The shrill ring of the phone and Sharen glares at me, daring me to answer. As if she already knows who it must be. At this hour.
I get up from the couch and reach over for the receiver. The international wind-tunnel sound. “Are you back in LA yet?” asks Isabel.
“Not exactly.”
“It’s New Year’s Eve.” She sounds exhausted too. “You promised.”
Still yesterday there, seventeen hours behind. “If I could be,” I say and there’s silence as my eyes meet Sharen’s. “Where are you?” I ask.
“Santa Rosa Airport.”
“Wine country,” I say, Sharen staring me down through the lamplight, stroking Reggie’s forehead and humming some kind of prayer. Her aqueous, marbled eyes.
“I thought I’d be back by now but things have gone apeshit here,” I say. Sharen squints as if fearing I might make light of what’s happening.
“You don’t even sound like you,” says Isabel through the hollow airport noises.
“There’s a boy fighting for his life right here,” I say. “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to sound.”
Sharen nods approval, as though at least that’s real.
“I don’t know what to believe,” says Isabel. Maybe she thinks it’s me fighting for my life, and why wouldn’t she? But I don’t sense her empathy now. The softness has gone from her voice, and it feels as if I’m drifting down another river.
“I don’t know what to believe myself,” I say. I look out through the curtains. The rain has stopped, the burned-up trunks straight and mute as blackened teeth. Walker still out there, maybe, or the chance of him gone. My mother and her kerosene. A faint wisp of crimson on the horizon. It could be a wisp of hope but it’s a peek of red sky and it’s morning. Delight doesn’t rhyme with morning.
“I thought I was pregnant,” says Isabel. My stomach turns tighter, as if tied in two. I glance back at Sharen and listen. “I confirmed that I wasn’t in the bathroom at a Walmart,” says Isabel. I can’t tell if she’s happy with that result.
“Would it have been mine?” It slips out too quickly, I’m blurring, the line gone quiet as the room. Mascara-smudged Sharen looks over; she knows what that question means, and my mother’s no longer snoring, maybe she listens too, the dog with its legs up in the air. Just Isabel’s breath.
“My grandmother warned me how men only accuse you when they’re guilty themselves,” she says.
I want to make light of it, but I’m too worn down for that. “I haven’t been perfect,” I say, wait for her to ask more but she doesn’t. Maybe she knows anyway, hears it in my voice, the erosion of what a heart holds. The brutality of distance.
“Then I’m going to New York to party with Doug and Bennie,” she says, her gay friends with the Schnauzers, the swank penthouse in Chelsea where I always feel not quite “up with people.” The idea of Isabel there drains the life from me. Then I remember.
“What about my Jeep?”
“Is that what you care about?”
She can’t just abandon it. “Then what about Laurel Canyon?” My sudden desire to salvage things garners a shrewd glance from Sharen.
“What would be the point?” asks Isabel and I’m not sure. The thought of her in some drugstore bathroom peeing on a strip and waiting for the color, flying into LAX on New Year’s Eve to spend the night alone.
“I’ll be there soon,” I say.
“What if I had been pregnant? What would you do then?”
An ache returns behind my eyes. “I would come home,” I say.
“Don’t insult me with your promises!” she says, then a fax beep in my ear; she’s disconnected. I stand there stunned as Sharen searches down at Reggie. The words she spat at me on the dance floor, how we Rawsons think we can have everything. Everything and nothing at all.
THE DOG BARKS as car lights appear up the drive, make shadows in the room. I glance at Reggie sleeping in his mother’s arms. Her nurturing is unlikely but somehow hopeful, her belief in her ability to save him, or for him to heal himself.
I watch my father limp across the lawn, the red dawn opening its lips through the trees. My mother stirring in her chair as the screen door slams and my father stands lop-sided in the sitting room doorway, his shoulders hunched about his ears. “Couldn’t sleep,” he says, surveys the room.
“Daniel’s given your mother’s cottage to Reggie,” Ruthie announces. Has he not smelled the fire?
“That’s the least of it,” I tell him.
“That house is mine,” he says, his eyes alight and Sharen observes him with quiet disgust. He slides a plastic reindeer off the desk onto the floor and frightens the dog.
“Then why don’t you live in it?” my mother says, puts her legs down from the ottoman.
“It was yours, Dad,” I say. “A long time ago. Before you screwed yourself out of it.”
He fossicks furiously through a desk drawer. “I worked my whole bloody life for this farm,” he says. “And I did it for you.” He presses a faded Polaroid in my face.
This picture of him windblown in his forties beside his diminutive mother, Hilma, standing on the cottage steps. She shades her glasses from the sun, her soft gray perm and rosy skin. “For absolution,” I say, as if he knows what that means. “To assuage your guilt.”
The pink sag of my father’s eyes meets mine. “I’ve been more loyal to this land than you could ever be.”
I angle the image in the light, knowing what he says is true—the fancy little English woman who rocked me on her childhood horse from Coventry, then died in the bed beside me. And here we are. The cottage emptied of its history by this woman on the couch. “You promised Walker he could have the twenty-five acres where he was born,” I tell my father.
My father grabs the photo out of my hand. “That was before he started stealing horses,” he says. “Before your mother demanded I get him off the place.”
“You could have given him something.” I feel Reggie’s eyes on me, a compass searching. Gauging every word. “Otherwise he mightn’t have come back to haunt us.”
“He was always wrong in the head,” says Ruthie in her own defense. “And the town didn’t want him.”
“As if you care what the town thinks,” I say and she winces at the chord of my disloyalty.
“I gave him calves and instead of letting them fatten into heifers he took them straight to market,” my father says.
“They were his,” I tell him.
Sharen squints at my father and me the way we talk about the man who tracked her down, who she had to escape.
“He didn’t listen to me,” he says and I can feel his energy waning, knowing he was wrong. “And neither do you.” He tosses the picture down on the desk. How must it feel, being a man no one listens to? “This is the place we belong,” he says. “You don’t just give it away.”
The eerie exhilaration of just a row of black chimneys. “Unless you want to,” I say but my words just hang in the air as my father focuses on Reggie as he stirs. Sharen curls an arm about him as he sips from a cup of water.
“What happened to you?” my father asks the boy.
“His father,” says Sharen, cradling the boy how she’d held the wallaby. It seems like days ago my father tried to dance with her. But it was only a matter of hours. Last year. A decade older than I am, she’s made a bed here, earned it in a strange way. Now her son is sneaking back to life. His eyes open, seeking her comfort. Making choices. Time for me to make mine.
My father limps to the window. Outside it’s on the verge of daylight. The reds turning into purples and grays. “The trees!”
My mother blows out a candle on the mantelpiece. “Walker,” she says, catches Reggie’s eye in a quick complicity I recognize. She did set the trees up as a decoy for Reggie. A ruffle of wings sounds in the chimney and the dog is poised and ready. My mother catches me, stares back in an old communion.
“Where is he?” my father asks, his face burning with what my mother used to call his agitatu
s.
“Let’s go see,” I tell him, Reggie catching my eye, looking for a sign. He and Ruthie running things the old way. I nod, yes, I meant it. You can trust me.
My father prods the skewbald pony out the back door. “Bloody horses inside,” he says. He should realize Ruthie was just keeping her favorite safe, Patch or Patchouli, whatever his name is these days. He stands on the bluestone path, munching on plants. “Get out of here, little blaggard,” my father yells but the pony doesn’t budge, just looks at him as we pass. The clouds seem to move against the morning breeze.
“You better round up the stock,” my father tells me. “See what’s left.” The notion of rounding up stock feels beyond me. Out here I feel even more sleepless and hungover. The morning birds silent after the fire.
“I’m giving the land to Reggie,” I tell him. “Not to sell, but to keep or rent.”
My father gimps along in disgust, the vague scent of damp smoke in the air as we round the veranda, the sprawl of the cotoneaster, the ground emerging before us, a carpet of charred twigs and branches, the trunks giant black legs going up into a layer of mist.
My father, speechless, peruses the damage. A fireman’s shovel left in the crisped sand. A memento. “Bloody lucky the house didn’t burn,” he says.
“Is it?” I ask but he just examines the burned cypress leaves like fine black feathers and beyond, the black horses sniff at something down near a small cross-country jump, the fallen log where there used to be an explosion of calla lilies in spring. I head through the sooty garden gate. Bile rises at the sight of a body, half on its side, one leg bent and folded under the other. Walker, his face fallen into his beard. I try to breathe, try to hold myself to the facts of it, but my imagination runs to an injured boy desperate, killing his father. My elderly mother in cahoots. And I feel as naive and useless as my approaching father. One of the geldings sniffs the top of Walker’s half-bald head, the hair fallen sideways. Blood blooming dark through the blue plaid of his shirt, wounds from belly and chest. The rifle planted by his side. More than one shot concealed by the sound of the branches cracking, the siren, my father beside me now, and the horses circling at our backs as the day spreads light around us.
“Who did this?” he asks, strangely calm. “Walker Dumbalk wouldn’t do himself in for love or money.” He kneels to reach for the stock of his own dead father’s trench gun.
“Don’t touch it,” I tell him, his fingers already on the wood stem. Fresh prints mingled with the others. I recall how rain doesn’t erase fingerprints as you’d imagine. Reggie’s and Ruthie’s probably still evident, now my father’s too. I think to wipe it down and bury it, but hiding a weapon that clearly matches the bullets never bodes well. Both of us staring, sinking into the ramifications. I look back at the eerie trees still scarfed in mist. My mother no doubt watching, opening the curtains further, scraping the rings along the rod. No wonder they didn’t want police. Even without the gun, Sharen would be the primary suspect. Two casings here in the damp gray sand, her bruiser ex-lover gone. I imagine that cop Gullikson from Cranbourne crouching before this and smiling, knowing the Winchester’s placed too carefully, that the angle of the bullets won’t jive with a rifle suicide. My father looks at me in general disbelief.
“Go get some feed sacks,” I tell him.
He blanches at me, stunned. “Are you barmy?”
“Yes,” I say. “Let’s put this to bed.”
His whole body sags as if he’s a child been given orders as he gimps away to the stables. I grab the abandoned shovel and dig before the sky clears its throat. The cutting edge sharp, the sand digs deep and easy, softened by that downpour from nowhere sharp as nails, as if from the Bible. My hand that was healing hurts again, the wooden shaft of the spade against it plying this soil as I haven’t in years. The horses line up as undertakers, witnesses; my head aching still and this shot-up body behind me. As I dig, an image of the front page of the Pakenham Gazette. One Unfortunate New Year. A photo of the house and trees. Walker Dumbalk recently of Yarram found dead in the paddock at Tooradin Estate. Alleged he lit a fire then shot himself. The story of how Walker was born here and taken away. Then, the suggestion: Foul play not ruled out.
I square off an end and keep shoveling, try not to glance at Walker, the first dead body I’ve seen up close. I think of the word “slain.” Sweat through my shirt and my father returning with a wheelbarrow’s worth of hessian sacking. I take a break and catch my breath, stare past him into the distance, the rows of hay bales that have been rained on. Next he’ll want them stacked damp in the shed. The way moist bales build heat and smolder all year. My father was born taking risks, the Massey Ferguson chugging on its own through the grass in first gear, alongside us. The baling wire dug into my fingers as this shovel digs now. He went off to talk to Annabell Lipman who rode up on a buckskin, left me with the unmanned tractor, the stick locking its steering wheel. And I just let the tractor go on ahead. The Fergie got right to the fence, the posts so rotten they snapped to the ground as it rolled right over the wires, churning into Royal Genoni’s rented paddock.
Now he looks fearful, all the years he walked through these paddocks, checking on troughs and fences, wearing out his hips, treating yearlings caught in barbed wire, lighting the boiler each morning to keep the water hot. All of it penance. Along with the sense that sags heavy in the air between us—that this will not make anything easier. My mother out on the veranda, shading her eyes, guarding the house in case of reprisals, surveying through the black cypress trunks as they cast their narrow morning shadows. Pleased at how we finish what she’s wrought.
I line the grave with hessian, my father trying to help, grunting beside me. Ants already pour over the bloody flannel-covered wounds. To avoid the weight we both kneel and roll him, his limbs stiffer than I imagine. His eyes unblinking, glare, his neck and jaw bulge with fury, the last moment of his face as he flops into the sandy hole I hope is deep enough. We stand there with him half-facedown, turn him, the rifle in his arms like a scepter—rest in peace, you crazy bastard—and begin to fill him in.
“There was once a rumor,” my father says. “That he was your grandfather’s son.” Then he talks about how we should put an old bath here, make it a trough, be sure these horses don’t start digging around. I shovel till my hands are bleeding. Knowing I will leave.
FRIDAY
I watch the familiar trees go by. Winding up the canyon in this grubby Los Angeles cab turning onto Lookout Mountain, past the fallen-down stone mansion where Houdini was supposed to have lived. This canyon I envisioned as a boy, singing myself to sleep in the shearer’s quarters beneath the festooned horse show ribbons pinned to the tongue-in-groove walls, listening to the sound of Bob Seger from a dusty tape deck. Those Hollywood nights in those Hollywood Hills. It was this winding road umbrellaed by eucalyptus, these perched wooden houses. I saw them then, rocking my head on a pillow eight thousand miles away, my dreams reaching out. This road, these trees, these bends, the weatherboard cottages, California bungalows, colored Cape Cods, envisioned without any frame of reference, just the words of a song. The same as unfolded before me as I drove up here the first time. Seven years ago. The same as unfolds now. And it feels as though I buried a man in a dream. How I want to pretend there’s no way that rumor could be true, he couldn’t have been my cousin; he didn’t look anything like us. Still, the notion of my grandfather even fondling Gracious hollows me out with sorrow.
Usually I chat to Ethiopian taxi drivers, talk about Eritrea and war, and what life is for them here, but I’ve been awake too long to talk, trying to sleep on the plane, watching foreign movies. Isabelle Huppert as a sado-sexual piano teacher, just to cheer me up. A documentary called Sun Come Up about the ocean rising on an island called Carteret near Bougainville. Then I dreamed the farm was under the sea, Walker’s body rising through the water and the stone with the eye floating up beside him from his grave, the undressed Christmas tree I laid to rot on top of the sand that covere
d him.
My father stood there with his hands cupped in front of him, reverent. “May the roads rise up to meet him,” he said and I wondered if there was space inside my father where he might blame himself. For legacies and tendencies, the possessed and denied, himself and others. And if there’s a space inside of me. “If anyone asks,” I said to him as I smoothed the sand. “Tell them it was me.” I stared out to the hills over past Cardinia, to Bunyip, as far as Labertouche as the sun roped up to fill the sky and the black mare walked over to nuzzle me, her hoofprints on the grave. With her warm breath I found words I did not say. May his son take over and let the place run wild.
When I said good-bye to my mother this time, she’d gone deaf again. I held her to me then drove away, leaving her and her dog and my stooped little father striped by the shadows of those burned-up trees. As I turned through the gate near the stables, the skewbald pony Patch looked up from the grass in the pond paddock and it was then I began to cry.
It was only when I saw the electric vastness of this city painted on the earth below; I fastened my seatbelt and began to feel my heart both alive and still. Energized by the frequency here, the absence of a past and the chance of Isabel. The prospect of the cab pushing through the early traffic on the trek up La Cienega, all the way to the morning-lit hills. The winter air crisp and everything vivid as though the winds of climate change have been a gift for this unbecoming, dirt-aired city. The ugliness strangely comfortable, the surprise of bougainvillea and lawns pretending it’s not a desert, fancy cars shining as if water to wash them is as available as money to pay off the loans. Drivers staring each other down at the lights, hungry for something—attention or connection. Random things feel possible. The best and the worst. The thought of Reggie running that farm like a menagerie, Sharen keeping an eye on Ruthie, my father as fringe dweller, until Ruthie dies. And then what will he do?
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