The Legend of Winstone Blackhat

by Tanya Moir

  Ow Jemma don’t, Debbie used to say, it’s not nice to bite, and she was right, it wasn’t.

  Winstone dug potatoes for Debbie. He coaxed baby carrots from the mud and hunted out lost eggs and brought in firewood and herbs. But the job that mattered to Debbie most and the one he liked best was looking after Jemma. Keeping her out of trouble happy quiet safe. Every weeknight from feeding the dogs until her father came home she was Winstone’s responsibility. Sometimes she liked to draw and when she did she liked him to draw with her. She drew slanting Haskett-houses sprouting unnamed growths in colours that houses shouldn’t be while beside her on the paper allotted to him Winstone demarcated white squares with straight lines of black and red and on the table in the middle of papers and felt-tipped pens the cat settled and folded its paws and purred.

  On the other side of the living room door there was a cold hall leading to the front of the house and colder bedrooms. Along the hall there were shelves and with tatty books and magazines and forgotten toys on the shelves were photographs of Debbie and Todd and Debbie and Jemma and Todd and Debbie and Todd and other kids, boys and girls of various ages. Winstone passed the shelves every time he went down the hall to his room or to the bathroom and every time he came back and he had a lot of questions about the kids in the photographs that he did not ask and chief among them was how long the kids had stayed and where they’d gone next and if theirs were among the sticky fingerprints all over Llama Llama.

  How long am I going there for? he’d asked Ros, and she’d looked at him and tapped her pen and said they’d see how things worked out.

  In the hours he looked after Jemma all the while outside the light would be running west and in its absence the cold rose out of the ground and filled the garden to the top of the hedge and spilled out over the valley and the colours of the valley sank to grey and violet and the smoky blue of stone. About then he’d hear the door of the Pajero slam like a clapperboard wrapping up the day and they’d all watch the door and just as the panes of the kitchen windows completed their slow fade to black Todd would walk in with his beanie pulled down over his ears and the stubble standing out on his cheeks and the skin of them glowing.

  That was the end of Jemma time. She forgot about Winstone for a while then and he didn’t hold it against her because after that the times allotted for tasks drew in and ran hard and fast on each other’s heels and he needed to concentrate so he didn’t trip up and cause a collapse Debbie turning with plates and the table not cleared not set everything all mixed up and one thing tumbling into the other.

  Making food had looked easy for Zane but Debbie made it hard and it took a long time and most of the bench every night and Winstone never did find the courage to tell her about the many good things you just heated up in the packet.

  After tea things slowed down again and they watched the weather report to the end and then it was time for Jemma to go to bed and Winstone to load the dishwasher and make tomorrow’s school lunch and after that he could watch TV for an hour and a half but he didn’t get to pick the channel. There were no exploding trucks or ice roads or fake tits in the reality shows Todd and Debbie liked just a lot of cops of various kinds and nurses and hospitals and occasionally polar bears or sharks and at the end of the week Coronation Street.

  At nine o’clock he closed the door on the TV and the fire and Debbie and Todd and the living room with its dinner smells and he went into the bathroom and washed his face and brushed his teeth even though he’d done both of those things in the morning. Then he dried his face and his hands on the dark green towel that was his and he stepped out into the hall and switched off the light behind him and walked down the gallery of kids who hadn’t worked out to the room that was becoming his room but was not his yet with no locks on the door and the light on waiting for him and an echo of old damp in its smell and faded tank engines on the duvet and in the small orange glow of the light he put his emergency home pyjamas on and at ten past nine he got into the bed.

  He carried the cold of the room into bed on his skin and he turned his face to the wall and pulled the duvet tight and closed his eyes and waited for the cover above and the electric blanket below and the blood inside to warm him through. He closed his eyes and lay still and quiet alone and he didn’t think about the people with whom he’d shared rooms and beds the ones he’d maybe see again and the ones he would never see because ten past nine was the time for going to sleep and not for thinking. He closed his eyes and lay still in the bed and every night he asked that the dreams not come. Almost always the dreams did come but he had no other plan on which to fall back and so he went on asking.

  What frightened him most about the dreams was that they’d make him wet the bed. Sometimes he dreamed he’d started to pee and he rose out of sleep on that helpless tide, the exact and soothing warmth of his blood, to surface suddenly in panic. Then he’d throw back the duvet and pat down his sheets and in the blunting chill of whatever small hour of the night it might be he could hardly grasp that they were dry. In other dreams Marlene was back in his bed and she wet it for him.

  The dreams didn’t stop coming and he did not wet the bed and after a while he got used to Marlene being as she was now, or maybe she did, and the horror faded out of the dreams and he quite enjoyed hanging out with her there. Things between them went back to normal except for when he woke up and remembered that none of it had happened and couldn’t happen and never would. So he stopped waking up in the middle and dreamed the dreams to their end or until Debbie called him out of them in the small close darkness of seven o’clock when he lay for a moment or two in the dry bed while the tail of the dream slipped away in the dark and he tried to pinpoint the unreal thing he knew had been contained in the dream that had made it a dream and not true. Then at 7:02 he removed his hand from his pyjama pants and climbed out of bed and went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth and showered and got dressed and put on his shoes.

  By the Sunday he went to Queenstown enough days had swung round that Winstone couldn’t recall which one of the Sundays he’d spent at the Jacksons it was and all he could say, looking back, was that it must have been the weekend after Debbie bought the new couch and she thought it was pick-up from Clyde and it wasn’t it was Frankton. So they had to go, just him and Todd in the Pajero with the back cleared out and the seats folded down, and get it.

  Omakau, Todd said. Chatto Creek. Clyde.

  Otherwise silent with the windows open through thin-skinned bandit country cracked and crusted by rock and buttressed by clouds the colour of fire-blacked steel and a taste of metal too on the air rushing in charged up with the threat of a storm and cold off the hydro lake and the lake’s surface a rough iron plate wind-riveted above the drowned valley floor.

  Cromwell, Todd said. Bannockburn.

  The last after they’d turned off the highway and into the canyons, a cream dust detour to see a man about a pump and the man not there and Todd pulled over texting by the side of the road with the dry slopes rising around them dotted with rabbits and thyme and above the vineyard terraces just breaking leaf and the crumbling earth warm and the smells of all those things stirred together and contained within the clay bowl of the canyon walls and the Pajero’s tin cab and Winstone tasting the breeze and thinking of a pot hung over a willow-wood fire and that a desperado might get a lot less desperate in that country.

  Back on the main road first the orchards and fruit stalls and then the valley floor fell away and the road humped its back as if taking a breath and sidled the rock wall gritted and black with damp through shadow the sun hadn’t touched in half a year while below the river’s slow fury coiled and uncoiled as it ate out the path and the blue water ran slick and fat with the dust of the country it was chewing.

  Gold miner’s hut, Todd said, and Winstone looked and among the bluffs on the river’s far and unreachable side there was a small area where the schist was piled with greater purpose and above the piled schist some broken ribs of timber. To Winstone’s surpris
e Todd continued to speak for a while and he said that miners had come from as far away as California looking for gold in the river and they’d broken the hills and broken themselves and some got rich and many didn’t get rich and never went home and in the end it was the miners and not the river that was exhausted. After that Todd was quiet again leaving Winstone to settle the foreign badlands beyond the river’s frontier with characters of his own choosing. He brought the women and little kids in by covered wagon train and the men on horses and for himself he choose a palomino with glossy honey-coloured hide and its loose mane and tail foaming down pale as falling water.

  Around noon they crossed the river on a high iron bridge and left its course and came into a valley hatched red with bare vines and at the valley’s end they crossed the river again between towers of rock and entered into different country.

  They came to Frankton and found the house and a woman in furry slippers came out and opened the garage and showed Todd the couch and Todd bent his neck to one side and he looked at Winstone and back at the couch and he sighed and reached out from his pocket a fold of notes already counted. Todd backed the Pajero up to the garage and he and Winstone wrestled the couch inside while the woman stood and offered advice and then they thanked her and drove away.

  When they reached the highway instead of going back the way they had come Todd turned left and there was the big lake with its shifting shades of blue and rising from its edges willows and houses and hills and the snowbitten mountains bruising the sky and they followed the shore of the lake into town and drove through McDonald’s and Todd supersized everything and then he parked the Pajero and they took their brown paper bags and carried them down to the wharf and sat and ate and wiped the sauce from their faces and hands while under their feet the wash of the lake thumped against the wharf piles and the light of it shone between the boards.

  Winstone looked across the lake and there was a steamship coming puffing black smoke and he looked back and there was an old stone hotel and he could almost hear the slide of shot glasses along the bar and the piano playing inside. Todd looked at the hotel too and he said the name carved into the stone and he said that he and his mates used to drink there when they were kids. Not that much older than you, Todd said, and he smiled. Winstone asked if he wanted to drink there now and Todd said no and besides it wasn’t that sort of place any more and then he turned back and watched the steamer come in and they talked about that for a while.

  They watched until the steamer docked and the passengers got off and Winstone asked Todd what sort of people they were and Todd said all sorts and that anybody could buy a ticket and go for a ride and Todd didn’t suggest he and Winstone go and Winstone didn’t expect him to.

  They drove home and the rain hadn’t come and by the time Todd said Omakau again the shadows were stretching over the dry chipseal and the sun sat high on the fenceposts.

  Winstone hadn’t felt anything fall. It wasn’t until he was getting undressed for bed that he realised the red phone wasn’t in his pocket. Maybe he’d lost it while they were shifting the couch or maybe it had slipped out when he leaned down over the side of the wharf to see the trout flitting in the water but really it could have happened at any time and he couldn’t say. There had been no credit left on the phone and the battery had died months before and he probably could have got a new charger and topped it up if he’d asked but then he would have had to explain and so he’d just carried the phone around as it was just in case it could somehow be brought back to life or maybe worked remotely.

  To be on the safe side he searched Todd’s Pajero the first chance he got but the phone was nowhere inside and he hadn’t thought it would be. He knew straight away it was gone for good and Winstone thought about the phone lying red among the stones beneath the lake and he felt a lot of things but mainly lighter.

  WEST

  OVER THE BANDIT CITADEL the sky ran red with the rising sun and the citadel’s shadow stretched over the road to the west and the Kid riding out of the shadow kept his eyes on the road ahead and did not look back over his shoulder. Behind him high on the walls of the citadel El Rabbitoh stood alone against the sun and watched him go and the dawn light caught in the eyes of the Bandit King but his face could not be read.

  The Kid rode with shoulders set and Cooper watching the Kid’s shoulders did not speak but turned his head and looked back and in the softening distance he could just make out two figures. Halfway back along the road to the Bandit Citadel the boy paused with the mule’s rope slack in his hand and looked after the riders. Then he tightened the rope and spoke to the mule and led it on to the other side.

  You know where you’re goin Kid? Cooper said.

  I know, the Kid said and the palomino’s hooves whispered in the cold morning dust. Don’t worry. It aint far.

  You figure he told you the truth? Cooper said.

  Yeah, the Kid said. I do.

  No reason he should, Cooper said.

  No reason at all, said the Kid.

  So what makes you think? Cooper said.

  I don’t know, said the Kid. I just do.

  You figure he’s comin after us?

  No.

  He say anythin else you want to tell me about?

  The image of the Bandit King’s face as he left remained with the Kid as if it were lodged in the sky.

  Not a thing worth repeatin, the Kid said and he touched his heels to his horse’s sides and the palomino’s forelegs lunged as the horse picked up the canter.

  Behind them a buzzard circled the citadel silhouetted against the sun and El Rabbitoh turned and left the walls and the hooves of the grey and the palomino drummed and drummed upon the road and only the buzzard high in the sky remained to watch the rising dust of the riders as they lit out west across the range.

  Winstone listened to the drum of the hooves fall into the dust and the rain blew in over the Rough Ridge Range and paused and fell without hurry. It wrapped around the cave and he listened to it patter soft as mouse-feet over the tarp above his head and land thud-thut in the dirt beside his ear thut-thud and on the rocks and the grass beyond the cave the rain made a stillness without sound and he listened to that too.

  It was a still thick enough to take his weight and he leaned back into it and drifted for a while.

  When he woke up the rain had eased and the stillness had mounted and he pulled on his trainers and went out into the beaded grass and sank ankle-deep in the stillness and travelled with it over the range with the cloud overhead and around in and out like breath over a lens. On the top of the ridge he stood with the wet grass bathing his knees and looked down on the grey tin sheet of the dam and he watched its slow corrugations.

  CENTRAL

  A man should know how to fish, Todd said once. He said it up to his knees in the Glentrool Stream looking over his right shoulder not at Winstone where he stood on the bank hands in pockets but at the grub on the end of his line as he swung back to cast and then he turned body arms shoulders and wrists all in time and the loose reel whirred and the line curved out like a spider’s line on the wind and grub and hooks and sinker entered the pool without splash or sound like the cunning trap they were.

  Todd was talking more in those days and after he’d reeled in he said that two other things a man should know how to do were to drive a car and shoot a gun and though he agreed with Debbie that Winstone was too young for those yet, fishing he could learn.

  The first time Winstone swung the rod back he hooked his jeans and Todd had to get him free. Todd said try again and he did and this time he got the line into the river but only a metre or so from the bank and the bait plunked in and sent up a big water spout like it was some aerial bombardment. Here, Todd said, and he stood behind Winstone for a while and put his hands over Winstone’s hands and he showed him when to free the line and when to brake it.

  It was a bright day with some wind and the high sun behind them and no wonder they didn’t catch anything but it was the first weekend of the
season and Todd had bought the fishing licences while he was filling up with gas in Glentrool the day before so they had to try. The next day they got up early and tried again but the weather had held and they could see themselves in the river and so could the fish. After three hours they picked the drowned grubs off their hooks and packed up their gear and Todd said they’d have another go soon and that in the hills there were dams full of trout and that one day they’d go up there and he pointed out the whereabouts of those dams and traced the broken lines of their access roads with his fingernail on the dog-eared map in the Pajero. He and Winstone didn’t go fishing again and they never drove up to the dams but that wasn’t Todd’s fault and Winstone didn’t hold it against him.

  One day later that week Wednesday Thursday maybe Winstone didn’t remember exactly he got up and went to school and sat at the desk and looked at the date written up on the board and there was something familiar about it. At playtime he was eating his crackers and cheese and watching the little kids run and squeal when it came to him for no particular reason he could see that it was Bodun’s birthday. He sat and chewed and thought about that for a while and he wondered where Bodun was and if it felt any different being fifteen and away to the east an unmuffled V8 raked the main street of Glentrool like a blast of bad news and it went without saying that Bodun was hanging with the wrong crowd but Winstone hoped they were treating him kindly. After that he thought about all the runaway kids on the news who got murdered and cut up and sold but Bodun wasn’t a kid any more and anyway there was nothing Winstone could do about it.