Dust Off the Bones

by Paul Howarth

  “What’s got you so bloody cheerful for a change.”

  Tommy drank the beer in one and passed it back for a refill. “Smiling’s allowed in here now, is it not?”

  “Unusual, that’s all. You’re about the miserablest bugger I know.”

  “Been over the bakery, I reckon,” Collier piped up beside him. “Never mind smiling, I’d be crowing all over town if that was me.”

  Tommy nursed the second beer. “Which is why you ain’t married, Jim.”

  Mick smirked. Collier sat there frowning. Mick said, “Busy day, then, Bobby? Saw you had a visitor out your way?”

  Tommy paused, lowered the glass. “What visitor?”

  “Wasn’t he coming to see you, then? Tall fella, kind of fancy-looking?”

  “I was working,” Tommy said, his voice tightening. “I’ve not been back to the house, came straight off the fields. When was this?”

  “Hard to say, I mean—”

  “When, Mick?”

  “A couple of hours ago. Y’all right there, Bobby? You’ve gone pale.”

  His gaze roamed the bar and the dusty shelves behind. He teetered from the stool to his feet. “Tall, did you say? Did he have a longcoat on?”

  “I wasn’t paying much attention to what he was wearing, like.”

  “Did he have a fucking longcoat or not?”

  “I seen him,” one of the other drinkers said, and Tommy spun. “Long dark coat on him, aye. Like a rain slicker almost.”

  “How tall was he?”

  The man shrugged.

  “How tall?”

  “How should I know? He was on a bloody horse!”

  Despairingly Tommy reached above his head. “Like this? Seven foot almost?”

  “I wouldn’t quite go that far. More like your own height, maybe.”

  Tommy lurched forward, knocking the stool; it clattered loudly on the floor. He left the pub without paying. Staggering to the door then outside, where the first fat raindrops had just begun to fall, peppering his shoulders and carving little craters in the sandy road. Tommy stood there trembling head to toe. It could have been anyone, might not have been going to his house, the track followed the creek for miles beyond. He glanced in that direction. He didn’t even have a gun. He’d got comfortable, careless, and now a man had come to see him, tall, wearing a longcoat. He should leave, he thought suddenly. Ride off and lose himself and start all over again. Lady was across the road, tied to the rail, it would be so easy, but . . . the bakery now in darkness, Emily waiting round back, Arthur and Rosie, even Tess, this little life he’d so tentatively built. He couldn’t leave them. He closed his eyes, cupped his face, groaned. He wasn’t that boy who’d run from Noone, from Burns, from everyone; all his life he had run. Not this time. Not again. If this was what it had come to, he decided, he would face it, take his chances, even if it meant the end.

  Around the back of the bakery he found Emily sheltering beneath the canopy, against the wall. She had changed her dress and lost the apron, and stood clutching a little overnight bag in her hand. In the other she held the two leftover pies he had wanted, wrapped in a clean white towel, and the sight of her holding them, smiling at him, nearly broke Tommy’s brittle heart. “Thought you’d forgotten all about me,” she began teasing, then stopped when she saw his face. “Bobby? What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “You can’t come to the house. Stay upstairs, keep the door locked. I’ll come and get you. Wait here.”

  “Get me when?”

  “Tonight, tomorrow, when I know it’s safe.”

  “Safe? You’re scaring me now—what’s happened?”

  He shook his head, slick with rain. “Just . . . please, Emily, do what I ask.”

  “Not unless you tell me what’s going on.”

  Tommy looked up at the sky, the clouds full, heavy, pillowy-gray; blinking raindrops from his eyes. “There might be a bloke come looking for me. I just need to see what he’s about.”

  There was something in her stare that changed then, like she’d always suspected this moment would come. She’d asked about his past, his childhood; he’d assumed she believed the answers he gave. Maybe not, he now realized. Maybe she just felt enough for him that she’d decided to leave it alone.

  “It could be anyone,” she said hopefully. “Cattle business, maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Because you already know who this man might be.”

  He nodded.

  “And you’re afraid of him? Is that what this is?”

  Yes, but it stung hearing her say it. “I just need to go and check.”

  “And then you’ll come back and tell me?”

  “I will.”

  “When, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. As soon as I can.”

  She swiped her cheek. It wasn’t rain she was brushing away. Tommy reached out to touch her but she swatted his hand. “You come back to me, you hear? You come back to me, Bobby, understand?”

  Meekly he nodded. They came together and kissed, hard and desperate. As if trying to tell each other all those things they hadn’t yet said. As if it was their last.

  Tommy pulled away but Emily moved with him, reluctant to let go.

  Chapter 35

  Henry Wells

  “But did he at least say he would consider it?” Henry called into the dining room, washing his hands in the kitchen sink. “Once I have all the evidence in place?”

  Jonathan was lighting candles, pouring wine, their food already served and steaming on the plates. “Yes, I think so. I don’t really see how he could refuse.”

  Henry came through, drying his hands on a tea towel, which he balled and dropped on the table as he sat down. Jonathan looked at him reproachfully. Henry smirked and rolled his eyes, moved the towel onto a spare chair. Jonathan sat down beside him, they touched glasses and drank, but before they could begin eating, the doorbell rang.

  “Are you expecting anyone?” Jonathan asked.

  “Of course not.” Henry nodded at the wall clock. “Look at the time.”

  Sighing, Jonathan rose, brushing off Henry’s protests, touching his shoulder as he passed. Henry watched him fondly. He still got a kick from them doing this, living together, their little domestic routines. To the world they acted chaste and respectable: gentleman companions in the vein of Herbert and Bramston, their famous counterparts in town. The neighbors seemed to have accepted them anyway. No doubt their ages helped. As did their professions: Jonathan now held a senior position in the attorney general’s office, and a disgraced barrister was still a barrister all the same. It also helped that they were very discreet.

  Henry sipped his wine and ogled Jonathan walking along the hall: the slender triangle of his body, the buttocks tight and round. He was one of those annoying people who kept the weight off, no matter what he ate, and had hardly changed since they’d first met. A little gray at the temples, a couple of crow’s feet, but his face had taken on a kinder, softer quality, and the eyes were still keen and full of life. Henry cringed at the disparity; he didn’t enjoy looking in the mirror these days. The ordeal he had gone through, his public shaming, had robbed him of the best years of his life. Almost broke him, truth be told. He worried that Jonathan would see it. Yes, he had stood by him, had rescued him in fact, but his fear was that whatever magic had brought them together would evaporate as mysteriously as it once came. He still considered himself lucky. And luck was a fickle friend.

  From where Henry was sitting he couldn’t see the front door. He heard Jonathan’s footsteps slowing, the familiar click of the latch, the handle as it turned, then a brief exchange of voices, low and muffled, Henry couldn’t make out the words. Soon Jonathan was returning along the corridor, must have given the visitor the shortest of shrifts.

  “Who was it?” Henry called, but already he could see in Jonathan’s expression that something was very wrong. His face was ashen. Cl
ear panic in his eyes. Henry half-rose in his chair and saw a tall figure behind him, enormous in the narrow hall, his longcoat flaring as he moved. Henry’s legs buckled. Clinging to the table edge.

  “Hello again, Henry,” Noone said pleasantly. “May I?”

  He swept toward the corner armchair; Henry wondered if he meant to sit down. Instead, Noone snatched up one of the scatter cushions, brought it back to where Jonathan cowered by the wall, and planted it into his face. Jonathan flailed helplessly. The cushion smothered his cries. Noone pinned him there with one hand while with the other he drew a gleaming silver revolver from inside his longcoat. He wedged it under Jonathan’s jaw and fired, the muffled shot no louder than a dropped book. Henry tried to scream but couldn’t. A noise that withered to barely a whimper, then died. Still, it was enough for Noone to notice: he spun and pistol-whipped Henry before he had the chance to cry out again.

  * * *

  Henry awoke to find himself gagged and hog-tied, bent over the table and lashed tightly in place with a rope, Noone sitting in Jonathan’s chair beside him, eating his meal, drinking his wine. There was a ghastly red clawlike smear on the wall behind him, the blood running thickly like paint, matted with clumps of that puppy-soft hair. Henry retched against the tea towel stuffed in his mouth, tears falling hot on his cheeks.

  Noone ate the meal patiently, delicately, like he wasn’t even there.

  When his plate was clear, Noone sighed and straightened his cutlery, dabbed his lips and sipped the wine. He glanced at Henry. Smiling faintly, he leaned back in his chair, and Henry got a look at Jonathan’s body, slumped and lifeless against the wall, and the black revolver that had been placed in his open palm. He thrashed against his bindings hopelessly, then with a sudden chill of horror fell still. He was naked below the waist, he realized. His trousers and underwear were down.

  “You know, I have rather missed this,” Noone said. “I so rarely get to enjoy myself these days. I am actually rather grateful. The chance may not arise again.”

  He sipped Jonathan’s wine contentedly. Henry moaned into his gag.

  “None of us can change our nature. I have known what I am my whole life, Henry, as I suspect have you. Lying with men while you were married, living here in sin, even taking up your little case against me when you already knew the risks. You are as selfish an individual as I have ever met. Bravo, I must say.”

  Noone drained the wine, stood, tucked in the chair.

  “A great deal has been written about it, actually, I don’t know if you are aware. Fatalism, determinism, nihilism, and of course predestination, for what that is worth: Why would this, why would anything we do, be any concern of God’s?”

  Henry raged unintelligibly. Noone inclined his head. “You have a point to make on the subject? Some thoughts on Nietzsche, perhaps?” He took hold of the gag and paused. “If you scream I will cut out your tongue.”

  “Jonathan was innocent,” Henry gasped. “He wasn’t even involved.”

  “No? Had you not already co-opted him into your little scheme?”

  “But he’d done nothing. All his life, he’d done nothing wrong.”

  Henry began sobbing. Noone puttered his lips. “How disappointing, Henry. You blather like a child. This is not my doing. The blame here is all yours. You knew what might happen but thought you could get away with it, and so here we are. Honestly, I thought you had more sense than to go in with a bullheaded imbecile like Billy McBride. What is it with you people? Did you really think I would not come?”

  He prized open Henry’s mouth and stuffed the towel back in.

  “I thought about poisoning you, both of you, a fatal dose of moonshine liquor, or even opium, since I know you’re prone to excess. It must look accidental, you see. But then the last thing I want is for you to enjoy this, Henry, to drift away happily into a calm and blissful sleep. So I reconsidered, and asked myself: What other deviance, what other vice, does Henry Wells have?”

  He smoothed his hair carefully, flicked out his longcoat, unhooked a polished foot-long police truncheon from its belt loop and thwacked it hard against his palm, at which Henry began struggling wildly like a chained and muzzled dog.

  “They will assume your paramour did it. Sodom, exposed. Then, unable to live with himself, your friend takes his life with that little pistol there; a rather neat explanation, don’t you think? I will make sure the papers have all the juicy details—imagine your father’s reaction when he reads the story in the press!”

  Chapter 36

  Tommy McBride

  Tommy dismounted short of the house and, hidden by the hedgerow, led Lady up the hillside through the rain. Lashing down now, his shirt soaked through, water running off his hat brim and trickling in little rivulets down the sand-and-pebble road. The pitch of the roof peeled into view, then the gate posts, the path, the corner of the verandah . . . and an unfamiliar horse tied to the balustrades. Tommy froze. Inching through the swirling mud. He peeked around the hedgerow and saw in the gloom a hunched figure smoking on his front steps, tall, broad, dark-haired, wearing a longcoat that pooled at his heels. As he smoked, he cast irritated glances around the front yard; Tommy couldn’t make out his face. But there was something in his mannerisms, in how he held himself, the inverted grip on the cigarette, that sent the memories tumbling, his entire past cascading down. All the air emptied out of him in a gasp.

  That was his brother up there. Billy, at last.

  Tess jumped down from the verandah and came bounding along the path. Startled, Billy looked up. He saw Tommy, flicked away his cigarette, rose stiffly to his feet, reached for his hat, squared it on his head, and trudged down the steps into the rain, while Tommy stood rooted on the track, clutching Lady’s bridle, Tess happily circling his legs. Billy waved at him, then when he got no response impatiently opened his arms. Tommy’s head hung. He’d never walked so slowly up his own path before, halted ten yards away. It felt close enough. Billy grinning stupidly through the rain: dark eyes, dark beard, crooked nose, the threat of a chin. The resemblance to Father was chilling. He was Ned McBride in a good year.

  “Hello, brother,” Billy said.

  He took off his hat and stepped forward, swallowed Tommy in an embrace, Tommy standing rigid in his arms, paralyzed by the contact, the enormity of it, and by the little details too: he was taller now, he realized; the flowery whiff of Billy’s cologne. Billy kissed him roughly on the cheek. The intimacy felt obscene. They parted and Billy was frowning. He put on his hat again.

  “Hell, Tommy, will you say something? I’m stood here like a limp dick!”

  But what could he say? What, after all this time? It was unreal he was even standing here—over the years Tommy had imagined their reunion so often, the things he would yell at him, the blows he would land, but now that Billy was in front of him it had the quality of a dream.

  “I traveled a week to see you. It’s been twenty bloody years!”

  “Twenty-one,” Tommy corrected, his voice near-drowned by the rain.

  “There you go now, that wasn’t so hard.”

  That grin again—it sickened Tommy, a glimpse of who his brother was now. He knew him. Knew exactly the kind of man he would be. He was Billy at his worst back when they were children, full of cocksure arrogance, treating everything like a game. Daring Tommy to do whatever he wouldn’t, mocking him if he refused, then afterward, when it went wrong, when someone got hurt or they got in trouble, laughing off the consequences, no fucking worries mate.

  “Is that it then?” Billy asked him. “You don’t got nothing else to say?”

  “How . . . ?” Tommy began, then faltered. He slicked water from his face. “How did you find me?”

  “I hired a man. More than one. Took them long enough, but here I am.”

  “But . . . why?”

  “What sort of a question’s that?”

  “What are you doing here, Billy?”

  “Shit, I wanted to see you. Figured maybe you felt the same. If you like I
can head back to Queensland, try you in another twenty years’ time?”

  They stared at each other through the rainstorm, all trace of the grin gone. Two men, brothers once, taking the measure of each other again.

  “Stables are this way,” Tommy told him, leading Lady up the hill.

  In silence they saw to their horses, furtive glances back and forth between the stalls. Billy seemed a little rusty. Looked like it had been a while. When Tommy had finished he leaned on the partition, watching him struggle. “Hell,” Billy grumbled, “this ain’t even my damn horse.”

  On the back verandah Billy slid off his coat and hung it on a peg beside their hats, a puddle collecting on the boards below. They peeled off their boots and stood them in pairs against the wall: Billy’s knee-highs, glossy leather, alongside Tommy’s mud-caked work boots. His trousers were twill, his shirt was fine cotton, the silk lining of his coat likely cost about as much as Tommy’s house.

  “Nice little place,” Billy said, looking the yard over. “Land any good?”

  “Wouldn’t have bought it if it wasn’t.”

  “Bought, not leased?”

  Tommy paused with a hand on the door. “That so hard to believe?”

  They went inside. Tommy lit the stove while Billy rubbed the raindrops from his hair and appraised the little room. “So what’s the acreage?” he asked.

  “Enough.”

  “Just the cattle? No sheep?”

  “No sheep. Tea do you?”

  “Appreciate it.” He idled while he was waiting, fingering the books on the dresser, the few ornaments on the shelves. Tommy could guess what he thought of the house, of him. Billy said, “I don’t run sheep no more neither. Too much bloody work, what with the droughts we get up our way, and the dogs.”

  Tommy stalled and looked at him. “You’re still at Glendale?”

  “I was.” He coughed, suddenly bashful. “Actually, me and Katherine Sullivan are married now. Shit, Tommy, I’m co-owner of Broken Ridge!”