff tail made with his arsehole – but
the other dogs retreated. Lee shouted again and this time Ken drew out of the pig and looked. His head and neck were crimson. ‘Ken,’ roared Lee. Ken went away from the back of the pig and around to the front where he grabbed onto the pig’s ear and pulled. The pig listed like a torpedoed ship. Lee straddled its back, held the snout, and made an arc around its neck. Ken ducked into the blood. The smallest dog whined. Bruce sneezed. A fantail zagged over the sump.

  ‘Who’s carrying?’ said Lee, after a moment.

  Back at the truck Lee took out a bottle of Southern Comfort. ‘A pig like that,’ he said, ‘you have to have a drink.’

  The gutted pig was on the bed of the truck. The well fed dogs were asleep in the cages. Bruce and Gary were prone on the grass, angled off each other like cheeses on a board.

  Lee had said he didn’t want the pig. He had enough pork at home to feed the marine corp. Gary wasn’t interested either. Tania stuck to fish and the freezer in their room was the size of a microwave. But Bruce was keen – pork sausages, chops, pot roasts, steaks, bacon, back straps, pork loin – you beauty. Lee showed him how to wear the pig – fixing the forelegs like straps over his shoulders – and they’d headed off. Beyond the dead forest Bruce said he was rooted and Gary took over. The legs were bristled and baskety – they seemed too thin for the body – while the head slapped heavily against his head like the lid of a rubbish skip. The distance they could carry the pig got shorter and shorter. Lee didn’t help. Your pig, your carry, he said, holding a stick at his shoulder. The uphill sections were runways. The drifts were themselves forests; they were Olympic-length swimming pools. The pig bled into the waists and then the seats of their trousers – it bled down the back of their knees and ringed the tops of their socks. It grew heavier and heavier and they heaved and swore and held each other under the arms and by the forearms, pulling, pushing and righting each other when they fell. They cheered each other step by step, ‘A little further, that’s it mate, you can do it, drop it there, my turn, my turn, good shit.’