Hunting Elephants

by James Roy

  'And did it?'

  'No. He was lucky.'

  'My mum's uncle was in the war. I'm meeting him in a couple of weeks, so that's why I'm reading about Vietnam.'

  'And you're thinking you might talk to him about the war?'

  Harry shrugged. 'Dunno. Maybe.'

  Mrs Ransome picked up the pile of magazines from the end of the computer desk. 'Well, good luck with that, Harry. If you can get him to talk, I'm sure he'll have a lot of great stories for you.'

  Dad turned and narrowed his eyes at the twenty-cent piece lying on the table in front of Harry. 'Oh, right. So you think you've got it this time? You've got the magic flowing through those fingers?'

  'I don't know. Maybe.'

  Dad laid the last potato and the peeler on the bench and came over, wiping his hands on a tea-towel. Then, after picking up the coin in his right hand, he extended his fists. 'All right, impress me. But it's going to be hard.'

  'Why? Because you know what to expect?'

  Dad laughed. 'No, because you're really crap at it.'

  'I've been practising.'

  Dad wiggled his wrists. 'OK, let's go.'

  Doug twirled a strand of beard between his fingers, chuckled, and waited until the express train had swept through the station. 'Are you still on about that? I told you, it's magic. Why can't you accept that?'

  'Because I'm not some stupid kid,' Harry said.

  'You're a kid.'

  'Yes, but not a stupid one. It's not magic – I know that much. And you told me I shouldn't assume that anyone taught you how to do those tricks.'

  'That's true.'

  'And that means you must have taught yourself.'

  'Maybe. So?'

  'So for you to teach yourself tricks as good as that one, you must have spent heaps of time working on them, which means you must have had a reason to do that.'

  His wiry old eyebrows bunched together, just a little. 'Why's that, then?'

  'Well, there's always a reason,' Harry explained. 'It's like this movie I saw, where this guy wanted to escape from jail, so he started popping his shoulder in and out all the time, which meant he could fit into super-tight spaces, but it really hurt to do that to his shoulder –'

  'Oh, I get you,' Doug interrupted. 'You don't think he'd go to all that trouble and pain unless there was a good reason, right?'

  'Exactly.'

  'Making coins disappear is a bit different from dislocating your shoulder.'

  'I know, but still ...'

  Doug smiled, and his face softened as it relaxed a little. 'There was a reason. You're right.'

  'I knew it! So, what was it?'

  'It'll cost you twenty cents.'

  Harry felt around in his pocket. 'Got change for a fifty?'

  'No, I'm afraid not,' Doug said, taking the fifty cent piece and tucking it away. 'But I'll make the story last a bit longer.'

  'OK,' Harry replied. 'Or until my train arrives.'

  'It was back in the early seventies,' Doug began. 'I'd been overseas for a while. Things hadn't gone all that well for me over there, and when I came back, I wasn't so good. No one would give me a job. Stuff had happened, you see, and I'd suffered some head injuries ...' As he spoke, he absently put the tips of his fingers to his right temple.

  'Had you been shot?'

  'Not exactly, no. Anyway, I couldn't concentrate for very long. Still can't.'

  'You concentrated all right when you did that trick the other day.'

  'I know, but that's different from holding down a proper job. I couldn't do it. I'd find myself just fading out, you know? In the middle of anything, I'd just find my mind wandering. Because of the head injury, and what had happened over there. So then I was in and out of hospital, and the nuthouse as well, but it was just hopeless. No one wanted to know me.'

  'Why not?'

  'I guess I was just too hard to be around. I'd have these mood swings that I couldn't control. And eventually I ran out of money.

  'Then one day I stole a pack of cards from a paper shop – a newsagent. We played a lot of cards when I was overseas, when we were travelling, or just sitting around waiting for something to happen, and I'd learnt a few fancy tricks. Shuffling tricks, card-forcing tricks, card-counting, you name it, I could do it. And they'd all become kind of automatic by then, so I didn't have to concentrate very hard.'

  'So someone did teach you your tricks,' Harry said triumphantly.

  'No, no one in particular – I just picked them up. And stop butting in.'

  'Sorry.'

  'So I pinched the pack of cards, and started doing tricks for people, for money. I cleaned myself up a bit, and I'd go into the city and wander around the cafes and pubs, going from table to table and group to group, doing these card tricks.'

  'Didn't they mind? The people who owned the cafes, I mean.'

  'Oh, I got chucked out of plenty of pubs. But I also started to make some money. And you know what I did with the first dollar I made?'

  'You bought a coffee?'

  Doug smiled. 'Actually, you're right. But what about the second dollar? D'you give up? I went back to the paper shop, and I said, "Last week I stole this pack of cards. Now I'd like to pay for it."'

  'Were they angry?'

  He shook his head. 'No. They offered me a job.'

  'Seriously?'

  'I know – weird, huh? They told me that they needed someone to work in the back room, just doing bits and pieces. It was only a few hours a week, but it was still a job. And in the evening I kept doing my magic tricks, and making money that way.'

  'So everything was OK in the end?'

  Doug scratched at his beard again. Then he dug about with a finger in one of his ears for a moment, and Harry half-expected him to pull a coin out of it. 'No, everything wasn't OK in the end,' he said after a while. 'I worked there for a year or more, and was eventually put in the front of the store. But I couldn't hack it.'

  'Because of your head injury?'

  He nodded. 'Something like that.'

  Harry heard a train, looked up, saw that it was his. 'This is me,' he said. 'Sorry.'

  'That's fine,' Doug replied. 'Harry, right?'

  'Yeah, Harry. It was nice talking to you.'

  'See you, sport.'

  'Mum, have we got any cards?' Harry asked.

  'What sort of cards?'

  'You know, playing cards.'

  'Oh, somewhere, Harry.' She scowled at her computer screen, before furiously tapping the Delete key. 'Bloody hell! Enough of this spam crap!'

  'But you don't know where?'

  'Where what?'

  'The cards.'

  'Harry! I'm working!'

  'Didn't Joel have some?'

  'I don't know! Who are you going to play with, anyway?'

  He sighed. 'It doesn't matter.'

  'Wait for your dad – he'll have some for sure.'

  Harry left Mum with her screenful of emails and went down the hall to Joel's bedroom, coughing twice to cover the sound of the opening door. It was dark in there, with the blinds down.

  Where would his brother have kept a deck of cards? He slid open the top drawer of the desk, and found nothing but junk. Pencils, bits of Lego, a few pictures Joel had drawn, some replica racing cars, a well-chewed tennis ball that Daisy had gnawed all the fluff from, but no cards.

  He opened the second drawer, and found pretty much the same kind of stuff in that one. Little, pointless treasures, very much like the ones he'd once had in his own desk drawer, as well as an astonishing over-supply of rubber bands. But again, no cards.

  Hearing a noise at the door, he turned to see Daisy standing in the gap, her tail beating against the wall. As soon as Harry turned his attention to her, she sat, her tongue lolling out and her ears pointed and alert, her tail still going.

  'Yeah, OK,' he said, reopening the top drawer and picking up the old tennis ball. 'Come on, let's take it outside.' And closing the bedroom door gently, he headed out to the backyard, with Daisy trotting along beh
ind.

  Harry dropped his school bag by the door of the corner store. He'd only ever taken it inside there once. 'Hey, you! Can not you read the sign there?' the old man who ran the place had shouted at him on that one occasion. 'No bringing of the school bag in the shop!' So he'd never done it since. He didn't like anyone simply assuming that he was a shoplifter, but he didn't like being shouted at either, so it was easier just to drop his bag at the base of the gumball machine before he went inside.

  The man watched him from behind his crowded counter, in front of the wall of cigarettes. He sniffed twice, before licking his thumb and turning the page of his newspaper.

  'Excuse me,' Harry asked, and the man couldn't quite conceal the roll of his eyes as he looked up. 'Do you have playing cards?'

  'For what, you mean like the poker card?'

  'Yes. You know, clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds ...'

  Another lick of the thumb, another turn of the page. 'In the back, with the toy and the pencil.'

  'Thank you.'

  Harry headed down one of the aisles, past the canned foods and pasta sauces, past the bins of spotted fruit and vegetables, past the olive oil and washing detergents and toilet paper. In the back corner was the stationery, and the cap guns and crappy toy cars and practical jokes. He was distracted for a moment by the exploding golf ball, but when he glanced up and saw the owner watching him in the curved security mirror, he returned it to the shelf and went back to looking for the cards.

  Two dusty packs lay next to a pile of scribble pads. They didn't have a price on them, so he took one up to the counter. 'How much are these?' he asked.

  The man took the pack and turned it over in his hands, looking for a tag. 'Five dollar.'

  'Five?'

  'If you don't want, then don't buy.' He shrugged, placed the cards to one side and went back to his newspaper.

  'No, I do want them,' Harry said. 'I just didn't hear you properly. Here.' He dug some coins from his pocket, counted out five dollars and handed them to the man, but as he reached for the cards, the man covered the pack with one hand, still counting the coins in the other. Finally satisfied, he grunted and let go of the pack.

  'Thanks,' Harry said, vowing never to shop there again.

  It was a good website, with short videos that showed you how to do card tricks. The man on the videos made it look so easy, which gave Harry some encouragement. Being a bright, intelligent, well coordinated young man with good fine-motor skills, he'd find this a cinch.

  After he'd dropped the pack for the third time, however, he decided that card tricks were harder than they looked. This was going to take a lot more practice than he'd anticipated.

  'What are you doing, Harold?' Dad asked later, as Harry tried once again to do a riffle-shuffle that resulted in the pack exploding all over the kitchen table.

  'Shuffling,' he replied, gathering the cards together in an untidy pile.

  'Right. Because from over here it looked like you were throwing cards in the air at random.'

  'Well, let's see you do better, then.'

  'Oh, I don't want to show off, Harold.'

  Harry finally got the pack squared up, and held it out. 'No, come on, let's see it.'

  Dad dried his hands on a tea-towel, which he draped over his shoulder. 'I'm not very good,' he said, taking the cards.

  'Well, just do something. Anything.'

  'All right. Um ... yeah, how about this?' He held the pack in one hand, squeezed his fingers in some subtle way that Harry didn't quite get, and with a soft flutter the entire deck flew to his other hand. Then he did the same in reverse.

  'Wow,' said Harry. 'What else can you do?'

  'Not much. This,' he said, taking the top card from the pack and holding it between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand. With the tiniest twist of his wrist, the card started spinning as cleanly as if it had a pin stuck through the middle of it.

  Harry smiled. 'Not bad,' he said. 'Where did you learn to do that?'

  'A misspent youth, Harold. Long, smoky poker nights at the Ivanhoe when I should have been studying Advanced Taxation Law.' He handed the cards back. 'A far less useful life skill than tax law, but infinitely more fun. Practice, mate, that's all it is. Where did you get those cards?'

  'The corner shop. For five dollars. I think I got ripped off.'

  'I think you did too. They're pretty crappy quality. They should slip better. If you'd told me you wanted cards, I could have given you some of mine. They're just lying around the house somewhere.'

  'I didn't even know you played.'

  'Yeah, I was pretty serious for a while. I never lost my house or anything like that, but I played in a few tournaments before this new Texas Hold'em craze started.' Dad's eyebrows flickered. 'Yes, it's yet another of the many mysteries that is Me.'

  'Were you good?'

  'I was, actually.'

  'But you don't play any more?'

  Dad went back to wiping down the kitchen bench. 'No, mate. Too much real living to do. A misspent youth is romantic, but a misspent middle-age is just plain pathetic.'

  'A lot of places have poker comps now, Dad.'

  'I know. Maybe I will play again some day, when life settles down a bit.' He straightened, squeezed the dishcloth, and draped it over the drainer. 'Anyway, I promised myself an early night. Make sure you pick up all your cards before you go to bed – there's a queen under your chair.'

  Eight

  Every time Harry went to his room, he would walk past his brother's door. The sign Joel had made out of Fimo clay when he was in first grade was still hanging in the middle of the door. He'd got the O and the E back-to-front, and the apostrophe was wrong as well, so it actually said JEOLS' ROOM. There was a green blob to the right of the words, too, which was believed to be a frog. Like everything else in Joel's room, that sign was still there. And Harry saw it every time he went down the corridor to his bedroom.

  He'd have liked to take the sign down, to lift it off its nail and put it away in one of Joel's drawers with the rubber bands and Matchbox cars. But that would have been more trouble than it was worth, once Mum saw that it was gone. Especially when she figured that someone had gone into Joel's room and put something in the wrong spot.

  But Harry hated how that sign reminded him of what happened to Joel. Often when he closed his door, he'd hear the sign tapping as it swung from its string. The walls in the house didn't feel very firm or secure, and closing doors, or even just walking up the corridor, would make them shake, just a little. And the sign would tap.

  The walls weren't very thick, either. After Joel went to the hospital for the last time, Harry found it hard to sleep at night without his brother's breathing machine murmuring through the wall between their rooms.

  After a while – a couple of months or so – he did manage to sleep, but that sign was still there whenever he walked by, bumping lightly against the door with each footstep. He sometimes hoped that the brown piece of string that had its ends jammed down into the Fimo would fray through and snap, and the sign would fall and smash. Then he wouldn't have to worry about it any more.

  He wouldn't be reminded any more, either.

  Mrs Ransome was near the computers, putting torn squares of scrap paper into the little plastic containers. 'Morning, Harry. More Vietnam research?'

  'No, not really,' Harry said. 'I'm just looking for some information about something. How do you spell cystic?'

  'As in fibrosis? C-Y-S-T-I-C.'

  'Thanks.' He typed it in. 'And what's the word you'd use for needing something. Like when you breathe, you need oxygen. How would you say that?'

  'Dependency, maybe?'

  'So, oxygen dependency?'

  'Yes, give that a go.'

  He hit Enter, and a moment later a full page of results blinked onto the screen.

  'Any luck?' Mrs Ransome asked.

  'Yeah, thousands. Thanks.'

  'You're welcome. How are things at home, Harry?'

  This took him by surpris
e. 'Fine. Why?'

  'Well, you know, obviously I heard about your brother. It must have been awful for your family.'

  'Yeah, it was pretty horrible, but we're getting there, I guess. It was last May when he died. The fifth.'

  She hesitated, as if she knew what she wanted to say, but wasn't sure if she should. Or could. 'And are you OK?'

  'Me? Yeah, I'm fine. Like I say, it was almost a year ago. Why do you ask?'

  It was like the words were stuck to the roof of her mouth, making her face twitch with some kind of odd tic. 'What I mean is, you're not sick, are you?'

  'No. I mean, I haven't got CF, if that's what you're thinking.'

  She relaxed, and the twitch stopped. 'Of course not. No, well, that's a relief. I thought you might have been looking up that information for yourself.'

  'No. I've just been thinking about Joel, and ... and that's all.'

  'I see.'

  'I mean, you sometimes wonder if you'd ... if they'd done things a bit differently ... Anyway, thanks for helping me with the spelling.'

  She absently flicked through the pile of scrap paper in her hand. 'Sometimes things happen that we can't control, Harry.'

  'I know. Like Joel dying, you mean?'

  'Exactly like that. And we come down very hard on ourselves for not doing more. Or for being the one that comes through something.'

  Harry nodded. 'Yeah, I remember the counsellor said that after Joel died. Survivor's guilt, or something like that.'

  'Exactly right. Harry, your brother lived all his life in a first-world country and was looked after by the best medical people around.'

  'I know. And I know what you're saying,' Harry said, staring hard at the little raised bump on the F key.

  A group of girls had come to the front desk. They were busily going through the pile of returned books while they waited to be served.

  'Excuse me, Harry.' Mrs Ransome left him with a very light touch on the shoulder. She also left him with a screen full of guilty reminders of what he'd done.

  Harry was in bed, shuffling his cards in the dark, over and over. He was getting quite slick now, even with the cheap pack from the corner store. Dad was yet to come through with his promise of good cards, but Harry figured that if he practised until he was good with these crappy ones, he'd be a demon with good ones.