His Illegal Self

by Peter Carey

  Why don’t you just talk to my lawyer and see if you can settle something. I don’t want money.

  Lawyer, oh please.

  In that oh please Dial heard only privilege and condescension.

  You’re not helping yourself, you silly old woman.

  Excuse me?

  Jay is here. You want him? Or not?

  Dial thought, I have become a kidnapper.

  I lost a daughter. I can’t lose a grandson too.

  Listen to me, please, Dial said, we just want to come home.

  Do you have any idea what trouble you are in. Put him on, let me speak to him again.

  There isn’t time.

  You’d better not have hurt him.

  Listen to me, Dial said. You’ve only got one chance. Do you want it?

  No, you listen to me, the old lady said.

  Shut up and listen, Dial said. She was scaring the boy. She could not help herself. She was in a mad place, swinging a length of two-by-four.

  Yes, the old lady said very quietly. Go on, I’ll listen.

  Then she could hear Phoebe Selkirk crying.

  Shut up, Dial said. You rich spoiled bitch. You want to see this boy again, you talk to Phil. You get him out of jail.

  She put down the phone, and began to take stock of the damage.

  53

  The boy and Trevor were digging behind the hut. When the hole was finished you would be able to lie in it and see all the way, above the roof of the hut, to the broken yellow strokes of road. That was the plan, being presently executed with great urgency. In the hut Dial could feel the regular thud of Trevor’s pick.

  Behind the sink there was a thin lead-light window through which she could, depending on where she stood, see the boy with his head down in the hole scratching dirt behind him like a dog. Gravediggers, she thought, and that was pretty much her mood. She, Anna Xenos, had brought all this about. If only she had not done this. If only she had not done that. Everything she touched was broken. As Rebecca had said to Trevor, Why doesn’t she just bomb Cambodia?

  It was Trevor’s conviction that Phil would quickly confess the boy’s location to the New York cops. Who wouldn’t? he said and in the hard glaze of his eyes she saw sufficient bitterness to trust. By tomorrow morning the Brisbane police will be out here, he said. Just before dawn. Wait and see.

  It was already late now and the valley had lost the sun, and although it was worse than gloomy inside the hut, Dial thought it wiser to not light the lamps. Did the Alice May Twitchell Fellow really believe that they were being spied on from outer space, that her alarm clock was her key to freedom, that she needed to crawl into a muddy hole to keep her liberty?

  She changed into a tank top and a pair of shorts and walked barefoot up the hill where she found the boy naked, lying on his stomach, digging with his hands. Trevor, wearing underpants out of some perverse politeness, was shoveling, grunting, the muscles on his back shaded with dirt like charcoal on good linen.

  There had been sufficient rain to make the path slippery with mud, but all that rain had not penetrated far below the surface of the hill. It was the dry season, and after a few inches of moist earth there was hard yellow clay which had already broken the boy’s fingernails.

  Are you OK, baby?

  I’m OK, he said, but she thought of trapped animals gnawing off their limbs. He had to go, to be released, but first they must survive the night, so the three of them worked awkwardly together until it was necessary to bring hurricane lamps up from the hut. It was still not finished when the boy was dead eyed and droopy and she took him down to wash. Then he sat on the countertop with a towel around his hunched-up shoulders, and they both listened to the scratch and scrape of Trevor’s shovel as she made a kind of ratatouille with pumpkins and potatoes, a bastard thing without a name.

  While the rice was cooking, they went up hand in hand and found that Trevor had already roofed the hole with a sheet of tin and covered it with dirt and Wappa weed. He had lined the inside with the black plastic from the garden.

  Won’t the police find us here? she asked.

  They’re afraid of the bush, he said. Trust me.

  They ate their dinner in darkness on the deck of the hut and afterward they showered and dried themselves and put on what clean clothes they had. Finally they carried and dragged blankets and cushions up the hill, bringing with them twigs and leaves and spiders swept up in the dark.

  They crawled down into the cushioned dark, the boy between Dial and Trevor, and although their positions suggested some familial protectiveness, Dial could not forget how she had hurt the boy, screaming like a harpy at his grandmother in that sweaty colonial post office. She imagined her own teeth like de Kooning’s mama, growing up into the base of her nose, the criminal auntie, rattrap jaws to mince him up. But of course what she wanted was not this desperate criminal last stand but to take him like a poor injured bird and place him in a box of cotton balls and feed him warm milk from an eyedropper. She loved him, loved his smooth brown skin, the leafy smell of his tangled hair, most of all the eyes which were once more open, limpid, filled with trust. He loved her too.

  God bless Phil and keep him from harm, the boy said, and in the stunned silence that followed the prayer, he fell asleep, sliding into a whispery almost silent not-quite-snore.

  The hole was tight, the blankets tangled and the boy kicked as usual in his sleep, but Dial fell asleep quickly and did not stir until Trevor shook her shoulder, once, very hard. As she woke, he placed his earthy hand across her mouth and she understood the boy was sitting up. All three of them could see through the gap between the roof and the earth: yellow headlights and brighter, whiter quartz lights sweeping over the hut. They heard men’s voices, suddenly very loud, as the unlocked door of the hut was broken open and lights brushed everywhere inside, like mad swooping things with sharp glass wings.

  The worst was the breaking of the door, the malice of it. She held the boy and covered his small flat ears and he pushed himself against her but he must have heard the true splintering, cursing, stamping boots, the discordant choir of radio instructions. She was her father’s daughter as she waited for the men to come. They laid his hands on a pillow before they shot him. She could have burned them all alive.

  54

  The boy lay between their bodies. He was held more firmly than he had ever been held, by earth, breath, soft Dial, hard Trevor. Dial covered his ears with shuffling hands and kissed his head while the police attacked the hut as if they wished to make it bleed. What made them so angry? Was it him?

  He heard the last thing break, and lay on his back and watched the headlights swing across treetops as the police backed and bogged and pushed and finally got away.

  Then, just when he thought it was done, he heard them snaking up through other tracks, visiting their neighbors, looking for him there. He woke in full daylight with Trevor shaking him. They came down the hill together, feet wet with dew. The front door was still red but splintered into pieces, a red lightning bolt sticking in the grass.

  Stay, Trevor said. Dial held his hand. Trevor went up the steps.

  Dial touched his head.

  Trevor returned with the shoes they would have to wear to go inside.

  When the boy stood at the open door he thought of raccoons ripping at his grandma’s trash, bags torn apart, cushions disemboweled, the golden walls busted up like packing cases in the back of Peck’s supermarket. Take them home for kindling if you like.

  When he saw what he had caused, the boy knew he must go. There was no choice. He knew this before the Pudding-head arrived and the four of them walked through the bush to see what had happened to her daddy’s factory, the candles smashed, the walls all broken.

  He told the little Puddinghead, I’m going.

  As the sun rose in the sky a crowd toured the damage and each place they arrived at he said, I’m going. The sky was so clear. The sounds were so distinct. The cries of the Australian magpie, like nothing else on earth. Who was
it who said like an angel gargling in a crystal vase?

  No one said he was allowed to stay. He found himself alone, on the edge of a cliff, when everything in him expected to be tugged back, but even Dial could not go with him although she spent all day by his side. They walked through the bush, having a honey sandwich at this place, a glass of milk at that. The hippies were nice to him.

  To them he said, I have to go now. He knew what he was saying.

  It was too sudden, but it is always too sudden, there is not a sign to tell you that the artery will burst. You walk in the expectation that you will continue to walk and even when you say I have to go you are saying it in the place you are to go from and it is this place, the one that will soon vanish, that inhabits your eyes, your lungs, its earth packed in black moons beneath your nails.

  You say things about the future but you have not been there so you do not know.

  The boy said, I must go.

  Everybody stepped away from him and even when Trevor made him the satchel for his drawings and Dial sat close as breath beside him, and as they lay out the ice-cream wrappers, the leaves, the drawings, the picture of his daddy, the drawing Dial did of Phil in his zoot suit, and as the case was closed and tied up and Dial wrote his name on both sides, SIXTY-SECOND STREET on one side, KENOZA LAKE on the other, he could feel the lonely air between him and everybody else.

  Everything had become so familiar, the kookaburras marking out their territories at dusk, flying in the path of squares and triangles which made a fence, visible to them at least, meaning that this land was theirs.

  Only now did they realize the Peugeot had been stolen, towed away. They did not go back inside the hut. It felt as if someone had died in there, as if all the bats and golden light had been suffocated and cut up.

  The boy wanted to sleep down in the rain forest, but Trevor said they must sleep in the same place again tonight.

  The boy said, Will they come again.

  Trevor said they would not come again and Dial began to cry. She said she was sorry. Then Trevor explained how they would get him back to his grandma without Dial getting caught.

  There was a ball of ice as big as an egg inside his stomach.

  Rebecca will come for you, Trevor said.

  He lay rigid, between them, completely alone. Dial cried but he could not even hear her. He did not cry himself. He felt the stone orphan beside him, all of them awake all night. It was ruined, he had ruined it. She should not have cried. He should not have been angry. It was not their fault and that was all he felt all night-I ruined it.

  The morning came slow and gray as dirty hands and Dial dressed him and he was polite and so tired, his eyelids gritty. He would not shower but his skin was sour and he held his case of drawings and a hundred dollars in a single bill and Trevor and Dial walked with him down the slippery path past the place where the car had always been and now was nothing but a dark oil stain and down onto the road where it was still too dark to see the red and yellow pebbles in the road. He took two anyway.

  Dial held him by his shoulders and kneeled down on the road.

  I love you, Che. Every single thing was worth it.

  He did not know what to say. He was angry, but he had to go and Trevor tried to say good-bye and then Rebecca’s car came hissing on the sandy track, quiet as a shark, and before anything had passed between them all he was in the front seat with his case and he would never see that hut again in all his entire life, or eat the peas or the papaya, and the skin he left behind would turn to powder dust and centuries would pass and that part of him would never leave the valley.

  Are you OK?

  Yes.

  That was all. He did not ask where he was being taken although he could feel his little ball pouch as tough and hard as a chicken gizzard and he watched all the familiar turns in the headlights of Rebecca’s car.

  Are you taking me to the police?

  No, not exactly.

  Maybe she thought he knew what was about to happen, but he did not know at all. When they came out on the Bruce Highway she headed north.

  Are we going to Canada?

  No, not so far, she said. They drove a good while though, much faster than Dial. There was not much traffic on the road and soon she turned in to the left and there was one of those wire gates like Trevor had, and she opened it and closed it, and then they drove up a track and onto a ridge where finally she stopped the car.

  It was dawn and the light was lying low across all the paperbark and cane from Coolum all the way to the great Mount Ninderry. When he got out of the car with his plywood art case, he felt the wind, and the hairs stood up on his bare arms and on his neck and all over his body and he finally looked at Rebecca and understood she did not know what to say.

  I didn’t know you, she said.

  No.

  You’re a pretty amazing kid.

  Thank you.

  I’m sorry about your cat, she said.

  That’s all right.

  No, I really am.

  And she was crying and hugging him, her big wide face all shining and red, and he was sorry for her but he could not think.

  What will happen now?

  She blew her nose.

  I have to go and tell them where you are.

  My grandma.

  The police, she said, looking over her shoulder. There was not much to see. A stand of wattles on the distant fence line and a couple of cows.

  Is that a bull?

  No, she said, as if she knew. I have to get going.

  OK.

  I’m sorry I bawled.

  That’s OK, he said.

  She held out her hand and he shook it and he watched as the car started and then drove over the hill and down to the right. From the ridge he could see it moving up north, toward some other town. He guessed she would use a call box from far away.

  Then there was nothing to do but wait.

  They should have given him a sweater. They forgot. He stood and listened to the lonely sad trucks down on the highway and watched what was maybe a hawk circling overhead. He was pretty frightened by then. As if he might be killed or something. When he saw a police car on the road below he lay down. Farther along there was a hole where a rabbit might have lived. He inched along toward it over the short brown grass. He wished he could just lie down with Trevor and Dial and feel the blood and bone and earth around him and never move again.

  No one could see him from the road, and he stayed lying down for maybe five minutes and then maybe five minutes more and it must have been at least half an hour before he heard the car and knew that he had finally come to the end.

  Always too sudden. He knew that at eight. The end will come like a tree dropping in the night.

  He heard the driver riding on the clutch. He turned to look up at the sky and only then, with both ears working, did he understand that the car wasn’t coming from the road but from the wattles and the bull, not far away, the ice-blue seven-hundred-miles Vauxhall Cresta moving fast, too fast, across the paddock, lifting and crashing, aiming itself at him, then drifting sideways like a plane about to land, and at the wheel behind the glistening windshield was Anna Xenos, her elbows wide, her head forward, and beside her was Trevor and they were coming so fast that the boy jumped up so as not to get killed and they saw him and opened the passenger door to scoop him up, to hold him tight, to take him now, recklessly, because they would not lose him from their lives.

  What happened to the boy in that moment felt as if it could be measured with a twelve-inch ruler, a sharp searing pain that somehow did not hurt. Something stabbed him, he thought. Even as an adult he would believe that something physical had been left inside him-small, smooth, not a pearl, more lustrous, luminous, a sort of seed which he would eventually pretend to believe was simply a memory, nothing more, that he would carry along that littered path which would be his own comic and occasionally disastrous life.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter Carey received the Booker Prize
for Oscar and Lucinda and again for True History of the Kelly Gang. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he now lives in New York City, where he is the director of the Hunter College MFA program in creative writing.

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