by Peter Carey
She had no prayers, comrade. Dear Papa, that was all.
40
When the boy was four years old, and before that probably as well, Grandma Selkirk would take him to the Guggenheim Museum and order him to run down the spiral ramp which-she said so-was what was intended by the architect, Frank Lord Right. That had been the boy’s misunderstanding. Grandma used the name herself whenever possible. How perfect, she said. Frank Lord Right was not building Calvary, she said, did not mean us to trudge upward to our crucifixion. Push UP on the elevator button, his grandma said, then run like the wind.
Three times he got in trouble with the guards apparently-he had no memory of this but he sure recalled Grandma’s argument with the tiny black guard after she cupped her hands on the Brancusi head. The guard said, Get back, then Grandma called for someone higher up and in the end she was the only person in New York allowed to touch the head.
It is art, she told the guard, who hated her for being bohemian, she said so.
Afterward she said, That guard could not have imagined that Brancusi was my friend. History would prove this not quite true, but never mind. She touched the boy’s own head the same as she touched the Brancusi, fitting her palm around it. She loved him. He felt it there, an almost exact notion of how precious he was to her. She was a smeller too, always sniffing the salt and death in seaweed, the waters of the lake, the crush of dried lavender. Her nose was small and straight. It was her best “instrument,” she said so. He would lie with her on the sofa in the big room at Kenoza Lake and she would go to sleep and the boy would sit with his hands on his knees and will her to continue breathing, the perfume of martini in the summer night, forever and ever, world without end.
The boy knew the names of smells, but it was his “visual intelligence” that was thought to be his “gift.” This was unmasked one winter Saturday when the Guggenheim had activities. The boy could not escape activities, and was forced to obey a leaflet containing a tiny section of a Jackson Pollock painting. Grandma said he had to match the little bit of picture with one of the three whole Pollocks on the museum walls.
When he found it pretty easy she looked at him so fiercely he knew he had done something good. You have the Selkirk eye, she said.
During the week she brought back her powdery friends from the English-Speaking Union, to see if they could do the same. They could not match her grandson. Four years old.
None of this had ever helped him in any way that he could understand.
When he saw the power lines and the cane fields and he made his way down the dry gully he had no idea that the Australian bush was crusted, creased, folded on itself, long gray ridges and bright streaky torn bits where the earth had tried to pull itself in half, or that he was like an ant making his way across a Jackson Pollock without a map. He did not know the story of the lost child or the drover’s wife and he came down the gully, jumping from broken rock to broken rock, and when he lost sight of the road ahead, he had lots of worries, mostly how he would get back to Kenoza Lake, but it did not enter his head that he might perish here.
He got a thorn in his hand and this broke off inside the flesh and he suffered a scratch on his cheek, but when he entered the lifeless pine forest at the bottom of the gully he walked without hesitation through the creepy quiet toward the dry white road.
Coming out into the sunlight, he understood that he could turn left to reach Yandina, but he turned right and so headed deeper into the bush, trudging along the lonely road which he remembered from the day after the storm. What had been slick and slimy had set hard and the ridge and rut of truck tires were now becoming clouds of dust, like dead souls rising in small whirls and skirmishes.
A little along, set back into the plantation and guarded by a chicken-wire fence, was a small house with a flower garden in the front. It was painted emerald green and the roof was a rusty red. At the beat-up front gate was a fat old woman with a floral apron and dusty-looking stockings on her creased-up legs. Her face was round and kind.
The woman said hello and asked him would he like a glass of water on account of all the dust. They had such a weird way of talking here, like Hobbits maybe.
He said he’d rather have a glass of milk.
Would you like a bicky too?
The boy didn’t know a bicky was a cookie so he said no.
He waited at the gate, watching bees crawling around inside the black part of the poppies and when the woman returned he drank the milk.
He thanked her, and said he had to go.
She watched him depart, not saying anything, and after he had walked a bit he began to think she could tell someone which way he went. He was up to no good, as his grandma would have said. So he walked back to the gate where the old woman was standing, still holding his empty glass.
Excuse me, he said, is the town this way?
You were going the wrong way, she said. I knewed it.
He said, Thank you, miss. He walked toward the town until she could not see him anymore and then he cut into the pine forest and walked back along the creepy quiet carpet floor coming around behind her house and only returning to the road when he was beyond her view. He was on his own.
He came down out of the pines at the place where the road split in two. He knew the steep scary track was called Bog Onion. At the bottom was the place with the blue plastic bag.
Leave it to Beaver, he said.
The burned-out cars and the broken-up log fires made it clear which way he had to go and he entered the bush at the exact same place where Trevor had cut his way through with a machete. The slash wounds had gone gray and dead looking, but some were now releasing baby leaves and small pink thorns as soft as the rasp of a cat’s tongue.
He pushed his way through the tangle and then into the feathery knee-high sea of fishbone ferns. He headed along the side of the saddle until he found the rough red bank of dirt, the fallen tree with pebble-crusted roots. He took off his T-shirt so he would be able to feel a bull ant’s legs upon his back and he kept his eyes down as he walked along the fallen trunk. He jumped as he had jumped before.
He walked into the soak and felt the mud ooze around his feet and he bent and made a little hole with his hands and drank the water which tasted of bark and blackberry and lantana leaf and dirt. He knew what was behind him, in the hollow of the fallen tree which jutted like a cannon from the bank-you could see a tiny, tiny bit of blue, pushed deep inside. He climbed up on the trunk and pushed his head into the dark hole in the sweet yellow rotting wood. He got his fist around the slippery bag and pulled until it popped out, lumpy and much heavier than he had thought. It landed on the soil and lost its breath.
He waited with his hands folded in front of him, his ear cocked, trying to hear what was hidden by the sighing trees. Then he dragged the bag off a ways into the woods, as if it was something he would eat in private. When he had untied the neck he reached his arm inside and took out whatever his fist closed around. These wads he placed inside his underpants. He did not rush but neither did he count, and he packed the slippery cutting bills against his waist and bottom and tried to arrange them where they would not hurt his penis no matter how far he had to walk.
He had not been there for more than four minutes before he was stuffing the blue bag back inside the tree. As he came out in the clearing by the cars, the crows were crying to one another in the spreading shade, and the kookaburras were flying from tree to tree, marking out the boundaries of their world. He walked beneath their notice.
41
Dial finished burying Buck. She squished up her face and bashed the dirt hard down on top of him. Parrots flittered in the last wash of light, the size of circus fleas up on the tattered ridge. The boy was up there with Trevor, lost to her, that is what she imagined.
Down in the valley the mosquitoes were already rising. They could smell her body gases a hundred feet away.
Which gases, Dial?
Lactic acid. Carbon dioxide.
Except there was no o
ne there to ask her. No one who gave a damn about what she thought.
Her papa was dead. The boy was gone. She had buried Buck. She walked across the rotting-leaf floor of rain forest, finding the shower in the deepening shadow beneath the bedroom hut. She thought, I purchased a slum but at least I have hot water I can waste.
The shower water was like an easy promise, running down the long trunk of her lonely white body, cooling in a puddle around her ugly feet. That is what she thought. Once she had been beloved. She had met the boy’s father in safe houses in four different cities. She had bathed in rose oil. She had been delivered to him like a princess to her groom, trusted servants in Volkswagens, back stairs to a warehouse tower. He kissed her calves, the arches of her feet. Even when she contracted a disease from him, she allowed that he was a man, a soldier in a war, the king.
She had been a goddess, six feet tall, a fool. Who could imagine her made so small and worthless, heartsick for a little boy.
Not till she turned off the shower did she notice anything but her own spaghetti boil of pain. The first cat’s cry was drowned. But the second time she heard it clearly and it thumped her heart, a great electric whack that left goose bumps across her scalp.
She stood naked in the pooled-up soapy water. Something rustled. The water dripped. She hadn’t even lit the lantern in the big hut but when she heard Buck again she ran down into the forest. There was only just sufficient light to see the grave was as she had left it. It was too shallow, she knew it. If it was Massachusetts there would be raccoons or dogs to dig him up and drag him through the night. What was there here? No bears, that’s all she knew. Mosquitoes jabbed their hollow noses through her skin. She dragged the blocky gray carving from in front of the abandoned hut and laid it on top of the loose black dirt.
Lady Macbeth. Exactly.
She ran up to the hut, muddy feet, dead leaves sticking, but no more thought of cleaning up than if she was six years old and scared. Buck cried again. She whimpered. She found the Redhead matches and the propane roared white illuminating her naked skin in all its fright and weakness. There was a pair of overalls by the shower but she was too creeped out to go back down there, to feel banana fronds brushing against her shoulder.
She pulled on Adam’s prickly army coat. Not his war, not hers either. She turned the light down and she sat out on the shadow of the front deck where she could keep watch to see whatever blurry black things the night would bring toward her.
She had killed the cat, taken his life to make a point, win an argument. It was Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale. She listened to the ghost until it stopped which was pretty quickly, but still she had no chance of sleep.
She climbed up into the loft bed and settled in the nest of quilts and shawls. It smelled of boy. She could not sleep for thinking of him, but it was not until just before dawn, when she heard that cat meow again, that it occurred to her that there must be other cats and she had murdered her sleek lovely mischievous Buck in vain.
She tossed and turned until she heard the car descending Trevor’s hill.
Scratchy eyed and heavy headed, she clambered down the ladder and ran to fetch her dew-damp overalls and then, hearing the thump and slam of the car as it bottomed on the track, she sprinted down the hill toward the road, straight through the uncut feathery grass. She heard the bang as its engine slammed the yellow rock, and then she leaped off the cutting and she was in its deadly path.
No headlights.
She cast her hands high in the air and watched the car slide toward her, the front wheels barely missing her, the steaming nose pushed in among the blackberries.
It was Rebecca who was driving, Trevor she saw first, but she did not care about either of them. She wrenched open the back door.
Where is he?
There was nothing there but an unreal shining darkness, black plastic bags. She touched them, immediately imagined they were taking hedge clippings to the dump.
Where is he?
Slap her, said Rebecca. She’s a fucking spy.
Where is he?
Where is who?
Where is my son, she bellowed, and her voice echoed along the valley floor, across the shallow rills.
Shut up, said Trevor. He took her shoulders. Be quiet.
They were both looking at her weirdly.
Where is he? she demanded.
He’s with you, said Trevor.
He’s with you.
She began to howl then properly. It was beyond her, beyond any preparation or understanding.
She’s fucked this, said Rebecca, and went back into the car. She turned on the headlights and began to cautiously back up and turn around.
Don’t go anywhere, Trevor said to Dial. He had his two meaty hands around her upper arms. Stay here.
He got back into the car and he slammed the door so hard it hurt, and Rebecca, with her big tits and hairy legs, took Trevor back up the hill leaving Dial no comfort but the white clay dust which rose from the road and settled like wiggy talcum in her hair. The cat called. The empty day began.
42
The boy had seen two of Trevor’s secrets but he knew Trevor had boxes inside boxes inside boxes. Trevor did not trust banks but he had accounts, in Sydney, Lismore, Tweed Heads. His right hand could not find his left hand. His lungs did not know his heart. There were all sorts of secret stashes-Canadian money in railway lockers, out-of-date Australian pounds, a pack of gelignite strapped inside a concrete pipe buried in his road. The explosive had hung there for two wet seasons so the electrical tape was curling and the pack was dangling, but there were still wires leading up the red clay cutting, lying doggo in the bush like two death adders beneath the fallen leaves. Trevor had a plunger hidden in the rafters of the compound. He was a secret man but so pleased by his secret he had to tell the boy.
Trevor was audiovisual, he said so. He had the Book of Revelation on cassette. He could not read or write but he could imagine the end of the world better than a university professor, also the destruction of Noosa Heads by cyclone, also a police four-wheel drive thrown six feet into the air by gelignite. He would puff out his cheeks and blow his hands apart. He gave the boy bad dreams-fire, sharp black weapons, tree trunks burning like fuse cord in the night.
Rebecca was Trevor’s girlfriend, sometimes.
Was Rebecca also afraid of Trevor? Maybe, the boy thought, must have been, for sure. Who would want to know what Rebecca knew, i.e., the trails, huts, shacks, the individual marijuana plants hidden like buried bodies in the bush. Rebecca and Trevor walked the unmarked bush together, Trevor said so, backpack straps cutting into their naked shoulders. The boy had seen them load up with stinky fertilizer, blood and bone. He knew Trevor was an orphan, invisible to infrared. Not even the spies in outer space could see his true occupation.
Rebecca’s house was at the bottom of the hill, across from the concrete drain and the explosive charge. Trevor had built her a bed. He had put guttering on her roof.
She lay in wait, near the bottom of their driveway, hating Buck, hating Che, hating Dial for being American.
43
Trevor, in a breathless fury, found Dial, lying like roadkill beside her drive.
Get up, he said, all arrows and orders, pointing at her car.
Drive, he said. Not there, he said. There, he said.
The roads laced through the bush.
The day would soon be hot and sultry but for now the light was cold and sad. Dial stayed behind the wheel while Trevor called up to the hippies in their homes. The best of these were like cocoons made from glued-together sticks, the worst of them like Buckminster Fuller, fired from Harvard, far away.
The Peugeot engine was running rough, pumping out white poison. The hippies descended from their perches, sleepy birds with trailing blankets, egrets in the exhaust smoke mist. She thought, Some of them are graduates. They peered at her. Yesterday she had killed the cat. Now she had lost her son.
She drove Trevor some more.
The starved-chest girl emerged from an ugly A-frame, came right up to the car and tapped on the glass. Dial slowly rolled the window down. When the girl hugged Dial she was all bones, warm from sleep, perfumed with patchouli and poverty.
A chain saw started with a raw hard cough. The two women waited while the saw did its work. Soon they saw five men walk out of the bush, each one carrying a fresh cut pole. They walked in single file down the track, not looking at the car.
She asked the girl what they were doing.
They’re going to check out the creek.
In her confusion Dial wondered were they fishing. The starved-chest girl lay her raw-knuckled hand on Dial’s arm.
They’re going to find your little boy, she said.
What are the poles for?
Dial saw the transparent freckled terror-dumb fear that the girl would be forced to name the dreadful thing that would be done with the poles.
They’ll go to the swimming hole too, she said.
Oh. She wanted to throw herself back on the ground, lie in the dust until she was squashed or killed. The men were calling out.
What are they calling?
Coo-ee.
No, his name is Che.
Yes, the girl said, we know his name.
Dial recognized this dreadful sympathy. She gazed distractedly at the signs of hippie industry, beehives, potted rain forest plants beneath shade cloth. When Trevor came back to the car she expected they would go to the swimming hole but instead he told her to wind down her windows and drive very slowly along the road. She could hear the tiny grains of gravel sticking in the tires, a soft rolling noise, and the echoing foreign cry, as sharp as knives: Coo-ee.
At the ford she stopped, looking with dread at the wash of water which flowed around the tires and washed toward the swimming hole.