His Illegal Self

by Peter Carey

  You come on home now, Dial said.

  She was standing behind him, by the cabbages, an army coat around her shoulders, a hammer in her hand.

  Against the current of his anger, the boy ran to her and pushed his face into her stomach and she wrapped the coat around him hard.

  Carry me, he said. His face was wet and snotty and he buried himself in her smoke-dust hair as she carted him along the saddle where the oil drums stood, then down the jolting yellow hill. She crushed him so tight it nearly broke him. When he slipped down her body she hoisted him back up. He wrapped his legs around her waist but she did not finally give up his weight until her army coat dropped off her shoulders and fell to the dirt and lay there like a big old dog.

  This was by the rusted Volvo, where the turkey lived. The boy had worse things than that to be afraid of now.

  She kissed him on his dirty forehead and tried to look him in his eyes but he did not want her seeing what he thought. He grabbed the hammer from her hand and ran at the car, smashing its headlights. This took much longer than you might expect, but she did not try to stop him and when the lights were pretty much destroyed he bashed at the part of the car body that was wedged onto the road. It would not budge.

  She watched him with her arms folded, her eyes sort of soft and vague.

  He said, We can go get your wood. The wood you hit him with, he said, waiting to see what she would say. He picked up a pebble and threw it at the car. We could put the wood under the car and make it fall.

  Sure, she said.

  I hate the car, he pressed on. I hate that bird. I’m going to kill it.

  To his surprise, she did not tell him he should not kill.

  You wait, she said.

  What did that mean?

  You’ll see.

  He imagined this meant she was going to show him photographs although when he considered this later he saw she gave him no reason to think anything at all. Grandma Selkirk had many old photographs she kept in shoeboxes, brown and dusty yellow. When the wind was bitter off the lake they would go through the pictures together by the smoky fire. There was an uncle who was crazy about Packards. There was an aunt who lost all her money drinking wine in Paris. This was his true history, in the box. Trevor could have no idea.

  What will I see, Dial?

  You wait, she said. You’ll see.

  They set off down the washed-out hill, around the deep gutters made by storms and even deeper holes probably done by the orphan in a rage. There were crowbar marks like stab wounds in the clay.

  You wait, she said, trying to make him laugh, but her hand was wet so he knew she was afraid and he was too. As they turned up the cutting into their driveway, the sun got swallowed by the clouds and there was a dull sad cast to everything. Shut your eyes, she said, they were only halfway up the track. His breath caught in his chest as she steered him by the shoulders along the thin clay path between the huts.

  Now lift your foot, she said. One more step.

  He smelled the sawdust before he opened his eyes and saw the fresh-milled wood nailed onto the walls, the yellow moisture barrier now a secret hidden like a letter in a book.

  We’ll make it very beautiful, she said, it’s the only thing we can do. We’ll make a lovely home. Those crooked nails are there to keep the boards flat while they dry. After that we’ll cover the space between with other bits of wood.

  Battens, he said. He could not live here.

  Yes, they call them battens. Then we’ll paint with linseed oil. Do you know what that smells like.

  No.

  Have you been in an artist’s studio?

  You are not my mother, are you?

  They were standing facing each other in the middle of the hut, with the kitchen sort of behind them and the big open door in front, and there was sawdust everywhere around their feet. Dial squatted down, to be his height.

  I knew you when you were just born, she said. I bathed you, she said. You were all slippery with soap. I was so scared I’d drop you.

  Were you the babysitter, Dial?

  She was crying but he did not care. You were only little, she said. You had an expensive knitted jacket your grandma gave you and I burned it with the iron.

  The tears frightened him, the strange red twist they gave her face.

  That’s why you talk funny, he said.

  He had meant to be mean, and she walked out on the deck and he heard her blow her nose.

  She is my grandma, right.

  Yes.

  Grandpa is my grandpa.

  Yes, of course.

  So why did you steal me, he said and saw how he made her wince.

  I did not steal you. I was taking you to see your mama.

  He felt a huge angry power to hurt her, like he could do anything and not be stopped. You stole me, he said. You brought me where no one could find me.

  She reached her hand for him, and although he would not let her touch him, he allowed himself to be persuaded to the cushions. She sat beside him. Her eyes were red and deep beside her great big nose. He thought the nose was ugly and he could hurt her any way he liked.

  I didn’t steal you, she said.

  You lied!

  He waited for her to reach out her arms and catch him, but she just hugged herself as if her stomach hurt. Her lips were cracked and parted and her brows pushed down.

  My mommy’s dead, he said.

  He watched her shrivel.

  Your mommy wanted to see you, but that was against the law.

  You nearly got me run over by a car.

  Your mommy did that, yes.

  You nearly got me killed.

  Your mother was underground. Do you know what that means?

  SDS, he said. I know. You know I know.

  She hesitated as if she was going to say that he was wrong.

  Do you remember in Philly, the Greyhound station.

  Why?

  There were lots of sirens in the street.

  No.

  I came to take you to your mother but your mother died. I couldn’t tell you. It was terrible.

  His throat was burning. His mother died. How did she die. He dared not ask. You should have taken me back.

  Honey, I would have gone to jail.

  He shrugged. He could hardly see.

  You don’t care if I go to jail?

  You shouldn’t have stolen me. You should have taken me to my dad.

  I did.

  No you didn’t, he shouted. You shouldn’t lie.

  Listen to me, you little idiot. Who do you think hosed you down when you pooped your pants. Who did that to you? That was your lovely daddy. I forgave him everything till then. Don’t turn on me. My life is totally destroyed by this. I’m a teacher. I’m not meant to be here.

  Then go away, he said.

  You go away, she said. I’m sick of you.

  You want me to go away?

  Yes, she said. Go, go now.

  And so he did. He headed down the path between the huts, his legs falling forward, just sort of spilling down the hill. He could not go to Trevor’s anymore, so he ran the other way along the valley floor and he was still running when he came past the hall.

  There were three cars there. The stupid mumbo jumbos were on the platform and they all came to stare at him as he headed down the road, bawling like a mad bad baby in the dust.

  38

  He listened for the sound of the Peugeot coming to get him back, the wheeze, the whir, the cough. He would have heard it above the pounding blood, the air tearing at his chest. When he arrived at the ford, he stopped and waited more. Had the mumbo jumbos called to him just then he would have gone to them. Their voices would have echoed along the creek like saws or hammers, but nothing came along the water except a brilliant breathless nameless bird-blue back, orange chest, flying about two inches above the ford. His grandma would have known it-she knew the names of everything, water strider, Atlas moth. She could show you a dead bee through a magnifying glass. His grandma l
oved him, stroked his head, was always there, still swimming across the lake, her heart just broke in pieces as Jed Schitcher said.

  Past the ford, the road got steep and mean as murderers but he was not going back. Soon enough he was up on the plateau where dirt tracks ran off among the gray spiky grass between the big fire-blackened trees.

  When he was hosed down on the lawn in Seattle, the water hit him hard as stones. She was not his mother. She just watched. Her face was way too big. The color of her skin was darker, her smell was dusty, like apricot beneath the jasmine.

  He must have walked an hour, he figured, and still it seemed he got no farther. When he heard a car coming from the direction of the redneck town, he was pleased at first but then he climbed up the dry clay bank and squatted in the broken bush. One minute the road was empty, then it was full of brilliant blue-a new auto towing a trailer and a curling tail of pinkish dust.

  When the car came around the bend, he lay down on the scratchy dirt, pebbles on his cheek and stomach. The car stopped and waited, hissing quietly to itself, just out of sight, below the cutting. Then it set off crawling, bumping onto a bandit track on the far side of the road. When the engine quit, the quiet was big and still as water on a lake so he clearly heard the magpies and the brown and black and yellow birds the size of wrens.

  A door opened, then slammed shut. He could now see the driver-about the distance to first base, not a mumbo jumbo but a redneck with glasses thick as soda bottles and hair oiled flat on his tiny shrunk old head. His neck was thin and did not fill his collar and he poked his nose forward, sort of sniffing. Then he peed real loud, like a creature on a farm.

  The rednecks in Sullivan County had plaid shirts and baseball caps with DIESEL something written on the front. This one was not like that. He walked around some. Then he was kneeling on the ground. The boy’s hair pulled at his scalp. But then he heard the sound of a saw.

  The man worked for about an hour. Once he sat and smoked a cigarette. Once he had a drink of something.

  Once he said, Mary.

  There were nasty small black ants crawling along the boy’s arms. He would have killed them except there was no point. The sun went behind the clouds leaving everything dull dead green, burned black, tarnished silver. The boy stood very carefully and began to make his way through the low worn-out scrub, planning to get behind the ridge, then come back on the road a ways ahead.

  Coo-ee! The cry burst out in the silence, a dreadful sound.

  The man had his hands up to his glasses, pretending to have binoculars.

  Hello young man, he called.

  The boy walked quickly, covered with a prickly coat of fright.

  You come down here, the man said.

  He could hear the man coughing and clambering up the bank to get him. He ran then, until he got down behind the ridge. Trees with dinosaur feathers-wattles-he cut around to the left, trying to be quiet among all the crackling sticks. For a long time he could hear the breathing, but around the bottom of the ridge it got quiet and even the high ocean of gloomy trees was still.

  He had been certain of where he was headed but the road was not in its expected place. If he had been born in Australia he would have known to retrace his steps before he died, but he was from New York and there was a long dry rocky gully ahead of him, and at the end of that was a view of cane fields and some high electric pylons.

  He was positive he had seen those pylons and that sugarcane before, and then it came to him what he must do.

  39

  Dial fell asleep, curled up in bed, alone with her hammer and her molting pillow and the mosquito net pulled like a veil across her bare carpenter’s knees. The boy was miles away when she awoke. She had no clue, having slept until that hour of the afternoon when the hot sun fell directly on the corrugated iron, heating it until it pulled angrily against its hippie fastenings. Bang-the roof exploded. Who would have known that bloodless things could cry like this.

  Her eyes opened to see Trevor Dobbs standing silently beside the bed. She thought-He has come to tell me the boy is going to live with him. She watched his smile, thinking he had no idea how cruel he was, or what he had destroyed. He seemed dry and cool in all this unrelenting heat, an English apple, mottled but healthy.

  A fly had found its way inside the net. When it crawled along her neck, she killed it.

  She thought, He has come to collect the boy’s clothes.

  They want to talk to you, he said.

  FBI, she thought. She had been waiting for this.

  Trevor pulled aside the mosquito net and she let him take her hand as if she were an invalid. Her mouth was dry as chalk.

  They’re your neighbors, he said. You’ve got to talk to them. They can invalidate your sale. He said in-vwelidate, softly.

  This caused some considerable confusion as Dial began questioning the legal reach of the FBI.

  Your neighbors. Jeez. Who did you think?

  So she agreed to meet with the neighbors, but like a prisoner with her hands clasped behind her back, following the weirdly graceful feral in falling white pajama pants. They went through the long grass, across the road, down to the shaded creek and then beside the shallow runs where Trevor jumped lightly from rock to rock ahead of her. Children had made dams, lines of rocks, memorials that caused her to catch her breath.

  The stream was just thirty yards from her hut but she had never walked here before. She never showed this to the boy before she lost him to Trevor Dobbs. There were corners of the mossy damp that made her sad. Of course it was her papa. He would have loved this, a damp, green dappled part. He was from Samos, an island with a green half and a dry half. Peaches on one side, priests on the other. In New England he had found a mossy-smelling home, running through leafy tunnels with his beagles and his gun. They had hunted cottontails together.

  Remus Creek was a paradise with ferns of all varieties, palms, creepers with the skin of baby elephants, its water shallow but perfectly clear so that the small pebbles shone red and yellow in among the rippling gray. Poor Papa.

  They arrived at a stand of flooded gums, tall thin eucalypts with shiny white-green bark and there in front of them were the foundations for the rotting buckled floor and when she followed Trevor up the wide wooden steps she thought of platforms in the jungle, Aztec, Mayan, sites of sacrifice.

  The mumbo jumbos were waiting for her in a semicircle and Trevor went to sit at one end next to Rebecca leaving Dial alone, squinting into the sun.

  Rebecca said, We have a rule, and in those four words Dial felt the bilious bitter taste of her dislike.

  Dial did not answer but she saw that not even pretty Roger would catch her eye. The girl with the starving chest was playing with her toes.

  Rebecca said, You know what I’m talking about, Dial. She looked sideways at Trevor as she spoke. Again Dial thought, She’s sleeping with him.

  Yes, said Dial, you said you had a rule.

  About cats.

  Yes, you said that before.

  Yes, and you said there was a lawyer who told you not to worry, but he was wrong, Dial. He admits he was wrong, said Rebecca. She held out a letter.

  Dial nodded at the letter but went no closer to accepting it. She was thinking, I cannot take this shit. I will not. She was also thinking about the boy who had chosen to live up the hill with Trevor. His clothes would be removed as if he’d died, nothing left behind, not even a plastic toy to break her heart. She thought, I do have to take this. Then she thought, not for the first or last time either-This is where I’ve ended up.

  So what do you want me to do? She tried to smile.

  Get rid of the cat.

  I take it none of you want him?

  Ha-ha, said Rebecca.

  No one else spoke, but Rebecca stood and walked off the platform with her great fat ass wobbling inside her cotton pants. In a moment a car door slammed and when Rebecca returned Dial could hear Buck. He arrived up on the platform, a prisoner in a metal cage.

  Rebecca
held out the cage and Dial took it.

  Buck was meowing piteously.

  I know you think this is cruel, Rebecca said, but considering he’s a murderer…

  Dial was reading the metal manufacturer’s label on the heavy cage. FERAL-TRAPPA. She set it down and opened up the wire door and inside she saw Buck’s pink complaining mouth. He stood and sat. His front paw was caught, a sort of mousetrap for a cat.

  Feral, she said.

  It means wild, said Rebecca. The feral cat is declared as a class two species under the Land Protection Act.

  You’ve crushed his fucking leg. He’s not feral. He’s my son’s cat.

  He’s not your son, said Rebecca.

  Dial looked to Trevor who looked away. She set down the cage and gently lifted the sprung arm of the trap and brought Buck into the light. He cried, and raked his claw down her arm.

  You’ve crushed him. You know this won’t mend.

  It is a her, said Rebecca.

  Dial stood on the platform under the harsh violet sky. The time-warp idiots, she thought. Why don’t you fight for something real?

  You can’t look after that cat, said Rebecca. You can’t even look after the kid.

  Dial could look after Buck. That was all she knew to do. If you shot a cottontail you often found him wounded, struggling. You picked him up quickly, stilled your heart, stretched his neck. And it was done.

  She stood before them. She did it swiftly. In a few seconds Buck was a warm pelt in her bleeding arms.

  Go watch Walt Disney, she said to Rebecca.

  She turned and walked down off the Aztec platform and passed between the flooded gums, along the shadowed creek with its stones and dams. She was crying then, not loudly. She found a shovel in the garden and carried Buck down into the rain forest and there, before the abandoned hut with the stone gargoyle, she dug down into the soil, chopping through the fresh white wounded roots, laying him in the crumbling black soil and covering him.