His Illegal Self

by Peter Carey

  Up the hill, said Trevor. He was leaning out the window, staring into the bush. For fuck’s sake, aren’t you looking on your side?

  She did now, as she drove on up the steep hill, and then again as they bounced along the logging tracks. Trevor, his head out the window, cried Coo-ee. There was so much bush, beyond acres, beyond hope or forgiveness.

  They arrived at a high spot above the creek, almost the end of the track, when Trevor said, Stop. Turn off the engine.

  He called, Coo-ee.

  A call came back to them.

  Of course it was not Che. It was nothing like a boy, but she still insisted that he reply.

  Trevor left the car without so much as looking at her. He ran across the flat barefoot, jumping fallen timber, Coo-ee.

  Coo-ee, there was an answer.

  It’s not him, Dial thought, but she left the car. They were parked on a kind of bluff above the creek. On another day she would have found it beautiful, but today it was a horror and when they came upon a man with a blue car and trailer she was angry that they had wasted time.

  Let’s go, she said.

  Trevor lay his hand on her arm and spoke to the man who had glasses thick as soda bottles and hair oiled flat on his little shrunken head. Trevor stroked her shoulder, so gently she could have cried. The man’s neck was thin and did not fill his collar and he poked his nose forward, sniffing. Dial’s arm, in the palm of Trevor’s warm hand, was chicken skin.

  The old man was a retired schoolteacher who had been cutting loads of firewood to sell in town. He had seen Che. Oh yes, indeed, he said. He saw him very well. Little fellow, a good set to his shoulders.

  Dial tried not to be frightened by his hands, about one inch wide at the knuckles.

  Don’t you worry, Mum, he said. She let him take possession of her hand, it was like being inside a big warm bag, or being in touch with God or aliens.

  He’ll be back, he said.

  He had been dead. Now he was alive. No one was going to prod his bloated white sausage body with a pole. She ran back to the Peugeot so quickly that by the time Trevor arrived she had turned the car around.

  Trevor took his seat, but left the door open, one bare foot resting on clay.

  Let’s go, she said.

  He looked at her wearily, his eyes squinted. What’s the plan?

  Furious, she drove down the track and he had no choice but to close his door.

  So what’s the plan?

  There was no damn plan except she could not go into the valley and be stared at. She was beyond the pale. She killed her cat. She killed her boy. When she came back on the road she swung left toward Yandina, looking out the window at the wiry scratching undergrowth, and when they came to the Cooloolabin fork she swung away from town. She could not bear to be looked at. She drove past the house where the boy had drunk the milk. She did not know she had come down this road, so short a time before, hundred-dollar bills sewn inside her hem.

  Turn here, he said. She did not recognize Bog Onion, but she obeyed, her stomach churning at the steepness of the track, the precipitous drop along its edge.

  Suddenly Trevor was like a dog with its ears pricked.

  What is it?

  He leaned forward, resting his forehead against the dusty sun visor, peering ahead and to each side.

  Stop, he called.

  She slammed on the brake and the Peugeot locked and sledded. Oh God, she said. What is it?

  But Trevor was already out and stumbling, running up the hill. She pulled on the hand brake, but it would not hold. In the spit-smeared mirror she saw Trevor pick up something-candy wrapper, that’s what she thought. He jumped back in the moving car and handed it to her.

  Ben Franklin. One hundred dollars U.S.

  His eyes were slitted.

  Drive, he said.

  Brake light all the way.

  44

  Dial pulled up beside a burned-out shell of a Volkswagen, bullet holes along its door, a ruin consistent with her stomach, knotted in a tangle of dread. She watched in the mirror as Trevor got out and circled behind her back. Would he be her benefactor or her assassin?

  Arriving at her open window, he turned off the engine and snatched the keys.

  Oh please, she said. I wasn’t going to run away. But why did she even say that? What was she thinking-that she had crossed the Mafia? And was it like that? She tried to read his eyes but he held the door open, a match between his teeth.

  I should stay here, she said, in case.

  He escorted her to the path, the one he had forbidden her the first time. His hand on her arm was not rough, or brutal, but really rather soft, as if he thought kindly of her and might protect her, but she thought of how gently cats hold prey inside their mouths.

  Was his anger just about his one hundred dollars? She followed him like a lamb, through the scratchy lantana, the whispering ferns, boneless, without the will to run. He was a pissed-off criminal, clambering out along the horizontal trunk of fallen tree and then doubling back inside like a possum, a ferret, an animal unexpectedly supple and sleek, its muscles and tendons showing through the skin. He dragged out the blue banana bag, showing her his teeth before letting it fall, like trash into a compactor chute, rushed and violent, raising dust. He tore out a paint-splattered plastic sheet and a fistful of sandwich Baggies each big enough to hold two ounces. He shoved the Baggies in his shoplifter’s pockets and lay the sheet in the blue shadow of the fallen tree. The wind was gusty from the west. The plastic rose and fell until he subdued it with rocks and logs.

  He held her gaze a moment. She did not know how to look at him. His pupils were keyholes. The wind blew and schools of eucalypt leaves turned like silver knives above her head.

  Kneeling before his bag, he removed a fistful of currency and tucked it beneath the plastic sheet. She thought this was a good sign-but how could she know what to hope or fear in the awful nothing of this day.

  As he defended his stash from the thieving wind, he was shiny and fast, really lovely in his wild and muscled way. He gave a final wad to Dial and pointed at the bone, a cow bone big enough to brain him with.

  Put Australian money under that.

  Cool, she said, her heart racing.

  American, he pointed to two broken yellow rocks. U.S. dollars under there.

  She sat cross-legged on the plastic, her skin sweating like processed cheese. He held up a single crumpled hundred-dollar bill, the one he found up the road. There was a violent gust of wind and the plastic rose and brown leaves tumbled past their knees. Something fell or thudded somewhere.

  What?

  Ssh.

  He held his finger to his lips and turned back toward the track.

  She stood too.

  Stay, he hissed.

  He clambered up the muddy bank, so fast that clumps of dirt sprayed on the sheet. She waited, aware mostly of the sky, its storybook blue, its invisible violent life.

  He returned quickly.

  Was it him?

  She watched him pack the rest of the money.

  That’s yours, he said, OK.

  His eyes held hers so tightly that it took a while to see that he was holding two Baggies filled with money. If you needed it, he said, you could come here yourself. His voice was very level. You wouldn’t need to send a child.

  She was slow to understand him.

  It’s yours, he insisted. I’m keeping it for you. This is too far for him to come without a grown-up.

  You really think I would do that to him?

  He shrugged.

  She had to stand so he could take the plastic sheet. When he climbed back up the bank to hide the bag she waited.

  He said, You going to wash?

  I wouldn’t do that to him, she said. What sort of monster do you think I am? You want to make this all my fault?

  He walked off ahead of her drying his hands on what passed for his backside. She stood by the Peugeot while he searched inside both the burned-out wrecks and under one of them. She
could not stand the accusation.

  But then he exclaimed and her heart was suddenly in her mouth and she was right beside him, willingly his ally, squatting on the gravel when he emerged from beneath the Volkswagen, all that dull ashy anger washed from his eyes.

  In his hand was a second hundred-dollar bill, and a green avocado.

  He pushed the avocado at her-it had been gnawed, was still quite fresh, a pale creamy green. He showed his own teeth.

  Get in the car, he said.

  She obeyed, starting up the engine when he gave the silent signal.

  She put the car in gear and heard the cry, the thump against her seat, and she turned to see Trevor dragging up a squirming boy-life from the backseat. It was a puppy-boy held by the neck, slimy, muddy, white, its arms wide, spreading its fingers, and all its boy face swelled up with grief or bites, left eye closed, mouth open.

  The car shuddered and jerked. Dial jumped out while it was rolling, ran around the lethal front, opened the back door, tugged the stowaway, violently, as if pulling a rabbit from a hole, held the shivering bawling thing against her breast.

  When Trevor charged at them she had nothing to protect herself against the tumult of his fatty orphan’s heart, the saline, mucous, the awful sac of grief so big it burst itself wide open.

  So they gathered, three of them, joined messily-it was not like anything Dial had envisaged in her life.

  45

  Dial drove back up Bog Onion, stalling twice. Obviously, the boy thought, she never drove to Montana with anyone. She never had a gun, a wound, a son. Weren’t you cold last night? she called to him.

  I’m cool, he said, and listened as she tried to make a joke of cool and cold. He did not laugh.

  From the plateau they traveled through the pine forest and he did not tell them that he had been inside that old lady’s house in the middle of the night. That house. Right there. Dial was peering at him in the rearview mirror but the boy held his secret hard against him. In the pitch dark he had crept in the back door. He could, therefore he did. He expected to get nice and warm but once inside he was so creeped out he could not even move his toe. He stood in the blue-black shiny kitchen and listened to the old lady snoring. Was that what he came for? If so it was a big mistake, for when she stopped, he thought she had died. He knew that feeling from Kenoza Lake, waiting for the breath to start. Let her not die now. He often thought what would he do with Grandma when he found her dead. He was frightened of it, how she would look. The old Australian lady coughed. He imagined her big eyes staring and all her gray hair spread out around her pillow. She moved something, perhaps a tumbler. He grabbed the avocado from the countertop thinking it was something else. There was no time for blankets. He got ahold of the rug on the kitchen floor and rushed out the back. A chair fell. The rug got caught. The door slammed. The yard lights turned on and he almost left the rug behind. Finally he dragged it into the woods like the body of a stinky bear. Then he was inside the belly of the night staring out its burning throat. He was doggo. No one could see or hear him. Soon enough a car arrived. It had no flashing light but a loud radio. He retreated from the flashlight stabbing at the pines. Maybe they would hit him like the priests hit Trevor, with a cane or strap. He dragged the heavy rug down into the dark and out of the pines and into the bush and when he was sick of falling over and cutting his head and arms he rolled himself up in the rug and finally he slept.

  The carpet smelled of rancid fat. He should have gotten arrested, but he did not want to go to jail for stealing money.

  He made green vomit.

  When there was enough light to see, he rolled up the rug and stuffed it in the drainpipe beneath Bog Onion. His stomach tasted of lead sinker, and he knew he had to put the money back for now. The avocado would not be eaten. He returned the money to the blue bag and crawled under the burned-out Volkswagen and stayed there, mostly sleeping. He woke when he heard the Peugeot coming down the hill.

  He was captured, but no one knew what he had done. Trevor took the front seat without asking and the boy lay along the length of the broken backseat with his nose pressed against the hot leather and the car shook above the corrugations of the long straight road to town. They turned back on the hairpin toward the valley and, for a moment, the sun flowed across his legs and neck. The snaking braking road soon blocked the light and he breathed the cracked Peugeot leather which had once been a creature with babies of its own. He was pitched and rolled, until they skidded down the steep road onto the splashing ford where he had, only a day ago, seen a blue-and-orange kingfisher swoop like an angel across his path.

  Now the Australian trees closed over him like monkey fingers and the light turned green and the road was smooth and sandy so the tires swooshed. Not even God could see him here, curled up like a lost caterpillar, filled with green stuff to be squashed.

  There was a bang against the roof. A second one against the window.

  Shit, said Dial.

  As the car skidded he stung with fright and he itched as if his skin was pierced by prickly seeds with feather tails. The windows were filled with bodies, crushed velvet, beards and bosoms.

  She had made the neighbors hate Americans. Now they were all pushing in around the Peugeot. As he sat up he could see there were maybe ten cars, twenty, some VWs with paintings on them, other junky old station wagons and behind them was the buckled so-called hall and on its platform there were mumbos sitting.

  Closer there were slitty-mouthed hippies holding skinned and bleeding lengths of tree. They swarmed the car like bees, erupting like bull ants from a nest. In the Bible they would have stoned him. He thrust his hand into his pocket and folded up the hundred-dollar bill.

  Rebecca dragged Dial from the car.

  When his own door opened he scampered to the other side where the starving-chested woman pulled him out and before he could say anything she crushed his face against her smelly ribs.

  He saw Trevor talking to a man with a pole. There was so much noise and rush and all the kids-some he had seen once, some he hadn’t-were grabbing at him with their warty hippie hands. A snotty little pudding-headed girl was Velcroed to his leg. She could not be bucked away.

  He looked for Dial but Rebecca had her arms around Dial’s neck and Trevor was walking away into the lantana and the boy was being taken away by the kid named Rufus and the kid named Sam. They had made a stretcher-a brown coat with two poles-and Rufus and Sam said, Get on it.

  Why?

  Come on, Che, they said.

  He thought, You don’t know my name.

  Che, Che, get on.

  They were bigger but he could have fought them. His stomach was filled with old balloon air as he was lifted off the giddy bilious earth and four kids took the shafts including the pudding-headed girl who was maybe four years old and they ran lopsided and stumbled along the road. As they swung into the bush the boy saw Trevor, just ahead. His shoulders were sort of round. He was by himself, beginning his lonely climb up to his fort.

  The hippie kids dropped him and he hurt his arm and he burped and vomited inside his mouth.

  What would you like first? Bath or eat?

  He sat on the coat on the ground. He spat. He rubbed at his arm and they all argued with one another and then they were suddenly off again, directly through the slapping stinging bush.

  Hey, hey, Che, Che.

  Rufus was fourteen maybe. Keep your head down, Che, he said.

  They jolted him along too fast and when they dropped him a third time they told the pudding-headed girl she should let go and then Rufus took the front and everything was steadier and the Puddinghead tried to hold his hand while she ran alongside. Soon she ran into a tree and began to cry and then he was put on the ground a fourth time and Rufus asked him would he mind walking. Not one bit.

  Rufus had long bright red hair. He put his arm around the boy’s shoulder and the kid named Sam dragged the stretcher through the tangling scrub and the pudding-headed girl took the boy’s hand and that is how t
hey all arrived at a clearing in which stood a long low hut made from logs and tin and sheets of glass on which was printed TELECOM, over and over.

  Inside he found a gloomy kind of candle factory with long narrow benches all around the walls and it was on one of these they sat him and cleared away some candles to make space for a glass of milk.

  The Puddinghead asked if he liked it. She had snot on her upper lip but her face was round and pretty and her hair was almost white. In a shaft of sunlight he could see soft down on her brown scratched arms.

  It’s good, thank you, he said. In fact it tasted hairy.

  Say something else, she said.

  OK.

  Something American.

  George Washington, he said. He was pretty sure he would have to vomit.

  It’s from a goat, said the boy named Sam. That’s why you don’t like it.

  What?

  The milk. I don’t like it either. This Sam had a thin face and beaky nose like a bush animal, a possum, with big dark eyes and very crooked teeth.

  Tastes of bum, he said. His voice was all tight and curled up like wood shavings. It came out of his nose and mouth all at once.

  Say something else, demanded Sam. His way of speaking made everything into a puzzle you had to peel and flatten out. Say something else American, he demanded.

  Can I have a glass of water?

  They had been pressed tight around him and now they all sprang away. The Puddinghead came back with water.

  I’m Sara.

  He nodded, suddenly very pleased.

  The boys brought bread and butter and a bowl of honey. Rufus cut a slice of bread with a knife maybe two feet long.

  The boy asked, Is that a dagger?

  It’s a machete.

  Yes, but is it a dagger?

  No one knew what he meant. Rufus silently cut a thick slice of bread and covered it with butter and honey.

  The boy was not exactly happy, but much better than he had been in a while.

  We thought you was dead, mate, said Sam. We reckoned you was a goner.

  The boy did not understand.