by Gee, Maurice
‘The cops,’ Leo yelled.
The car came to a halt, slewed half round. Puffs of dry grass rose like smoke under its wheels. Davies jumped out. And from the other door Dawn Stewart came. She waited there. Davies ran into the scrub.
Leo was halfway to the ground. I climbed down after him. I almost dropped down the tree, grabbing branches to check myself. For once I was faster. I ran ahead of Leo through the scrub and burst into the clearing, wormed into the crowd, fell over the rope into the ring. Marv was on his feet again, with blood on his mouth. He was stepping forwards heavily, slow and sure, and Jack was circling. I think Marv would have been too strong in the end. But it never ended, not that way.
‘Police!’ I yelled. And Leo, behind me, yelled it too.
It was like an ant nest broken. Men went off in every direction, or seemed to start in three ways at once. Several tripped and fell, but were up again and crashing head down into the scrub. One, I heard later, swam across the river in his clothes. Dad took off. He was first. George Perry vanished in a puff of smoke. Herb got Marv, ran him over the fallen rope and half off balance into the scrub. I don’t think Marv knew what was happening. I took Jack. He ripped off his gloves and let them drop as I pulled him along. Leo, thinking fast, very calm, gathered Jack’s clothes and got Marv’s too and ran with them heaped in his arms.
We got into the scrub and found a place to squat. The clearing was empty. Distant yells sounded by the river. The ring had two posts fallen and ropes drooping from the other two. Our bentwood chairs lay on their backs in the grass with Jack’s boxing gloves curled and bloodstained nearby. The keg of beer stood on the table and empty glasses glittered in the sun. That was all Bob Davies found when he came charging into the clearing.
He stopped. He listened. Yells and crashes, moving away. He could have caught someone if he’d tried. He could have found out who owned the chairs. But Davies, in his way, was an idealist. He wanted the perfect arrest. He wanted Alf Pascoe red-handed. Nothing else would do. He’d missed getting him for the sugar and now he’d missed him at the boxing match. Well, he’d wait. The day would come. In the meantime…
Davies picked up Jack’s gloves and tossed them aside. He pushed a corner post on to an angle with his boot. He went to the table and took a glass and wiped it clean with his handkerchief. He ran a glass of beer from the keg and held it up towards the silent scrub. ‘May the best man win.’ Then he picked up a chair and put it on its feet. He sat in the sun and drank his beer. We had to wait there squatting in the scrub until he was finished.
Chapter 12
Flapjacks, Milk and Lootenant Paretsky
We went back to town a roundabout way and dropped Marv’s clothes over the fence into Whalleys’ section.
‘It was Dawn who brought him.’
Jack looked surprised.
‘She was in his car,’ I said. ‘How’d she know?’
‘I told her.’
‘Why?’
‘Why not?’
‘She’s a rat. You would’ve knocked him out.’
‘Maybe I didn’t want to, eh?’
Now it was my turn to be surprised.
‘Maybe I didn’t want any fights in Kettle Creek.’
I muttered at that. I couldn’t see what he meant. ‘I’ll fix her.’
‘No you won’t. You don’t say nothin’.’
‘Why not?’
‘ ’Cause I’m tellin’ you.’ He didn’t often speak as sharply as that.
‘Anyway, you knocked him over,’ I said.
‘Sure. Good punch.’ He was humouring me. ‘Right hook’s a good punch.’
We went to the launch and found Dawn there. I left her alone until Jack went into the wheelhouse to change into his togs. Then I darted at her snakily. ‘You stopped him winning. He was going to win.’
‘He didn’t want to be in a fight. Your father made him.’
‘Liar! You wait till he’s gone. I’ll get you, Stewart.’
Jack appeared in the doorway, wearing togs. ‘Now you listen, all of you.’ I was mutinous but I obeyed. ‘You’re my buddies, one, two, three. And me makes four.’
‘Sure,’ Leo said. He wasn’t upset about the fight.
‘Okay, Dawn?’
‘Yes, okay.’
‘Rex?’
‘She told the cops. We should kick her out.’
‘Nobody’s out. We’re buddies.’
‘And it’s my launch,’ Dawn said.
Jack went into the deckhouse and came back with four apples. He gave one to Leo, one to Dawn.
‘Take it,’ he said to me. I did as I was told, but wouldn’t bite.
‘What happened, that’s over,’ Jack said. ‘Too nice to quarrel, this sun.’
We sat on the deck and ate our apples. Even I ate mine in the end.
‘Will you go back to Chicago after the war?’ Leo said.
Jack nodded. ‘That’s home.’
‘The war will go on for years yet,’ I said crossly. Jack gave me a patient look.
‘Do you really have to go tomorrow?’ Dawn said.
‘ ’Fraid so.’
‘Can you come back for a holiday?’
‘I’d like that. I sure would.’
‘Chicago’s better than Kettle Creek,’ I said.
‘It’s bigger, that’s for sure,’ Jack said. He threw his core away. ‘Nowhere’s better.’
‘They should let you have a longer holiday.’
‘Soldiers don’t get holidays. He’s got to go and help win the war.’ Everything I said to Dawn was contemptuous.
‘What I’ve got to do is learn to swim. Who’s my teacher?’
‘Me,’ Dawn said.
‘No, me.’
Jack stood up. ‘I reckon I’ll have one on each side.’ He grinned at Leo. ‘And one underneath, to stop me sinkin’.’
So we spent that last afternoon teaching him and by the end of it he could dog-paddle across the creek, with his head held high. It was his helplessness in the water that calmed me down and made me start behaving in a reasonable way again. I think we all felt the same towards him – protective, and yet somehow protected by him. Equal to him, accepted, yet innocent and simple and silly alongside Jack and all the things he knew.
I lay in bed and watched him pack his bag. Mum had ironed his shirts and he held them to his face.
‘Still warm.’
‘Will you write letters to us?’
‘Sure I’ll write.’
‘And tell us where you are?’
‘Can’t do that. They don’t allow that. I’ll send you some cigarette packets. Rare ones, eh?’
I felt under my pillow and pulled out the Purple Heart.
‘Jack.’
He took it and dropped it in his bag, never a glance. Then he turned out the light, opened the curtains, got into bed. He tapped a Camel out of his pack and lit up. Just as on that first night, his face came forward from the dark and sank away. The scar turned pink and faded out in time with it. I felt a dull ache in my own shoulder. Perhaps I’d been swimming too hard that afternoon.
‘You don’t like the war, do you?’ I said.
Jack laughed at my way of putting it. ‘I don’t like the chance of gettin’ killed.’
‘We’ve got to stop the Japs though.’
‘Yeah, I guess.’ He drew on his cigarette. His face lit up, then dimmed.
‘They won’t get you, Jack.’ I scrambled out of bed and turned on the light. Jack flicked the curtain across. ‘Blackout,’ he said.
I opened my drawer and took out the drawing I’d meant to save for him till morning. ‘I did this for you.’
It was my usual crude affair, drawn side-on. A man, coal black, in boxing shorts and gloves, knocked a white boxer backwards through the air with an uppercut. Underneath was printed: KO by Tiger Coop.
Jack squinted at it. He put his head on one side to see the white man’s face. ‘That’s ole Marv.’ He grinned at me. ‘Out stone cold.’
‘Yes,’
I said, delighted.
‘An’ this is me? Brown Bomber, eh?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s real good. You draw real good, Rex.’
‘Will you take it back to the war?’ Perhaps I meant it would keep him safe.
‘Sure I will.’ And Jack, just perhaps, understood. He put the drawing carefully in his bag. ‘Lights out, eh? Got some sleeping to do after all that sun.’
As I went to sleep he ground out his cigarette in the ashtray. But I woke several times in the night and Jack was always awake. Once he was smoking again and once he stood at the window and looked down Barrington Road at our town in the moonlight.
‘Can’t you sleep, Jack?’
‘I’m okay. Jus’ thinkin’.’
‘What about?’
‘Lots of things, Rex. Lots of things.’ He angled his watch to read the time. ‘It’s near two o’clock. You better get some shut-eye.’
I raised myself on my elbow and caught a glimpse of moonlit sea, far away. ‘Are there any Jap subs?’
‘Not here. No subs here.’
So I went back to sleep. I’m not sure that Jack slept at all that night.
In the morning he cooked flapjacks. Gloria helped, while Mum watched from the table and made darts at the stove to make sure enough wood was on.
‘Leave the recipe, Jack.’
‘I will. Better turn him, Gloria, he’s burnin’.’ He brought a heaped plate to the table.
‘They’re delicious,’ Mum said.
‘They’re better with maple syrup. That golden syrup ain’t no good.’
Dad came in with a broken-backed chair. He put it at the table with a flourish. ‘Presto!’
‘I don’t want that. I want my own ones back,’ Mum said.
‘Temporary measures, love. I’ll have a six-piece suite for you on the carrier tonight.’
‘You’re lucky he didn’t take your beds and sofas,’ Jack said.
‘Ole Marv could’ve done with a lie-down,’ Dad said.
We feasted on flapjacks. Then Gloria had to leave for her bus.
‘Hey,’ Jack said, ‘I don’t see you any more.’
‘Isn’t it sad?’ She was only half joking. She threw her arms around him. ‘Goodbye, Jack. Thanks for punching Marv for me.’
‘Any time.’
Gloria grabbed her bag. She walked out fast and jaunty, but I saw her wipe her eyes as she went by the kitchen window. And soon only Jack and I were left. Dad called Mum to the bedroom to hunt out a shirt. She’d washed and ironed Jack’s clothes but hadn’t got round to his.
‘Did he give you some money for the fight?’ I asked Jack.
‘I don’t want money.’ He forked another flapjack on to his plate. ‘Don’t you go till I finish eating.’
‘No, Jack.’
‘You eat too.’
‘I can’t…’ I’d had six already. I was bursting.
‘Just one, eh?’ He put a flapjack on my plate. ‘There, eat.’
I obeyed. I saw he didn’t want to be alone.
Mum walked down to the ten-twenty bus with him. She kissed him and gave him a bag of fruit and put him on. The bus went through the main street, where Dad waved from the barbershop door, and ground up the hill past the school. It was morning playtime. Dawn and Leo and I waited by the fence. The bus, a green and yellow rattletrap with gears that seemed to lose teeth at every change, went by. There was Jack, waving at the window, grinning at us. He looked happy to be going but I knew that was a pretence. He shifted to the back seat and waved from the rear window, and that was how we saw the end of him, framed there, smiling, diminishing. The bus turned the corner, leaving its dust.
Leo said, ‘It was Marv and Herb.’
‘What?’
‘On the bus.’
‘I didn’t see them.’
‘Nor did I,’ Dawn said.
‘They were there. On the other side.’
‘Jack’s all right. He’s not scared of them.’
‘They can’t do anything on the bus,’ Dawn said. She turned from the fence and walked away. I looked at Leo. It seemed there was nothing to keep us together now.
‘Got to go to the dunny,’ he said. And went.
I leaned on the fence until the dust at the corner had drifted into the gorse. Then I walked across the playground to a seat by the chestnut tree and sat down and read my Champion. But somehow, that day, Rockfist was unreal.
After lunch Miss Betts came in rubbing her hands together. ‘Instead of nature study we’ll have science. Who wants to see an experiment?’
Our hands went up.
‘Good. Now, watch carefully because after this is done I want you to describe it in your books. Why do we do experiments? Dawn Stewart?’
Dawn thought. ‘To find things out?’
‘Exactly. We find out, for example, what sort of minerals are in rocks, or what the air is made of, and so on.’
‘The air’s just made of air, Miss Betts,’ Nancy Barnhill said.
‘That’s what you think. I’ll tell you about air another day. Now – to do experiments we have to have equipment. So…’ She took three jars from her cupboard and put them on her desk. We laughed.
‘They’re just jam jars, Miss Betts.’
She didn’t get cross. She only smiled. ‘They’re containers. They hold liquid. We don’t have to be Madame Curie in her lab. I’ve got a mark on each of them, you see, three-quarter-ways up. Who can guess what we’re going to test?’
Nobody could. Miss Betts went to her cupboard again. She brought out a bottle of school milk and held it up.
‘Milk’s just made of milk, Miss Betts,’ Nancy said.
‘Oh indeed. Shall we see?’ She shook the bottle and took out the cardboard stopper. ‘Tell me when I get to the mark.’
‘Now, Miss Betts.’
‘Now.’
‘You’ve gone over.’
Miss Betts smiled and drank a bit from the jar. We’d never seen her in such a good humour. ‘Now, two more.’ She took them out, sauce bottles, and held them by their necks like hanged men. ‘More milk.’ She put one on the table and screwed the top off the other. ‘This is McDonalds’, fresh this morning. Tell me when.’ She filled the second jar up to the mark. ‘Now, that’s on my right as I look at it. Your left. With school milk in the middle. And on my left…’ she uncapped the second bottle, poured it in, ‘…Stewarts’ milk. Enough?’
‘Yes, Miss Betts.’
I looked at Dawn. She was watchful. Leo was looking at her too.
‘Right,’ Miss Betts said. ‘So far we’ve got three lots of milk from different places. Our experiment is going well. Now we take another piece of equipment.’ She opened a drawer of her desk and took it out: a glass tube with marks like those of a ruler on its side and a bulb at the bottom. She held it up for us to see.
‘Before I tell you what this is, some facts about milk. It’s not just milk, as Nancy seems to think, it’s all sorts of things. It’s got casein, that’s what makes it white. It’s got fat. That’s the part that makes the cream. It’s got lactose – I’ll write these on the board later on. Lactose is milk sugar, not as sweet as ordinary sugar. It’s got mineral salts, calcium especially. That’s for your bones and teeth. But – do you know what makes up most of our milk? Anyone?’
No one knew.
‘I’ll give you a hint. This – ’ she held up the glass tube – ‘is called a hydrometer. Hydro means…?’
I put up my hand. ‘Something to do with water?’ I guess that was a kind of betrayal of Dawn but I couldn’t miss the chance of showing off.
‘Good. So water is the other important thing in milk. In fact it’s eighty-seven per cent of milk. That seems a lot but it’s quite normal. Now, the second part of the word hydrometer – meter – means measure. So a hydrometer is a piece of equipment for measuring how much water is in a liquid. And today we’re going to try it out on three different lots of milk, and all of them, you’ll see, will come out the same.’
/> She smiled at Dawn. And how – having scored my triumph with ‘hydro’ – how I wished something would happen to save her. She could not even put up her hand to leave the room.
‘Let’s try school milk first. Watch the little red mark as I lower the hydrometer in.’
It floated bobbing in the middle jar. Miss Betts looked up to call the reading out; but a car engine sounded in the road. Car engine? Jeep. We were experts in the sound. It stopped at the school gates with a skid of tyres. A woman laughed, making a clear and lovely sound. Dawn half stood up.
Leo, in his window seat, had the best view. He turned and looked at Dawn and mouthed, ‘Your mother.’ What he could not signal was the driver, the Yank, who jumped out and ran round to the passenger door. He held up his hand to help her down – just like in the pictures, Leo said. Miss Betts flattened craning children with her finger.
‘What on earth do you think you’re doing? Dawn Stewart, sit down.’
Dawn sank into her desk. She sat very still. Before Miss Betts could get busy again, high heels clattered in the corridor outside. That was a sound Miss Betts was expert in. She put her head on one side. The footsteps came to our door and three knocks sounded, chirpy, rhythmical.
Miss Betts gave us a warning look. She crossed to the door and opened it, but not widely enough for my half of the room to see.
‘Miss Betts?’ said a voice. ‘I’m Rose Stewart. Dawn’s mother.’
Miss Betts did not reply. She turned to us with a frown. ‘Not a word.’ She stepped outside and closed the door.
‘Your mother. Your mother,’ everyone whispered at Dawn.
‘Bettsy-bum won’t let you go,’ Jim Whittle said.
‘I’ll go, she can’t stop me,’ Dawn said.
‘She’s got a Yank,’ a boy said.
‘Her boyfriend,’ Whittle grinned.
‘Shut up, Whittle, or I’ll bash you,’ Leo said.
Miss Betts came back. She closed the door firmly behind her. ‘Dawn Stewart.’