Albert of Adelaide

by Howard Anderson

  He slowly and deliberately took off his clothing, folding each article and placing it neatly on the bank of the water hole. He stood there naked, savoring the anticipation of both the pain of memory and the tactile pleasure of the water. He lay down on his stomach and pushed himself down the bank and into the water. His entry was soft and silent, and only a few ripples disturbed the shadows of the cabbage palms that played across the surface of the water hole.

  The moment Albert hit the water, the worries and concerns of past and present disappeared. He was just a creature in the element he was born to inhabit. He didn’t need to think; he just needed to do. His webbed feet drove him deeper into the pond with each stroke of his legs. The coolness of the water rippled his fur and washed away the dirt from days of desert travel.

  Albert opened his eyes and watched freshwater crayfish dart among the rocks on the bottom of the pond. He grabbed one in his bill, and as he crushed and swallowed it he was overcome by hunger. Without thinking, he used his bill to push over rocks on the bottom of the water hole and ate the earthworms he found. He swam the length of the pool and dived in and out of the reeds on the far bank. Albert chased tadpoles and water beetles through the shallows. He ate what he caught and was excited by those he missed. For the hour he hunted, he wasn’t Albert, late of the zoo in Adelaide. He was just an ordinary platypus in a water hole. It was a good feeling.

  11

  Every Paw Turned Against Him

  A faint splashing sound woke Albert from an unsound sleep. He rolled over in the sand and saw TJ kneeling on the bank of the water hole, wringing water out of his long johns. TJ had on his hat, and a blue bandana had been tied around his neck where it partially covered the gunshot wound. His moleskin pants had been washed and were draped across another patch of bottlebrush a few yards from where Albert had been sleeping.

  TJ looked over at Albert. “Good morning, sunshine.”

  He stood up, shook out his underwear, and walked over and put it on the bush next to his pants. TJ looked up at the sun, which had passed midpoint.

  “Make that good afternoon. Bring your stuff over to the camp and we’ll make a plan.” TJ felt his pants to see if they were getting dry, then walked back toward the lean-to.

  Albert got up, brushed himself off, and got dressed. By the time he reached the lean-to, TJ was already sitting next to the fire pit pulling things out of the cotton sack.

  TJ looked up at Albert. “Sorry to fade on you like that, but I hadn’t slept in three days.”

  Albert sat down across the fire pit from TJ. “What sort of plan are we going to make?”

  “I was thinking about revenge and then maybe a holdup or two. I tried claim jumping once, and let me tell you, there ain’t no money in it.” TJ pulled a can of black powder from the sack.

  Albert didn’t know who TJ was planning to get even with. On top of that, he didn’t know who or what TJ was, or why TJ had gone to the trouble of saving his life. He started to ask TJ but thought better of it. Asking direct questions in Old Australia had usually not provided the answers that Albert hoped for, and he was beginning to believe that the best course was just to let things unfold of their own accord.

  “I don’t know anything about holdups or claim jumping.”

  TJ pulled a couple of small lead ingots out of the sack. “Then we’ll start with revenge. Nobody chains Terrance James Walcott to a post and gets away with it. I put paid to that damned possum, now it’s Bertram’s turn. What do you think about burning down the Gates of Hell?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it,” Albert said honestly.

  TJ continued looking through the contents of the sack. “It probably wouldn’t be as easy as setting fire to the store at Ponsby Station, not with all the dingoes around, but with a little luck we ought to be able to pull it off.”

  Albert hadn’t been too surprised that TJ knew his name. There was no telling how long TJ had been listening to his conversation with Bertram before the fight in the Gates of Hell. Albert had told Bertram his name, but he was sure he hadn’t said anything about Ponsby Station.

  “Ponsby Station? I don’t think I know the place,” Albert said carefully.

  “They sure seem to know you.” TJ pulled a folded piece of paper out of the sack and passed it over the fire pit to Albert.

  Albert unfolded the paper. It was a poster with his name on it.

  REWARD

  ALBERT THE PLATYPUS WANTED FOR ARSON

  AND CHEATING AT TWO-UP

  With paraffin and malice aforethought,

  the above named platypus burned down the General Mercantile

  at Ponsby Station and cheated at two-up

  DESCRIPTION

  Medium height, webbed feet, has a beak, and is not a marsupial.

  Last seen in the company of a wombat accomplice

  FIVE SHILLINGS will be paid for the capture of said platypus, dead or alive, and delivery of the corpus to the proper authorities

  Sing Sing O’Hanlin, Cap’t, Ponsby Station Fusiliers

  “It’s a bill,” said Albert after reading the poster.

  “What?”

  “I said it’s a bill, not a beak.” Albert handed the reward poster back to TJ. “That’s all I’ve got to say.”

  TJ nodded, took the poster, and put it back in the sack. “I like a partner that knows how to keep his mouth shut.”

  Albert wasn’t about to tell TJ that Jack was the one that set the fire. No platypus from Adelaide would betray a friend. Besides, he realized that TJ thought he was a tougher creature than he really was, and there was no reason to let him think differently.

  “I’m not used to having a partner,” Albert said after a little thought.

  TJ looked Albert straight in the eye. “Hell, Albert, we need each other. I don’t know straight-up about this place, and from the looks of that poster, you could use someone to watch your back. Furthermore, I’ve seen you shoot, and you need a lot of help in that direction. Besides, robbery is always more fun if you can talk to someone about it.”

  After Ponsby Station and the Gates of Hell, Albert knew that getting killed in Old Australia was a lot easier than he had thought. Jack had tried to tell him, but watching Theodore frothing at the mouth had brought it home. Without help, he didn’t stand much of a chance of getting to the place he belonged. TJ probably knew more about Old Australia than he did, but Jack had taught him a few things, and that might be enough to hold up his end of any deal with TJ.

  “I guess learning to shoot couldn’t hurt any,” he said.

  TJ pulled a tin of percussion caps out of the sack. “I pulled that poster off a gum tree the day before that possum caught me. I was hoping I might run into you. What did you get away with last night, besides your pistol?”

  Albert searched through his coat pockets and brought out the Colt, the box of strike-anywhere matches, the gold sovereign, and the piece of oilcloth that Jack had wrapped the pistol in. Albert laid everything on his coat.

  “That’s the lot, except for an empty canteen.”

  TJ reached over and picked up the sovereign. He flipped it in the air, caught it, and bit down on the coin. Then he smiled.

  “That’s the stuff, Albert. It’s been awhile since I put a tooth to real gold. Where did you get it?”

  “The two-up game in Ponsby Station.”

  “Did you cheat?”

  “I don’t think so, but I was drunk at the time.”

  TJ started laughing. “You’re the partner for me, sure enough. Hand me the Colt. I’ll clean it up and reload it.”

  Albert handed TJ the pistol.

  “You’d like San Francisco, Albert. Hell of a town. If it hadn’t been for letting my guard down, I’d be there yet. Where are you from?”

  “Adelaide, and I can do without it,” Albert said firmly.

  TJ put the gold coin back on Albert’s coat, got up, and walked over to where his underwear was drying in the sun. He took it off the bush and brought it back to where he’d been sittin
g.

  “I wasn’t always from San Francisco. It’s a place you’ve got to look for.”

  TJ searched in the sack and pulled out a needle and thread. After a little difficulty he got the needle threaded and began to sew up the hole in the shoulder of his long johns.

  “I was born in the forest. I didn’t like it much. It always seemed that everywhere I went was twenty miles from nowhere. Learned a few things in the forest, though: how to steal, how to run, and how to fight if I got cornered. All that came in handy when I got to California.”

  TJ reached over and held up the cotton sack. “I stole all this at the Gates of Hell. I’m glad to see I haven’t lost my touch.” He put the sack back down and continued: “After I got loose, I snuck back into the building to get my clothes and finish the job I started the night before. Then you showed up and needed a demon. I was glad to oblige.”

  “Bertram said they didn’t sell supplies at the Gates of Hell,” Albert remembered.

  “Among other things, Bertram’s a damn liar.” TJ spit into the fire pit and went back to sewing. “They sell what they steal or what they get from the dingoes. Bertram takes it around to other towns and sells it to storekeepers.”

  “Who told you that?” Albert asked.

  “Bertram, of course. That possum was too crazy to hold a conversation.” TJ finished sewing up the hole and bit the thread loose from the needle.

  “The night before, I had jimmied the lock on the back door of the Gates of Hell and was just getting ready to slip inside when that damned possum snuck up behind me and hit me with a rock. When I woke up, I was chained to a post out in back of the store. Bertram would get bored every so often and come out the store and brag on himself. He talked so much he didn’t even notice I had managed get one end of the chain loose.”

  TJ put the needle and thread back in his sack, stood up, and started putting on his long johns. “They’re still a little wet, but they should dry before evening. I can’t abide being dirty.”

  After he finished putting on his underwear, TJ walked over and took his pants off the bush and put them on. “You might want to start collecting some firewood. I’ll head over to the far side of the pond and see if I can catch some crawdads for dinner. I didn’t have enough time to steal any food.”

  Spending the rest of his life stealing and shooting was not what Albert had in mind when he left Adelaide. He still wanted desperately to find the land that he’d dreamed of for so many years, but he wasn’t sure anymore what that place might look like. He had assumed that it would be something like where he was born, but he had just spent the morning in a place similar to that, and the experience had left him feeling incomplete. But to doubt in Heaven was not something he could do and still go on.

  He was wanted dead or alive in and around Ponsby Station, and that was going to make his journey more difficult, no matter what the destination. With every paw turned against him, shooting and stealing seemed more like educational necessities and a lot less like a couple of bad habits. The time would come for him to move on again; but for now, the valley he was in was world enough. The thought of a fire that night was comforting to him and would be enough to carry him into the uncertainties of another morning.

  Fallen tree limbs littered the valley floor, and it took no time to pile up enough firewood for the evening. His days with Jack had given him a sense of how much wood was needed, and he finished the chore with enough time left to explore the valley before it got dark.

  He found the spring that fed water into the valley and found more ancient paintings on the cliff walls above the spring. The drawing of a segmented serpent caught his attention at the base of another faint trail a hundred yards ahead.

  He made his way up the trail and discovered a rock shelter halfway up the cliff wall, a shallow cave carved into sandstone by eons of wind and rain. Carvings of animals and stick figures of men covered the cliff wall at the entrance.

  Albert ducked his head and crawled into the shelter. The ceiling of the shelter had been blackened by fires in the far-distant past. Now, the only inhabitant of the cave was a brown snake coiled in the corner digesting something that had formed a lump halfway down its body.

  Albert sat at the mouth of the shelter for a long time, watching the light fade in the valley and wondering whether animals or men had made the drawings that surrounded him.

  12

  A Paradise Lost

  The smell of smoke broke into Albert’s thoughts, and he looked down to see TJ feeding branches into a small fire he had started. The snake had stretched itself out along the back wall of the cave and appeared to have gone to sleep.

  Albert quietly crawled out of the shelter and made his way down the cliff and across the valley to the fire. TJ had put the crayfish on a large, flat rock that he had slanted toward the fire, and was using the point of his clasp knife to move the ones closest to the flames when it looked like they were starting to burn.

  “I used to cook in a mining camp, but the job only lasted two days, so don’t expect much.” TJ picked up a smaller rock, put some crayfish on it, and passed it to Albert. “Remind me to steal some plates.”

  Albert ate slowly. He wasn’t very hungry after his morning hunt, but crayfish cooked or fresh were a welcome change from sardines.

  “Where was the mining camp?” he asked.

  TJ scraped the rest of the crayfish into one paw and put down the knife. He juggled the crayfish between paws for a moment to let them cool. “It was a placer claim near Coloma. First job I had after I found California.” He began eating the crayfish.

  “Did you have a hard time finding California?” Albert put down the rock and held his paws out toward the warmth of the campfire.

  “Not really. I just walked away into the forest, got lost for a while, walked through some trees, and there I was.”

  TJ finished his meal, walked over to the edge of the water hole, and washed the smell of crayfish from his paws. He came back to the fire and continued:

  “In the forest you always heard things about a place where things were a lot different, a place where animals got to shoot back. First time I heard the story, I said to myself, That’s the place for Terrance James Walcott. Stealing bird’s eggs and running from dogs might be good enough for other raccoons, but I wanted the big time, and by God, California was the place.”

  TJ reached in his sack and pulled out a pint bottle of whiskey. “Drink?”

  Albert shook his head.

  “You should have seen San Francisco, Albert. Gold coming in from the mines around the city, ships in the harbor, gambling and drinking started at noon. Every badger, weasel, and bunco artist from miles down the coast hung out there. Every night was Saturday, and shootings were a dime a dozen. It was a paradise, let me tell you.”

  TJ looked wistful and took a long pull on the bottle.

  Albert wasn’t sure what badgers, weasels, and bunco artists were, but he assumed they were animals that lived in California. San Francisco didn’t seem very paradise-like to him, but good or bad it was at least a world that was different from the one he had found when he left the zoo. If there were two places that were different from Adelaide, there were bound to be others—and if so, it was just a matter of walking far enough in the right direction until he found the one he wanted.

  “When I find paradise, I’m not leaving,” Albert said, thinking out loud.

  TJ put the cork back in the bottle. “You might, if one dark night a mob with flour sacks on their heads started chasing you down a wharf.”

  He put the bottle back in his sack and took out a small pot and one of the lead ingots. “Every once in a while virtue gets out of hand, even in San Francisco. One day you’re a customer, the next day you’re on a list of bad apples.” TJ put the ingot into the pot and placed the pot on the coals at the edge of the fire. “The local feather merchants stop watering their whiskey long enough to form a Vigilance Committee. They lynch a few creatures, just to show their wives that they believe in law a
nd order, and then go back to making money off sin and greed.”

  TJ took a small ladle out of the sack and put it in the pot with the lead. “I got caught up in the annual frenzy of piety, and if it hadn’t been for a strange ship at the end of that wharf, I would have ended up decorating a lamppost.”

  He was quiet for a while as he sat watching the lead melt into a bright silver puddle. When the lead was completely melted, TJ took a bullet mould out of the sack and began ladling the molten lead into it. Albert had watched Jack make bullets for his pepperbox pistol one evening, but TJ seemed more at home with the process.

  “I ran up the gangplank of that ship with the mob a hundred yards behind me. The second I got on board I pulled a pistol, hoping they would have to come at me one at a time. I turned to shoot the first one up the gangplank, when a bank of fog closed over the ship and the wharf disappeared. That scared the hell out of me, let me tell you.”

  When the mould was full, TJ set it by the fire, then took off the bandana from around his neck and spread it out in front of him. “I could hear paws running along the deck and hear the captain yell up to sailors in the rigging, but I couldn’t see a damned soul. Pretty soon I heard water running under the keel and knew we were under sail. Every so often I could see a faint image of some animal, but the image would fade as soon as I took a second look. I wandered around. I looked in the hold. I looked in the captain’s cabin. The whole ship was empty, and except for the voices and the shadows there was no sign of life, no water, no supplies, no nothing. The fog covered everything. I couldn’t see the sails, and I couldn’t see beyond the railings. I sat down with my back against the quarterdeck and put my pistol in my lap. I didn’t think the gun would have done much good, but it’s hard to shake the habit of a lifetime.

  “After a few hours, the ship became very quiet, and I couldn’t hear the voices anymore. I stayed awake as long as I could, but running from a mob and hunting ghosts had taken the starch out of me. I went to sleep, and when I woke up, here I was.”