Champion

by Gee, Maurice

  It happened the morning after our visit to the launch. Dad had two sacks of black-market sugar under a tarpaulin in the hearse and was taking them to Stipan Yukich, who, he was sure, would pay a good price. He let me put my bike in the back of the hearse for a ride to school and I lifted an edge of the tarpaulin and saw the sacks. I felt sick. Dad was being crooked again. He was being careless as well. Driving through town with sugar! He should have been caught a dozen times over.

  Jack was going with him for the ride. He didn’t know what was under the tarp. We stopped outside the school and lifted my bike out. Dad got alarmed at the children round the hearse.

  ‘Watch those doors, if you get inside you go to the cemetery.’

  Jack waved at all the friends he’d made the day before. Off they went, Dad tooting – and if I’d watched a bit longer I would have seen Bob Davies in his car following them. But I turned away, found Leo, gave him the Hershey bar Jack had sent – ‘Don’t let Bettsy-bum see’ – and gave Dawn hers.

  ‘He showed me his Purple Heart,’ I told kids crowding round. ‘He’s got a big scar, right across his chest. From a Jap bayonet.’ I made up that last bit.

  Meanwhile Jack and Dad drove to the vineyard. Jack noticed a black car, way back, but had no reason to think it was following them. My guess is that Davies overheard a bit of what Dad said to Leo outside the barbershop – heard a bit, put two and two together, watched and waited. His great ambition was to catch Dad – black marketing, bookmaking, he didn’t care. But although Bob Davies was a good country cop, he wasn’t a very good detective. He should have stopped the hearse and searched it and arrested Dad. Instead he followed, hoping perhaps to get Stipan Yukich too.

  The hearse rolled into the vineyard and stopped outside the shed and Dad played ‘Come to the cookhouse door, boys’ on the horn. That was his way, always flamboyant. Stipan and Matty came out of the shed.

  ‘Mr Yukich.’ Dad bounced up to him. ‘You get my message?’

  ‘Message?’ Stipan looked blank. He turned to Matty.

  ‘Sugar, Dad,’ Matty said, and added something in Dalmatian.

  ‘The sweet stuff,’ Dad said.

  Jack came round the hearse.

  ‘This is my friend Colonel Coop from the USA.’

  ‘I ain’t no colonel,’ Jack said. He shook hands with Matty and Stipan and even his big hand was swallowed in Stipan’s.

  ‘Come here,’ Dad said. ‘Got something to show you.’ He went to the back of the hearse and threw the doors open. He leaned in with a grin and flipped the tarpaulin. ‘Presto! Sugar!’ Dad loved this sort of play-acting. ‘That’s special delivery, just for you.’

  ‘Where you get?’ Stipan asked.

  Dad waved his finger waggishly. ‘Mustn’t ask. Just let’s say I’ve had my scouts out scouring the country.’ But he made a sideways wink and a jerk of his head, implying that Jack was the supplier. It alarmed Jack. He’d caught on straight away that the sugar was illegal and he wanted nothing to do with it. A US soldier caught in criminal dealings in New Zealand would have been in serious trouble. Trust Dad not to think of that. He was always getting people into sticky situations – quite by accident, of course.

  ‘You could make a nice lot of sherry with that. For our Yankee friends. And their little girlies with the sweet tooth, eh?’

  Stipan spoke Dalmatian to Matty again, asking if the sugar was stolen, and Matty – he told me later – answered that Dad wouldn’t steal but must have got it from a crook somewhere. He said ‘crook’ in English; and Stipan said, ‘Crook?’

  ‘Hey, nothing’s crooked, I’m a businessman,’ Dad said.

  Matty was in an awkward position. Remember he was keen on Gloria. ‘Not you, Mr Pascoe. Someone else.’

  ‘I no want,’ Stipan said.

  ‘Steve, of course you want. Where can you get sugar?’ His eyes went flickety-flick, Stipan to Matty, back again. ‘I’ll mark it down.’

  ‘What if the police come?’ Matty said.

  Dad laughed. ‘Bob Davies? I could bring a truckload of sugar in here and he’d think it was horse manure.’

  I wonder if Davies heard. He hadn’t driven in – which he should have done – but parked up the road and crept through the vines. Matty found his footprints later on. He crouched there, watching, waiting for the business to be done. Then he’d pounce. He must have been furious when Stipan stepped back from the tail of the hearse.

  ‘I no want. You take away.’ He went back into the shed, leaving Dad open-mouthed.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Pascoe,’ Matty said, ‘Dad’s not going to break the law.’

  ‘Bend it. Bend it’s all I do.’

  ‘Come on, Alf,’ Jack said. He closed the hearse doors and made Dad get in the driver’s seat. Davies should have stepped into the yard then. He still had Dad red-handed. Instead he chose to follow again. Maybe he thought Dad would try another customer.

  Back to town the hearse went, Dad talking all the way, and when they turned into Barrington Road Jack noticed the black car again. He said nothing to Dad but asked to be let off at the grocer shop. He had a shopping list and a kitbag from Mum. Dad let him out and he watched from just inside the door. The hearse turned down the alley to the yard behind the poolroom, and sure enough, the black car turned down too, slow and sneaky; and that was a policeman at the wheel.

  Jack moved fast out of the shop without the grocer seeing. He’d grown up on the streets of Chicago. He could cross a public road invisibly and slide down an alley like a cat. When he got to the corner and looked round, Bob Davies had just got out of his car. No sign of Dad. Dad had gone through to the barbershop.

  Davies had parked his car so the hearse could not get out. He opened the back doors – Dad careless again – and lifted the tarp and looked at the sugar. Grinned like a wolf. He cracked his finger joints, set his helmet straight, and marched into the poolroom for his prey.

  Jack reckoned he had only half a minute. Davies had left the hearse doors open and that saved a second or two. He ran to the hearse, pulled the heavy sacks, one with each hand, to the tail, hefted them up, an arm for each, and ran under that heavy load to the only hiding place Davies wouldn’t think of. He stowed them there. Then it was back up the alley, across the road, ambling casually, and into the grocer’s, where he stepped from behind a rack of seeds as though he’d been there all the time. He took Mum’s shopping list from his pocket. ‘Howdy, man,’ he smiled at the grocer. ‘You got some sugar? Mrs Pascoe give me these here coupons.’

  Oh yes, Jack knew his way around.

  The next part of the story comes from Dad. He was tying on his apron when Davies came in from the poolroom.

  ‘Morning, Alf.’

  ‘Bob. You gave me a heart attack.’ Dad wasn’t joking. His heart flipped right over, he said.

  ‘Come with me a minute, eh? There’s something I want you to see.’

  He took Dad through the poolroom and into the yard, keeping close to him all the way. ‘I think he expected me to bolt.’ Dad must have been tempted. The doors of the hearse were open wide. ‘My mouth was so dry it was like eating green persimmons.’

  Davies didn’t look in the hearse. He pointed inside but kept his eyes on Dad, wanting to enjoy every minute. ‘What would those be, Alf?’

  Dad looked. At first he thought Davies was cat-and-mousing him. His eyes went darting about, looking for the place where the sugar must be.

  ‘What’s what, Bob?’

  ‘Quit playing games. I’ve got you, Alf.’ Then he looked.

  ‘Poor guy,’ Dad would say, telling the story. He felt really sorry for Bob Davies. ‘He looked as if Joe Louis had punched him in the puku. He looked as if he was going to cry.’

  Davies hunted of course – under the hearse, in the poolroom, in the sheds opening off the yard. He even got a ladder and climbed on the roof.

  ‘You’ve been seeing things, Bob.’

  In the end there was nothing for him t
o do but go home. He drove out of the alley and up the road – and Jack, who had spent half an hour chatting with the grocer, came out of the door at that moment, with Mum’s groceries in the kitbag. Later on, when Davies asked, the grocer swore that Jack had come into his shop after Dad had dropped him and not left it for half an hour. Jack was a slick mover, as I said. Davies got no joy.

  Where was the sugar? Why, in the boot of Davies’ car. When he arrived back at the station and opened up to take out some gear there the two sacks were, fat and bland. There wasn’t a thing Bob Davies could do.

  ‘Gone!’ Dad said. ‘Vanished in thin air,’ with a look at Jack.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ Jack said. ‘I was in the grocer’s all the time.’

  But he told me, ‘I couldn’t let your daddy get caught. He’s been good to me.’

  Jack spent a lot of time with Grandma and Grandpa. He helped with the amphibian but liked even more working in the garden, spreading compost, digging potatoes, picking beans and cucumbers. He pulled out old tomato vines and turned the earth over and held up huge worms for Grandma to see. He wheeled the barrow in the cow paddocks of Stewarts’ farm while she scooped up shovelfuls of manure.

  ‘How’s Rex getting on?’ Grandma said.

  ‘He’s doing okay. He didn’t expect anyone like me.’

  ‘He thought you’d be Errol Flynn, with a chestful of medals.’ (Errol Flynn, a swashbuckling actor.)

  ‘Yeah,’ Jack laughed. Then, curious: ‘Why did Mrs Pascoe invite me?’

  ‘She likes Paul Robeson.’ (Paul Robeson, a Negro baritone.)

  Grandma lifted a dry cow-pat and showed Jack threadlike worms on its underside. Perhaps they reminded her of me, because she said, ‘Rex is not a bad boy. He just wants to win the war, all by himself. He thinks his mum and dad aren’t trying hard enough.’

  ‘Yeah, that Alf. He wouldn’t last half an hour in Chicago.’

  ‘He wouldn’t last half an hour in Auckland. Kettle Creek is Alf’s size, he can just about handle it.’

  ‘I’d like to come back to Kettle Creek,’ Jack said.

  ‘Don’t be too sure.’ She pointed at Mrs Stewart, striding over the paddocks.

  ‘Who said you could come on my land?’

  ‘Lay off, Joan, I’ve been getting cow dung here for twenty years,’ Grandma said.

  ‘You can come, not anyone else.’

  Grandma winked at Jack. She knew better than to introduce him. ‘Anyway, we’ve got enough. Oh, Joan, those old scales you used to have, can I borrow them? For my gala veges? Ask young Dawn to drop them over. Perhaps she’d like to help on my stall?’ And off she went, with her shovel on her shoulder and Jack at her side with the barrow. Grandma could get most things she wanted. She could handle Mrs Stewart, up to a point. As they unloaded the dung in the garden she told Jack the story of the Stewart farm, Rose and Jimmy, Dawn’s childhood.

  ‘Joan does her best. She keeps the girl looking nice, that sort of thing.’ It wasn’t enough. And here I’d better say that Grandma and Dawn had a friendship I knew nothing about. Dawn used to walk across the paddocks and spend half an hour talking to Grandma. That afternoon when she brought the scales, Grandma hunted through a box of old photographs and found a photo from 1910. It showed two women in white dresses holding racquets by a tennis net; and smiling, smiling, with white shining teeth. One of them was a pretty girl.

  ‘Is this my grandmother?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘She’s smiling,’ Dawn said.

  ‘Of course. She was young. She was happy.’

  ‘Could she play tennis?’

  ‘I’ll say she could. She was deadly at the net. Quick as a cat.’ She fetched another box, junk this time not photographs, and upended it on the mat. Searched in the bric-a-brac. Found a tiny silver-plated cup and dusted it on her sleeve. ‘We won the ladies’ doubles in 1910.’

  Dawn took the cup and puzzled out the names. ‘Miss J. McInnes. That was her?’

  ‘Joan McInnes. See, in the photo, her engagement ring?’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Ah, too many things.’ Far too much for anyone to explain. ‘Would you like to have that photograph?’

  ‘Yes, I’d love it. She said I can help on your stall.’

  ‘Good,’ Grandma said. ‘Take a bag of veges home to her.’

  Dawn carried them home and put them on the table. She hid the tennis photo in the drawer with the bottle of perfume and the photo of her mother, and looked at it frequently in the days that followed, trying to work out the puzzle – how could Miss J. McInnes be so happy then and Grandma Stewart so unhappy now?

  Chapter 9

  Chicago

  Leo and I searched for the canoe but never found it.

  ‘It could be Whittle and his gang.’

  ‘They don’t come here. I still say it’s her.’

  We called Jack from Grandma’s garden and went to the launch. Dawn was swimming in the creek and she stayed in the mangroves on the other side while we changed. Jack wore Dad’s 1920s bathing togs, which were tight around his chest but baggy at his hips.

  Dawn was a better swimmer than Leo and me. She dived off the bow and didn’t come up, didn’t come up…and Jack’s head went this way and that, looking for her. ‘Hey,’ he said, taking a step and stopping, then taking another.

  ‘She’s swimming under water.’ But I wasn’t sure.

  Dawn surfaced twenty yards away. ‘Come on, yeller bellies.’ She was completely changed from the girl at school.

  Leo and I dived in and tried to reach her but came up short. Jack sat on the rail.

  ‘Come on, Jack.’

  ‘I can’t swim.’

  I couldn’t believe it. We were river kids. We swam almost as soon as we could walk. Dawn duck-dived and came up by the launch. Her sense of direction was amazing. You couldn’t open your eyes in that yellow-brown water. She grabbed Jack’s leg and tried to pull him in. He let himself go but twisted round and held the rail. Leo caught his other leg.

  ‘No. Hey. Leave go.’ I saw the panic in his eyes.

  ‘It’s not deep. Come round the stern.’

  He went hand over hand where I showed him and stood in water up to his waist.

  ‘We’ll teach you.’

  Dawn and Leo had swum off. They wriggled into the mangrove trunks and dipped for handfuls of mud and pelted each other.

  ‘Let yourself float.’ I was offhand with him. I thought it shameful that a grown man couldn’t swim. ‘Now try dog-paddling, like this.’

  He tried and almost sank and reared up in a half-panic.

  ‘Keep your fingers closed.’

  Leo threw mud at us.

  ‘Lay off, I’m teaching him.’

  Dawn threw and hit Jack. Mud stuck on the scar that ran like a ragged sword from the point of his shoulder into his chest. He scraped it off and threw it back. The time wasn’t right for lessons. I watched sourly as Jack climbed into the mangroves, hunting Dawn and Leo. They splattered him with mud, and he, dipping down, came up with great handfuls and threw back. It was too good to stay out of. I went ploughing in and a mud fight raged, Jack and me against Dawn and Leo. We drove them back but they split up and took us from the sides. Up and down the fringes of the mangroves we went, all of us plastered inch-thick with mud. No side won. In the end everyone threw at everyone else. We washed ourselves clean by diving deep – Dawn and Leo and I – and poured buckets of water on Jack as he stood at the stern of the launch. Then we dried off on the warm deck.

  ‘How come you can’t swim?’

  ‘Ain’t no swimming pools where I come from.’

  ‘There’s a lake,’

  ‘I’ve only seen that lake two, three times.’

  I found that hard to believe: a lake as big as the North Island that you hardly ever saw.

  ‘When it gets hot, maybe someone opens the fire hydrant, us kids cool off under there.’

  ‘That would be fun,’ Dawn said.

  ‘Yeah, fun.’ He smi
led at her. Jack was patient with us all.

  ‘What’s your place like?’ Leo asked.

  ‘My place?’

  ‘Your house? Where you live?’

  ‘I don’t have no house. My mammy, she’s got two rooms. In a tenement house.’ He measured with his hands and grinned. ‘With big rats instead of puppy dogs.’

  ‘Yah,’ Leo said, ‘that’s more than a foot.’

  ‘I’m tellin’ you.’

  ‘Was it a slum?’ Dawn spoke the word apologetically. We’d heard about slums from Miss Betts.

  ‘Yeah, slum.’

  That kept us quiet. Leo said, ‘What about your job?’

  ‘I don’t have no job. I learn about cars though. I wash cars and look in the motors. Learn that way. Washin’ cars, that’s better than the stockyards.’ We sat quiet while he thought about Chicago. He shrugged his shoulders, putting some memory by. ‘Then I went for a boxer, at the gym.’

  A pity he said that. I was starting to see a real Jack but now, in a flash, put an unreal one in his place.

  ‘Did you have any fights?’

  Jack gave me a lazy look, half amused. ‘I got my head beat off.’

  ‘Did you win any though?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘By knockouts?’

  ‘I knock one feller out – ’

  ‘Great!’

  ‘– one feller knock me out. Ain’t no future. I’ll try for a mechanic after the war. Then maybe I can come back and get me a job in Kettle Creek.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Leo.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dawn. They liked that. But all I could see was Jack knocking another boxer out.

  ‘An uppercut?’

  ‘I dunno, Rex. I jus’ kinda swing my fist an’ down he go.’

  I thought he was being modest. We got dressed and I made some collections for Dad while Jack waited. At half past five we stopped at the barbershop. Dad was out the back practising shots at a table. I gave him the money and he opened up the wall seat and unpadlocked a tin safe lying on its back – his place for spare cash and the betting ledger. He kept only one book so he could get rid of it quickly in emergencies.