Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘Is that the dog?’ he asked.

  George stayed silent.

  ‘They keep the dog in here,’ he said to himself.

  ‘I don’t know about you, George, but I’ve got no particular interest in the Orientals. Nothing against them really. In fact I knew a fellow in medical school … but he was … not Vietnamese. Very bright, some of them. Of course, I’ve got no time for Communism, but Russell and I … I don’t think we ever talked about it. Probably never talked about it with anyone … unless he started asking questions in the army. I suppose not. Not the place for questions, is it, George? Maybe they talked about it on the way over, on the Hercules.

  ‘My wife talks about him all the time … all the time but not of him in Vietnam. She talks as though he’s still home. She prefers to dwell on his boyhood, on his youthful doings. She has many stories about him from that time that I had never heard before. From that time—I say it but it was only a few years ago … all stories of Russell are of his youth. Louise too. She’s come around several times, a good girl. She speaks of a kindness in him to her and to her friends before her. Of course, I couldn’t have known about that either.

  ‘But my area is Vietnam. I’ve found people, it wasn’t too difficult, who could tell me what happened. The first day he was there, the very first day, he was sent out on a night ambush. Apparently there were certain villages known to be sympathetic to the VC. At night some of the civilians would smuggle food to them. Do you know anything about claymore mines, George? A man of your years could have seen action in World War II but I don’t know whether they were using them then. Truth is, George, I don’t know much about weaponry, only what I’ve found out ’cause of Russell.

  ‘A claymore mine is a command-detonated mine made out of plastic. I think it’s a green plastic. It has ball-bearings pushed into the explosive, which is a paste … with a plasticine-like consistency. Attached to the plastic covering are electrical leads connected to what they call “clackers”. The troops are able to set them up, angle them in trees or dense foliage and then, when the VC are within range, they just hit the clackers. The explosion is instantaneous.

  ‘Some of those claymore mines had been set up in trees on the route these villagers took at night when smuggling food to the Viet Cong. Russell was part of a group lying in ambush waiting for the villagers. Now apparently they have to wait in utter silence, not a word to be spoken, not a movement. You can imagine.’

  What was George imagining?

  ‘Well, they waited for a few hours in the middle of this Vietnamese jungle. I cannot imagine what Russell was thinking. What goes through a young man’s mind at a time like that? I suppose only those who’ve been through it can know. His mother doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to hear about Vietnam at all. She turns off the news or else leaves the room. Dwells on his boyhood.

  ‘They waited for a few hours and sure enough a group of villagers came their way, men and women, with food under their arms. They had to be VC sympathisers moving about, George, because there was a curfew over the area at that time and no one else had any other reason for being there. In the dark it was difficult to see which of them were men and which were women. They’re so skinny anyway, it’s hard to tell their womenfolk, especially at night. You know what I mean. But two or three of them—and this is apparently highly unusual—two or three of them, probably women, were carrying children, babies, on their backs.

  ‘Well, Russell and his mates had been waiting for hours but when the commander saw the children with them he let them all pass without a scratch. You see, it was hard to imagine any of the villagers taking their babies along to smuggle food to the VC. And any attempt to question them would’ve divulged the Australians’ position. So they let them go and continued waiting. They waited another … it was more than two hours before another group of villagers came the same way carrying more provisions. It occurred to the commander while they waited that the babies might be some new tactic or trick the villagers had come up with to lend a cloak of innocence to their movements if they were caught. It was possible, he thought, that these peasants were using their babies as insurance. They’d had experience of nine-year-old children coming into bars where the troops were relaxing and blowing themselves up. These people are said to be capable of things beyond our imaginations, George. My wife … she won’t hear about it.’

  I knew Mrs Byard. Her husband was right.

  ‘Having mulled it over after the second group of villagers had gone through, the commander gave the order when the next lot came through. It was a smaller group that time. One child. Only one they could see. Russell was one of the boys who hit the clackers. Not one of the villagers survived. It was his first night in the country.’

  He ran his palm over his satchel again. I imagined those perfect fingernails.

  ‘You see, George, I’ve tracked down men here and there from his regiment, his company, from his platoon. I’ve been something like an investigative journalist or a historian these last few months. It’s not so hard. You’ve just got to be persistent, keep ringing back. People understand. It’s been time-consuming, at some cost to my practice but the more you find out the more you want to know. As futile as it might seem, George, I am … trying to put myself, trying to take for myself the view that he had of everything … to stand in the middle of it. Then maybe I could be there with him.

  ‘A night lying in ambush doesn’t entitle you to anything. It’s part of the job, a job he didn’t apply for. The next day, Russell was at a place called Binh Ba. It’s a rubber plantation the French established before the war. He can’t have had much sleep. I don’t know how much sleep he had but it can’t have been much. They take men in this kind of sleep-deprived state, he can’t have been the only one, and subject them to open warfare.

  ‘The very next day at Binh Ba his platoon were fighting in close, out in the open. Russell was in the open … like a field, they said. And children were running all over the place from a nearby school, trying to run out of the line of fire. Russell was yelling at the children, “Dung ly, dung ly”, which means “stop” and waving his hands for them to get down. He must have heard the others yelling it at the children.

  ‘Lying in the long grass he had to get up somewhat to make the waving motion. A child was running towards him, not knowing whether Russell represented safety or danger, I suppose. When the little girl got close enough Russell stood up and caught her, covering her with his body. At that moment, the moment he stood up to catch her, that’s when he was hit the first time. He fell on the little girl and, in that position, the second bullet hit him and crushed his skull. He was, after that, unrecognisable. You know, it was probably our own fire.

  “‘Too much too late,” his mother says. She doesn’t want to hear about it. Says it’s just speculation … about his last two days. I don’t agree. There’s blame in there, George. She’s angry … angry with me. And I’ve thought … I’ve tried to find something I’m responsible for in all of this … in his death. I never gave him the idea for any heroics. Anyway, he was conscripted. It was not as though he was schooled in war stories and military adventure. We never talked about war.

  ‘But there is one thing I’ve come up with. I wonder if it’s occurred to her yet. It will. Engineering. I did encourage it, George, I really did. But not enough. I should have pushed him. I should have made him enrol. I should have whetted his ambition, George. Isn’t that what a young man needs? Enrolled in engineering, he could’ve grown older discussing the war over dinner like the rest of us. Ambition is what a young man needs and I did not instil any in him. Ambition. Every man needs it.

  ‘My wife thinks these investigations of mine have been a waste of time. It’s true Russell and I had a fondness for each other which manifested itself … at a distance. But I thought by gaining, by knowing as much as possible of his last two days … we could get … closer. I don’t of course know what he was thinking but it’s a terrible thing for a father to feel that, whateve
r his son was thinking during his last two days, and this is in no way reprehensible, he probably did not think of his father once.

  ‘I know what I know, George, about the claymore mines and the night ambush, the civilians and about the next day with the children running in the open at Binh Ba. At least I know what I’ve been told. No one can say for sure about Russell. He’d been there for two days. He didn’t know anyone. Nobody knew him.’

  There was a long silence punctuated only by my dog’s gentle breathing. Then, for the first time since Dr Byard had entered the room, George spoke.

  ‘I don’t sleep. Have you got anything to help me sleep?’

  From under the bed I heard the clasps of Dr Byard’s satchel opening. He placed something on the bedside table and said nothing more.

  I was not there to hear his report, if there was one, to my father. Had he spoken honestly, not only would my father not have been comforted or any the wiser, but he would also have had to recommend someone to attend on Dr Byard himself.

  The next day, fresh and unashamed in the white light of childhood summers, seemed to possess an innocence so pristine as to make a lie of the previous day. I was first up and gave myself breakfast. My parents had decided to take us, which really meant me, to the beach. The invitation was extended to Kirsten as well and she accepted, but unlike me, she was not completely dependent on other people to take her to places. I was still at that stage where each unaccompanied journey on public transport was the outcome of some fiercely contested negotiation. It was planned that we would get there in the morning and leave by lunchtime when the sun would be directly above us.

  For a while it seemed that I had my father back. The bay was invitingly calm and he took me out past most of the other revellers to a sand-bank of the kind he could always detect but I never could. It was another part of the mystery of adulthood and I could content myself with the belief that if I simply stayed alive for enough rotations of the earth around the sun the scales would fall from my eyes and I too would be able to detect sand-banks from the shore. But as an adult now in his late thirties with only three dollars, it seems that this skill, along with many others, has yet to develop.

  On the way out to the sand-bank he let me ride on his back when the water got too deep but on the way back in I rode all the way. There was French cricket on the sand with a bat and a tennis ball I had brought. He even took an interest in my sand castles, which warmed me the same way a good strong sun dries you so quickly after you have been for a swim. In decades to come, this type of concerted effort with one’s children would be called ‘quality time’ but, like for so many things, there was no name for it when I was a child.

  Kirsten had gone for a walk leaving my mother to alternate between reading and watching us. But the last of my sand castles, though better in terms of aesthetics and structure than the early ones, was paid almost no attention, my parents by then being deep in conversation. Kirsten had been gone for an hour and three quarters. My father went to look for her. My parents were each equally divided between concern for her safety and anger at her irresponsibility.

  In the car on the way home it transpired that my father had found Kirsten sitting in some sandy scrub between the car-park and the beach proper. She was with Joe and a few of their friends. It had about it an air of premeditation. That was my mother’s feeling anyway, a feeling to which she gave some voice on the way home in a series of rhetorical questions and accusations.

  What had got into Kirsten? She used to be so reliable. Didn’t she see enough of Joe? Hadn’t they always welcomed him into the house? Whose idea had it been to have him to dinner last night? Was this the sort of influence he had on her? Don’t insult them by pretending the rendezvous was a coincidence. At least confess the first lie. She had a good mind to forbid Kirsten to see Joe. She didn’t want to do it. Kirsten was forcing her with this irresponsible behaviour. Don’t speak to her that way, young lady! The tone, it was the tone. It had been such a lovely morning. Why was there always someone who had to spoil it?

  The dog did not come to the door as she usually did when the car pulled up. I found her in my room, not in her basket under my bed but whimpering on George’s bed. I tried to quieten her because George was asleep but she whined even more. My father came in to check on George. After looking at him and feeling his forehead he told me to take the dog out of the room and to get my mother. My mother came quickly and they closed the door. Kirsten was already in the shower by then. I was on my way back to my room when my mother opened the door and ran to the telephone calling out behind her for me not to go in there. I had never seen her move so fast and wondered who she was phoning. Whoever it was, they could do nothing for her. George was dead.

  He had swallowed an excess of the sleeping pills Neville Byard had taken from his satchel the previous day. When he had taken them, how many he had taken and whether the excess was deliberate my father went over and over as though something could be salvaged depending on the answer. It was possible, perhaps even likely, that, still barely touched by sleep after one or even two pills, George had within a few hours absent-mindedly taken more. It was possible, perhaps even likely, that had someone looked in on him sooner, an ambulance could have been called and he could have been saved. But we had been delayed at the beach. My father discussed all these things with my mother. Kirsten and I listened to them from the other room where the clock ticked as if nothing had happened and the barometer lied that all was fair. That’s when Kirsten started crying and she would not stop even when my mother assured her that she was not at all responsible for what had happened to George.

  I did not cry then. Even when the ambulance officers went into my darkened room and started clunking around, accidentally knocking my aeroplanes to the floor, lifting George onto a stretcher, putting a sheet over him so that he could have been anyone, carrying him down the passage past the kitchen into the street where the neighbours were watching; even then I did not cry. I waited.

  I waited till beyond the time my parents had taken Kirsten to see George buried a few days later beside my father’s parents. I was left with a neighbour but through a gap in their fence I saw Joe Geraghty on his bike in the street near our place. I called out to him in a whisper. He pulled up beside the gap in the fence and I told him where Kirsten was. He thought for a moment, said he was sorry and then asked me if I wanted a ride.

  He took me to St Kilda pier on his bike and bought me fish and chips. As we walked along the pier, Joe wheeling his bike, I told him about the way George used to be, about losing his house and the verandah. I told him about Peggy and Fitzspiers, the man from the bank. I told him about Amanda and the school for ‘young ladies’. I told him about Neville Byard, Mrs Byard and Russell Byard and Louise, about claymore mines, and about the rubber plantation at Binh Ba where the children ran from their school to get out of the line of fire. And even then I did not cry.

  At night in my room, which was suddenly bigger since George’s makeshift bed had been removed, I thought about the mints he used to bring us and whether there is anything wrong with choosing the time you die. He disappeared in the dead of summer. The bay was still, the streets almost deserted. The seagulls rested on the public statues, the mercury rose in the mouth of his dying day. What instruments we had agreed the day of his death was a fine still day.

  I got up to get a glass of water and found my father sitting in the lounge room in the dark. I got him a glass of water too and sat on his lap. He told me that Kirsten and I had always to take care of each other, that we should never give up on each other. I put my hand to his face in the dark. Then I cried.

  CHAPTER 3

  The first time I saw Tanya she was sitting outside, on her break, smoking, wearing desert boots, white socks, black jeans, heavy mascara and the smock provided by the supermarket which employed her. She had dark hair tied back and large gold circles for earrings that made her look like either a pirate or a Romany gypsy musician. As she stared down at the cigarette burning between
her fingers, ignoring the talk of her colleagues around her, I was struck by the recalcitrant beauty in what Durkheim would call her ‘anomie’. I didn’t know it at the time but she, like me, had just finished high school and was waiting to see which faculty at which university would metamorphose her into a solid pay-as-you-earn citizen.

  I was not about to talk to this ethereal raccoon-eyed and deeply troubling girl however much I might have wanted to. I was still a few years away from Wordsworth—What are fears but voices airy?—Whispering harm where harm is not— because Tanya had not yet read Wordsworth and it was through her that he and I were introduced. She has always known more than me, about most things. Even on our wedding day it seemed she had done it all before.

  I met her formally in a checkout. It took a number of attempts, all of them embarrassing, before my courage, my pitiful groceries—cottage cheese, Vita Wheats, celery, Coco Pops—and the hard-hearted, unfeeling, trolley-pushing hordes relented or else conspired to permit us to speak. I had hoped she was going to say something smart like, ‘You going to eat all that celery yourself?’—something that would open the door for the kind of wicked repartee so common in the teen movies of the day. But neither of us watched teen movies until we were much older (when Tanya took a course in the semiotics of them), preferring instead the Bergmanesque tight shot of a languid drop of Scandinavian water reluctantly leaving its metaphor. I half grunted and handed her the cereal.

  ‘You’ve been here before, haven’t you?’ she told me.

  ‘Mmm. Coco Pops.’ I smiled back; protoplasm with small banknotes, that’s all I was. She stopped the conveyor belt and the cottage cheese was left stranded between the things she had rung up on the register as belonging to me and the goods of customers not yet reached. Tanya seemed oblivious to the queue that had formed behind me. She brushed her hair behind her ear with one hand and asked me,