by Tanya Moir
Winstone hadn’t, except maybe with Bodun back in the day, but he’d seen quite a few and although this didn’t feel like the same thing at all it was true that guys saw each other’s dicks all the time and maybe the weird feeling was having a mate and if he’d had them before he’d have done this for years and be used to it by now. He bit the inside of his lower lip but he didn’t move his hand.
I tell you what, Zane said, how about I go first.
Winstone wasn’t looking at Zane but it sounded like he was smiling. Winstone’s tongue didn’t want to move either, it was stuck to the back of his teeth, so he just nodded a bit, his chin tucking into his chest, his neck shrinking into his shoulders. He wondered what the rules were, when he should look and how much, and he heard and felt more than saw Zane’s hands move and unzip the front of his trousers. Then he did look, and he got quite a shock and suddenly all the stuff people said about woodies and boners made sense because there it was, Zane’s dick, not floppy but standing straight up, and Winstone had thought Bodun’s was getting big but this was massive. He couldn’t look away.
You want to touch it?
Winstone kind of did, just to see if it was as hard as it looked, though not with his fingers.
Here, Zane said, it’s okay, and he showed him how to move his hand and it was just as well really that Winstone had asked because it turned out he’d been doing it all wrong. It still didn’t work that well, though, when he tried it on himself and Zane won the contest easily but he said, Don’t worry, mate, it’s practice that’s all, and when Winstone went off for his shower Zane said he could do with one too and they hit the bathroom together like the All Blacks.
Zane helped Winstone get clean and dry and they sat back on the couch and had ice cream and watched Winchester ’73 which was all about the best gun in the world and then Zane took Winstone home.
Walking the last of the way down Boundary Road Winstone thought about the soldier who only got to say one thing in the film, that he didn’t like yellow hair and his wife’s hair was brown, brown with red bits in it, and then he was dead and he never saw his wife’s hair again no matter what colour it was.
While he was getting out of the car, Zane had said, You know mate if anything ever, and then stopped, looking down the road towards Winstone’s house even though you couldn’t see it from there. If you ever need me I’m here. Just call and I’ll come get you. Winstone just nodded and opened the door like he didn’t understand what Zane meant, but he did, and the time Bic used the jug cord to whack him and the plug went all the way in came to mind, and he wondered what Zane would have done about it.
There was nobody home at his house, not even Marlene, and nothing to eat in the fridge but that was okay because Winstone was hardly hungry. He left the lights off in case he used up all the power again and sat on the floor in the lounge and turned on the TV. There wasn’t much on, just old-people stuff, and the house was cold and he thought about calling Zane and he might have done if they had a phone.
He watched a show about cops and tracker dogs and then the one Bodun liked where girls in bikinis got sweaty and dirty and were made to do all kinds of weird stuff, whatever the show could think up, and the girls cried and screamed but they did it anyway, no matter how gross it was. They couldn’t say no because it was TV. It was called a reality show but Bodun said that was shit and not even the tits were real. He wanted to see them, though, those fake tits. That’s why he watched the show every week, waiting for a big fake tit to fall out. So far none had, and they didn’t tonight, not that Winstone saw, though he might have missed it because next thing he knew there were car headlights sliding over the walls and the clink of bottles outside and a show he didn’t know on the screen and Bodun kicked his foot and said, Hey shithead wake up, we got you a quarter pack.
Bodun dropped the paper bag on the floor beside Winstone and flicked on the lights and then Marlene trotted in yawning and covered in fried chicken grease and holding an empty bucket of KFC like it was a prize. She sat down beside him and she was excited because she’d been all the way to Dunedin and when Bodun wasn’t looking Winstone let her have one of his fries.
Then a woman Winstone had never seen before walked in and said Hi! like she’d been waiting to do it all day and Bic was right behind her. Bic didn’t say anything because he had a rollie in his mouth and a six-pack of something pink in one hand and a twelve-pack of stubbies under the other arm and he was watching the woman’s arse, which was hard to miss. Winstone stared at it too.
What’s your name? the woman said, slow and bright and loud, like Winstone was retarded.
His mouth was full but he caught Bic’s look and said his name fast and a bit of chicken fell out and the woman smiled. She smiled a lot and her smile was almost as big as her arse and she laughed a lot too and Winstone wondered what she had to be so happy about and he figured it wasn’t going to last much longer.
Bic put the drinks down and took the rollie out of his mouth and said finish your chicken and go to bed and Winstone did as fast as he could. Sure enough, the banging and moaning started up pretty soon after that and it was coming under the doors and through the walls from Bic’s room to Marlene’s to his and filling up the whole house and Winstone heard Bodun swear and his bed creak but it was too dark in their room to see what he was doing.
Winstone got up and went into Marlene’s room and he found her down in the smelly centre of her bed under all the covers. He got her out and she held his hand down the hall and climbed into his bed and he lay between her and the wall and she pushed her bony back and bum into him as hard as she could and put her hands over her ears. Winstone put his hands over the top of hers and held her like that until the banging stopped and she went to sleep and then he did too. Later there were car headlights again and the chug of the Commodore’s motor pulling away and Marlene got up and he checked and his bed wasn’t wet but it did smell a lot of KFC.
WEST
THEY WERE FLYING, the Kid and Cooper, along a pale road, tearing up the dark, and the moon was on their hats and the shadows fled and tumbled under their horses’ hooves and the hooves beat the night like rain on a tarp, like shower jets on glass. They rode, and the range grew wide around them, and the road ahead was empty and they were alone.
The range grew wider yet, and the road ran on until it slipped off the edge of the world and there, small and red, at the very brink, a fire burned beside it.
Closer, someone stirred the fire and the sparks swarmed orange and gold and the embers blushed and crumbled. Beyond the fire there was a blanket and under the blanket there was a girl with yellow hair, long yellow hair spilling into the grass, yellow hair with red in it, and it was everywhere yellow and red and thick, red and yellow, and Winstone woke up and the camera rolled back to where it belonged, tracking Cooper and the Kid as they raced the night on a white dust road.
We’re close, the Kid said, we aint never been this close, but the palomino was walking now and his neck was low and his hooves were heavy. No one could run for three days and three nights, not even the grey, and up ahead his foot buckled over a stone and Cooper said, Whoa easy now, and reined in. I’m sorry Kid. We got to rest these horses.
We’ll lose em, the Kid said. They’ll be through the pass.
We got to rest.
We’ll be too late.
We’ll find em, Coop said. Trust me.
Yesterday’s sausages were all gone. The vanilla rice too. Just two dark greasy stains on the rock outside the cave. Winstone hoped the kitten had got them. He imagined it tucked up in the rocks somewhere, its stripy belly stretched and fat, warm in its fur and sleeping soundly. It was cold this morning, a new kind of cold he’d felt on his cheeks, in the tip of his nose, as soon as he woke up enough to feel anything, cold enough to put his khaki fleece on and climb through the grey to the top of the gully to get warm and when he did he saw why.
There was snow on the backs of the mountains beyond the range to the west, not the usual patches but a t
hick cover glowing peachy yellow and pink above the shadows of ranges and valleys soft as smoke. The backs of the mountains, because Winstone had been in front of them once and there was a lake with a steamer and a wharf and an old hotel where cowboys from Califor-ni-AY stayed in the Gold Rush. Winstone had sat on the wharf watching the steamer come in and he’d looked at the old hotel with its name carved into the stone and Todd Jackson had taught him how to say it right which wasn’t how it looked at all. I-carts, Todd had said, like pie carts, and Todd laughed and Winstone didn’t know what a pie cart was but he said it like that anyway and he laughed too and the steamer took a long time to come and he looked at all those stealthy letters that made no sound until he could see them with his eyes shut. EICHARDT’S. It was German.
That had been a long time ago. He was behind the mountains now, at the back of beyond, and Todd wasn’t laughing any more. He wouldn’t show Winstone anything ever again, leastways nothing that Winstone wanted to see, and the last time he saw Todd was the kind of mean and maggoty thought that would eat you out and buzz in your bones if it got inside and he could feel it coming for him, crawling up the white dust road in the driver’s seat of Todd’s Pajero.
Winstone turned around and went back down to the cave and found the tin of All Day Breakfast he’d been saving and heated it up and sat in the shadowed gully and ate and waited for the world to get a little lighter.
IT’S NO GOOD, the Kid said with his ear to the ground in the grey breaking dawn. They’re too far ahead. We’ll never make it.
You wanna give up?
No, the Kid said, and it was a lie and Coop knew it, the whole wide waking world knew it, even the buzzards up in the sky. But what do we do Coop?
Only thing we can do Kid.
And so Cooper and the Kid saddled up and rode, rode the cold trail west, away from the rising sun and into their own shadow. They had their faces to the tattering dark and the country ahead was the colour of ash and the road ran through it and out of sight and if they should ever reach its end the Kid didn’t know where they’d be and all Coop ever could or would say about it was that they’d be on the other side.
But behind them the sun was coming up and lighting the grass and pretty soon it would be on their shoulders. The Kid watched the range grow sharp and gold and the sky turn blue and the sun warmed his back and the palomino shook the cold from his mane and stepped a little higher. The range ran forever and it was empty and free and theirs for the riding and as long and wide as it ran there was no need to stop or turn back or get anywhere because there was no place better than this and not everything had to …
Winstone froze, a chunk of All Day Breakfast sausage between his teeth. The kitten. It was creeping over the rocks, a cartoon cat, placing each paw with exaggerated care, watching him as it wound its way up and over and through to the vanilla rice stain and when it got there it sank, ears back, a pressed spring, and began to lick the stone.
Slowly, Winstone took the sausage out of his mouth and the kitten’s ears pressed even tighter to its head and its stripy tail batted side to side on the rock like a rattlesnake someone was trying to kill but the kitten stayed where it was and very gently, with just his fingers and wrist, Winstone threw the sausage onto the ground between them.
The kitten exploded out of the rocks as if the sausage had been a grenade and Winstone stared at the empty air and chewed and he half expected to see some bits of fur come down. When they didn’t, he got on with his breakfast, and he was picking the last bit of bacon out of the beans when the kitten came back, through the grass this time, stalking that Wattie’s canned sausage like it was a gazelle on the Serengeti.
The kitten snatched up the sausage and then it didn’t know what to do first, run or chew, and it glared at Winstone and hissed like it was all his fault it was in such a difficult situation. In the end, it scuttled backwards a bit and dropped the sausage and licked it and turned it about and then ripped into it with its kitten teeth and bolted it down.
Winstone threw a bit of potato next because those weren’t as good as they sounded. The kitten seemed pretty keen on it though, so he threw it another chunk and this time he didn’t throw it as far. The kitten didn’t like that one little bit, you could tell, but it wanted that potato bad and so it had to come closer.
The kitten was right to be nervous. It was on the run too. Wanted, just dead. People were probably hunting it now, laying traps and poison. Its kind had no right of their own to a place in the world, all they did was hurt good things, lizards and birds, the things people cared about, and sometimes they enjoyed it. That’s why people wanted to destroy feral cats. ANNIHILATE them, which was another word Winstone had learned how to spell in Glentrool after Tom Barker threatened to do it to him and he’d found it in Todd’s dictionary, waiting for him between ANNEX and ANNIVERSARY, a long cold word, a line of traps around a silence.
Winstone fed the kitten all the potato and himself all the beans and by the time they were finished the kitten was really quite close. Then there was no more food and the kitten ran away but not as fast, and that afternoon when Winstone broke into the hut with the sliding door, as well as caramel condensed milk and a bottle of Coke he stole a tin of cat food.
EAST
Winstone could remember the first time he slept over at Zane’s. It was right after he got his phone.
Hey there mate, Zane said when Winstone walked through the door after school, I’ve got something for you, and he threw Winstone a box.
The box was covered in light blue paper with cowboys on, long tumbling lines of cowboys in hats and chaps and boots and spurs and they were rearing and roping and galloping on brown and white and red horses. Winstone turned it around.
Go on, Zane said, you can open it now.
He’d probably been given wrapped-up stuff before, he must have been, those years when his mum lived at home, but right then Winstone couldn’t remember when or what and although he fully intended to get to what was inside the cowboy box he wasn’t in any hurry. He found a bit of tape and picked at the end of it with his scraggy fingernail and as it lifted some cowboy came too and so he pressed it back down and tried again at the other corner.
Just rip it, Zane said, but there was no way Winstone was going to do that. He wanted the paper all in one piece and so he skinned that box as patient and slow as Bodun with a possum. It was only after he’d got the whole thing off and folded it up and put it away in his bag that he really started to think about the kind of box it was and what it must have inside it.
It’s a phone, Zane said. For emergencies. You can keep it in your pocket.
Winstone took it out of the box and held it in his hand. It was tiny and shiny metallic red and he didn’t care one bit that he’d never heard of the kind of phone it was.
I got you the smallest one I could find, Zane said, and Winstone thought of Zane looking for it, going to all the phone places, for him. Nobody will even know you’ve got it, Zane said. It’s a secret phone.
Winstone picked the charger up and wondered how he could hide it from Bodun and Bic and what effect it would have on the PrePower card but Zane said, You can keep that here if you want. Charge it up when you come over. It’s got a long battery life anyway, it should be good for at least a week.
A week was a long time not to be at Zane’s. Thinking about all those days made Winstone feel a bit sick.
For emergencies, he said. Like what?
Well not just emergencies, Zane said. You can use it for whatever you want. Like if you want to call me.
Winstone tried to imagine himself calling Zane and he wondered what he’d say.
Like, Zane said, if you felt like coming round sometime and your dad wasn’t home, you could send me a text and I could come and get you. Meet you up the road.
Winstone had to check the rules. When can I call you?
Any time, mate. Zane’s voice went all soft. Day or night. Any time you’re lonely.
Back home, Winstone stuck the blue cowboy p
aper up on the wall beside his bed and when Bodun came in and said where the fuck did that come from he said he’d got it at school and Bodun said it was the gayest thing he ever saw.
Then Bodun went out again and Winstone heard him turn on the TV and he had no idea about the secret red phone in Winstone’s pocket. Winstone stayed where he was, lying on his back on the bed looking up at the cowboys on his wall and wondering what it would feel like to sit on a horse and what sort of things the cowboys did when they got down, what they said, and whether they were all mates back at the ranch or if maybe a couple of them liked each other more than the rest and Zane texted to make sure he’d got home okay and Winstone got down under the covers so no one could see and he texted back yes. Then Zane texted good, and Winstone texted he wished he had a horse and Zane texted that he did too and it felt much more like being friends than Facebook, which was pretty useless actually since Winstone could only log on when he was at Zane’s and then Zane was there and he already knew his status.
It was pretty much dark when Bic got home. Winstone heard him come in and yell at Marlene for not doing the dishes and eating the last of the bread and he put the phone away and pulled the covers in tight and felt something that was maybe the Aunt Betty’s double chocolate pudding he’d had at Zane’s try to push up his throat but from the sound of things Marlene only got a slap on the legs and she hardly even cried. He could barely see the cowboys by now, but he knew how they looked, the colours of their scarves that were called bandanas and also their horses and hats, and he closed his eyes and made the shape of each one on the back of his eyelids.
When he woke up it was properly dark and all he could hear was the wind in the hedge and he looked across and the window was up and Bodun’s bed was empty. Above his head, the cowboy paper was rustling in the draught, and he thought of all the places it would be nicer to be, Utah or Mexico or Christchurch, or just there, by himself, in the blue. He wondered how much night there was left and he checked on his phone and it was only eleven o’clock and there was a message from Zane saying are you in bed and sleep well.