by Tony Birch
I ducked behind the blackberry bushes and listened. Rita was moaning. I stuck my head up. She’d lifted her dress around her waist and seemed to be searching between her legs for something. She didn’t see me at all until I was standing next to her. Rita covered her face with a hand and was quick to duck her head, as if I was somebody who had come to hurt her, too. I called her name, quiet, so as not to frighten her. She might not have known who I was, but at least I wasn’t Laurie Wise.
‘I’m going to have a baby,’ she cried.
‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I seen pregnant bellies before. When will you be having your one?’
She moaned again and reached between her legs with her hand. ‘I think now.’
We both stared at her hand. It was covered in blood. She lifted it up to her face and the blood, pelted by rain, ran down her arm. It looked bad enough to frighten me.
‘You have to go to the hospital,’ I said. ‘If you want, I can ride my bike home and tell my nan to bring a doctor here.’
She moaned again and began to cry. ‘Oh, fuck. It’s going to come. Now.’
If a baby was going to come Rita had to get out of the rain and mud. I looked up at the trestle bridge. The only place close by was Harmless’s hut. ‘You’d better come with me.’
‘Where to?’
I held out my hand. ‘Away from here. Laurie could come back.’
Rita put her hand in mine. I helped her to stand. She leaned on me as we walked up to the bridge, getting belted by the weather, slipping in the mud. While it was slow going, at least her pain seemed to have stopped.
She looked at me closely as we crossed the bridge. ‘I know you. From school.’
‘You too,’ I smiled. ‘I know you.’
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Just along here. Out of the rain.’
‘But there’s nothing up here.’
We were on the narrow dirt track when she moaned again. She put both hands between her legs. Liquid ran down her thighs. It was the colour of milk.
‘Stop. I need to lay down,’ she said.
I could see smoke rising from the chimney of the shack. ‘We can’t stop. Not yet,’ I told her and yanked her by the arm. ‘Just a little further.’
I knocked at the door. Not too loud. When Harmless didn’t answer I knocked harder and called out to him. ‘Mr Harmless, we need your help.’
Rita put one arm below her stomach, rested her head in the other hand and leaned against the door with all her weight. It swung open so quickly she fell into the room. Harmless jumped up from his mattress. From a distance I’d always thought he must be an old man. Up close he looked much younger, almost a boy. His skin was unmarked and his brown eyes were as soft as my nan’s. He looked down at Rita and up at me, like I needed to provide him with an explanation.
‘She’s having a baby,’ was all I could say. ‘And I think it’s coming.’
He frowned. I thought that maybe he hadn’t understood what I’d said. But then he reached down, grabbed Rita by the arms and dragged her into the room, onto the mattress. The pot-belly stove pushed out its warmth. Harmless threw a blanket over Rita’s shivering body and stood back. He didn’t know what to do for her any more than I did. She screamed and swore and slapped her own thighs and kicked and even spat. I was so afraid I huddled in a corner, closed my eyes and covered my ears. A little while later I heard a cry and knew it couldn’t be Rita. I looked up and saw Harmless, kneeling at Rita’s feet, holding something in his arms. It wriggled and squirmed and was pink and bloody. It was a newborn baby.
Rita lay on her back. She was worn out by all the effort and couldn’t move. Harmless looked down at the baby.
‘Should I go and get someone?’ I asked him.
Harmless said nothing, as if he was under a spell.
I ran from the shack and back across the bridge to where I’d dumped my bike. I pedalled fast enough to burn the muscles in my legs, riding all the way to the hospital on the other side of town. I couldn’t speak when I got there, until a nurse was able to calm me down. I explained about Rita and Harmless and the baby.
It took a lot of effort for the ambulance men to cross the bridge on foot, carrying a stretcher, blankets and medicines. Harmless was sitting on the floor with the baby in his arms. A bloodied rope was attached to the baby’s stomach. Rita hadn’t moved from the mattress. One ambulance man examined her and the other one spoke quietly to Harmless. ‘I need you to carry the baby, in the blanket you have her wrapped in. We’ll take Mum on the stretcher and you will follow. Is that okay?’
Harmless closely watched the ambulance man and nodded his head as the rope was cut from the baby’s body.
At the hospital, Rita and the baby were taken away. A nurse asked me and Harmless to sit and wait on a bench while she telephoned the police. ‘I’m sure they will need to speak to you,’ she said. Harmless looked straight ahead and ignored her. I wanted to thank him for what he’d done but was too shy.
He tapped me on the knee. ‘You ride the black bicycle,’ he said, speaking slowly, almost stopping on each word. ‘I seen you following me.’
‘Sorry, I wanted to see where you lived,’ I answered. ‘I’m really sorry. My nan is always telling me not to be a snoop.’
The nurse came back to tell us that the police were only five minutes away.
‘Is there anything I can get you two?’ she asked. ‘A sandwich and a cup of tea?’
I couldn’t think of anything I needed. Harmless said nothing but watched her mouth closely as she spoke. When the nurse left, Harmless stood up. He smiled down at me and walked straight through the automatic doors and out of the hospital. If I didn’t have a nan at home who loved me, I’d have followed him.
The next day the police sergeant, Mick Potter, found his way to the cutter’s shack and knocked at the door. Harmless wasn’t around. The local paper decided to write a story on what had happened and the reporter wanted to interview Harmless and take his photograph. The reporter couldn’t find him either. The newspaper asked to interview me as well. I was excited by the idea of having my name and picture in the paper but Nan wouldn’t hear of it. She told me that no good could come from making a public spectacle of myself. She sat me down in the kitchen and told me about Harmless. He was deaf, had always been so, but could lip-read perfectly.
‘He’s got a gift,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Well, when he doesn’t want to listen to people all he has to do is turn away or close his eyes.’
Weeks later I saw Rita Collins walking along the street pushing her baby in a pram. I called out to her but she walked by as if I didn’t exist. It wasn’t long after that she was seen riding around in Laurie Wise’s van. She never said a word to the sergeant about Laurie punching her in the face. And she told nobody who the father of her baby was. I kept my mouth shut and said nothing either. It made no difference. The town knew, as it always did. Eventually Rita and Laurie got together. They got special permission to marry when she was sixteen. Laurie moved out to the farmhouse and worked for Rita’s father. She had another two babies, little more than a year apart. I saw her in town now and then, often wearing a faded black eye behind a decent caking of make-up.
The year of Rita’s twenty-first birthday Laurie was electrocuted by a fallen wire while driving a harvester along the highway. The electric company was at fault and paid Rita enough money for her to buy her own house in town and put herself through college. Whenever Nan saw her down the street after that she’d smile at me and say, ‘How lucky is that girl?’
Harmless was never seen in town again. To this day nobody knows where he got to. Months after he vanished I rode out to the shack and knocked politely at his door, which he wouldn’t have heard anyway on account of his deafness. I knew in my heart he’d not be home. I went inside and looked up at the faded picture of the Queen of
England. I turned the mattress over to hide Rita’s stain that had since turned brown. I picked up an old broom, swept the shack floor and loaded the pot-belly stove with kindling and paper. I lit the fire, sat down and waited for the room to warm.
DEATH STAR
Many years earlier the town fathers voted to commemorate the war dead of the district with an Avenue of Honour. A mournful sentry of ghost gums was planted stretching along both sides of the highway just south of the town. Each tree represented the life of a young soldier fallen in battle. The trees grew tall and healthy. No one at the time could have predicted they’d become the site for more young deaths, drawing speeding cars and the bodies of teenagers like moths to a deadly flame. Roadside memorials – hand-painted white crosses, photographs, stuffed toys and unopened bottles of whiskey and beer – accumulated over the years to mark the carnage.
At a bend on the highway, opposite the front gate of Telford’s dairy, sat the darkened trunk of one of the greatest of the memorial trees. Dominic Cross would often take the hour-long walk from home and place his open hand against the deep scar in the tree trunk, which still bled thick sap from a gaping wound more than a year after the accident that killed his older brother.
Patrick Cross left the highway sometime around dawn, behind the wheel of a reconditioned Torana XU1. The model was an original legendary ‘suicide machine’, equipped with an engine too powerful for the young car thieves who coveted them. Old Mr Telford, heading back to his farmhouse after morning milking, heard a car gunning along the highway off in the distance. As the engine drew closer the vibration of its deep roar rattled the line of wire ribboning the farm fence. The car hit the bend, left the black-iced bitumen and ascended into the morning mist in a moment of grace that defied the imminent tragedy. The car slammed into the tree, wrapped itself around the trunk and exploded into flames. Telford watched in horror as the car burned, blackening the tree trunk. He returned to the farmhouse and telephoned the police, and later that morning stood on his front verandah nursing a mug of tea, watching as the burnt and mangled body of the driver was cut from the wreck.
Dominic hid from the world on the day of his brother’s funeral. The night before, his mother had laid out a black suit, white shirt and polished shoes for him to wear. When he failed to answer the knock at his bedroom door the next morning, she opened it. Dominic had vanished, and the suit that she’d laid out for him on the empty bed opposite was still where she’d left it. She searched the house for her son but couldn’t locate him. The boy’s father went looking for him in the unruly back garden and lean-to garage along the side of the house without finding him. When Dominic was younger he’d often hidden in the garage, playing alone, inventing a world for himself from scraps of wood and lengths of irrigation pipe. Unknown to his parents, Dominic had climbed the back fence in the early hours of the morning and run along the dirt track following the creek bed out of town. He didn’t stop until he reached the fruit cannery where he and Pat had once spent their weekends, a pair of tricksters on BMX bikes, racing the length of the loading dock and leaping into thin air.
In the end his parents had no choice but to leave in the funeral car without him.
The news of Dominic’s disappearance did not go unnoticed at the wake, which was held at the local football club changing rooms. Jed Carter, one of the pallbearers, had ridden with Pat. He was a hot-wire specialist and could break into a car and turn the engine over within seconds. As the wake wound down Jed volunteered to a weary Mrs Cross to help find Dominic. He knew where to look. Jed had punished his own bike at the cannery yard when he was a kid and had helped the Cross brothers build a ramp off one end of the loading bay.
Jed left the football club, beer in hand, and walked out to the old factory. He found Dominic sitting on the loading dock dangling his feet over the edge. Hearing him approach, Dominic lay back on the rough concrete and looked up at the sky. Jed tried climbing onto the dock and fell backwards onto his arse. He was drunk.
‘Whoa,’ he laughed. ‘I’ve had it. Too many beers. What are you doing here, Dom? Your mum’s worrying herself sick over you. And your old man. Every beer he downs he’s talking more about the belting you’re going to get from him when you get in. Why didn’t you front for the service? We’re talking about your own brother here.’
Dominic rested his hands behind his head. ‘Because I didn’t want to.’
Jed hauled himself onto the dock, brushing the dirt from the knees of his cheap suit, and sat alongside Dominic. ‘Fair enough. My older brother, Frank, when he went, I never wanted to go to the funeral either. They made me, my folks. Wish I hadn’t.’
Dominic flipped over onto his stomach. ‘Why was that?’
‘We’ll, he’d been in the water for three days before they found him by dragging a long net downriver. Scooped him out like some rotten old king carp. Jesus, he was fucked. His face, and the rest of him. The yabbies had fed off him. They should have screwed the lid of the coffin down tight.’
Jed looked into the neck of his bottle of beer, took a drink and stared across the empty paddocks, to the sentry of trees on the highway swaying in the breeze.
‘My mother, I still can’t believe this, she had words with the priest and they decided to keep the coffin open. Trigg, from the funeral parlour, he did what he could to get Frank looking decent. He puttied the holes where he’d been eaten around the face. Even put lipstick on him. I remember that. Mum grabbed me by the arm and marched me to the altar, where the coffin was. Fuck me. I could hardly recognise him. I reckon she was trying to scare me, to stop me fucking around.’
‘Was my brother’s coffin open?’ Dominic asked.
‘Nah. Thank God. They say he was too …’
‘Burned up?’
‘Yeah. And more.’
Dominic didn’t appear upset about his brother’s death, but it was hard to know, Jed thought. Generations of Cross boys were known for their toughness.
Dominic sat up. ‘He was driving no bomb. And it wasn’t a local car. Where’d he get hold of an XU1?’
‘Out at the country club. It belonged to some tourist up for the golf and the pokies. Fucken golf. What a joke.’ Jed finished off his beer and hurled the bottle into the paddock.
‘I would’ve been in the car with him Sunday morning except my old man ordered me to drive out west with him in the truck on Saturday night. We were supposed to be onto a bull run, but we couldn’t find the bastard. We came home with one dud milking cow and a pair of goats. He slaughtered the goats in the yard Sunday arvo and fed the meat to the dogs.’
‘What did he do with the cow, if it’s not milking?’
‘He’s taken a shine to it. Says we’ll keep it.’
‘You and Pat been racing or selling?’
‘Both. It depended if an order came in. A high-end motor’s worth a lot more in cash than drag racing some yahoo fuckwit out at the fire road.’
‘Who were you selling to?’
Jed was desperate for another drink. ‘Walk down to the bottleshop with me and I’ll tell you about it.’
Jed bought a bottle of whiskey, staggered across to the playground opposite the bottleshop and squeezed himself into a kiddies swing. He unscrewed the bottle and threw the cap at a rusted sign: Tidy Town – 1978.
‘You know George Barron who runs the scrap yard?’
‘Sure. He ran stock cars at the drag track for years. Dad used to take us out there on Saturday nights.’
Jed took a long swig from the whiskey bottle, a desperate man dying of thirst.
‘About six months back we were out at the yard, Pat and me, chasing a steering wheel for my Commodore. I could hardly believe it when we found one. We pulled it out with the tools, walked over to George’s hut by the gate and I asked, “How much for this?” He said nothing for a minute. I thought the cunt had gone deaf and asked him again. He winked at me and said, “Be patient, son, I’m thinking
.” Another couple of minutes went by and he said we could have the steering wheel for free, plus any other spare parts we wanted off the wreck. It was a good deal, but there was a catch.’
‘What was it?’
‘He said he wanted us to lift an Audi for him. “Like fuck,” I told him. There’s nobody in this town who drives an Audi. “It’s a city car,” I said.’
Jed took another drink from the bottle and swung back and forth on the swing.
‘Shifty old George was about twenty steps ahead of us. He told us some fella had been coming up to the country club from Melbourne most weekends for a wrestle in the cot with some woman he was having it off with. “He drives a beautiful midnight blue Audi,” George said. “You get me that car and we’re in business, boys.” The information on the car checked out. Around three the next Sunday morning me and Pat were watching the car from the rise above the car park. It was dead quiet except for a couple of drunks rolling out of the pokies. We waited until they were gone. All we had to do was stroll down to the car park and take it. We were out of there in three minutes, and back at George’s in ten.’
‘Why would George Barron want you to steal a flash car like an Audi, and strip it down for spare parts?’
‘That’s not how it works. George moves the cars to the city in shipping containers, working with a syndicate down there. The night we drove in with the Audi, Pat told him to stick the spare parts deal he’d offered. He asked for a thousand each. George didn’t blink. He paid us in cash that night. We’ve been dealing with him ever since. And three weeks ago we hit the jackpot. A two-door Mercedes. Close to new. You should have seen George’s face when we drove it into the yard. Looked like he was about to drop his pants and pull himself.’