Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  Buster was especially interested in cigarettes. He hoped to be able to take a couple of cartons every fortnight or so without them being missed. That was Buster’s calculating and far-seeing nature, even as a fourteen-year-old. At the time I didn’t realise his vision of criminal possibility was precocious. Tinned goods were high on Buster’s list also: baked beans, pineapple slices, asparagus tips, salmon, tongue. Buster had placement sorted out for them all, and the juvenile anticipation I felt at the chance of gutsing barely registered with him.

  The modern Acme building was a considerable challenge to Buster, and he worked on it. He spent a good deal of time in unobtrusive observation, and even went in and spoke to one of the storemen on the pretext that he thought he was able to buy things in bulk for a Christmas Sunday school party. The warehouse had an alarm system on the main doors, Buster said, and no windows. There was a large extractor fan high on the side away from the road, and for a time Buster wondered if we could find a way of removing the fan at will. We did a recce in the early darkness of a July night, carrying a plank surreptitiously through the back streets and then leaning it against the warehouse. I held it while Buster monkeyed up and checked the fan mounts with a torch and crescent. He decided it was too big a job, and besides, there would be too much risk coming and going with goods through such a visible and difficult route.

  Buster switched his interest to the dwarfed, glass-fronted office annex to one side of the main doors. It had its own access to the store, and Buster reckoned that, as an add-on, it didn’t share the concrete pan underlying the warehouse. We had several sessions sitting around his father’s neatly laid out and whetted knives in the workshop, during which we drew in Buster’s maths book possible tunnels from the RSA shrubbery and the machinery yard. Reluctantly we decided the plan was too risky and too slow. I suggested somehow getting an imprint of the key on a piece of soap, a comic book fantasy which Buster put aside without ridicule. In fact he said it reminded him that the office had a Yale lock with an inside snib, and this gave him the idea of hiding in the office until after closing time.

  We began close planning by taking my father’s binoculars down to the RSA shrubbery after school, and lying concealed there on damp, cold ground to spy on the dark-haired office woman. We learnt she spent a good deal of time doing her fingernails, and more time on the phone. She liked to eat white chocolate and take her shoes off when the sun was bright through the armour glass. There were no cash transactions that we observed, although lots of lists from the storemen and delivery drivers. Buster said there would have been lots of cheques in the morning mail which we never saw, and that they’d be in the squat iron safe, the key of which she kept in her purse. We also discovered that the key to the door from the office to the main store was kept beneath a potted cactus on the filing cabinet. The first time Buster saw her through the binoculars take the key from its hiding place to lock up, he gave a long, low whistle. I knew then he’d seen something important. It meant we could move on to the next stage of the plan.

  The thing was that the office had only one possible hiding place, and Buster was too big for it. The annex was very small with just the dark-haired woman’s desk, two high filing cabinets, the safe in a wooden cupboard, and the shelf with pot plants, vacation postcards and the electric jug. One of the filing cabinets was angled in a corner so that the woman could reach it from her desk, and in the recess of that angle Buster reckoned I could squeeze and hide. I had misgivings, but these were balanced by the pride I felt in being necessary for success, able at last to perform something that was beyond Buster himself.

  Buster went to the office and asked if Acme might have a job for him after school. The woman didn’t bother to consult anyone and said no, but Buster confirmed that the office door had a Yale snib lock, no alarm that he could see, and that the gap behind the filing cabinet should be big enough for me. That’s how I ended up late on a blustery afternoon waiting around the side of the Acme building for Buster to signal from the RSA bushes that the office woman had gone through to the warehouse. It was in some ways the most tricky stage of the whole thing, even though Buster said that most of her absences he’d watched had given enough time for me to get in. Buster told me to pretend I was having a fit if she did come back before I was out of sight. I thought a fit might come quite naturally in those circumstances.

  Buster gave the thumbs up from an RSA bush, and I was round the corner to the office without any conscious decision. I stepped onto the desk and then the filing cabinet, for a moment thought the space between it and the wall was insufficient, but then with the energy of fear wedged myself out of sight, my shoulders and head hard in the corner, my knees splayed for room.

  On the small patch of blue carpet between my legs was a thin scurf of dust, debris and dead insects, including a bumble bee almost as large as a ping pong ball, dried flower petals, a brass drawing pin, a used tissue. I tried to relax and breathe with my mouth open to make less noise. There was no way I could know if the woman had returned, until I heard her cough at the desk and then take a call from a shopkeeper impatient to receive an order of cereals. To pass the fifteen minutes or so before closing time I imagined the most attractive tinned foods piled high in the warehouse: stacks of fruit salad, corned beef and sweetened condensed milk. And I thought of Buster’s praise for my part in the carefully planned operation. I hoped I wouldn’t need to sneeze, or fart, tried not to think of the consequences. The dark woman’s perfume was heavy in the confined office.

  I heard one of the storemen say he was on his way, and soon after there were the sounds of the office woman preparing to go home: the key turning in the door to the warehouse, its scrabble under the cactus pot, the clicking catch of a handbag, and finally the light turned off, the surprisingly loud slam of the office entrance door and a rattle as she checked it was secure. I relaxed mentally, but was so physically constricted that little movement was possible. I decided to count to three hundred before puting my head up. It was almost black behind the filing cabinet once the light was off, and I knew that even outside, a winter night would be coming fast.

  After three hundred I gave an awkward push upwards, but nothing happened. Maybe I would be stuck there all night and die, while Buster looked through the window without being able to help. A desperate struggle, and I got my top half out and was able to lift myself over the steel cabinet, and drop beside the desk where I was shielded from the full-length glassed side of the office looking out to an asphalt park and then the road. The RSA bushes were indistinct wind-blown shadow, and I knew the interior of the office would be even darker to anyone outside, yet I hesitated to move about openly. I counted another hundred for good measure, in case the second storeman was slow to leave. I went to the outside door and released the Yale lock so that the door was pushed back strangely on my hands by the invisible wind. I put my left hand out and gave the thumbs up for Buster, not knowing if he’d see in the dusk.

  Buster was there almost immediately, breathing heavily not from nervousness, but the sprint across the parking area. ‘Bloody great. Well done,’ he said, and closed the door behind him. I told him how much of a squeeze it had been. ‘I knew you could do it. Shit hot,’ he said, and put the binoculars carefully by the door. ‘We’ve got to remember these.’

  He took the key from under the cactus, opened the door leading to the warehouse and we went through. Just enough light spilled in from the unlit office to show the outline of two forklifts and the monolithic racks beyond. With a small plastic torch, Buster led the way down the first of the alleys between the store racks. The place was Aladdin’s Cave. In the blade of Buster’s torch mountains of wealth rose up disguised in sombre cartons and pallets. The racks had printed tags to identify the stores — sanitary products, pet foods, beverages, tinned soups, spices and essences. You could have spent a whole life in there and not wanted for much, I reckoned.

  As we came round a corner from brown and icing sugar there was a sound in the dark like a mallet on a wo
oden peg, and Buster went down in front of me with a hissing cry, the torch skittering away on the bare, concrete floor. ‘Shit, shit,’ he said in a suppressed, angry voice. ‘Just grab the torch,’ he said when I knelt down by him, and when I brought it back he snatched it and shone it on his feet. His left foot was in a gin trap which was chained to the rack. The serrated jaws were sunk into Buster’s ankle just above his sneakers. It was an old trap, heavily corroded although it had been given a recent oil rub all over.

  Buster told me to kneel down close to his foot and take hold of one side of the jaws. He took the other. ‘Try not to touch my foot,’ he said, ‘and pull slowly when I say.’ We did it carefully, because I could tell what Buster feared was that one of us would lose grip before there was space for him to get his foot out, and he’d get another dose. When the foot was free, Buster moved it cautiously, saying, ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ because of the pain. ‘I don’t think anything’s broken,’ he said. The sock had soaked up what blood there was, though there was the pearly glint of Buster’s round ankle bone. He sat with his back against the rack and rested for a while. I was horrified that the storemen would lay man-traps, but Buster said the gin trap would be for rats he reckoned, big bastards after all the food. I was all for getting out straight away, but with Buster’s pain and anger welled up obstinacy as well. ‘Take the torch and nick a couple of cartons of cigarettes,’ he said. ‘I’m sure as fuck not leaving with bloody nothing at all.’

  So finally we were back in the little office and with the key replaced beneath the cactus pot. We let ourselves out into the dark, with a cold wind whistling at the warehouse corners. I carried the binoculars and one carton of cigarettes; Buster leant on me and tried to keep pressure off his left foot. There was nobody around in the night, and we went slowly into the RSA grounds and cut across to the river path which would take us home. Buster kept swearing when his foot got a special jolt, but he said that the warehouse people wouldn’t have any idea what had sprung the trap, and we could get back in the same way anytime we damn well liked.

  We never did, though, for a variety of reasons that are lost to me now, and neither do I remember seeing much of Buster after that night. When we parted close to his place, he said I could have one of the cartons, but a couple of packets was all I wanted. Buster gave me an odd, rueful grin before he limped off into the windy darkness, as if to remind me that you have to expect such things when you go up against the world.

  Minding Lear

  Money was scarce at the end of the university year. Well, it was always scarce, but then it was just that twitchy time between the end of lectures and the start of exams. My landlady said a friend of hers was wanting someone to look after her old dad for a few days while she and her husband had a break. Fifty dollars a day with food and accommodation, and I could spend most of the time swotting, my landlady said, because no doubt the old guy would mainly be sleeping. Maybe Mrs Lills was keen on me taking it because she’d be sure of her last few weeks’ rent. Maybe her motives were altruistic and she wanted to help both me and her friend.

  Mrs Lills was a tall woman with skin like a trout’s belly, and everything she cooked was stringy like herself, but she set very few rules in her house and didn’t interfere in my life. Mr Lills was a diesel mechanic and away most of the time on off shore fishing boats. Occasionally when I came in for a meal he’d be there, his nails ringed with grease, and he never recognised my presence, never spoke a word, as if we were on separate planes of existence, although sharing the same time and space. I wondered sometimes if we would be able to walk through each other with just the whisper of images passing.

  Angeline Moffit was the friend’s name, and she said if I was interested in the terms, I could come over the next morning, or the one after, to meet her dad, but no later because she had to get someone sorted as soon as possible. Angeline and her husband were going to Nelson for several days. She said the doctor told her it was imperative she have a break, absolutely imperative. I could tell from her voice that she was gratified to be the recipient of such an impressive word. My landlady said that wasn’t the all of it: their marriage had been drifting, and Nelson was a second-chance honeymoon.

  I went over on the morning after. The Moffits lived in Rosedown, close to the golf course, and seemed to be better off than my landlady. They had ranchslider doors that opened onto a broad concrete patio on which old man Ladd sat in a substantial chair amongst lesser, white plastic ones.

  ‘Dad,’ said Angeline Moffit, ‘this is Brian who’s going to keep you company when we’re away.’

  ‘Away?’ said Dad.

  ‘To Nelson and Blenheim. We talked about it, and Brian’s going to make sure you’re okay.’

  ‘Brian?’ said Dad. Later I was to realise that Dad was at his best in the mornings, and that’s why Angeline Moffit had asked me to call round then.

  Mr Ladd was eighty-eight, and suffering some sort of painless physical implosion: a big man, collapsing in on himself so that his shoulders were no longer at right angles to his spine and his head hung like a pendulum in front of his concave chest. His daughter told me he’d been the manager of an engineering firm with two hundred and seventy people, and five branches in the North Island, but what had once been robust and secular appeared to me at first sight mournful, pious and ecclesiastic. His hands were steepled in supplication, his large eyes upturned in abandoned sockets and shadowed by thickets of grey eyebrows.

  ‘Brian’s coming back on Sunday, Dad,’ Angeline Moffit said, ‘and he’ll be company for you when we’re away.’

  Dad didn’t say anything, but his eyes rolled at me for a moment, and the bones of his chin worked loosely, like a hand beneath a sheet.

  On Sunday after lunch I put a few clothes, my books and swot notes, in my squash bag and went out to Rosedown on my Suzuki. Angeline and her husband were keen to get on their way, enjoy the imperative break from work stress, and achieve the equally imperative repair in their marriage perhaps. She said she’d written everything down on a pad by the phone, but she went over it quickly nevertheless. The first commandment, and underlined, said Dad must never be left alone. So much for squash, I thought. ‘Dad’s doctor is Dr Morley Smith,’ said Angeline. ‘I’ve got the number there, except he’s away at present and someone’s standing in.’ They drove away in a white Corona and, after a quick wave to me, I could see them shrug off care and begin a relaxed conversation.

  Dad and I had a little more difficulty gaining rapport. He was convinced I was a spray man come to moss proof the rooftiles, and didn’t see why he should have to pay me to watch television with him. ‘It’s too windy to spray right now,’ I told him, and although there wasn’t a breath outside, he was mollified. I cottoned on early that it was more productive to debate with Dad on his own terms than appeal to reality.

  Women’s beach volleyball was the TV programme, and Dad and I sat in the creaking Sunday afternoon and let time pass. The women were powerful, yet shapely, and Dad nodded and blinked, sometimes scratching the top of one hand with the fingers of the other. There are some big dogs which are very lugubrious, ears, lower eyelids and the gleaming sides of their mouths all drawn down. Dad was a bit like that, but his skin in parts was scaled like a dragon’s. When the volleyball women had stopped flopping onto their backs in the silky sand, Dad forgot the television and told me it was time for wine and cheese.

  I wondered if he was having me on, but the checklist by the phone had no prohibition on wine and cheese. There was one of those round, soft bries in the fridge, and cans of local beer. Dad was interested in the cheese, but waved the beer aside. ‘Wine, Mr Mildew, wine,’ he said in a tone that implied he was humouring me rather than the other way around. The effort of getting out of the lounge chair gave him hiccups, and when I followed him through the house, rather than discovering wine, we ended in the sunroom, where Dad stood behind the warm glass and looked over the golf course. I discovered a rack of bottles in the cupboard under the stairs, and took a pinot noir bac
k to the sunroom as an incentive for Dad to return back to the lounge. His eyes hardly left the bottle, and he stopped only twice for a hiccup session. ‘Now you’re talking,’ he said. ‘Who did you say you were again?’

  ‘Brian.’

  ‘And what do you do in the firm?’ he said.

  ‘I’m just here to keep you company till your daughter’s back.’

  Dad gave a shuddering yawn which ended in hiccups, and after shuffling into a calculated position with his bum towards the big chair, let himself fall back into it. Wine cured his hiccups and took the place of conversation. I watched some European soccer, and soon Dad was dozing with a piece of cheese, like a nub of chalk, in the hand resting on his lap. Awake, or asleep, he breathed always through his mouth, and his lips had an absolute demarcation between the dry, faded outer rind and the gleaming red swell within.

  Angeline hadn’t left a great deal of prepared food — perhaps she thought I had to earn my money somehow — but there was a large packet of savouries in the deep freeze, and I took some of those for our tea. I wanted to make a good start on my exam revision in the evening. Dad wasn’t good at the end of the day, however: that was something I had to learn. He woke up when the sausage rolls and potato-topped miniature mince pies were heating, and bowled the pinot noir bottle with a random sweep of his arm. While I tried to get the stain out of the carpet before it set, Dad began with anxious interrogation. What time was it? Where was his family? Who was I? Who was he? Why hadn’t he been asked to sign off the general accounts? When was his left leg to be amputated?