Stonedogs

by Craig Marriner

  The route is soon identified, cleared of dead foliage, and I ease The ’Dan from the gravel, across a shallow ditch, into green shadow, her wheels cushioned by old pine needles. Barry and Mick re-camouflage the path behind me, dusting away tyre tracks. Steve walks ahead, clearing all obstacles.

  A hundred-odd metres down this passageway we find the route blocked by a thick line of native undergrowth, behind which the sun can be seen beating. Steve waves me to a halt.

  On foot, pushing through the bush, we pop from shadow to the grassed banks of a lively river — the Takahera, Steve’s map informs us — the ridge looming behind it, both running due east.

  The bank on which we stand is a good three metres above the water, a rough path of sorts dropping steeply down.

  Morning sun paints the scene so vividly idyllic that for an instant my heart leaps clear of the stress miring it.

  In a thrumming of feathers, a fantail stops on a branch near my head, its cocked eye assessing me. We swap stares for seconds, but its message is far too wise. Effortless, it leaps to a perch several feet away, leaps to another, then another, stopping suddenly, more balletic than history’s gold medallists combined. Then, without prelude, the ‘dumb animal’ throws back its head and lets rip a symphony to shame Chopin … just because it can.

  Mick and Barry join us and the bird takes its talents elsewhere.

  Against the harsh light Mick has swapped his specs for prescription sharkies, and the dude’s looking pretty damn smooth, it must be said.

  Barry, beaming: ‘Ahhhh, the Great Outdoors. Magnificent backdrop to a drugs swindle, don’t ya’s reckon? To any kind of swindle, really. Where’s this draft dodger fella, then?’

  Steve gathers us around the map. ‘First we ’ead downstream ’bout ’alf a k, till we come to a big boulder on the lip of the far bank. Woodstock reckons we can’t miss it. Then we cross the river.’

  Which doesn’t look to be a problem. Though brisk, the river is rocky, shingly, and at its yearly low-point; the main flow, in parts, eating channels through beds of sand. From where we stand, fords appear in excess.

  Mick, scanning the clear sky: ‘I wonder how quick this fucker floods in rain. Did ya’s get a forecast during the night? How’s that storm of Bum’s looking?’

  Me: ‘We got a few forecasts, and yeah, it won’t arrive till sometime after midnight. We’ll be safely back in the Smoke by then.’

  I wonder if my assurance rings as hollow to their ears as it does to mine.

  Steve: ‘It’s a good thing, tu, ’cause Woodstock reckons the river drains the ridge faw miles t’ the west; floods real quick in good rain. Anyway, we cross the river at the boulder, then bush-bash up the ridge faw a bit.’

  Barry: ‘That looks easier said than done, bro. That’s pretty thick, steep terrain.’

  Steve: ‘Yeah, but apparently the bottom section of the ridge ain’t as steep downstream as it is ’ere. And we’ll only ’af t’ trailblaze a short way befaw we hit Woostock’s path.’

  Mick: ‘There’s a path up that?’

  Steve: ‘Yeah. Woodstock blazed it ’imself, wif a shovel and light chainsaw. ’E reckons it’s rough, but OK. ’E wanted it t’ be impossible for sumone t’ find by chance, and invisible from tha air, so a lot of it’s just rope hand-’olds nailed t’ tree trunks.’

  Me: ‘Where’s he growing, then? On the far side of the ridge?’

  ‘On the far side of the next ridge. But ’e reckons the drop between them’s only small: once we’re up that fucker in front of us the hard yakka’s done.’

  Barry: ‘There’s no roads on the far side, then?’

  Steve: ‘According t’ the map, there’s no nothin’ on the far side. Nothin’ but bush and streams.’

  Mick: ‘So the lower part of this ridge is climbable. What about the upper? From here it looks like cliff-face, or near enough, all the way along.’

  Steve, pointing: ‘It is. But look along the top of the ridgeline. Yu see that low point, between the two spurs?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Woodstock reckons a deep, narrow cleft splits the rock in the middle there. Trees all over it, hide it from tha air tu, but he says ’is track’ll take us up to it, and then through, inta the next valley.’

  Barry: ‘Legendary.’

  For minutes no one speaks, eyes canvassing the ridge for something to do. Mick and I share a gasper in silence.

  Steve, at last: ‘What say we get our shit together, then, boys?’

  Barry: ‘Amen to that.’

  Sunday, 12 March, 10.51am

  If he lived to be a hundred, Wallace would remember this summer.

  Vividly.

  Summer is his favourite time of year. Normally. A time of long, sunny piss-ups, the lads chipping in for kegs, tapping them at ten in the morning in someone’s back yard. Sluts getting pissed faster than usual in the heat, even putting out for a prospect if he played it right. Pissing it up through to sundown, then hitting the town. Lording it through garden bars, loitering outside when the bouncers had finally had enough — if they had the balls to do anything — or if one of the patches wouldn’t remove it to conform with house rules. Perving and whistling at the ballhead chicks in their tiny outfits. Unloading on their boyfriends whenever the chance arose. Congregating round wagons in the carpark, pissing it up in public, the pigs too chicken-shit to stop them.

  Out to the lake on other days, swimming and drinking by day, crashing beach parties by night, even the tough fullas backing off, because they knew who it was Wallace would phone otherwise. The bitches, especially the out-of-towners, buzzing to these shows of strength, thinking it his personal rep meriting all that instant respect.

  Haha. Got maw than one fuck like that, bro, I can tell yu.

  Out the bush at least twice a week, hunting for plantations. Ripping some good ones, too. Sometimes asked along by patches to help on planting ops. Setting up some wicked booby traps, with nails and spring and stuff, even an old rifle once.

  ’Ard case if a hunter, or a bush-walker, come along. Dumb fucks’d think they found a crop’a tomatoes in the middla nowhere … then wham! Goodnight bawl’ead!

  Then this summer had neared, one that promised to be even more gratifying, given the muscles Wallace had packed onto his lanky frame through hard winter training. Got me some choice tats t’ go wif ’em, too. The chicks were gonna be all over him; the guys even warier. But just as the weather began heating up, the female finery growing scantier, along came Hemi and his ‘proposition’.

  Wallace had nodded his usual sycophancy. ‘Yeah choice, boss. Yu noe I’m yaw man fru thick and thin. ’Ow long yu want me ta stay up there? Pardon? April? Ahhhh … na, course I ain’t gota problem wif that! When we leaving? Pardon? Welllll … it’s just that … nananana, you can rely on me, boss!’

  Four fuckin’ months! Wallace’s inner voice had hollered, while his head smiled and bobbed.

  Four months of sleeping on a bedroll in a leaky bivouac. Near half a year of dried food from packets, tinned shit, powdered milk, stale biscuits. Twenty-odd weeks of no hot water. A hundred and twenty days of shitting in the woods like a fuckin’ animal. Three thousand hours without TV, without even seeing a chick, let alone rooting one. Four months of the most excruciating boredom imaginable, nothing to do but get stoned and patrol the plot, shotgun in hand — the mystique of this having expired after about a minute of it — half-heartedly awaiting raiders who simply weren’t going to find such a godforsaken location.

  Looking back, comparatively, the few days Wallace had spent with Hemi hauling supplies and fertiliser up that hideous ridge fronting the pine forest had actually been stimulating, engrossing. Though he’d cursed beneath his breath whenever Hemi moved beyond earshot, right now Wallace would trade his left nut for a job necessitating the two-hour hike back to Takahera.

  U’d’ve believed it? Wallace Haimona, beaten to a state where taking a journey fru the bush just faw the hell of it begins to sound like fun!

  Such diversion
is beyond question, though: Hemi has forbidden Wallace to stray near this approximation of civilisation. And in the chief’s absence, his decrees are enforced by that fuckin’, old, ugly, nerdy, four eyes, grey-beard, arsehole, cunt-face ballhead whose guts Wallace would swap his remaining nut for permission to rearrange by buckshot.

  Naturally, in immediate terms, the ballhead is incapable of compelling anything from Wallace. But Wallace ain’t no fool: he can see through the ballhead’s apathy as though it were glass; see through to the mental dossier the man is in the process of amassing, detailing Wallace’s wrongs, to be handed dutifully to Hemi as soon as the big man appears for harvest.

  Of course, there are acres of forest all around which Hemi hasn’t proclaimed off limits. The ballhead even purports his indifference toward Wallace spending whole days away from guard roster. But aside from the slope on which the plants grow — an area Wallace now knows like the head of his penis — the bush surrounding their campsite is just as thick as it is anywhere around this shit-hole, and picking a path through its trackless expanse soon frustrates Wallace to anger.

  At first, fishing rod in hand, Wallace had entertained images of the mammoth trout he’d spend four months pulling from the stream along the centre of their low valley. The ballhead certainly manages to land them with frequency. But following a single afternoon of fishing — the arsehole ballhead taking the piss with his smart-arse advice — it became clear to Wallace that fishing in that stream was a waste of fuckin’ time, and the only reason the ballhead enjoyed success was his long experience of the place, knowing exactly where to put his casts; sniggeringly withholding this lore from Wallace.

  And to make matters worse, the bastard won’t allow Wallace to entertain and feed himself by hunting either, claiming — when Wallace had first discharged his weapon hours after Hemi’s final departure — the sound would carry for miles in all directions.

  As if! It’s only a fuckin’ shotie, not a atom bomb! Jus’ ’cause ’e’s such a weird cunt ’e can stay entertained reading those stupid, wasta time, fuckin’ booksa his.

  On that day the ballhead had been some distance from Wallace, but was able to voice his censure immediately through the walkie talkies Hemi had equipped them with.

  Now, as Wallace relaxes in a fern clump, shotgun at his side, constructing his third joint of the morning — At least while I’ve bin out ’ere, I’ve ’ad free access to the best fuckin’ gunga I’m eva likely to come across — Wallace’s radio crackles to aggravating life.

  Curt: ‘Lunch.’

  Seething, Wallace shakes his head with grim promise. I’ll teach that old cunt sum manners one’a these days, just fuckin’ see if I don’t.

  In many ways what Wallace resents most about his exile is having no one but the ballhead to share it with.

  At first Wallace had made an effort with the guy. But it soon became clear that all the blow-arse cunt ever talked about were the many countries he’d visited in his travelling days; all the ‘fascinating’ people he’d spent time with; the ‘experiences’ and ‘humility’ he’d gathered from ‘immersing himself in alternative cultures’.

  I mean, ’u gives a fuckin’ shit?

  And if he wasn’t bullshitting about his ‘adventures’, the ballhead was going on like a fuckin’ priest, or a social worker or something, babbling about ‘our true place in the world’, and ‘the suffering of indigenous peoples under imperialism’, and ‘the methods by which man and nature could share the world harmoniously’.

  ‘’U the fuck wants t’ yak ’bout crap like that when they stoned and sittin’ round a campfire?

  Yet, though he’d shut his mouth for minutes at a time, let the ballhead jabber, when it came Wallace’s turn to speak, tell about that fuckin’ huuuuge brawl they’d had with the Black Power down Matata that time, or joke about all the ballhead chicks Wallace spent his summers fucking out at the lake, the jealous old cunt’d just sit there, staring into the fire, not even asking questions!

  Then there was the way the ballhead had tried to turn Wallace into the camp maid, asking him if he’d wash the breakfast dishes while he took water up to the plants, checked on their ‘levels’ or some bullshit, lugging his pack and tools and crap around as if he was King Shit of the whole operation.

  The fuckin’ cheek’a the cunt!

  He’d even tried to get Wallace to do some of the cooking!

  Whad’u I look like, a bitch or sumthing?

  Wallace had said: ‘In yaw fuckin’ dreams, beau. Yu the maid and gardna round ’ere. That’s the reason yu on board. Me, I’m just the muscle. I’m ’ere t’ protect the place, not do the fuckin’ chores. My job’s t’ kill any cunt ’u comes wifin a mile’a Hemi’s plants, or die fuckin’ trying. I’ve got that well covered: now yu just get on wif yaw job a runnin’ this place.’

  Now, though, things have degenerated to the level where the fuckin’ disrespectful arsehole simply refuses to wash Wallace’s dishes any more, letting them pile up, keeping his own locked in his pack, so that Wallace finds himself eating off dirty plates like a fuckin’ bum, or a refugee, or something. And it’s only Wallace’s threats to raid the foodstores, break their rationing, that ensures the ballhead continues even to cook for him.

  Not that the meals he prepares are much to write home about. ’Ardly feed a fuckin’ sparrow. With his winter spent weight training, and the chin-ups and push-ups and crunches Wallace now does every day in an effort to retain his hard-earned gains, he needs to maintain a large food intake or his muscle is going to fade away. But, just to spite him, the ballhead had imposed a strict regimen of rationing on them both, claiming their food wouldn’t last the distance otherwise, utterly ignoring Wallace’s demands that his meals grow in magnitude. ‘If you needed extra food,’ the ballhead takes pleasure in parroting, ‘you should have carried it in with you when you had the chance, taken charge of your own diet.’ Oh, yeah, right, cunt, and ’ow was I t’ noe I wooden be ’llowed t’ shoot birds and shit out here? Or that the stream wooden ’ardly ’ave fuck all fish in it?

  Yes, things have gotten well out of hand, the ballhead never mentioning, but always, with his smiles and eyebrows, alluding to the invulnerability he enjoys as Hemi’s bitch.

  Lunch, eh? Wallace lumbers to his feet, opting to smoke his joint while he walks back upstream toward their campsite.

  His belly grumbles cavernously.

  The breakfast the ballhead had prepared for Wallace this morning had been meagre even by his standards. Over the ‘meal’ the ballhead had informed Wallace of his intention to march to the top of the valley’s southerly ridge, spending the morning staking the plants up there. ‘About four hours’ work,’ he had claimed. Which, by Wallace’s calculations, left the man returning to camp around five minutes ago. Bitch can’t ’ave ’ad time t’ prepare much of a lunch, ’less he come back early. Beda not be just biscuits an’ tea again, like tha uva day.

  In fact, the ballhead had radioed Wallace twice over the morning, originally to enquire whether Wallace had heard the gunshot issuing from further down the valley — Wallace hadn’t, the ballhead believing this to be because sound carried to the heights far better. He had asked Wallace to stand a watch down there. His second, later call was more in keeping with the schoolmasterishness Wallace had come to expect of the ballhead, checking that Wallace was indeed at the said location.

  In any case, raiders hadn’t materialised, and Wallace is looking forward immensely to taunting the ballhead with his delusions.

  The foliage enclosing the valley’s stream is less thick here than in adjacent areas, and through much use a path of sorts has evolved, leaving Wallace able to make reasonable progress back upstream toward base camp. Had he been willing to get his boots wet, crossing to the southern bank, Wallace might have enjoyed even swifter headway, because along a stretch of some 500 metres much of the southerly slope of the valley — rising perhaps sixty metres above the stream — is composed only of scattered manuka and flax, leaving it dotted in hundr
eds of tiny clearings.

  It was these the ballhead had chosen as homes for the seedlings he grew from Hemi’s seeds, individuals transplanted at distance, often as much as thirty metres between specimens. With solar calculations and pruning equipment, the ballhead had maximised the hours of sunlight each plant might receive, while reconciling this with the need to camouflage them from aerial observation. In addition, given that the plants are scattered across a slope sixty metres high and 500 long, the telltale storm of lush greenery overhead observers are accustomed to searching for is nowhere in evidence.

  Wallace has to admit, he’s seen some plantations in his time, but this — it’s specious inaccessibility, its insidious outlay — is an operation of a slickness he could never have dreamed.

  Within ten minutes Wallace reaches the space fronting their bivouac which, in good weather, serves as a kitchen/dining room/front yard. The stream burbles nearby, thick foliage close overhead, blocking the sun, providing the ballhead with the camouflage under which he insists all signs of humanity must shelter.

  The bivouac itself is a stout affair — has to be, given that it doubles as a storage shed. With one wall comprising a sheer earthen bank, the shelter’s rear tapers inward, toward the blockage of a wide treetrunk. The second wall is of crude posts, along the top of which a beam has been laid horizontally, providing rest to smaller roof-supports. Dark tarpaulins were then lashed across the surface of the dwelling, one descending as a door across the three-metre structure’s open frontage. Drainage ditches, earthen guttering, sluice away all flooding.

  Kneeling before the cook-fire, stirring at a pot, the ballhead barely glances up through his spectacles as Wallace tromps into the small clearing, shotgun absently clasped in one hand. The ballhead, Wallace fancies, is what Jesus might have looked like had he been able to stomach his flock a decade or so longer. Though Jesus would surely have taken more care over his grooming, at least removing the twigs and leaves from his beard once in a while.