by Trent Dalton
‘Hold him for a second,’ Darren said, foisting the rat into my reluctant hands.
The rat trembled in my palms, inactive with fear.
‘This is Jabba,’ Darren said, reaching into his duffle bag. ‘Grab his tail.’
I half-heartedly gripped the rat’s tail with my right forefinger and thumb.
Darren then pulled a machete from his duffle bag.
‘What the fuck is that?’
‘Granddad’s machete.’
The machete was longer than Darren’s right arm. It had a tan wooden handle and a large wide blade, rusting at its flat sides but oiled and silver and gleaming on its cutting edge.
‘No, you really gotta get a good grip on his tail or you’ll lose him,’ Darren said. ‘Really wrap your fist around the tail.’
‘You gotta hold it tight like you were holding your dick, Bell End, because he’ll take off,’ Eric said.
I gripped the tail tight in my fist.
Darren pulled a red cloth like a large handkerchief from his duffle bag.
‘Okay, now place him on the septic but don’t let him go,’ he said.
‘Maybe Eric should hold him?’ I said.
‘You’re holding him,’ Darren said, something unhinged in his eyes, something unpredictable.
There was a concrete underground septic tank with a heavy red metal lid by the bottle bins. I placed Jabba gently on the tank, my right hand gripping his tail.
‘Don’t move a muscle, Tink,’ Darren said.
Darren rolled the large red handkerchief into a blindfold and wrapped it around his eyes, resting on his knees like a Japanese warrior about to drive a blade into his own heart.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Darren, seriously,’ I said.
‘Don’t move, Tink,’ barked Eric, standing over me.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve done this twice already,’ Darren said.
Jabba, poor dumb rat, was as fear-stiff and meek as I was. He turned to me with his teeth rattling up and down, confused and terrified.
Darren gripped the machete handle with both hands and raised it slowly and methodically above his head, the unsubtle instrument’s cutting blade sparkling for a moment in the full sun that was lighting this hellish stage.
‘Wait, Darren, you’re gonna chop my hand off,’ I stammered.
‘Bullshit,’ Eric said. ‘He’s ninja blood. He can see your hand better in his mind than he can with his actual eyes.’
Eric put a secure hand on my shoulder to keep me in place.
‘Just don’t fuckin’ move,’ he said.
Darren took a deep breath. Exhaled. I took one last look at Jabba, his body cringing with fear, motionless, like he thought if he just stayed still we might forget he was even there.
Darren’s machete dropped down in a swift and violent whoosh and the oiled and gleaming blade dug into the septic tank lid with a brief yellow spark a centimetre from my closed fist.
Darren slipped his blindfold off in triumph to gaze upon the bloody remains of Jabba the Rat. But there was nothing to see. Jabba had vanished.
‘What da fark, Tink?’ Darren shouted, his Vietnamese accent more evident in anger.
‘He let him run!’ Eric screamed. ‘He let him run!’
Eric wrapped his arm around my neck, the foul stench of his armpit like an old swamp. I caught sight of Jabba scurrying to freedom through a gap beneath the mesh school fence into the thick scrub running alongside Mr McKinnon’s tool shed.
‘You dishonour me, Tink,’ Darren whispered.
Eric spread his belly weight over my back, forcing me flat onto the septic tank.
‘Blood for blood,’ Eric said.
‘You know the warrior’s code, Eli Bell,’ Darren said formally.
‘No, I really don’t know the code, Darren,’ I said. ‘And besides, I believe that ancient code was more of a loose guide than anything else.’
‘Blood for blood, Eli Bell,’ Darren said. ‘When the river of courage runs dry, blood flows in its place.’ He nodded at Eric. ‘Finger,’ he said.
Eric reefed my right arm back out across the septic tank.
‘Fuck, Darren,’ I hollered. ‘Think about this for a second. You’ll get expelled.’
Eric yanked my right forefinger out of my closed fist.
‘Darren, think about what you’re doing,’ I begged. ‘They’ll put you in juvenile.’
‘I accepted my path long ago, Eli Bell. How about you?’
Darren slipped the blindfold over his eyes once more and raised the machete with both hands high over his head. Eric twisted my wrist to breaking point and pushed down hard, clamping my outstretched and exposed finger to the septic tank lid. I screamed in agony under the pressure. My finger was the rat. My finger was the rat wanting to disappear. My right forefinger, the one with my lucky freckle on its middle knuckle. My lucky freckle. My lucky finger. I stared at that lucky freckle and I prayed and I prayed for good fortune. And that’s exactly when Mr McKinnon, early-seventies drunk Scotch-loving Irish groundsman, rounded the corner of his tool shed and stood, perplexed, by the scene of the Vietnamese boy in a red blindfold about to sacrificially sever the forefinger of the boy with the lucky freckle who was spread out across the septic tank.
‘What the hell’s going on here!’ Mr McKinnon barked.
‘Run!’ Eric screamed.
Darren fled, indeed, with the stealthy reaction powers of his beloved ninja. Eric was slower to lift his burdensome belly fat off my left shoulder but he evaded the clutches of Mr McKinnon’s thick sweeping left arm, which eventually found a hold on the back pocket of my maroon cotton school shorts, making me look like Wile E. Coyote running on air as I tried to beat a useless getaway.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Mr McKinnon said, his breath reeking of Black Douglas.
*
Creeping now, hunched down, to the Dang family’s fence made of tall brown timber palings with pointed ends. Lyle padding down Darren Dang’s long driveway. Darren Dang’s house is one of the biggest in Darra. Three thousand yellow bricks bought half-price direct from the Darra brickworks, shaped into a three-storey house with Italian mansion ambitions but bad-taste cheap-suburbia realities. The front lawn is the size of half a football field and lined with maybe fifty tall palm trees. I slip briefly down the long concrete driveway then peel off right among the front lawn palms to stay out of sight. Closer to the house is a trampoline surrounded by plastic princess castles belonging to Darren’s three younger sisters, Kylie Dang, Karen Dang and Sandy Dang. I scurry to the trampoline, duck behind the largest of the princess castles, a pink plastic fairytale kingdom with a brown drawbridge fashioned into a children’s slide, with castle walls big enough for me to hide behind as I watch Lyle sitting with Darren’s mum and stepdad, Bich and Quan, on a lounge suite through the sliding glass doors of their living room.
‘Back Off’ Bich Dang earned her nickname with acts of unspeakable savagery. As well as the Little Saigon supermarket, she owns a large Vietnamese restaurant and the neighbouring hairdressing salon where I get my hair cut, across from Darra train station. Quan Nguyen is more her humble loyal servant than her husband. Bich is famous in my town as much for her selfless sponsorship of Darra community events – dances, historical society show days, fundraising flea markets – as she is for the time she stabbed a Year 5 Darra State School girl, Cheryl Vardy, in the left eye with a steel ruler for teasing Karen Dang about having steamed rice every day for school lunch. Cheryl Vardy needed surgery after the incident. She nearly went blind and I never understood why Bich Dang didn’t go to prison. That’s when I realised Darra had its own rules and laws and codes and maybe it was ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang who had selflessly drafted them into existence. Nobody knows what happened to her first husband, Darren’s dad, Lu Dang. He disappeared six years ago. Everybody says Bich poisoned him, laced his prawn and pork rice paper rolls with arsenic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she stabbed him in the heart with a steel ruler.
Bich wears a
light purple dressing gown, her mid-fifties face made up even at this hour. All the Vietnamese mums in Darra have the same look: big black hair in a bun so heavily treated it can bounce light beams, white powdery foundation on their cheeks and long black eyelashes that make them look permanently startled.
Bich has her hands folded, elbows resting on her knees, giving instructions, pointing her forefingers occasionally the way the great Parramatta Eels coach Jack Gibson used to give instructions to his on-field brains trust, Ray Price and Peter Sterling, from the sideline. Bich nods her head at something Lyle is saying and then she points at her husband, Quan. She directs him away somewhere and he nods obediently, waddles out of view and then returns with a large rectangular Styrofoam ice box, the same kind the Dangs keep their whole fresh fish in at the Little Saigon supermarket. Quan places the box at Lyle’s feet.
Then a sharp and cold metal blade presses against my neck.
‘Ring, ring, Eli Bell.’
Darren Dang’s laugh echoes through the palm trees.
‘Jeez, Tink,’ he says, ‘if you’re trying to stay invisible you might want to think about changing out of your old pyjamas. I could see that pale Aussie arse all the way from my letterbox.’
‘Good advice, Darren.’
The blade is long and thin and presses hard into the side of my neck.
‘Is that a samurai sword?’ I ask.
‘Fuck yeah,’ he says proudly. ‘Bought it at the pawn shop. Been sharpening it for six straight hours today. Reckon I could take your head off in one slice. Wanna see?’
‘How would I see it if I don’t have a head?’
‘Your brain still works even after it gets chopped off. It’d be cool. Your eyeballs looking up from the ground, me waving at you, holding your headless body. Fuck. What a funny way to go out!’
‘Yeah, I’m laughing my head off.’
Darren howls.
‘That’s good, Tink,’ he says. Then, on a dime, he turns serious, pushes the blade harder against my neck.
‘Why are you spying on your dad?’
‘He’s not my dad.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s my mum’s boyfriend.’
‘He good?’
‘Good at what?’
The blade isn’t pushing so hard against my neck now.
‘Good to your mum.’
‘Yeah, he’s real good.’
Darren relaxes the sword, walks over to the trampoline, parks his backside on the edge of the trampoline, his legs hanging over the steel springs connected to the black bounce canvas. He’s dressed all in black, his black sweater and tracksuit pants as black as his bowl haircut.
‘You want a smoke?’
‘Sure.’
He moves his sword, spears it into the ground, to make room for me on the trampoline’s edge. He takes two smokes from a soft white packet with no branding, lights them in his mouth and hands me one. I suck a tentative drag and it burns my insides, makes me cough hard. Darren laughs.
‘North Vietnam durries, Tink,’ he smiles. ‘Kick like a mule. Good buzz, though.’
I nod heartily, my head spinning with the second drag.
We look up through the living room sliding doors at Lyle and Bich and Quan talking over the Styrofoam ice box.
‘Won’t they see us?’ I ask.
‘Nah,’ Darren says. ‘They don’t notice shit when they’re doing business. Fuckin’ amateurs. It’ll be their undoing.’
‘What are they doing up there?’
‘You don’t know?’
I shake my head. Darren smiles.
‘C’mon, Tink. You must know. You might be full Aussie but you’re not that fuckin’ dumb.’
I smile.
‘The box is full of heroin,’ I say.
Darren blows cigarette smoke into the night.
‘And . . .’ he says.
‘And the purple firework was some kind of secret alert system. It’s how your mum lets her clients know their orders are ready.’
Darren smiles.
‘Order up!’ he says.
‘Different coloured fireworks for different dealers.’
‘Very good, Flathead,’ Darren says. ‘Your good man up there is running for his boss.’
‘Tytus Broz,’ I say. Tytus Broz. The Lord of Limbs.
Darren drags on his cigarette, nodding.
‘When did you work all this out?’
‘Just now.’
Darren smiles.
‘How do you feel?’
I say nothing. Darren chuckles. He hops off the trampoline, picks up his samurai sword.
‘You feel like stabbing something?’
I dwell on this curious opportunity for a moment.
‘Yes, Darren. I do.’
*
The car is parked two blocks from Darren’s house in Winslow Street outside a small low-set box of a home with its lights out. It’s a small jelly-bean dark green Holden Gemini.
Darren pulls a black balaclava from the back of his pants and slips it over his head.
From his pants pocket he pulls a stocking.
‘Here, put this on,’ he says, creeping low towards the car.
‘Where’d this come from?’
‘Mum’s dirty clothes basket.’
‘I’ll pass, thanks.’
‘Don’t worry, they slip on fine. She’s got fat thighs for a Vietnamese woman.’
‘This is Father Monroe’s car,’ I say.
Darren nods, hopping quietly onto the car’s bonnet. His weight makes a dent in the car’s old, rusting metal.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I ask.
‘Ssssshhh!’ Darren whispers, one arm down on Father Monroe’s windscreen to prop his weight as he crawls up and stands in the centre of the car’s roof.
‘C’mon, don’t fuck with Father Monroe’s car.’
Father Monroe. Earnest and ageing Father Monroe, softly spoken retired priest from Glasgow via Darwin and Townsville and Emerald, in Queensland’s Central Highlands. Butt of jokes, keeper of sins and frozen paper cups of orange and lime cordial that he keeps in his downstairs freezer and gives to permanently thirsty local kids like August and me.
‘What did he ever do to you?’
‘Nothing,’ Darren says. ‘He did nothing to me. It was Froggy Mills he did something to.’
‘He’s a good man, let’s just get out of here.’
‘Good man?’ Darren echoes. ‘That’s not what Froggy says. Froggy says Father Monroe pays him a tenner every Sunday after mass to show him his dick while he whacks off.’
‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Froggy doesn’t bullshit. He’s religious. Father Monroe told him it’s a sin to bullshit but it’s not a sin, of course, to show a seventy-five-year-old man your bat and balls.’
‘You won’t even get it through the metal.’
Darren taps his shoe on the car roof.
‘That’s thin metal. Half rusted out. This blade has been sharpened for six hours straight. Finest Japanese steel all the way from—’
‘The Mill Street Pawnbrokers.’
Through the holes in his balaclava, Darren closes his eyes. He raises the blade high with both fists gripping the handle, concentrating on something inside, like an old warrior about to ritually end the life of his best friend, or his favourite Australian suburban getabout motorcar. ‘Shit,’ I say, frantically pulling Bich Dang’s unwashed stocking over my head.
‘Wake up, time to die,’ Darren says.
He drives the sword down and it stabs into the Gemini with a shriek of metal on metal. The first third of the blade pierces the car roof like Excalibur in stone.
Darren’s mouth drops open.
‘Fuck, it went through.’ He beams. ‘You see that, Tink!’
A light goes on in Father Monroe’s house.
‘C’mon, let’s go,’ I bark.
Darren reefs at the sword handle but the lodged shaft doesn’t move. He tugs hard three times with both hands. ‘
It won’t come.’ He bends the top end of the blade shaft back towards himself, then forward, but the bottom end won’t move.
A window opens in Father Monroe’s living room.
‘Hey, hey, what are you doing?’ Father Monroe bellows through a half-open window.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ I urge.
Father Monroe opens his front door and steams down his pathway to his gate.
‘Get off my car!’ he screams.
‘Fuck,’ Darren says, leaping off the back of the car.
Father Monroe reaches his car and sees the samurai sword twanging back and forth, its mystical shaft speared inexplicably through the top of the parked car.
Darren turns around at a safe distance, joyously waving around the Vietnamese cock he’s pulled from his pants.
‘Just ten dong for this donger, Father!’ he screams.
*
Still night air and two boys smoking on a gutter. Stars up there. A cane toad down here has been flattened by a car tyre on the bitumen road a metre from my right foot. Its pink tongue has exploded from its mouth so it looks like the toad was flattened halfway through eating a raspberry lolly snake.
‘Sucks, doesn’t it?’ Darren says.
‘What?’
‘Growing up thinking you were with the good guys, when all along you were running with the bad guys.’
‘I’m not running with the bad guys.’
Darren shrugs. ‘We’ll see,’ he says. ‘I remember when I first found out Mum was in the game. Cops burst through our door when we were living over in Inala. Turned the place upside down. I was seven years old and I shit my pants. I mean, I actually shit my pants.’
The cops stripped Bich Dang naked, threw her against fibro walls, smashed household items with relish. Darren was watching The Partridge Family on a large National television that detectives tipped over looking for drugs.
‘It was fuckin’ mad, stuff breaking everywhere, Mum screaming at them, kicking her legs, scratchin’ ’em and shit. They dragged Mum away out the front door and left me alone on the floor of the lounge room crying like a bitch, huge big dump in my dacks. I was so stunned I just sat watching that Partridge mum talking to her kids upside down on the telly.’