Wedding Bush Road

by David Francis

  As I get in, I glimpse the pony’s face through the bedroom window, turned about with its head now facing out, the window as its stable door. Another of Sharen’s stowaways. The black one nuzzles the windshield and Pip barks, but the looming horse ignores him, looks in at us until I beep the horn. I wonder how my mother bred such supercilious horses.

  “They’re all sired by that big-boned New Zealand horse that stood up at Caldemeade,” she says. In her element now. Horses and son. “You remember him, Sonambulo?” Parts of her memory are sharp as scissors and her hearing has somehow improved. “Trombone. Satchmo. Sleepwalker. All of them black as creosote,” she says, “but out of that same creamy mare. That mean old Lady Lime. The size of a shed.” My mother the size of that stick left in the pool by the sluice gates. “But they took their father’s color. Black as your boot, all three of them. Thick as thieves. That’s how we used to be.”

  I drive off and feel the weight of the time change, the lack of sleep. We’ve left my father behind. “What are we now?”

  “Arm’s length.” She bathes in the late morning sun refracting through the windscreen. The sign on the gate says STRICTLY PRIVATE but the gate’s wide open so you can only see the warning as you leave.

  “I have a girlfriend,” I say. “She’s part Venezuelan.” Starting in a way my mother might understand, with bloodlines. “We’re talking about getting married next year.”

  “Oh,” she says. She feigns neither judgment nor interest as we turn through the gate and bump back down the track onto Wedding Bush Road. These places that recur in my dreams as I sleep cupped with Isabel, holding onto her as if she’s a raft.

  “I guess we’ve left the lovebirds to it,” my mother says.

  I look back at the house in the dust unfurling behind us. And that’s the end of the Isabel discussion.

  “Where the Munnings hung,” I say, “something’s been painted on the wall.”

  I keep my eyes on the gravel but sense hers growing narrower.

  “He’s out of Sharen,” she says, “by that bloke who was born here in the bush. Remember him? Walker. Old Gracious’s son. Walker Dumbalk.” She grimaces. “Small world.” She turns to me and her face almost softens, then doesn’t. “Reggie thinks this place is part his,” she says, “because his father was born here.”

  She watches back out toward the Albertinis’ place. “Might as well be, I suppose, if your sights are set on Venezuela.” She starts humming one of her tuneless tunes, the one she always used to when she clipped the horses. “Danny Boy,” her favorite.

  “Her name is Isabel,” I say.

  SHE DROPS HER shopping bag on the kitchen table. The Sun and the mail, the New Idea, all of the reasons we went into town seem unimportant to her now. She’s feeling fragile, I can see it in the glaze of her eyes as she hangs the dog leash on its hook then disappears up the dark hall, touching the wall for balance.

  “Do you need me?” I ask her, but all I get is her halfhearted wave. As though letting me know she’s familiar with neglect. And I’m left in the doorway wondering if I’d not been here would I have ever heard of her fall. The way life only seems real if witnessed firsthand. If at the moment of her death, I’ll sit bolt upright in my bed in the canyon with a streaking thought of her.

  Alone, my focus is drawn to the phone on the desk, to the life where I’m not. I dial the “0”s and “1”s, the familiar string of numbers. “Your international call cannot be completed as dialed.” A polite Australian accent.

  The dog watches me as I try again. Do they even have cell phone service at Esalen? It makes me suddenly anxious. Only days ago, we stood together at the law firm’s painful Christmas party, taking the faux fur–collared coat off her shoulders at the door of the California Club. Her slender Versace knit dress I bought for her birthday, spending more than I ought. But it was worth it—she looked lovely. The narrow slope from her ribs to her hips, her buttery skin. The woman the partners tried not to notice in front of their wives. The dress my secret penance for being drunk at the summer associates’ dinner in August, right before Isabel said she was moving out to LA. I told her about Farideh, the Persian girl from Duke, how under the table our legs pressed against each other’s. I told myself that’s all I’d done but then we’d danced too close. “You’re a man,” said Isabel, “I like it that you’re so honest.” But I didn’t tell her how I wanted to take Farideh back to my office in the middle of the night, lay her on my desk and push a chair against the doorknob; how I wanted that when I was so in love with Isabel.

  The telephone ring sounds far away. I imagine the crystal bowl tone of her iPhone’s ring, rummaging in the pockets of her bag. If we’d flown out here together and we’d witnessed my mother and the dog hunting that possum along the picture rail, she’d have been so polite, suggesting a side trip—Bali, Lizard Island, or at least the W in Sydney. She’d have read up on restaurants, Bilson’s and Aria, the Bather’s Pavilion, ways to explore the reef. Would I have stayed here in this dark sitting room where that brumby foal once slept on the couch? Would Isabel have understood? I’ve seen her grandmother’s tureens of sacred cowrie shells, oracles and talismans. Her grandmother who taught her that the White God doesn’t talk or dance or even come to visit. The White God hates the feel of flesh and the sound of laughter in the night. The White God would reject her. And how she shouldn’t be with me.

  The line goes dead and I’m redialing, wishing there was wireless here, that my mobile might work.

  “Daniel. Hey, lindo.” The slight burnish of her accent on my name.

  I look up the hall to be sure my mother’s not prowling. “Mon amour, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, I’m here.” My accent feels broad and croaky, unprepared, my words swallowed up in an echo of wind on her speakerphone. “You’re driving.” Near San Simeon maybe, or the beach where the famous seals dot the sand. “Are you nearly there?” I ask. “It must be getting dark.”

  Her easy, guilty laugh. “We’re on the PCH near Topanga. We just left.” I can hear Mona laughing. “L-O-S-T,” she says, her Latins-Only Standard Time. I imagine the sun glinting silver off the water and the shadows of the cliffs.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “Mona’s driving.”

  “Her car?”

  “She doesn’t have one,” she says and there’s laughter. She’s driving my Jeep.

  “It’s lucky I love you,” I say. “Why didn’t you just take the 101?”

  An echo breaks onto the line and it’s harder to hear. “We wanted to see the sunset from that big rock, near where the sand slides down the hill.” The day we tobogganed down on cardboard sleds and sat on the giant rock with a view of the ocean, the towers of the naval station at Point Mugu.

  “And we wanted to see the surfers.” Repeating Mona, and I feel a twinge of envy, the two of them together spotting guys changing out of wetsuits right on the side of the road. The colored sails of the late kitesurfers at Zuma. The beaches with Spanish names: El Matador, El Pescador. “You should stop for the night at Pismo.”

  “We’ll be fine,” she says but I can feel her smile trail off in the wind, and I can feel her colluding with Mona, a playful roll of eyes.

  “I told my mother about us,” I say, but she’s having trouble hearing so I shout it.

  “Well, I should hope so,” she says as if that’s no big deal. I look up through the dimness, along the sitting room picture rail, a photo of me jumping High Colorado at Melbourne Royal, but the horse has been speckled with dots.

  “You’re so strange, lindo,” she says. “Are you okay?”

  I want to tell her about the boy and how I miss her but the line starts shrieking as though it’s a fax so I lay the receiver down, stand up on the couch, and reach. Me in jodhpurs and short elastic-side boots, but the horse’s bay rump is painted as if it’s an Appaloosa. The other photos, my mother with a stirrup cup with the Findon Harriers, the line of framed Lipizzaners with their different airs above the ground, are untouched. The phone is bee
ping.

  WHEN I OPEN my eyes it’s already late, slants of last light shelve through the motes of dust, through the sharp speckled light, and then I see what’s woken me. A half-naked boy slithers silently up from the top of the wardrobe, up into the hole in the roof.

  “Reggie,” I say, sitting up in the bed. “Get down here and talk to me.” But there is no movement. “Did you go through my things?” Still nothing and I wonder if I imagined him, somewhere between dreaming and awake, it doesn’t seem possible to get through that hole from the wardrobe, it’s too precarious. “I just want to talk,” I say. “Why are you up in the roof?” As I pull on my jeans, I remember the ladder leaned up against the trellis outside.

  The flashlight I grabbed from the top of the fridge smacks on the doorjamb, the ladder not that tall as I lock the legs wide, but I’m climbing, suddenly wary of putting my head up through this hole. Black as a well, the ragged edges barely wide enough for shoulders. The whine of the dog and my mother is up with her fierce night eyes. “What the hell are you doing?” she asks, coming over to steady the legs but her hold just makes them shakier.

  “Just checking,” I say as I poke my head up through, cobwebs wrapping about my hair, the acrid smell of rat dirt. I open my eyes to others that shine back at me. I spray them with light. Possums, mother and baby, staring from tornup papers, debris. Rafters exposed with fine shafts of light from the last of the sun through a crevice.

  “See anything good?” she asks.

  The possum skulks behind a fallen beam and I glance down. “Sharen’s boy, I saw him. I think I did, I just wanna make sure I’m not going bonkers.”

  I see smudges in the dust on top of the wardrobe, but a possum wouldn’t just be standing there. Pushing my head back up into the darkness, I try to shed the light on what’s behind the chimney, illuminate something—a blue blanket with pink checks and I make out a row of baby swallows, their heads from nests tucked under the eaves, but no sign of that boy.

  “We need to fix this hole,” I call down, but my mother’s lost interest; she’s stepping back toward the bed.

  “How would the possums get out?” she asks. “They’d starve. Stink the place up.”

  As I pull my torch arm through, his face appears from behind the chimney, then his half-naked body shining with sweat in frayed denim shorts, and I’m staring as if I’m the one intruding. “This is yours,” he says. “I borrowed it.” He holds up the photo of Isabel and I shine the flashlight on her face, her almost-smile. The boy smiles too as if he’s sorry for the inconvenience. His dry surf-knotted hair bleached pale by the sun.

  “Give me that,” I say reaching to him as he kneels to hand it over. As I try to take her from him, the ladder swoons sideways then jerks from beneath me, ripping out under my feet like I’m a man being hanged.

  A DIZZYING PAIN stabs at my eye as I try to sit up; trees rush by in the dark. The dog observes me from between the front seats and my hand aches, blood on my shirt. Two fingers strapped tight with electrician’s tape, and what is it? Thinly peeled bark underneath it, the smell of eucalyptus. A crease in my palm oozes red. I remember the wardrobe mirror coming at me, my hand stretched out. Touch my forehead where the skin feels raw, my eyebrow swollen. I’m about to throw up.

  Rising again, I want to make out who’s driving but it’s as though the car is roving on its own. The night seems furry outside and the car lurches above the gravel. Pound Road, this stretch between hedges where the Anderson boy ploughed his motorbike through those hawthorn hedges and wrapped himself up in the fence.

  Hoisting myself up, I make out my mother’s gray hair through the headrest. The pain strikes back in my eye. “Turn on the headlights,” I say.

  She leans into the steering wheel as if it holds her up. “They’re on,” she says but it looks as though it’s only the parkers.

  “Where are we going?” My voice is hoarse, from far away.

  “Emergency,” she says. “You broke the wardrobe mirror. You were out like a wino, your hand was bleeding.” She winds her window down and the night blows in at her hair. “It looked like an axe wound.”

  “How did I get to the car?”

  She doesn’t answer, her concentration is out in the shifting darkness and I remember the face of the boy in the roof and those blood-grained eyes. He helped her. Maybe she likes him because he helps, because he’s the only one here.

  The pain pierces through my head. “You shouldn’t be driving,” I tell her but she leans farther forward, her shoulders clenched high by her ears, her small hands clawed on the wheel, straining to stay on the gravel, smelling her way through the blackness. I watch the farms pour by through the bug-smeared window.

  I come to, squinting through a white, fluorescent light, laid out on my back in a hospital bed. A dark-skinned doctor looms above me, examining my hand. It aches as though a nail has been run through it. “We’ll need to stitch this,” he says, his accent clipped, Anglo-Indian or Sri Lankan, but he’s talking to somebody else.

  “Hello there, Mister Daniel,” says a nurse as if she knows me, her hair stringy, gray-blond. She places her clipboard on the table and bends low to winch up the bed. She looks like a friend of my father’s.

  “Where am I?”

  “Berwick Medical Center,” she says.

  The room is a pale lime green and trimmed in pink, plastic-smelling, a deep window with a view out into a bright-lit parking lot. I don’t remember Berwick having a hospital. A line of silvery poplars shines in the night, lit like popsicles. I feel nauseous.

  “You have a concussion,” says the doctor in his pristine coat, “plus a good cut and some abrasions. You must have taken quite a spill.” He peers down through gold-rimmed Gandhi glasses.

  “Went for a burton,” says the nurse as if she needs to translate.

  “Who wrapped bark under the tape?” asks the doctor.

  I blanch as the nurse uncurls a small bloodstained strip of bark. The depth of the cut, a gorge between my thumb and first finger. The mirror broke my fall, shattered, the glass must have sliced me. I imagine my mother fetching gauze and tape and that boy running out for a ribbon of bark off the blue gum.

  “They do that with bark where I come from,” says the doctor, “in Punjabi villages. They say bark clots the blood.”

  “Did we run off the road?” I ask but the nurse looks at me confused as she pinches a needle in my palm and I clench my eyes at the pain. “Where’s my mother?” I ask as the feeling of the anesthesia pushes through my hand and I don’t hear an answer just the shunting sound of a train in the night, the cold comfort of iron clattering on tracks. Isabel’s face in that silver-framed photo, down in Battery Park the weekend we met in New York and she leaned against the boardwalk fence, the way she hugged her shoulders, the sky bright against the sea behind her, then she did a little ballet. She’d be quizzing this doctor about brain swelling, bleeding, demanding an ambulance to a city hospital. I should insist on an MRI.

  The numb sense of the needle sewing, webbing the skin between my thumb and forefinger. The train-throttle sound and I’m staring away from the numbness, out through the window. My mother is down there in the parking lot, flimsy as a thread. The thought of her holding the car on the road as if it were an airplane landing, and the boy’s spittled leaves and the bark now on the tray.

  “Just one more,” says the doctor and I look down at the miniature knots being tied, the catgut and tweezers, the neat little stitches. A tremor weaves inside me as the doctor wheels back on the stool and then stands. He walks around to the window and looks down as if intrigued. The dark and silent parking lot, the little woman with the dog by the car.

  “Is that your mother?” he asks.

  “She doesn’t like hospitals.”

  My mother rights herself with a hand on the car door and the doctor removes his glasses, rests an end of the frame on his coffee-stained teeth. “Will she be driving you home?”

  With that my mother looks up and regards us.

&
nbsp; “She drove ambulances during the war,” I say.

  SITTING ALONE IN this stark hospital room I’d call Isabel, if my hand wasn’t wrapped like a mummy’s, and if I had my phone. Why can’t I remember her number? I want to listen to her strange stories, not deal with my own. How her New Yorker father had factories in Caracas and Cartagena making fine leather gloves and belts, a wife in Manhattan who knew nothing of his secret daughter in the Bronx. When she was eleven and he took her on a picnic to Central Park she knew she shouldn’t but she told him how the Babalawo came to her mother’s flat with two big cages, one full of doves and the other had a rooster, and how everyone huddled in the grandmother’s room with the altar where the Babalawo sang and shook his shells and called in his spirits, his jangling beads and crazy eyes. Coaxed by her father, she said it cost a thousand dollars for a night with the Babalawo, she told him that and stared down at the tartan picnic blanket, told how the doves were taken from the cage, one by one, rubbed all over her body, how scary it was as the Babalawo took out his knife and slaughtered the rooster, squirted blood from its neck right into her mouth so it ran down her throat and over her skin. When her father asked why, she could tell he was angry. She said she was being prepared in her grandmother’s ways for womanhood. She remembered her feet sticking out from the end of a sheet and how they were sticky, bathed in blood and bird guts, and how her father took her home from the picnic and from her bedroom she heard shouting, folded her ears and buried herself in her pillow. Then the door slammed and she knew it was the last time she’d hear her father’s voice. That it would be the last of the glove factory money.