Arms Race

by Nic Low

  He approaches downwind and out of sight, rifle automatically against his far flank so it won’t catch the moonlight. At the hut he leans to the fogged glass. There are young fit men ranged around the hearth, sprawled on the sacking bunks. By the fire a man with sandy hair holds a silver tube that looks like toothpaste. He squeezes the contents into his mouth and sluices them around. The others laugh. He swallows, throws the tube in the fire and grins. His voice comes clear through the cracks in the walls.

  Okay, you bastards. Now gimme some bacon.

  There’s a man at the fire holding a frying pan. Uh-uh, he says. No bacon where you’re headed.

  The culler pulls back from the window. His instinct is to keep moving. But it’s six hours to the next hut and he’s already exhausted. And he’s not one for curiosity but there it is, tugging at him like some old, half-forgotten cruelty. It’s too cold and remote for trampers. If they were hunters there’d be rifles outside the door. He watches embers sweep from the chimney into the brilliant night sky. Easy, he tells himself. They’re only people.

  He doubles back, unloads his rifle and removes the bolt, then crosses the frozen ground in full view, whistling the first few bars of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. He learned them from a GI in the back of a camion out of Cassino. Eighteen hours jolting, and them all too ruined to say a word except for this sack of a man with a big slow laugh, patriotic for sure but none too bright. Only knew those first heroic bars. Whistled them over and over like an idiot bird.

  O say can you see—

  He’s halfway to the hut when the wire latch opens. Light fans the ground.

  Hey there! a silhouette calls. It looks like the man with sandy hair.

  Gidday, the culler says. His voice sounds like a rusted gate.

  Come on in, zero-one-niner. Bet you weren’t expecting us.

  Can’t say I was.

  Well, the fire’s on. Come and get warm.

  The hut is ripe with bacon and sweat. There are six men in all, half his age, focused and lean. It occurs to him that they might be soldiers. There’s a chorus of greeting, all hey and howdy. He leans his rifle in the corner and crosses the room with eyes down. He can feel their gaze, and it takes all his concentration to feign calm.

  There’s no one on his bunk, but someone’s draped a kind of heavy-duty helmeted suit across it. For a moment he stands and stares. He’s never seen anything like it.

  Sorry, pal. I’ll get that. The sandy-haired man heaves the suit onto the top bunk. There ya go. He turns and extends a hand. I’m Neil.

  The man has a galaxy of freckles across his nose and cheeks. His eyes are a hopeful blue. Face to face with another man, the culler is suddenly too aware of himself: the bloodied deer tails tied to his pack, his filthy beard, cracked nails and hard hands. He lowers himself abruptly onto his bunk, leaving the man’s offering hanging in space.

  Good day? Neil asks, undeterred.

  I’ve had better, he says, busy with the straps on his pack. He pulls out a good-sized haunch, cut from a young spiker he’d hit clean through the neck a good half-mile out. He can still make a shot like that out here, away from the drink. He unwraps the fresh meat, and there are whistles and claps.

  Look at that. Beautiful.

  There ya go, Neil. You don’t like the food up there, take a rifle and shoot your own.

  The culler takes the haunch and lays it on the bench to start cutting steaks. He risks a glance around. The men’s packs are square and hard-looking. Leaned beside the fireplace is a huge American flag, and there’s a metal contraption beside him on the bench that might be a camera. Perhaps they’re making a movie.

  Hunter like you must know the area well.

  This from the man tending the frying pan. He seems to be in charge. He’s older than the others; just as fit, but thickening round the waist.

  Culler, he says.

  Excuse me?

  Culler. Hunter does it for laughs. Parks Board pays me per tail.

  The man is studying his army-issue rifle leaned in the corner. Where’d you learn to shoot, he asks. The war?

  Yeah, the culler says, though he’s lying. It wasn’t shooting the war taught him. He pulls his frying pan from under the bench and the men make room around the fire. He pushes the pan down into the coals. He can’t keep his curiosity in.

  What are you doing out here? he asks, and wishes he hadn’t. The men’s sudden quiet is intimidating. He has broken cover, feels himself about to draw fire.

  We’re scientists, Neil says.

  The culler stares at him. Neil doesn’t quite meet his eye.

  We’re with the National Alpine Sciences Association, the older man says. His voice is clear and precise. In for a fortnight’s field testing in remote environments, and this here is about the remotest environment on earth.

  The culler’s heard that sort of thing before. Field testing. None of your damn business, more like. He drops a steak into the pan with a squelching hiss. You using this hut as a base? he asks.

  The man takes his meaning. Just passing through, he says, turning the bacon in his own pan. Leave you to it. We’re heading to Falling Mountain. Know it?

  The culler nods.

  What’s up there?

  Rocks.

  Rocks?

  Mountain came down in a quake. It’s like the moon up there.

  That right? the man says. He pulls his pan from the fire. Say, you want some bacon?

  The culler grunts a negative, but something in his face gives him away. The man has already flipped six fat rashers onto a tin plate and added a slab of bread.

  Here, the man says.

  He can’t refuse. After weeks of venison and damper it smells like heaven. He feels them watching him eat, crabbed over the plate, piling the slick and salty food into his tired body. He has to force himself to slow down.

  Neil holds out a plate of his own. C’mon now. My turn?

  Focus, the older man says. Have another tube. Right now you’re a hundred thousand miles from any such bacon.

  Neil doesn’t argue. He takes another silver tube from his pack and sucks it down.

  What’s that? the culler asks.

  Food, Neil says. Weighs nothing, and good for you too. Pity it tastes like hell. Here. He tosses a tube across the room.

  The culler catches it, and squeezes a little paste onto one calloused finger. He touches it to his tongue. Peanut butter and something else, meaty and rich. Not too bad, he says. Lighter than potatoes.

  I bet the Russians take potatoes, someone says.

  Yeah, another says. Spudnik.

  The hut fills with laughter. The culler doesn’t get the joke, but he senses it is not at his expense. The bacon has calmed his hunger. He finds himself cutting his steak into chunks. He offers the plate around and five of them take a slice. Neil ruefully shakes his head.

  Twenty-one hundred hours, the older man says. Fifteen to turn-in.

  The men pack their gear without a word. In minutes the room is tidy but for the white suit hanging on a nail and the six identical
packs lined up beside the door. The men step outside to piss, return and put in earplugs, blow out their candles and climb into bed. Their snoring soon fills the room.

  While he waits for a second steak to cook, the culler tries to read. He watches his icy breath send shadows down the page. He can’t concentrate. Scientists. Bullshit.

  The door nicks open. It’s Neil, late coming back from outside. He unrolls his sleeping bag on the boards. It occurs to the culler that there are only six bunks, and one of them is his.

  Short straw? he says.

  Something like that.

  Go cut yourself some bracken. Better than those bunks. There’s plenty up behind the hut.

  Thanks, Neil says. But I’ll be fine. You ever hear of method acting?

  The culler looks at him. Neil shrugs, and climbs into his bag. He reads a notebook by firelight. His lips move, repeating phrases over and over in a whisper. Above the snapping fire and the river’s distant drone it sounds like gibberish. One’s mall sleep foreman. One gaunt sleep firm and kind.

  After a few minutes Neil looks up. Have a listen to this garbage, he murmurs. This is an historic moment, to be remembered as the triumph of a great nation’s industry and vision.

  Who said that? the culler asks.

  Me. Well, I’m supposed to say it.

  What’s it all about?

  Neil thinks. Imagine you were the first person to climb a mountain. Everest, say, and you had to make a speech for the cameras on top. That’s what it’s about.

  How’d you get a film camera on top of Mount Everest?

  Well, Neil says, that’s a damn good question.

  The culler takes his pan from the coals and slides the steak onto his plate. So, are you a scientist, or a mountaineer, or what?

  Neil doesn’t reply. There’s a look on his face the culler recognises from the war: when a person’s brimming over with what they know. Then the young man’s gaze strays to the sleepers in the adjacent bunks, and he shakes his head.

  Tell me, he says, how long you spend out here? On your own?

  The culler shrugs. Long as I can.

  You’re damn far from the world. How do you stay sane? The culler slices the steak in two and holds out the plate. He keeps his gaze lowered when Neil grins and takes the piece. There are times he’s had a deer in his sights and not squeezed the trigger, because he gets a sense that the animal is important. He’s done the same with men. He can’t decide if that makes him sane, or the opposite.

  You weren’t regular army, were you? Neil asks. Sniper?

  The culler nods. He’s used to the question from wet-mouthed drunks, turned on by talk of headshots. Neil’s curiosity seems different.

  You worked by yourself? Same as out here?

  Yeah. Why?

  Just wondering. What was it like coming back?

  Like coming back from outer space.

  He’d come off the ship at Lyttleton, and followed the others into the pubs. He hadn’t known where else to put himself. He wore the uniform everywhere, even to his father’s funeral. Around the grave’s raw edge the civilian crowd seemed ragged and disrespectful. At the wake his brother said to him, You need to move on, and he thought his brother was already speaking of their father. He’d meant the army. After the homecoming parades, the failed reinventions and third chances, the streets were still full of maimed drunks. The uniform earned no respect. He had a VC for bravery and he was afraid to sit in a parlour with his trigger finger crooked through the handle of a china teacup.

  Too hard? Neil asks.

  Hard enough.

  Neil runs a hand along his jaw. It must be lonely out here, though. I think I’d miss people.

  The culler laughs at that, a short bark. I miss people, he says. In a good way. This far from the world, you can forget what bastards they are.

  People are bastards?

  Trust me.

  Neil shifts in his sleeping bag. What do you think of this, then? he says, riffling through his notebook with a chuckle. For one priceless moment in the whole history of mankind, all people on this earth are truly one.

  Truly one? the culler says. Yeah. Truly mean.

  C’mon. Neil sits up, grinning. You don’t think that.

  You think people are kind? You who’s sleeping on the floor? Can’t have any bacon?

  Sure I do, Neil says. You who’s telling me how to make a bed. Giving me venison.

  Horseshit, the culler growls. That’s not kindness. Any fool can do that. But he can’t help himself: he likes the kid. His cheeks have mutinied into a grin.

  There, Neil says. You see?

  After a moment the culler settles back against the hearth. He jabs at the fading coals with a stick. The moon’s visible through the window now, sitting above the black swell of the ridge beyond.

  All those questions, the culler says. You’re going away, aren’t you?

  Yeah.

  More than a fortnight’s field testing.

  Same as you. Rest of my life.

  Helluva trip. Where?

  Ah shit, Neil says softly. I guess I can tell you.

  The culler wakes before sunrise. He swings his legs over the edge of the bunk. The men are gone. There’s ice on the window from their frozen breath. On the bench they’ve left him a pile of silver food tubes and a block of chocolate.

  He pulls on his clothes, socks last. Where the wet wool hits his skin, tiny curls of steam rise and drift into the gloom. He carries his pack to the door.

  He thinks of the men taking the white suit and the flag up the valley. Neil is wearing the suit as he walks, sealed from the world, with only the sound of his own breathing for company. He’ll climb, slow and dreamlike, through cloud and ferns and the splintered beech brought low by last week’s snow, till he’s just a dot among the bluffs and peaks. He’ll vanish into the moonscape, as far from civilisation as can be.

  The culler slings his pack onto his back, shoulders his rifle and opens the door. The dawn valley gives him an icy lungful of pleasure. Mist fills the riverbed, while up above sunlight carves the shadowed lip of one ridge from the next.

  He sees Neil planting the flag as the camera rolls, his face lost behind the mirrored visor. Neil will spend the rest of his life pretending. People will think he’s changed forever. But he’ll still be capable of kindness.

  The culler launches himself from the top step of the hut into the world. He hears Neil’s voice in his head. That’s one’s mall sleep foreman. One gaunt sleep firm and kind.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  To my family Geoff and Hikatea, Ben and Tim, thank you for the years of encouragement, stimulus and challenge, and the sense that stories are worth telling.

  To Beth Ladwig, a thousand thanks for your critical insight, support and generosity, each of which made this book possible.

  Thanks to my Stewart Street family—Stephen Mushin, Piers Gooding, Meg Hale, Robin Tregenza, Dom Kirchner and Imogen Hamel-Green—for enduring my long bush absences, and for all the coffees, dinners and discussions about characters like they were real peop
le.

  To everyone at Text, and particularly David Winter, thanks for your consummate skill in shaping raw material into polished work. The jokes in the margins were frequently better than the ones in the text.

  A number of people provided invaluable critiques of early drafts. Thanks to Tim Low, Beth Ladwig, Hikatea Bull, Geoff Low, Stephen Mushin, Annie Zaidi, Jennifer Mills, Melissa Cranenburgh, Sam Gates-Scovell, and all the Monday night regulars. I owe a particular debt to Tom Doig for structural feedback that was on the money every time, and for Moron to Moron, the Mongolian inspiration behind the title story. That one’s for you!

  Thanks also to Lesley Alway and Asialink for the encouragement and trust in allowing me to juggle working and writing; the National Young Writers’ Festival and This Is Not Art for the idea that it’s okay to simply make shit up; Griffith Review, Overland and the Big Issue for getting behind early versions of three stories; Kerry Reid and Craig Gaston for being superb bush-neighbours and keeping me sane up there in the hills; and Marion M. Campbell for years of guidance at the University of Melbourne. I’m grateful to you all.