by Anna Krien
Eva climbed out of bed, the cat leaping from the pillow. She was still wearing the Miami Dolphins T-shirt and had switched her shorts for a baggy pair of men’s boxers. ‘I’ll make you something,’ she said firmly. ‘You lie back down.’
Gerry crawled thankfully under the blanket. He put his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. Eva turned on a lantern and he listened as she busied herself, opening and closing an esky and putting things on the bench. The cat mewed, turning figure eights around her ankles. ‘Oh, sorry, Pickle,’ he heard her say quietly, ‘I forgot to feed you.’ Gerry began to feel sleepy. He heard a whisper of gas followed by a small sizzling.
‘Hey.’ Eva gently shook his arm. The smell of food opened his eyes. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, a plate of fried flat-bread and scrambled eggs with chunks of avocado and tomato beside her. He sat up in a rush, scooping the food into his mouth. She was smiling when he finally looked up, using the last bit of bread to clean the plate.
Gerry looked around the bus. ‘Where’s Elliott?’ he asked.
Eva rolled her eyes. ‘Waylaid, apparently,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I knew I should have gone instead.’ She smiled again. ‘But I’m not sure you would’ve been so lucky with Elliott. He is possibly the shit-test cook I’ve ever met.’ She laughed, revealing a crowded bottom row of teeth. ‘Do you know what he did with the juicer? He put the oranges in with the skin on – and served it! People were gagging. It took me ages to work out what happened, and he was like, huh?’
Gerry thought a bit. He felt good, better than he’d felt in weeks. His face tingled as though he was being coloured back in. ‘You have to cut the rind off before putting them in?’
Eva looked at him. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s annoying.’
Eva laughed. ‘Oh, man,’ she said, rising to put the plate on the bench, the cat leaping up to check for scraps. ‘That’s just great,’ she continued. ‘Another genius in the mix.’
*
‘Hello, is this Toohey Colpitt?’
‘Yes?’
‘Father of Gerard Angus Colpitt?’
‘Yes?’
‘My name’s Rory Hardwick, from the Department of Foreign Affairs.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Dead? Ah, no.’
‘Good.’
When Toohey put down the phone, he went to the cupboard. His uniform was bunched together on three thin wire hangers, a sheet of clear plastic from the dry-cleaner over the top. He took it out and laid it on the bed. From the top shelf, he took down a shoebox. In it was his passport. He checked it, flicking through the pages, and put it on top of the green military uniform. He punched a number into his phone. ‘Pete? Listen, I’m going to have to disappear. A week, but maybe longer. Yeah. Yep. First thing. I should be back in time. You will need to prep the rosters. Correct. Make sure you keep an eye on Vihaan. Lazy-arse bastard will just stay in the car sitting in his own stinking farts all night if he can. Right. Correct. Good.’ And that was it. He leaned over his bedside table and pulled his charger out of the wall, winding the white cord around it. Took two of everything from his drawers: underwear, shirts, socks, pants. A pair of leather shoes and a tin of polish. Affairs in order.
Behind the bedroom door, Melanie began to scratch. Pining for him already. He’d shut her out there when he got the call. Affairs not in order. He looked at his phone. She would call soon. She could look after the dog.
Sure enough, it began to ring. He waited. Six rings, then picked up. Put the phone to his ear as he pulled the small black suitcase from under the bed. There, affairs in order.
*
Gerry was in the fruit and vegetable section of a Colorado supermarket when it started to rain. There was the rumble of thunder and then a fine mist began to fall over the apple display. A little earlier, in aisle seven, a box of Cheerios had spoken to him, then Captain Crunch, the two boxes talking fast, bending in the middle like mouths, so Gerry was wary. He looked up at the ceiling for signs of clouds, seeing a subway network of pipes, chutes, air-conditioning units and fluorescent lights, all of it dotted with shiny CCTV eyes. He looked back at the suspiciously rosy apples, which had only become rosier with the mist. He put out his palm, watched the water bead on his skin. Suddenly two arms snuck around his waist, wrists chattering with bracelets, the left tattooed: triangles and circles in white and blue ink. He leaned back. Counted the kisses between his shoulderblades up to the nape of his neck. One, two, three, four, five.
The two of them lurched forward as another body barrelled into them. ‘It’s raining, it’s fucking raining!’ Elliott hollered, swinging a bag of hamburger rolls, his brown eyes popping. His lips were stained with plum juice and his wild Medusa hair writhed like a dozen coral-banded snakes, dreadlocks threaded with white and red clay beads.
As if to mock his own athletic godliness, Elliott wore dainty old-lady dresses, pearl buttons busting over his chest, hems riding up his inflated thighs. A few times Gerry had seen the muscles under Elliott’s skin suddenly begin to twitch as if the sinew was being awoken. The tall man would pace, eyes darting until he’d found something physical to sate the itch, be it lifting a minor boulder, tilting a picnic table or levering a road sign out of the dirt.
On Gerry’s first morning in the bus, he’d woken to the idling engine of a pick-up truck and a coquettish ‘See you later, boys!’ He’d propped himself on his elbows in time to see a man straddling a large tyre as he waved to a group in the open tray of the truck. Elliott, Gerry realised. He was wearing tiny pink shorts, a yellow blouse and bright yellow sandals.
‘Yoo-hoo!’ he sang, rolling the tyre adroitly down the escarpment. He paused at the parked Honda, peering through the window. ‘I said, yoo-hoo!’ he called, straightening up.
‘Eva,’ Gerry hissed, and sleepily the girl lifted her head, gazing at him before flopping back on the pillow and rolling over. The bus door banged open and there were noisy footsteps. For a moment he considered closing his eyes, pretending to be asleep, like when he was a kid and his father had come home. Instead, he sat up to watch Elliott enter his life.
Together, the three drove past straggly cornfields, Gerry’s Honda sometimes in front, while the sea-green bus, with its painted mermaids, led the way around red mesas, tall and jagged contortions of time. Early on, Elliott had scrutinised Gerry solemnly, like a doctor, before prescribing a starter of pills, followed by a large dose of acid. ‘No pot,’ he advised, conferring with Eva, ‘at least not to begin with.’ And so, on MDMA Gerry sank into velvet nights and velvet streams. Waves of cloying, almost unbearable warmth rushed through him. The three of them danced, hips and hair flicking light around the bus, and Gerry fell in love with Eva’s shoulders, the curve of her collarbone, the palimpsest of tiny warts under her knuckles. They got drunk in a bar decorated with gilt-framed portraits of men in sombreros, where in among the bottles of booze were jars containing scorpions and rattlesnakes suspended in piss-yellow formaldehyde. Behind the bar, an older woman in a strapless leather dress and pink lipstick served them tequila shots. A stuffed roadrunner stood next to a John Denver record, and in the toilets Gerry and Eva kissed, pressed up against the cistern.
He had come to the southwest looking for cowboys and instead he’d found Eva, with her shark-grey eyes, the long white gill on her neck, in her earlobes tiny dangly lightbulbs she’d fashioned into earrings. Eva, who took him to a peepshow in Tucson, his job to feed coins into the slot while she sketched the women dancing in the booths. He’d found Elliott, who wrote Moses on his forehead when they spied a group of evangelicals playing celebrity head elsewhere in the city; Elliott, who strode into the hall, shouting, ‘I’m Moses, praise be! I’m Moses!’ And every day, there was sunny reflection as they drove, music playing and the highway humming, when a fragment of the previous twenty-four hours came back to Gerry as if written on a postcard.
Eva holding Pickle to my ear so I could listen to her purr.
Elliott performing Nina Simone
’s ‘See-Line Woman’.
Eva asking about the scar on my forehead, and telling her about the rock.
When we saw a gopher, Eva saying in an idiotic voice, ‘Let’s shoot it,’ and how now it’s a thing, whenever we see a creature, not hurting anyone, we say, ‘Let’s shoot it.’
Eva kissing me in the toilets.
And, unlike the touristy postcards he had bought and not sent, littering the floor of the Honda, these postcards, slips of memory, made his heart lift.
He got scared once. He was leading their mini-convoy, and a sort of cold entered his chest. He could see the other two in his rear-view mirror, Eva driving, Elliott gesturing, his palms pale and fluttering like two moths. He got annoyed looking at them. Anger took hold, his foot sinking heavier on the accelerator as he thought about how they laughed for ages at stupid things, how their voices crowded his head, how they took forever to make a decision. It was the sticky, quicksand nature of them, he told himself, as the bus receded to a speck – and then the speck was gone. It was like he’d driven over the edge of the world. In a freefall, Gerry felt released. He cheered himself on, still accelerating. The stretch yawned ever wider between the Honda and the bus. In his mind he had a bird’s-eye view of them, the two dusty tumbleweeds, calling it quits.
He could hear himself again. Yes. He could make the decisions again. Yes.
He saw a gas station ahead and pulled in. Had trouble getting air in his chest suddenly. It had happened to him before, a long time ago. When the Department of Human Services showed up. He’d watched from a window as a woman parked in their driveway, Gary the policeman stopping his car behind hers. In the hallway, his mother and the woman spoke, while Gerry stood to the side, his backpack on.
The woman held out a plastic envelope to his mother. ‘The number is in here if you need to get in touch with myself or Gerard, as well as the details for the hearing. There is Legal Aid information in there as well.’ Jean dipped her head, taking the envelope, fixing her eyes on the floorboards. ‘Let’s get going then,’ the woman said gently, to Gerry but also to Jean, indicating it was time to say goodbye. His mother nodded. She was polite. She put her lips on Gerry’s cheek. ‘Be good,’ she said.
Gary didn’t come into the house. He was there in case of Toohey, but Gerry’s father never left the bedroom. He lay in the semi-darkness, the curtains drawn, the door half-open. After he’d checked and repacked his bag, Gerry padded down the hallway and stopped at his parents’ room. He could make out the shape of his father on the mattress. Toohey slept violently, so Gerry knew he was awake. He stood for a while, just watching. In a way, it was the bravest thing he’d ever done. He got the sense his father was watching him too.
In the back of the woman’s car, he had trouble breathing. ‘Being removed’, as the DHS woman had called it, was kind of the perfect description, he thought later. Like he was being rubbed out. The woman chatted as she drove, and he never let on that he couldn’t breathe. ‘On a scale of one to ten,’ a doctor had asked him once, when his arm was fractured, ‘what is the pain like?’ Gerry had been bewildered. You hide pain, you don’t talk about it. You don’t rate it. So he stared out of the window in silence, trying to find some air.
It was a fifty-minute drive to the foster home. In the yard was an old trampoline, its hinges rusty and cobwebbed. In the weeks that followed, he jumped on it most days. He jumped without pleasure, just up and down, side to side, backwards and forwards. He didn’t try any tricks. He only jumped, willing his body to come into focus, to stop the feeling of being removed.
Now, at the gas station in America, Gerry felt it again, the filling up of his airways, like someone had gotten in there with a glue gun. He’d read a Steinbeck story once, as part of his cowboy obsession, about a colt that couldn’t breathe. It had a sickness called the strangles, one of those words that sounds like what it is. In the story the stablehand had to cut a hole in the horse’s neck. It worked, for a time. Syrupy blood gurgled out and then the horse took a huge gulp of air into its lungs. Gerry thought about that cut in the horse’s throat as he sat wheezing in the Honda. It was empty, the highway, no sign of Eva and Elliott, and the kid in that story, it was his job to keep the hole clean and clear with a piece of cotton so the colt could keep getting air in. Gerry’s breath was ragged just thinking about it. He pushed open the door to let the outside in. How many holes can you puncture a body with to keep it alive? He almost pissed himself with relief when the painted bus rattled into view.
*
After that, Eva and Elliott persuaded Gerry to pool in with them. At a town in southern New Mexico, he sold the Honda and they celebrated with lunch at a Native American restaurant across the road from a McDonald’s. Local families sat at round tables eating frybread, strips of bacon and eggs sunny-side up, passing ramekins of cottage cheese. Women wore turquoise barrettes in their hair and some of the men had two long shiny plaits, silver hoops in their ears, and shirts with a length of leather under the collar, joined with a cat’s-claw pendant. At one table a group of girls in white basketball uniforms with purple and black stripes, the words ‘lady chiefs’ emblazoned on their backs, joked rowdily, cheeks flushed and dark hair greasy with sweat.
Gerry looked around, amazed. ‘I can’t believe I was so dumb,’ he said to Eva and Elliott, telling them how he’d come to the southwest with this naive idea, how he’d gotten it into his head that he would find this world of cowboys with ruddy faces and squinty eyes who broke in wild horses and said whoa, whoa under their breath, how he’d practically heard the voices, soothing him to sleep.
‘And then what?’ Eva asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What would happen after you found the cowboys? The guys who said “whoa, whoa”?’
Gerry spread his hands. ‘I don’t know. It was more a feeling than anything.’
‘Let me guess,’ Elliott interjected, ‘in all your fantasies, not once did you imagine a black cowboy?’
Gerry shook his head. ‘I never even heard of a black cowboy.’
Elliott sniffed. He stirred sugar into his coffee. ‘You think the Lone Ranger built this country? No, siree,’ he quipped, shaking his head. ‘Hi-ho just branded his niggers before sending them out to brand his cattle.’
Gerry looked sheepish. ‘Like I said, I was really dumb.’
Eva squeezed his shoulder. ‘You were a kid.’
‘There’s an old poster out west,’ Elliott said in a nasal drawl. He looked at Eva. ‘You remember that?’ She smiled dryly. ‘There’s an old poster out west,’ he said again, ‘that says Wanted: dead or alive.’
Eva rolled her eyes. ‘What an idiot,’ she said.
Elliott nodded. ‘President Bush junior,’ he explained to Gerry. ‘One of your beloved cowboys.’
Eva pushed her plate away, folding her cutlery over it. ‘It’s a brand basically, the cowboy thing,’ she said to Gerry. ‘Marlboro did it, most of our presidents do it. Reagan wore a Stetson hat and said shit like, Go ahead, make my day.’
Gerry laughed in disbelief. Elliott and Eva bobbed their heads vigorously at him. ‘It’s true,’ Elliott said. ‘And even though the real cowboys were mostly black or Native American or Spanish or Mexican, that isn’t what people think of when they think of cowboys. If they did, I bet they wouldn’t be so popular. You know why people love cowboys?’
Gerry shook his head.
‘Because their idea of a cowboy is a straight shooter, meaning a white man who gets things done —’
‘— by sending the fodder in,’ finished Eva.
Elliott’s eyes were shining now. ‘Exactly.’ He looked around the restaurant. ‘To these guys, white folk were like fucking zombies. Kill one and they’d come back tenfold. Now they send us in. White folk who don’t have to send their own sons to war because why would you do that when you got my black brothers —’
‘And rich people,’ interrupted Eva, ‘who say they shouldn’t have to pay taxes because those on welfare are leeches who should
be burnt off the teat. The same rich bigots who are leeching fucking oil out of the ground.’
‘Right,’ said Elliott.
Gerry looked at Elliott with interest. ‘Your brothers went to Iraq?’
‘Nope,’ Elliott replied, shaking his head. ‘Afghanistan. Jerome’s still there in a million little pieces.’
Gerry recoiled. ‘Really?’
Elliott looked at him coolly. ‘Really.’
‘My dad fought in Afghanistan. And Iraq.’
Elliott looked perplexed. ‘I didn’t even know Australia was in the war.’
‘From 2001 to 2005, three tours,’ Gerry said, reciting his father’s mantra, adding, ‘Came back with pieces of bone from a suicide bomber in his neck.’
Eva’s nose crinkled. Elliott snorted, shaking his head as if appalled, then caught himself. He looked at Gerry, an unusual expression on his face. ‘You mean, like shrapnel?’
‘Yeah,’ said Gerry.
Elliott stared at him for a minute. When he spoke, his face was changed, a layer of unexpected possibility in his eyes. ‘I wonder if Jerome . . .’ He stopped. It was like a leaf, this new idea, slowly detaching itself from its branch and falling, swaying on its way down, the air an invisible ocean of waves and currents. ‘I wonder if,’ Elliott began again, ‘one of the guys in Jerome’s unit . . .’ He paused, then finished his thought, ‘brought a piece of him home.’
After they left the restaurant, they parked near the Rio Grande, a silty brown river that funnelled its way through the long grass, and Elliott announced it was time to change gears. He held out in his palm three tiny balls, the size of poppy seeds. He looked pointedly at Gerry. ‘I think it’s time to drop these.’
Gerry peered at the specks. They didn’t look so powerful. ‘What are they?’
‘Microdots. Acid. Kaboom.’ Elliott made a cup with his other hand and launched it from his head like a mushroom cloud.
A tingling went up Gerry’s spine and into his hair, each strand prickling like it had caught alight. Eva wet her index finger with her tongue and dabbed Elliott’s palm. She picked up a dot and put it in her mouth. Gerry followed her lead.