His Illegal Self

by Peter Carey

A little farther was the cutting into Adam’s land. It was not difficult to find. The American babe had a huge propane lamp. She was like an oil refinery. The lamp perched on a three-foot yellow pipe screwed directly to the brand-new gas tank and it spilled light out across the uncut grass, the mustard-yellow path leached white, winged insects rising by his knees.

  Trevor called out to announce himself but he did not slow his pace. The boy watched from his hiding place beneath the hut. He saw Dial’s feet meet Trevor’s in the bright back doorway, two steps above him. She stepped aside and Trevor brushed past her.

  Inside the hut Trevor and Dial faced each other.

  You can’t torture him like this, he said.

  Trevor, what are you talking about?

  Tell him about his father, Dial. She flinched and Trevor thought, She’s left him!

  He led the way out onto the piddling little deck that weak lazy Adam had constructed, and here he squatted, the heavy flashlight lying across his lap, the ridiculous uproar of the propane lamp behind him.

  You know you could see this place from outer space, he said.

  I like to read, she said.

  I’m word blind, he said. I was whipped for not reading, he said, but my brain can’t do it.

  The American did not reply and so he waited until she came to him. She would not come completely. She leaned against the doorframe, half in, half out, but her big dark eyes were sort of naked. He thought, She’s single.

  I’m an orphan, he explained.

  Really.

  You shouldn’t be pissy with me, Dial. I’m one of your neighbors.

  Don’t start that.

  You should be visiting them. You haven’t been friendly. They don’t know who you are.

  If I wanted friends I would have stayed in Boston.

  But you are friendly, Trevor said. He meant it too. I’ve seen you, Dial. You’re kind. You’re not his mother but you love him.

  He hadn’t planned to say that. He didn’t even know he knew it. They watched each other in surprise. For a moment she was rigid but then she hugged herself and sighed.

  I’m an academic, she said. I shouldn’t be here.

  I know that, he said.

  She gestured at the puzzling plank nailed crookedly on the wall. I hate all this shit.

  I can see.

  I’m from South Boston. Do you know what that is?

  It’s in America.

  I’m the first person in my family to go to college. Can you imagine what it would mean to them if they could see what I’ve become.

  A hippie, like me.

  It’s so much worse than that.

  You’re not his mother, though, he said. He wished she would sit closer to him.

  You don’t know that.

  His father’s dead. Isn’t he! He did not know if this was true or not. He tried to read her bitter smile.

  He has a right to know, he said.

  He has a right?

  Yes.

  Oh really.

  Dial, I know what I’m talking about.

  You know what? Stop fucking with his head, man. This is much much worse than you can know. He’s not you. No one’s going to burn his legs with cigarettes.

  She had read the scars, that’s all. Big deal.

  I know, she said, that you think he’s just like you. She spoke gently now, and lay a hand upon his knee.

  Trevor shrugged.

  But this boy comes from Park Avenue. In New York. He’s going to go to Harvard and be a fucking corporate lawyer. He’s so absolutely not you, Trevor. He’s a fucking prince.

  So he’s going back to that, soon, to his real mother?

  Did I say that?

  Then what?

  She rocked forward on her knees and for a crazy moment, as she lay her hand on his bare shoulder, he thought she was going to kiss him and he felt a brief giddy surge of blood.

  Instead she whispered in his ear-I heard something under the hut. He’s out there somewhere.

  And together they looked out into the skirt of light, at the places where the tree trunks drowned in dark.

  Shush, she said, and there was, as if in response, the sound of a feral animal scurrying beneath the deck, and then fast footfalls on the path and then a great thump as the boy arrived inside the hut, like a possum fallen from a tree, eyes ablaze like gas. Buck was tucked compliantly beneath his arm.

  The boy did not say a word. When Trevor approached him, he stood his ground.

  Dial watched this happen with a kind of bilious feeling in her gut. When Trevor asked for soap and a towel she was pleased to find them for him, and when he escorted the boy outside, she took a sharp knife and began to cut cherry tomatoes in half, for what reason she could not really have said.

  God save us all, she thought.

  Soon she heard the slapping sound of the shower. It was just a pipe beneath the floor of the other hut, a slab of sloping concrete that let the water flow away into the bush. It was lovely in the afternoon, but at night there were spiders and bugs biting you. When the boy returned his hair was wet and his face was pink and scrubbed. She had chopped perhaps ten tomatoes, and they lay in half with their tiny yellow seeds glistening on the bench.

  Trevor asked the boy, Where are your clean clothes?

  He pointed up to the loft bed.

  Then go get dressed.

  The boy’s face had some strange soapy glaze, but he obeyed, and Trevor came to the countertop. He removed the knife from her hand and lay a fistful of weed inside her palm. Then, without asking her permission, he began to crack eggs into a bowl. Yesterday’s spring onions had not wilted and with this and not much more than a few baby tomatoes he put together three omelets which they ate in silence.

  Afterward the boy helped Trevor to wash and dry the dishes. Watching this, Dial tasted green and bitter jealousy rising from her gorge. So now she did not want him taken from her? How fucked was that?

  The boy stayed close by Trevor, rubbing his soap-wet hands on his clean shorts.

  Trevor turned off the propane lamp. In the sudden quiet the boy heard the panic of a single insect in a web. His own breath was held like a crumpled milk carton in his bony chest.

  Trevor sat, his back against the doorframe opposite where Dial was squatting.

  You know those boards are going to shrink, he said.

  The boy sat too, cross-legged, pink faced, closer to Trevor than to Dial.

  They’re green, Trevor said.

  Oh, really?

  The boy saw how the moonlight was caught in the gauze of many little wings, white ants, mosquitoes, moths with black jeweled bodies.

  I’m just telling you, Trevor said.

  And I appreciate your kindness.

  And then no one spoke and it made the boy feel sick and worried like when you watch the Kenoza Lake stars and try to imagine the end of space. You build a brick wall but when you break through, there is still more space. You can scare yourself to death.

  The boy said, I’m an orphan, aren’t I?

  He was pretty scared, to hear himself say that.

  He expected Dial would reach out to him then, and he would push her clear away. Dial did not move.

  No one spoke some more.

  The boy thought, What have I done? Behind him were the shadows of the stupid timber lying on the floor.

  Where’s my daddy, he asked.

  The frogs were singing to one another, things were dying in the night. He could see Dial’s hair, the cold fiery edge of it. There was papaya balm on Trevor’s leg ulcer. Made him smell like rotten fruit.

  Where is my daddy, Dial?

  I don’t know, she said at last.

  You promised you would write to him. You must know.

  Not really.

  Like that.

  In the dark, finally, she reached out to touch his streaming hopeless face.

  The air was suddenly filled with parts of him, each bit sharp enough to cut. You liar!

  Where is his dad? asked Trevor. He
deserves to know.

  You, said Dial.

  You, she began again, are a cruel and dangerous fool.

  Don’t you ever call me a fool.

  Oh, please. Don’t be so precious. He isn’t you. He’s someone else. You couldn’t imagine him if you lived to be a hundred.

  Are you his mother then?

  The boy got quiet and listened.

  What, said Dial.

  You heard me, said Trevor, but Dial was already standing and staring behind her into the dark. She brushed past the boy, bumped the lamp. He thought she was going to climb up to the loft but when she came back she was carrying a length of two-by-four and she cracked Trevor across the back with it.

  The boy cried out.

  Trevor roared, rolled, a mouse, a cockroach.

  Dial would not permit him escape. She thudded him twice more, across the ribs. The boy watched the big man curl up like a baby. Then he rolled clear off the deck. Onto the smelly dirt where Adam used to pee.

  Dial looked down into the stink, timber in her hand. No one spoke.

  Trevor whimpered. She threw the wood on top of him and turned away. When she wiped her nose and stepped toward him, the boy did not know what to do.

  Come here, she said, but the boy ran out into the night and down the hill, past the car, and on the dark road below he smelled papaya balm.

  Are you there? he whispered.

  36

  She stacked the wet dishes, crying quietly. There was nowhere to store them in this slum.

  Her mother would have died to see her genius in a dump like this. She did die. Anyway. Of Ajax, Mr. Clean, Murphy Oil. Died of the knives and forks of Patricia Van Gunsteren who never knew who her housekeeper was. They had not the least idea, is what Dial thought. No clue. She pulled hardwood splinters from her hand while the propane light hissed in a white fury at the empty hut.

  No one has the least idea of who I am. Not that little bratty boy who stole her heart and ran. Not Trevor, not Chook, not Roger, not scrawny chicken Adam. How could these B-list hippies understand that Dial was an SDS goddess. Who could see that? Hardly herself.

  In Cambridge she had covered herself with peasant dresses, bits of mirrors, sheep’s wool boots as if she were the corrupt princess of Nepal. Harvard babies did not see the contradiction.

  They called her Dial because she said dialectic had been invented by Zeno. So they mocked her, idiots. She was the truth teller. She only lied to the boy to keep him from hurt, and for her sin her intestines were pulled from her on a Catherine wheel.

  She stole the boy. Is that what she had wanted? She did not think so. Maybe she wanted to make love to his pretty daddy or did she want to hurt the daddy, make him burn in hell, the creep?

  She took her own papa to the house in Somerville and dear George walked across the Persian rug in dusty boots. He was five foot four, his greased-back hair standing high up from his head. He did not even notice the baby, baby Che, sweet Jesus in the crib. But he shook pretty Dave Rubbo’s hand. You want to know about the revolution, comrade?

  George Xenos had bullet wounds in the middle of each palm, his fingers crabbing so he held his knife and fork like a trained bear. He was not ashamed. He would show you, comrades-how he had been forced to place his hands on the pillow of a woman’s bed. The fascists shot him with a Mauser. He would tell you the caliber. Not German bastards. Greek bastards. He laughed. Even his missing teeth appeared heroic.

  He came to Somerville in September ’66, a few weeks before the McNamara visit. There was mud on his boots, clean white socks turned over, his strong short legs shown off in summer shorts.

  Comrades, he said, not knowing why they called his daughter Dial. Comrades, he said, choosing not to see the new hair on their boy lips. But he too had had soft boy hair once, sixteen years old, baby fluff, a fighter in the mountains of Macedonia.

  Fuck Stalin, he told the leaders of SDS. Fuck Churchill too. By 1945 the comrades had won Greece. They were betrayed first by the British and then the USSR.

  You don’t have no revolutionary situation, he said. This is America. God bless America, he said, and still they loved him, a workingman from Southie. He could say there was no revolutionary situation in America and they did not stone him. They drank his ouzo, played knuckles, arm wrestled on the floor.

  Papa flirted with Susan and Melinda and the leggy Smith girl who had VD. Two weeks later Mama was dying in St. Vincent’s.

  He had asked the Harvard comrades to visit his yard, admire his illegal sausage factory. Two days later he sent word not to come.

  So they were saved, Susan Selkirk, Mark Dorum, Mike Waltzer, all those people who were later in the newspaper, saved from grappling with the dialectic which was his life.

  By the end of 1966 his two sons had run off, one to be a drug dealer in New York City, the other to have sex with a widow in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He was left only with the scholar, and it was she who drove to Southie from Cambridge at night and on weekends and did what her brothers should have, boning the scrag ends, working the grinder, lining up the casings in their sticking dispenser. She could lift the big plastic vats of scrap meat from floor to bench. She could have arm wrestled those Harvard boys flat to the floor.

  Who was going to tell them? Not cute Dial. Someone else would have to teach them-do not please be romantic about the working class, no matter what you think of the stigmata on poor Papa’s small square hands. For the working people he risked his lovely boy skin in the mountains, but when some Irish fellows tried to renegotiate a price after he had delivered, it was George Xenos who took his wrecker’s bar and beat their refrigerator so hard the cockroaches fell in showers from catastrophe.

  This is how we renegotiate in Greece.

  Get in the truck, he told his daughter. You drive.

  She turned up the propane so it roared. On my father’s knee I learned it, she thought, weeping, at my mother’s breast.

  She thought, If you are watching me from outer space, watch this, boys.

  She took a fistful of nails and fed some into her mouth and dropped the remainder in the crumpled paper bag. She picked up the hammer and a long whippy yellow length of paling and she rested this against the wall, on top of the piece she had previously pinned in place.

  And then she nailed it in. Straight in. She could build a proper home for him. Are you watching, boys?

  Two nails at every stud, one at the top and one at the bottom. And that was pretty much how she continued all that night, working until there was morning mist across the floor and even then she could not stop, not because it looked so fabulous but because she knew she would die of grief if she did not continue, because her eyes stung and her throat closed over and the pain came in huge sweeping waves, during which she could barely stand. She would have him, she would feed him, she would watch him grow. There were lives way worse than that. She knew them personally.

  37

  No one loved him. He removed his shorts and underpants and folded them carefully. Then he squatted above the pit and looked down across the dammed-up valley full of mist and white-veiled trees. He was gooseflesh, head to toe. The birds were pretty quiet, but he could hear a tap-tap echoing far below.

  He did not know how he could ever get back to Kenoza Lake.

  When he had wiped himself he poured an ice-cream tub of lime and a second scoop of sawdust into the pit and closed the heavy-hinged lid.

  A magpie gargled as he turned to go. Trevor’s alarm clock rang as the boy came back beneath the roof.

  Trevor? He watched the open mouth and broken foreign teeth. Do you want to wake up?

  Trevor showed a bloody crocodile eye, groaned, rolled and revealed his beaten back-black and purple like an old lady’s dress. The clock engine unwound. Trevor began to snore.

  He would make her buy him a plane ticket. That’s what he was thinking when he squatted beside the bed of cauliflowers and drove his arm beneath the mulch. With his cheek pressed flat against the soil, his fingers found his burie
d blue banana bag.

  The sun was striking the trees above the mist, waking up some birds who brought down a loud shower of bark or seeds on the tin roof. By the time he smelled the papaya salve, it was too late.

  You cunning little bugger, said Trevor, and kicked at the mulch with his big toe and exposed his secret to the light. He had money in that bag and other stuff as well.

  Trevor put his hands on his hips and pushed his nose toward him. What you got?

  My dad, the boy said, surprising himself. He lay back on the mulch and drove his arm deep in the bag. He could feel the Uno cards, the poker pack, his ticket to Shea Stadium, a business card, a coin, three bills, a stone, and the folded page from Life magazine. He never showed this to anyone but he had to show it to Trevor now.

  It’s sort of beat up, he said.

  Trevor studied the page of Life. He could not read. What’s the matter with her? he said as he refolded it.

  Does she hit you?

  I know she’s not my mother, the boy said, tears welling up. I know, OK!

  You shouldn’t eavesdrop, Trevor said.

  You’re not fair, the boy said. You shouldn’t talk about me. You don’t know me hardly. He snatched back his father’s picture and pushed it down into his shorts, burning with the pleasure of destruction.

  Here’s a story for you, Trevor said. There was a boy like you had a teacup handle. It was like a little bone, a bit of chicken bone, a wishing bone, the leftovers of a saint put in a wooden box. Reliquary, he said.

  The boy did not care for Trevor’s stories anymore.

  The boy with the teacup handle, said Trevor, told us his older brother had the matching cup and this was how they would know each other, because the brother would produce the cup and they would join and be made whole.

  The boy was hardly listening. He was thinking how to purchase a ticket by himself.

  I knew this fellow real well, said Trevor. He went around saying that his brother was ten years older and he was driving from Brisbane to Adelaide with the cup. Are you listening?

  Trevor wanted the boy to look at him, but the boy sat with his cheek against his knees staring off into the bush. I’m going to Harvard, he said at last. You can’t imagine me. He was crying so hard he could hardly see. He tried to lie down on the dirt but the dirt just bit him back. He stumbled up the path, howling, and took the pallet and dragged it bumping along the path. In his mind he could see the teacup handle, the dried-out bones, the wooden box and the poor smelly orphan boy, dead of death most likely.