by Tanya Moir
Then the stores stopped and the houses began and he turned his head and there she was. The girl. Her brown hair all fixed up with a ribbon in it. She was sitting at the piano in a lit-up front room with a fire in the hearth and flowers on the mantel. The Kid watched her fingers move over the keys and then she straightened her back and opened her lips and the Kid crossed the empty street to get close because the most important thing in the world right then was to know what she was singing.
He would have given it back anyway. Of course he would. Even if he’d taken Alicia’s iPad there’d have been no point in him keeping it because what use was an iPad when you lived in a cave. He’d just wanted to play Angry Birds till the battery ran out, that was all.
Winstone loosened his grip on the top of the sleeping bag and brought his face up for air. They’d have had nothing on him anyway. He was going to borrow it, not steal it.
He sucked the side of his finger where he’d cut himself with the Leatherman knife. If he’d bled all the way back to the cave maybe the dogs from the Green Camo Hut would track him. Maybe he’d left fingerprints. It wasn’t fair. He hadn’t even done anything wrong. Not tonight.
Winstone listened hard. Still nothing. Just the wind in the rocks and the crunch of the tarp. The Red Hut people hadn’t seen anything. The Green Camo Hut dogs couldn’t get through the fence. There was nobody coming. Tomorrow he’d get up and catch crawlies in the creek and stay away from the huts and it would be like every other weekend and not the end or the last.
He liked Angry Birds. Winstone shuffled up the sleeping bag so his head was back in the hood and rolled over to face the rock and closed his eyes and he thought about the birds and their furious eyes and their slings. They wanted into those pigs’ houses so bad they just hurled themselves at the walls until they were broken down.
THE KID crossed the street. He crossed the street and maybe the wind wasn’t dead after all because he went right through the gate in the picket fence and up the steps and onto the porch and fetched up at the door. The Kid looked at that door all shiny and red in the light of the lamps and he raised his hand and he knocked on it just like a man who had every right to.
The music stopped. There were steps inside and the Kid took one back and straightened his coat and then the door opened and she was there with a long hall behind her all warm and bright and she tilted her head to one side and looked up at him and the Kid swept off his hat and said howdy ma’am and the girl in the blue dress smiled.
Who is it? said the man in black blotting up the light. Black eyes black hair black coat, black everything, except for his skin and his shirt, which were white, and his belt’s great silver buckle.
It’s all right Paw. He’s come to walk me to the dance.
And she reached for her shawl and took the Kid’s arm and they went down the steps together and through the white gate and out into the street which wasn’t empty now but full of strolling cowboys in their best boots and girls in dancing dresses. The girl knew all their names and she told them to the Kid as they walked and they walked until they came to a pale wooden church and all manner of wagons and horses and mules fussing up in the road and as two wagons crossed and went their own ways the Kid saw in the space between their high rolling wheels a lit-up hall with a smiling jack o’ lantern outside and a sign saying Harvest Dance.
There were pegs in the porch and the girl hung up her shawl and the Kid hung up his gun. They stepped over the threshold and under the strings of red lanterns they danced, one two three, round and round. One of the Kid’s hands holding hers, the other holding her waist just right, keeping the perfect distance.
How did you know it was me? the Kid said.
Your hat, the girl said. I knew you by your hat.
Her name was Mary Ellen.
She was looking for the kitten. Winstone felt sure of it. She had a speargrass stem in her hand for a staff and he watched her part the tussocks and prod at the grass to either side of the track as she made her way down to the beach and when she got there Alicia stopped and bent over the sand just as he had done a few days before. Then she began to weave around the bay with her head still down and Winstone had a pretty good idea whose trail she’d picked up and that it was leading her from one crunched-up crawly shell to another.
He had no way of knowing if the tracks she was seeing were fresh or the same ones he’d followed himself, in which case his own trainer prints would be there beside them. He hadn’t seen the kitten for a couple of days. But on the evidence of last night the kitten had seen him and was hanging around and if Alicia started following it then he might have a problem. He’d known there was a reason he had to go back that morning and keep an eye on things around the Red Hut and it wasn’t to look at Alicia or Angry Birds and now he knew what it was.
She was getting closer to him. The rocks he was hiding in brought the beach and the bay to an end and overhung deep water. Winstone wasn’t worried. If she was on the kitten’s old trail it would veer off into the grass and even if the prints were new and headed his way it was quite a scramble to carry on over the rocks and it wouldn’t be any easier in a fluffy dressing gown and monster slippers. Besides, Alicia could hardly follow a track across stones.
She didn’t veer off but Alicia did stop at the rocks and look at them for a while. Then as Winstone watched she hitched back her dressing gown and put her furry toe to the face of the first rock and felt for a handhold and found one and pulled herself up and for the first time it occurred to him that if the kitten’s feet had been wet when it jumped up there then maybe it could have left paw prints.
Sure enough she stared at a spot on the rock and then sat on her heels for a closer view and then she looked up and all around.
She was only a couple of metres below the hole he was watching her from and Winstone was glad she’d had to leave the speargrass stem behind. He squatted down from the hole and leaned back on the rock and thought about his options.
Here kitty kitty, Alicia said.
When he looked back she’d turned away from him and was crouched on the far edge of the rock and he could see she was sizing up the best way to reach the next one and he watched her sit and take off her slipper and ease herself down some little way into the gap and stretch out her toe to bridge the distance. He could do it himself but Alicia’s leg didn’t reach and she’d have to jump if she was going to go that way. She sat back up on the edge and looked around again and then down at the steep underwater scree disappearing into the dark of the dam between the two rocks and removed her other slipper.
Behind her the Red Hut stood silent and closed with its curtains drawn and its chimneys cold and the scatter of other huts stood likewise. It was a good moment to slip away down the other side of the rocks but Winstone didn’t. The sun was just making the top of the ridge and sparkling on the rising chop of the dam and it shone on Alicia’s unbrushed hair hanging down the back of her dressing gown and her hair was all the soft and lovely colours of a mouse. He watched her take the dressing gown off. She had ponies on her pyjamas.
Then Alicia started to roll her pyjama legs up and Winstone thought he saw her plan. She was going to slide down and wade around the top of the scree. Sure enough she shuffled her way down into the gap with her arms and legs spread and her bum as a brake and he was impressed at how well she did it. At the bottom she dipped her foot into the dam and felt around the scree for a hold and tested the hold and let down her weight and there she was standing ankle-deep on one foot in the dam and that’s when she came to the hard bit. She needed to keep her balance. The best way to do that was to turn and face the rock so she could grab hold of it if she started to slip but that was easier said than done and she’d have to hold her nerve while she let go with one hand and leaned the wrong way out over the deep and brought her leg around. The other option was to keep going the way that she was and hope that the scree wouldn’t move, but if it did she’d most likely pitch in head first and in the meantime she’d have to look down at the dr
op the whole way and Winstone happened to know it looked a lot worse from there than it did from the top of the rock and you could see through the water a very long way but you couldn’t see the bottom.
He wondered if Alicia could swim. The wind was up and the sun wasn’t doing much to scrub the chill off the day and the dam didn’t look inviting.
Alicia turned. She turned and held onto the rock and felt her way around the scree and only once went in over her knees and she made it look easy. Winstone was impressed all over again, and before he had time to be anything else she was up the rock on the other side and over the top and out of sight. She’d have easy going from there for a few metres across a flat shelf and he no longer doubted Alicia could get all the way and it was high time he made a move before she came up behind him.
Winstone climbed around the side of his viewing rock and let himself down from the edge and dropped the last metre of empty air and landed silently as the kitten itself beside Alicia’s slippers and dressing gown in the very spot where she’d been standing. He crouched for just a second to look at the muddy kitten prints on the rock and as he got up he saw the corner of something slim and rectangular in Alicia’s dressing gown pocket.
It wasn’t an iPad. It wasn’t an iPhone either. It wasn’t even a smartphone but an ordinary phone like the one he’d had and Winstone squatted there on the rock with the phone in his hand and he thought of the satellite arcing high overhead and its beam spreading over the range and the world and the world spun and the plains of the east opened up and he thought of everyone he’d left there and he thought of the number he knew by heart and he ran his thumb across the screen. The screen came up but the sun was too bright to read what was on it so he shaded it with his hand and brought the phone close to his body and sheltered it there and curved over it he looked again at the screen.
No signal.
Winstone put the phone back in Alicia’s pocket. Then he took it out and wiped it for fingerprints and with the sleeve of his hoodie pulled down over his hand replaced it again and glanced around and up at the empty sky and stood and took a few steps back and a run and cleared the beach and landed in the grass so as not to leave fresh footprints.
He needed to take cover. He heard a plunk from the other side of the rocks and he hoped it wasn’t Alicia falling in and he thought about going to see. He was still thinking about it when he heard her calling the kitten again so he made a break up the slope to the next rock tor and circled it out of sight of the huts and climbed into the place he knew inside where he could look out down the slope and he settled down there and waited to see what Alicia would do next.
For the next hour or so they continued to move around the dam in much the same manner with Winstone keeping one rock formation ahead and it was a pretty good way to pass the time and they might have done it all day if it wasn’t for the dogs.
He should have thought about them. But he was too busy watching Alicia and thinking how much they had in common like horses and Angry Birds and the next place they’d look for a kitten. He didn’t even hear the guy from the Green Camo Hut open the ute. So he got as much of a fright as Alicia did when the dogs galloped up at full tilt and by then it was too late to get away and he just had to sit it out where he was and hope that they’d ignore him.
They didn’t. The two dogs played with Alicia for a nanosecond or so before the older dog lifted its head and looked at the rocks where Winstone was hiding. He saw the dog sniff once at the wind and then it came up the slope like it was auditioning for Dog Squad and the other dog rotated mid-bounce and followed hot on its tail and the two of them arrived together at the foot of the tor and began to pant and pace looking up at him and if they’d brought big foam fingers to wave they couldn’t have pointed to him more clearly.
Winstone drew back as much as he could from the gap he was watching them through and pressed himself close to the rock behind.
What is it? he heard Alicia say and her voice was right there below the rocks.
There was nowhere to go. Winstone pulled his hood up over his head and wrapped his arms round his chest and shut his eyes.
THE KID’S BACK hit the wall. His back hit the wall and the timbers juddered and dust circled in the stabs of light and the breath shuddered out of the Kid displaced by the stranger’s fist in his stomach. The Kid slid sideways and ducked the next blow and the stranger’s fist slammed into the boards and his knuckles split and he swore and the Kid forced new air into his guts and came up swinging because he knew how to fight and he had no fear of sinking his knuckles into another man’s flesh or breaking his hands on another’s bones. The Kid’s punch caught the stranger square on the jaw and it landed with a noise clean and sweet as a ball in a glove and the stranger staggered backwards and fell to one knee but arms grabbed the Kid from all sides and they dragged him back and pinned him to the wall.
The Kid looked down at the stranger crouched on the floor in the banded light and the man was dark as the shadows and slow to move as the drifting chaff but while the Kid watched the man raised his head and set his hat straight and rubbed a bloodied hand over the stubble of his jaw.
There was blood running on the Kid’s lip too and he tasted it there but he wasn’t afraid because he knew what he was made of. He heard the barn door open. Behind the stranger easing himself to his feet a widening stripe of the day fell in across the dirt floor and it struck the Kid in the face. He turned his head and narrowed his eyes to see what stood in the glare and there was a high white slice of the yard and the town and the morning outside and stamped out upon it the shape of a man and preceding the man and the morning and bigger than both the black stretch of the man’s shadow.
The sun burned on the silver rowels of spurs and the heels of the man’s black boots stepped through the dust and moved without haste down the path of his own darkness. The man’s shadow came on eating up the light and it overtook the stranger who stood opening and closing his hand in front of the Kid and as it did so the stranger moved aside without so much as a glance over his shoulder.
The man stopped in front of the Kid and the sideways light coming in between the boards of the barn raked his folded face from the dark and caught in his eye.
So, the man said. Where you come from kid?
Who’s askin? said the Kid. He didn’t see whose fist it was but it swung his cheek to the wall and when he looked back the man had a little gleam in his eye like he was telling a joke and about to deliver the punchline.
You don’t know who I am, he said. You got no idea in the world.
No mister I don’t.
Well, the man said. I reckon you hit the nail on the head. That’s the crux of your problem right there.
He took a step forward and tipped up the brim of his hat and there in the grainy light the Kid recognised the man in black as Mary Ellen’s father.
Now I’ll ask you again, Mary Ellen’s father said. Where you from?
Nowhere particular.
The Kid saw the punch coming this time and it landed him in the stomach.
A kid out of nowhere, Mary Ellen’s father said. That’s pretty much what I thought.
His face disappeared below the brim of his hat and he popped a match on his coat and looked up at the Kid again and took the burning cigarette from his mouth and exhaled and his smoke turned and tumbled in the shadows.
Well I guess they don’t teach much in the way of manners down there, he said. In these parts a boy asks before he goes puttin his hand to a man’s daughter.
The Kid licked the blood from his lip.
But some kid from nowhere, Mary Ellen’s father said. He just rides on in and takes what he wants.
I walked her to the dance, the Kid said. That’s all.
You walked a step too far, Mary Ellen’s father said. You oughter have stopped before ever you crossed the street to her house. Hell boy. He shook his head and dropped his cigarette and ground it out with his heel. You oughter have stopped at the town limits.
Behind
him something stirred the light. The Kid’s head was all shaken up and he squinted past Mary Ellen’s father into the churn of shadow and sun and he saw a star.
Mornin Eli.
Mary Ellen’s father didn’t take his eyes off the Kid but inclined his head to the sound and smiled. Mornin Roy, he said.
Sheriff, said the man with the broken hand and he stood away from the Kid and touched his good hand to his hat. Two voices echoed him to left and right of the Kid at either shoulder.
Boys, said the sheriff.
Mary Ellen’s father ran his eyes up and down the Kid one last time as if an accurate guess at the length and breadth and weight of the Kid might be required of him at some future date and when he was good and done he stood aside.
The sheriff stopped in front of the Kid.
This him?
That’s him.
Okay, the sheriff said. Okay. You boys there get his hands tied.
The floor of the barn came up at the Kid. Boots trod the hay. The rope wound around his wrists and doubled back and hitched him up neat as a mule.
You’re takin me in? he said. For what? For dancin?
Check his saddle roll, said Mary Ellen’s father.
In the sun coming down from the high window the two gold candlesticks glowed as if they were still holding flames. Between the bars of his cell the Kid looked at the pair of them there on the sheriff’s desk.
He put em there, the Kid said. You know he did.
Behind the candlesticks the sheriff raised his boots to the edge of the desk and set one on top of the other. Here’s what I know, he said. Somebody put them things in your saddle roll. He says it was you and you say it was him. Trouble is, son, I’ve known Judge Givens these thirty years. You and I are just gettin acquainted.
Judge?
That’s right son.
It don’t even make no sense, the Kid said. Say I did take em. I didn’t take em but say I did. What kind of damn fool would I be to leave em there in the barn?