by Trent Dalton
I don’t know what I expected from drug dealing. More romance, perhaps. A sense of danger and suspense. I realise now that the average street grunt suburban drug dealer is not too far removed from the common pizza delivery boy. Half these deals Lyle and Teddy are making I could make in half the time riding through the south-west Brisbane suburbs on my Mongoose BMX with the gear in my backpack. August could probably do it even faster because he rides faster than me and he’s got a ten-speed Malvern Star racer.
*
August and I do our Maths homework in the back of Teddy’s Mazda as we cross the Story Bridge from north to south and south to north, the bridge of stories, stories like the one about the boys who beat the fire, stories like the one about the mute boy and his little brother who never asked for anything but the answers to the questions.
August holds a ten-digit scientific pocket calculator he got for his birthday, tapping numbers and turning the calculator upside down to form words. 7738461375 = SLEIGHBELL. 5318008 = BOOBIES. He taps another bunch of numbers. Proudly shows me the calculator screen. ELIBELL.
‘Hey, Teddy,’ I ask. ‘At a school carnival twenty out of eighty tickets sold were early admission tickets. What percentage of early admission tickets were sold?’
Teddy looks into the rearview mirror. ‘C’mon mate, for fuck’s sake, how many twenties go into eighty?’
‘Four.’
‘So . . .’
‘So twenty is a quarter of the tickets?’
‘Correct.’
‘Quarter of a hundred is . . . twenty-five per cent?’
‘Yes, mate,’ Teddy says, shaking his head, stunned. ‘Fuck me, Lyle, don’t leave your tax return up to these two, all right.’
‘Tax return?’ Lyle says, feigning puzzlement. ‘That one of those algebra principles?’
The drug runs must be done on Saturdays because most of the third-tier drug dealers Lyle sells to have day jobs during the week. Tytus Broz is first tier. Lyle is second tier. Lyle sells to the third-tier drug dealers who, in turn, sell to the man or woman on the street or, in Kev Hunt’s case, the man or woman out at sea. Kev is a trawler fisherman who has a side business as a third-tier drug dealer supplying many of the users in the Moreton Bay prawn trawling scene. He’s out at sea most weekdays. So we make a drive out to his place in Bald Hills on a Saturday just as he likes it. It’s good business. Lyle adapts to his clients’ needs. Shane Bridgman, for example, is a lawyer in the city who has a side business as a third-tier drug dealer for the George Street legal set. He’s always at work and never at home during the week but he sure doesn’t want any drug deals taking place in his office, three buildings down from the Queensland Supreme Court. So we make a drive out to his place in Wilston, in the inner northern suburbs. He makes the deal in his sunroom while his wife bakes blueberry muffins in the kitchen and their son bowls medium pacers at a black bin in the backyard.
Lyle is masterful in these Saturday deals. He’s a diplomat, a cultural ambassador, a representative of his boss, Tytus Broz, a conduit between the king and his people.
Lyle says he approaches a drug deal in the same way he approaches Mum when she’s in a bad mood. Stay on your toes. Stay alert. Don’t let them stand too close to the kitchen knives. Be flexible, patient, adaptable. The buyer/angry Mum is always right. Lyle bends his emotions to the buyer’s/Mum’s feelings at any given moment. When a Chinese property developer bitches about council red tape, he nods his head empathetically. When the head of the Bandidos motorcycle gang bitches about the poor quality of the revving in his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, Lyle nods with what looks to me like genuine concern, and this is the same look he gave Mum the other night when she was bemoaning the fact that Mum and Lyle never make an attempt to befriend any of the other parents at our school. Just make the deal, kiss the woman you love, take your wages and get out of the room alive.
*
On our last Saturday drug run Lyle tells August and me about the underground room with the red phone. Lyle built the room himself, dug it out from the bottom up, dug a hole deep in the ground beneath the cramped space under the house that August and I were never allowed to crawl into, and up into the house. A secret space built from thirteen hundred bricks bought from the Darra brickworks. The secret room where Mum and Lyle could store large boxes of weed in their formative dope-dealing days.
‘What do you use it for now you’re not running weed?’ I ask.
‘It’s for a rainy day when I need to run away and hide,’ he says.
‘From who?’
‘From anyone,’ he says.
‘What’s the phone for?’ I ask.
Teddy looks across at Lyle.
‘It’s connected to a line that goes straight to another red phone just like it in Tytus’s house in Bellbowrie,’ Lyle says.
Lyle looks into the back seat to gauge our reactions.
‘So it was Tytus we were speaking to that day?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘No, Eli.’ We share a long look in the rearview mirror. ‘You weren’t speaking to anyone at all.’
He steps on the gas, speeds on to our last job.
*
‘I felt something today I never felt before,’ Mum says, forking spaghetti onto our dinner plates at the dinner table, the same laminated green Formica table with metal legs that Lyle ate cherry babka at as a boy.
Today was the school fete. For eight hours beneath a hot Saturday sun Mum was in charge of three sideshow alley stalls on the Richlands State High School oval. She ran the fishpond game where, for fifty cents, kids were tasked with hooking flat Styrofoam fish with a curtain rod and string; underneath these fish was a colour-coded sticker that corresponded with a colour-coded novelty toy prize worth approximately the value of the pony shit I stepped on today by the ‘Uncle Bob’s Barnyard’ animal display. The most popular game of the whole sideshow alley, by some way, was an original game that Mum developed herself, piggybacking on the irresistible pull of Star Wars to raise much-needed funds for the Richlands State High School Parents and Friends Association. Her ‘Han Solo Master Blaster Challenge’ asked potential saviours of the galaxy to dislodge three of August’s and my Imperial stormtroopers balanced on stands placed at increasingly ambitious distances, using a large water pistol she painted black to resemble Han’s trusty blaster. She placed the target stormtroopers masterfully, putting the first two at more than achievable distances, thus filling her largely five- to twelve-year-old customers up on the addictive lustre of early success, but placing the third and final stormtrooper at such a distance that a child would need to access and bend the powers of the Force to land a long and arcing single prize-winning water pistol shot. Mum was also, however, in charge of the fete’s least popular attraction, ‘Pop Stick Pandemonium’, one hundred pop sticks – ten marked with prize-winning stars – in a wheelbarrow full of sand. She could have promised the very meaning of life at the end of every one of those pop sticks and she still would have made $6.50 over eight hours.
‘I felt like part of the community,’ Mum says. ‘I felt like I belonged, ya know.’
I watch Lyle smiling at her. He has his right fist to his chin. All she’s doing is dumping large spoonfuls of her bolognese sauce with extra bacon and rosemary onto our plates, but Lyle is looking at her, wide-eyed and awed, like she’s playing ‘Paint It Black’ on a golden harp with strings made of fire.
‘That’s great, hon,’ Lyle says.
Teddy calls from the kitchen: ‘Beer, Lyle?’
‘Yeah, mate,’ Lyle says. ‘In the door shelf.’
Teddy’s staying for dinner. Teddy’s always staying for dinner.
‘That’s real great, Frankie,’ Teddy says, entering the living room from the kitchen. He wraps an arm around Mum’s shoulder unnecessarily. Holds her unnecessarily. ‘We’re proud of ya, matey,’ he says. All buddy buddy like. I mean, like, gimme a fucking break, Ted. Right here at Lena and Aureli’s table?
‘I might be mistaken, but is there a new little twinkle in those
blue eyes?’ he says. He rubs his right thumb across Mum’s cheekbone.
Lyle and I share a glance. August shoots a look at me. Get a load of this shit. Right here in front of his best friend. I’ve never trusted this fuckin’ guy. Comes across all nice as pie but it’s those nice as pie fucks you really gotta watch out for, Eli. I can’t tell who he’s in love with more: Mum, Lyle or himself.
I nod. Hearing you, brother.
‘I don’t know,’ Mum shrugs, a little embarrassed by her sunny disposition. ‘It just felt good to be part of something so . . .’
‘Boring?’ I offer. ‘Suburban?’
Mum smiles, holding a spoonful of bolognese mince in midair as she thinks.
‘So normal,’ she says.
She dumps the mince on top of my pasta and gives me one of those quick and beautiful half-smiles that she can send down a one-way corridor of devotion directly to the person she is aiming at, a tunnel of lifelong love invisible to all others, yet I know August has a tunnel just like it, and Lyle does too.
‘It’s great, Mum,’ I say. And I’ve never been more serious in my life. ‘I reckon normal suits ya.’
I reach for the Kraft parmesan cheese that smells like August’s vomit. I sprinkle cheese flakes across my spaghetti and I dig my fork into Mum’s pasta and twirl the fork twice.
Then Tytus Broz walks into our living room.
The top of my spine knows him best. The top of my spine recognises all that white hair and that white suit and the gritted white teeth in his forced smile. The rest of me is frozen and confused but my spine knows that Tytus Broz really is walking into our living room and it shivers from top to bottom and I shudder involuntarily like I do sometimes when I’m taking a piss in the troughs of Lyle’s favourite pub, the Regatta Hotel in Toowong.
Lyle’s mouth is full of pasta when he sees Tytus, watches him, stunned, as he paces into our house, somehow finding his way in from the back door beyond the kitchen past the toilet.
Lyle says his name like a question. ‘Tytus?’
August and Mum are facing Lyle and me across the table and they turn their bodies around to see Tytus walking in, followed by another man, bigger than Tytus, darker eyes, darker mood. Oh fuck. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck me. What’s he doing here?
Iwan Krol. And two more of Tytus’s muscle goon thugs walking in behind Iwan. They wear rubber flip-flops like Iwan Krol, tight Stubbies shorts and tucked-in button-up collared cotton shirts; one of them is wiry and bald and the other is heavy with an upturned smile and three chins.
‘Tytus!’ Mum says, slipping immediately into host mode. She hops up from her chair.
‘Please don’t hop up, Frances,’ Tytus says.
Iwan Krol rests a hand gently on Mum’s shoulder and something in the gesture tells her to sit back down. It’s now that I see he’s carrying an army-green duffle bag, which he drops silently onto the living room floor by the table.
Teddy is holding a fork in his right hand. He has two paper towels stuffed into the neckline of his dark blue Bonds shirt, and his lips are red with bolognese sauce, like a clown who smudges his lipstick. ‘Tytus, is everything okay?’ Teddy asks. ‘You want to join us for . . .’
Tytus isn’t even looking at Teddy when he puts a forefinger to his mouth and says, ‘Sssshhh.’
He’s looking at Lyle. Silence. Maybe a whole minute of silence or maybe it’s just thirty seconds but it feels like thirty days of thunderclap-loud-as-fuck silent staring between Tytus and Lyle. Vantage points and details, a single moment stretched to infinity.
A tattoo on the wiry goon’s left arm. Bugs Bunny in a Nazi uniform. August gripping his pasta spoon, nervously thumbing the handle. This moment from Mum’s point of view, sitting confused in a loose peach-coloured singlet, her head darting between faces, searching for answers and finding none but the answer on the face of the only man she has ever really loved. Fear.
Then Lyle mercifully cuts the silence.
‘August,’ he says.
August? August? What the fuck does this moment have to do with August?
August turns back around and stares at Lyle.
And Lyle starts writing something in the air. His right forefinger flows swiftly through the air like a quill and August’s eyes track the flurry of words that I can’t make out because I’m not facing him and I can’t spin them around properly in my mirror mind.
‘What’s he doing?’ Tytus spits.
Lyle keeps writing words in the air, swiftly and surely, and August reads them, nodding his head in understanding with every word.
‘Stop that,’ spits Tytus.
Tytus screams. ‘Stop that shit!’ He turns to the heavy goon and through gritted teeth, he furiously screams, ‘Please stop him doing that fucking shit.’
But Lyle, trance-like, keeps on scribbling words that August registers. Word after scribbled word until the heavy three-chinned goon thug’s right forearm connects with Lyle’s nose and he is thrown back off his chair onto the floor of the living room, his nose erupting with blood that runs down his chin.
‘Lyle,’ I scream, rushing down to him, hugging his chest. ‘Leave ’im alone.’
Lyle gags on a glob of blood in his mouth.
‘Jesus Christ, Tytus, what’s—’ Teddy stammers, stopped immediately by the blade point of a sharpened silver Bowie knife that Iwan Krol whips to his chin. This blade is a monster with teeth, it’s alien-like and gleaming, hissing on one sharp slicing side and shrieking with a serrated opposite edge, evil metal teeth for hacking things I can only imagine – necks mostly.
‘You shut the fuck up, Teddy, and you might survive this night,’ Iwan says.
Teddy recoils cautiously in his seat. Tytus looks at Lyle on the ground.
‘Get him outta here,’ Tytus says.
The wiry thug joins the heavy thug standing over Lyle and they drag him along the living room floor for two metres with me hanging onto him around his chest.
‘Leave him alone,’ I scream through tears. ‘Leave ’im alone!’
They pull Lyle to his feet and I drop off him, hard to the ground.
‘I’m sorry, Frankie,’ Lyle says. ‘I love you so much, Frankie. I’m so sorry, Frankie.’
The wiry thug drives a fist into Lyle’s mouth and Mum rounds the living room table with a bowl of her spaghetti bolognese that she cracks over the head of the sucker-punching goon.
‘Let him go,’ she screams. The caged animal that’s spent a lifetime inside her and has only seen daylight three or four times wraps its arms around the neck of the heavy thug, Mum’s monster digging its full-moon wolf fingernails deep into his cheeks and face, so deep the thug’s skin comes off in scratches of fury and blood. She’s howling now like she did when she was locked away for all those days in Lena’s room. Banshee wails, terrifying and primal. I’ve never been so scared in my life, of Mum, of Tytus Broz, of Lyle’s blood on my hands and face as he’s dragged on down the hallway of the house.
‘Stop that bitch,’ Tytus says calmly.
Iwan Krol rushes around the kitchen table, Bowie knife in his right hand, and August rushes around the table from the opposite side and meets Iwan Krol at the start of the hallway. He raises his fists like an old 1920s boxer. Iwan Krol instantly swipes the blade at August’s face and August ducks this attack, but it was only a diversion for Iwan Krol’s swift left leg kick that sweeps August’s feet off the ground so he lands heavily on his back. ‘Don’t you two dare fuckin’ move,’ Iwan Krol barks at us as he rushes down the hall behind Mum.
‘Mum, behind you,’ I shout. But she’s too rabid to register, desperately clutching at Lyle’s arms, trying to drag him back down the hallway. Iwan Krol switches the Bowie knife into his left hand and, with two impossibly quick and hard backhand thrusts, drives the knife’s handle butt into Mum’s left temple. She drops to the floor, her head hanging loosely over her left shoulder, her right calf bent back behind her right thigh like she’s a crash test dummy who’s hit one too many walls.
‘Fra
nkie,’ Lyle screams as he’s dragged out the front door. ‘Frankiiiieeeee!’
August and I rush to Mum but Iwan Krol meets us in the hallway and drags us back to the dinner table, our spindly thirteen- and fourteen-year-old legs not powerful enough to get a firm grip on the ground to fight back against the force of the killer’s furious dragging. He’s pulling me so hard my shirt’s popping up over my head and all I can see is the orange cotton blanket of the shirt front, and darkness.
He throws us onto our dining table chairs. Our backs are turned to Mum, who’s lying in the hallway unconscious, or worse, I don’t know.
‘Sit the fuck down,’ Iwan Krol says.
I’m struggling to breathe in the fear and the violence and confusion. Iwan Krol takes a rope from the army-green duffle bag. In a flurry of movement he wraps the rope around August three times and ties him tight to his dining chair.
‘What are you doing?’ I spit.
Tears and snot are pouring through my nose and I can barely stay upright on my seat, but August just sits quietly on his seat with a closed-mouth snarl directed at Tytus Broz, who is staring back at August.
I’m heaving deep gasps of air between tears and I can’t seem to get enough in my lungs and Tytus is bothered by it.
‘Breathe, for fuck’s sake, breathe,’ he says.
August reaches his right foot out and rests it on my left foot.
It calms me but I don’t know why. I breathe.
‘That’s it,’ Tytus says. He snaps a sharp look at Teddy, sitting stunned at the head of the table. ‘Leave.’
‘They don’t know shit these boys, Tytus,’ Teddy offers urgently.
Tytus is already staring back at August when he addresses Teddy’s words.
‘I won’t say it again,’ he says.
Teddy hops to his feet, rushes out of the living room and down the hallway, stepping over Mum’s unconscious body along the way. Even through all my fear and concern for Mum in the hallway and for Lyle, who’s been dragged to hell knows where, there’s still room enough in my thoughts for the notion that Teddy is a gutless prick.