Winter Traffic

by Stephen Greenall

  ‘Ten. When was that?’

  Around the time I made sergeant, dickhead. Ah, but that is the problem with plainclothes, with being a detective: absence of uniform means death of respect. Rawson hands up twenty-five and thinks, I wouldn’t respect me neither.

  ‘Here go. Your change.’

  Can’t even tip the bloke. Rawson sighs, pockets the drachmas, feels like the sheila from the poem who deals in truth / is never believed.

  —

  It is a city of hamlets. Time has fashioned a zoo of tribes, existences lived on northern beaches or otherwise misplaced. His family was lost to the swathe of green that limits Hornsby from the sea / Rawson has heard of squad cars lost in Ryde for entire shifts. He shudders to think of Blacktown folk equipped to be nothing else, of hordes that soak in Shire content and take it for proof of God. Still more will tell you the Inner West is booming and when the hell is it not? He once cottaged among the Kirribillis for an expensive fifteen seconds.

  Now he flashes-back to Coogee tiles, a bender lost to time. Like the name of the girl he spent it with, her particulars of face. He fell to violence at Palace gates, enraged by the yellow lighting. He fought gangs of surfers and off-duty cops, broke bones on bouncer faces.

  It is a different autumn now, at least for a handful of days, and he stands in another town unto itself—a settlement without pretension where winter is de facto underway. Sutton’s old girl is manning the drive and the front door gapes at For Sale in the lawn.

  For what?

  It is official, Henny Penny.

  —

  The lounge is empty / movers have been. Rawson goes without stealth towards the kitchen. ‘You’re a hard man to find, kemosabe. What’s with the sign?’

  Sutton fills the blue kettle and puts it on the stove. The electric was Susan’s. ‘The timing’s right.’

  ‘What? But I love this house.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll buy it.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘You and her,’ says Rawson. ‘You’re really quits?’

  Sutton readies the non-identical mugs. When he opens the fridge for milk it’s the only thing there. Bobby Cobra rocks on the balls of his feet and surveys the wall defaced. ‘And now a graffiti problem. Ratbags can’t spell.’

  ‘Vespa Kline. Nuts Finnegan.’

  ‘How do you know that.’

  ‘Real-estate lady ran into them.’

  ‘And they what—left business cards?’

  ‘Said they were mates doing clean-up. Blamed kids.’

  ‘Oh, natch. Did Nuts and Vespa offer any theories as to why the adolescent riffraff of the eastern suburbs might want to put a contract on you, motherfucker?’

  Sutton smiles, shakes his head, concocts the tea and passes one across. ‘Talk me through this stuff with Slane,’ says Rawson. ‘Or do I have to tuck a twenty in your G-string?’

  ‘You saw the paper yesterday.’

  ‘I did indeed—the glamorous fugitives. Kristy looked like shit. And that, coming from me, is really saying something.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Still, I already knew you were in the mix—the neighbour got a nice old squiz at your numbers. Getting sloppy.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘The fact that you roam the streets with a gigantic white wolf doesn’t help. Where is it?’

  ‘Out the back.’

  Rawson issues a sharp whistle and drinks his tea, wishing it was coffee with a hit of something whiskey. ‘Seriously—what happened over there.’

  ‘Just some trouble.’

  ‘Who caused it? Kristy or Whit.’

  ‘Whit.’

  ‘Because if Chris has raised his hand again—’

  Sutton walks into the next room and returns with paint, brushes, a brand new roller. He takes a bucket from under the sink and pulls out a cellulose sponge. Rawson removes his jacket to roll his sleeves, says Give that here. The detective cleans the wall while Sutton fetches a screwdriver, applies it to the four-litre tin and wedges the lip of lid.

  ‘I spoke to Glen.’

  ‘Is that a fact…We taping the trim?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where’s the roll?’

  Sutton goes into the next room and returns with painter’s tape. Rawson takes strips and makes a blue square, the result like a window through which Piece Talks! is viewable like crude and modern art. Sutton cleans the roller. ‘Glen spilled his guts.’

  The Incremental picks up a tea towel and wipes the wall to dry it, receives the tray of primer like a collection plate in church. He applies the roller in a W motion and the scrawl is soon erased. ‘Oh well. Shit happens.’

  ‘Tell me about him. The man who bought the debt.’

  ‘Okay. But not now.’

  The tinsel of claws: Bloke manifests in the hardwood hall, preceded by a lupine shadow even larger and more awful than himself. He goes past the kitchen with nothing more than a perfunctory nod in their direction, Everything under control here, gents?

  ‘Fuck you, Black Lips! You call that a hello?’ Rawson’s pager goes off and he takes it, mutes, sets it down again. ‘Piss off.’

  ‘Phone’s still on if you need it.’

  ‘Stuff that. Listen, is there maybe something you want to talk about?’ The question causes Sutton to down tools, induces a pregnancy in the room that Rawson hadn’t bargained for. ‘Because I can pretty much piece it together.’

  ‘Can you.’

  ‘I was actually aiming to take care of it myself.’

  ‘Take care of it how.’

  ‘With a spectacular display of fucken violence I should think.’ Rawson folds his arms, signalling that he means the thing he’s about to say. ‘I reckon a full confession might be in order.’

  ‘You don’t want a full confession,’ says Sutton quietly.

  ‘Well I certainly don’t want to be piecing it together from one of Sasha’s rants.’

  ‘Sash?’

  ‘Who else?’

  The moment slackens / Sutton applies his brush. ‘You’re talking about Mitchell.’

  ‘What did you think I was talking about? Whit Hammond? Fuck that, mate. This is family. This matters.’

  His family nods. ‘She called last week, said she couldn’t come to the park because she was grounded. Told me Mitchell hit her.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And you were in Newcastle so I decided to have a chat.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus. You’ve gone and killed him.’

  ‘Was that wrong? I didn’t know you liked him.’

  ‘I do fucken like him. I’m grateful she didn’t shack up with an actual bloke, someone I’d have to go round and beat the shit out of.’

  ‘One way of looking at it.’

  ‘What kind of fucken name is Mitchell, anyway. Would you trust a man called Mitchell?’

  ‘I’d trust this one,’ says Sutton. ‘He didn’t touch her.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yeah. She made it up.’

  ‘Christ.’ Rawson’s outward breath is raking. ‘Don’t have kids, bud. It’s too disappointing.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘Did you put the spook on or what?’

  ‘A bit. He spooks pretty easy.’

  Rawson lights a smoke and they stand around watching the paint dry. Sutton has a thought and goes to the shed, returns with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue all caked in dust. Forgot I had this / won it in a raffle. Rawson gapes to marvel that such a thing could disremember.

  They recycle the mugs, using them now to hold a different drink, and it occurs to Rawson that he is getting his wish plus something extra. And who cares that it is not his poison of choice? He will not quibble, stand on ceremony—not when a beloved house must be farewelled. Sutton says, Four weeks on the market and then auction. Rawson shakes his head and says, Goddamn.

  ‘Where you been staying?’

  ‘Different places,’ says Sutton.

  ‘Hitting the mattresses.’
/>   ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Going to the game?’

  ‘Reckon.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it then…You know, I had a horse run today.’

  ‘Yeah? How’d it go?’

  Rawson smiles, only half with bitterness. ‘Get fucked.’

  —

  They apply the second coat and remove the tape. Sutton tidies up and the last thing to dispose of is the bottle of Blue half empty. He looks at Rawson and Rawson shrugs like Atlas, takes fatalistic possession. They lock the back and walk the hall and Sutton shuts the door one final time. Bloke licks the outside of the hanging Rawson paw, goes again on the other side / the detective is always salty.

  ‘Smash a steak?’

  ‘Can’t,’ says Rawson. ‘Gotta thing in Surry. Bloke from R&B is retiring.’

  ‘Rhythm & Booze.’

  ‘You said it.’

  ‘I’ll run you over.’

  ‘Why—you headed that way?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ says Sutton.

  ‘Fuck it. I’ll go down the boulevard and grab a cabbage.’

  Sutton whistles and Bloke jumps into the tray. Sutton walks around to the driver’s side and Rawson looks at the house. ‘Did you make her go?’

  Sutton stops and thinks. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  A light plane passing overhead, going south. A fixed red light / a blinking green. It occurs to Rawson that he and Sutton are talking about different women. He takes the cap off the Johnnie while Sutton gets into the truck, rumbles her to life. The detective pats the dog and thanks the human through the window.

  ‘What for.’

  ‘Looking out for my girls like that.’

  Sutton puts his sunnies on the dash, puts the gearstick into R. It seems like a straightforward act but in that old girl requires a lot of inside knowledge.

  ‘Always.’

  07

  Whatever happened to that one sheila.

  You know.

  The one you were crazy about.

  —

  The Shakespeare’s awning is broad but the pavement brief, its drinkers spilling orderly onto bitumen and stoneway. It is a pub that runs to olden principle, a tavern where you take your dog and no smooth-eyed with manicure will dare to proffer different. As Rawson approaches a taxi pulls in, a woman stepping clear with three blokes from the Bomb Squad. Red hair declares it to be gorgeous Deanna, a drink before he faces it down.

  He detours to the park that abuts the council flats, a bunch of scaffy kids investing time in the ramp. Junkies mill in desperado corner while a dog refuses to shit, knowing that its handler will terminate the outing. ‘Avast with that goon bag,’ says Rawson to his man, a lonely old timer on the green plastic chairs.

  ‘Why, you a cop?’

  ‘Yes and no.’ Bonecrusher brings out the bottle, kept harbourside in his jacket like a sawn-off. ‘Receptacle?’

  The drunk is white whiskers, pink skin: the blue label awes. ‘Dangerous gear that, never go back.’

  ‘Not our fault we got regal tastes.’

  Rawson pours, generous for the both of them, chipped enamel that conducts the air. The hobo says, ‘You’ve watered this down.’

  ‘With what.’

  ‘With water.’

  ‘Nah,’ says Rawse. ‘Ambrosia, mate. Had it before?’

  ‘What do you think. God bless you, my dear.’

  ‘Someone should.’

  Rawson nips across the road with happiness in his wake, the final fifth of the impeccable whiskey. He chooses the most discreet of the Shake’s narrow doors but the man who retires has forged an eagle eye. ‘Little Bobby Cob! What are you drinking you handsome mongrel bastard?’ Rawson scrounges a smile as broad as New South Wales and Jesus, Morris—you look like the Wreck of the Hesperus. You even think about reaching for your wallet tonight and I’ll break your fucken hands.

  —

  Copperhead was named by Little Bobby Cob. It is an allusion to contemporary song, a joke that he alone finds funny. Sutton is mindful of words—of the parasite ways they tie things down—but there is not much poetry in him.

  —

  The selection is equal distance from a pair of English towns. Its blessing is to be reachable directly from neither. Someone from government is dreaming to connect them, a Kitemaker extension that would swallow up The Shack.

  No fear: that scheme would require a spectacular cliff-facing bridge, twenty million instances of the precious taxpayer dollar. It will never attract the stamp of permission / Sutton’s plot will be secret forever.

  —

  The silver sun comes out and is not much of one. The bush that surrounds is brazen with noise, Bloke barking reply to some bank johnny possums. A lyrebird struts atop this pyramid of singing but then all God’s people turn to voiceless at once.

  —

  He finds and rolls the forty-four-gallon. It is dark-enamelled, never used. When he ratchets it down he sets the power saw to hungry, sparks erupting from the scission like a fire out in space. A deranged magician performing Girl in a Barrel, a theatric vivisection but as yet she is not there.

  —

  The carpenter is still in his welder’s mask as he hauls the funerary half. The trip is a mission, the man lever to his fulcrum: it looks and feels like penance. He reverses into the lightless bush like a feckless insomniac Blaxland and when the scrub gives way, no breath of warning, it sits him on his arse.

  Such is his arrival at the cliff-top lookout. It is furtive, unchristened, the treasure of Copperhead Road. He lies flat on his back like an accidental telescope and radios the starfield.

  Exquisite pin-pricks, sable blanket, in its folds concealed infinity.

  —

  By the time he hacks return he is diminishing, strangely tired, quicksanding down into a bloody-minded rage. He goes into the workshop and takes three trestles from a stack, describing with a marker the depth of curve he must excise. When he feeds the skip with offcuts he sees the dog beside the entrance, a carnival grin on dressage legs that is whistled to piss off. Sutton loops an arm and drags the A-frames back to lookout, constructs a likely brazier for offerings to gods.

  —

  The embalming sheet shines dimly in the dark, her outline caked in sawdust and lime. Just a hasty half-measure when he left her there, a squalid quarter-proof against decay. A hundred-and-fifty hours of rigor and he knows she will be gaunt.

  A shape in the peripheral, a Bloke who has lurked without decent intent. He muscles past to shoulder for the door and Sutton moves without precedent / sinks his boot into the dog.

  —

  He sets her in the twenty-two and arranges facing water. She appears to lie on native dirt, on branches crowning his pyre of bricks. A crushing of leaves to scent the eucalyptus moment, a reach for butane fuel to make a complicated fire.

  The Pacific does not sound peaceable, it is rioting / at war. He tells himself it’s the best he can offer, God knows she was never conventional. She will enjoy the setting with its feel of high temple, perpetual rites across black and opal sea. When the breeze consents to veer east again, Sutton takes up the match that will part them.

  —

  Bloke can be heard in the outraged distance, howling his injury at invisible moons. Sutton calls a long time before his animal will answer, the dog sullen and reluctant as he lags the final tree. When he canters for the tray and human herds him to the cabin—takes him by the mane and drags the all of him to chest.

  06

  The Shake is going nuts. No one planned it—the party just went mega, a carousing pack of hyenas sending Morris out a deadset winner. A critical mass of mates, mateship, trays of Sambuca circuiting the room and tequila next on the hit list.

  Rawson has a fish eye now, perceiving a world flat and warped but very far from colourless. The pub is a hall of cavorting shadows, its ceiling like a firmament or echo chamber in which every forty-foot silhouette is a cruel-nosed Punch, a profane and cackling Judy. Existence revolves through the prism o
f his beer glass, a gold-piss aquarium that exposes all it lights.

  Deanna is abroad, red-headed of course, her yoghurt complexion and movement sleek like a fox. A beauty of fast russet among turd-coloured hounds, one that Rawson catches glancing his way from the profile edge of first this bloke, then that. The pale maiden of death, using as cover a closer and yet closer tree.

  ‘The road not travelled.’

  Bob Mack. Rawson turns and they shake hands on it, Bob the latecomer, relatively sober, not a heavy drinker in any case. Handsome at fifty and trim; no one ever made sideburns look half that good. He stuck with them, even when every other bloke in town wheeled away, headed along a different axis of fashion. That is what Bob Mack does / he sticks.

  ‘Every time I see you,’ says Rawson, ‘I’m surprised you’re not cuffing me.’

  ‘Steady on. How’ve you been?’

  ‘Better than some. I heard a dingo stole your baby.’

  ‘Sorry, Mike—don’t follow.’

  ‘Mike. No one calls me that. You still like it over there?’

  ‘Don’t know that I ever liked it.’

  ‘But you were made for it.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Bob Mack. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Everybody thinks so: the single best appointment I ever saw. You and it, hand in glove…I knew it would be different with you. That you’d hold your standing. That we wouldn’t hate your guts.’

  ‘Too generous by half.’

  ‘And then you broke the spell, did the realm a favour. The wizard removed, root and branch, the Old Man of the Mountain. Do you know, I think I saw Paddy Conlon in before.’

  ‘That I doubt.’

  ‘Magic Conlon. Remember his temper? The only man who was ever beautiful when angry.’

  ‘He had beautiful hands, I remember that.’

  ‘There’s Caron Daley. How dare he show that perfectly chiselled face? Hey Fuckbucket!’

  ‘Wish I was as pissed as you right now.’

  ‘Do-ya? Nora! A fousand beers for my mutton-chopped friend.’

  Bob Mack is about to stump up, shell out for a monster round, but then his phone rings and is heard by him and by Rawson above the din. He fishes it out and looks at the number. ‘They given you one of these?’