by Peter Carey
Yes.
Was it scary?
No, said the boy. I’m used to it.
You must be tough, said Rufus at last.
The boy said, My dad is pretty tough.
Then he asked for another slice of bread and honey and as he ate it he began to look around, trying to locate where he was and what he really felt. He was eating great bread and thick honey but he was thinking about Trevor, his snotty nose, his rounded shoulders, his heavy trudging walk as he set off up his road alone.
46
When the boy was a man he would be known as someone who took large and reckless actions, and he would often think that he had first been like this at Rebus Creek Road where he had first gone beyond what he was brave enough to do and changed himself because of it.
Coming back to Dial’s hut he found it changed as well—made beautiful with flotsam, jetsam, linseed oil. There was a twelve-foot wooden ladder, painted yellow and secured by butcher hooks above the sink. It hung parallel to the floor. Above the sink it held pots and pans, but the ladder went much farther along the golden wall and above the cushions it held no more than a single mustard scarf.
The boy could not know that this was the echo of a room at Vassar, a lost life with a Tabriz rug.
She was nice to him, but careful now, and sometimes playing cards he felt a cloud of sadness settle on them both, like bugs around a lamp. She didn’t love him the same as before, that’s what it felt like, as if he had stretched or broken something without meaning to. He was sorry for all the mean things he said. He wanted her to lay her hand on his shoulder, not that she didn’t, but less often, or not in the same way. She did not yell at him at all, as if she didn’t know him well enough for that.
Have you seen Trevor? he asked her.
You should visit him, she said, keeping herself apart from him, beyond his proper grasp.
But he had stolen from Trevor who had been his friend. He had gotten caught as well.
And yet these were also the best days he ever lived so far. Better than Kenoza Lake, better than being sad about his swimming grandma and standing in the blue moonlight listening to her breathe. In Sullivan County he had seen redneck boys through the windshield of his grandma’s car, kids throwing stones below the creek or bashing their bikes down through the woods. He had thought he would have to live behind the windshield.
But now he was the kid who had lived in the bush at night; he instructed the hippie kids how to make shelters in the bush, digging down in the black soil of the rain forest. They laid fishbone fern as he ordered, then sticks and branches on the top. He had never done this in his life before but no one knew that. He was a prince of liars. He won two dollars underwater. He could stay on the bottom beneath the waterfall and pick up pebbles in his teeth. The water was cold but it tasted of bracken and something else, maybe gold. He thought so definitely. The hippie kids were wild things with feet as hard as leather. They ran along the lacework trails. He made a divining rod from a wire coat hanger and then a map showing where there was gold and water. The gold he marked red, the water blue. As he drew it, he knew it would come true.
He got the last of the black dye cut off. His hair went curly from the water and was bleached white from the sun, like at Kenoza Lake.
Rufus had red hair. Sam had black. The boy and the Puddinghead were both the same color. The boy announced to them they were a gang.
He and his gang climbed the steep ridge behind Dial’s hut and went north as far as Cowpastures, as it was called. The boy led them back by Trevor’s which was pretty much the point of the adventure. That was when the boy discovered everyone was scared of Trevor. All the boy thought was how Trevor had been beat and broken and had no mother of his own.
But Rufus said, He has a gun, man, and would not go inside.
The boy entered on his own, recognizing all those smells of rotting and growing and the rich awful smell of blood and bone and Wappa weed. He discovered Trevor lying naked in his hammock listening to the war.
Can we have some carrots, Trevor?
Trevor cast his eyes at him, like a dog, embarrassed. How’s Dial, he asked.
She’s good. Can we have some carrots.
Help yourself, he said, closing his eyes.
The boy washed the carrots under the green hose. Trevor never told him not to.
I’ve got a gang, he said, to make Trevor look at him. Trevor kept his eyes closed.
That’s good. Who’s in it.
Sam and Rufus. As the cold water washed across his feet he missed the days when Trevor was his friend, and when he threw the green tops in the compost it was like doing something precious he would never be allowed to do again.
Who’s the other carrot for?
His eyes seemed closed.
Sara, he said. Where’s that ol’ horse? he asked.
I’m the bloody horse, said Trevor.
The boy stood in front of him begging to be seen. In his pocket he had the hundred dollars and all the other money he’d stolen from him. He could not carry it any longer.
I’ve got some money of yours, he said at last.
Trevor’s eyes stayed shut. I know.
I brought it back, he said, surprising himself.
That’s good, said Trevor.
Where will I put it?
On the table.
And that was all. The boy put one hundred and twenty-one dollars on the folding table with the melon rinds and took the carrots out to Rufus and Sam and the Puddinghead.
Squatting, eating carrots, in a state of indignation and relief, he heard that Trevor was a former sanitation worker, had a gelignite bomb below the road. He knew that anyway. He learned how Detective Dolce led a raid on him one Easter morning, and he learned the names of casuarinas, turpentine, flooded gum, ironbark, wattle, jacaranda, flame tree, lemongrass, bluetop, lantana and groundsel where the bees harvested their honey for Sara’s father. He ate lentils for lunch, got to put his head inside the steel boiler where Rufus’s father dried pawpaw to sell at the health food shop. It did not taste too good with all its water gone.
No one told him all this had been vacation and that Sam and Rufus would soon go back to school. Suddenly, there was no one left but the little Puddinghead.
Why can’t I go to school? the boy asked Dial.
Dial stood on a big metal drum painting the end wall with another coat of linseed oil. She splashed a lot of it around, on her shorts, her long strong legs, frowning very deep, squinting crooked. She did not even look at him until he came out with his question.
Then she jumped off the drum and did that crouching-down thing.
What, he demanded nervously.
She brushed his hair with her oily hand.
It’s the law, he said. I have to go to school.
She gave him a lopsided smile that made her nose look big and rubbery. It’s the law, she said, to lock me up for kidnapping.
She was a Turk, she said so. A bitzer. He stared at her, into her strange eyes, not knowing who she was. He wished she would love him again, but when she reached for him, he stepped away.
Where is Buck? he asked.
She did that smile again.
I’m a teacher, she said. I can teach you better than anyone in that town.
He stayed staring at her until she looked away and went back to painting. He stood on the back steps awhile and looked up the hill into the gray tangle of the bush. Flies buzzed around his face and knees as well. He was suddenly, all at once, bored by everything. There was nothing to do but go to the candle factory where he found the little Puddinghead playing with a doll in the dirt beneath the kitchen. Together they walked along the creek, not saying anything, and when they ended up back near Dial’s house, the Puddinghead said, Let’s make a hole.
The boy had invented digging holes and now he was sick to death of it, but he took her sticky little hand and went into the rain forest and began to mess around, pulling rocks out of the tangled web of roots and dirt. It must have been a river
once. He didn’t bother telling her. She took off her clothes so they would not get dirty and found a piece of shale to chop at the roots.
While they were digging the boy heard Buck meow. The Puddinghead looked at him but he did not want to talk about Buck. He had been told bad things already. Maybe they were true, or maybe not. Now he heard his meow and he had the idea then that they could make something called a blind. Grandpa Selkirk made blinds to shoot waterfowl.
The Puddinghead thought she would find a dinosaur bone and kept on talking about it. He did not listen but she worked very hard and before too long they started to collect sticks for the roof, going into the lantana to cut flexible pieces you could weave. That is where they were, not six feet from the Peugeot, when a white Land Rover arrived, a blue light on its roof.
47
Queensland was a police state run by men who never finished high school. They raided the hippies in Cedar Bay with helicopters and burned down their houses. They parked out on Remus Creek Road at night and searched the hippie cars without permission from a judge. So if you thought you came to Remus Creek Road to get away from being illegal, that was just a joke. The boy knew this. Dial must have learned it when the police arrived to add her to what they called their little map.
When the boy saw their Land Rover, he abandoned the Puddinghead without a word. There was no point in warning Dial. He cut across the rain forest to the yellow track. He was a good runner but the hill was steep and the sun was hot and by the time he got as far as the Volvo and the turkey he had a stitch.
It did not take the police long to threaten Dial and get her name and date of birth. Now the boy could hear the Land Rover rumbling and rolling over the rocks and potholes not so far behind him. He had no choice but to slip off the scary steep side of the road and hang on to a wattle root. He heard a voice above the engine saying, Egg bloody sandwich.
If they got to Trevor first the boy thought he could still start the engine on the ice-blue car and have it running. That’s why Trevor had taught him, obviously. He pulled his scratched and bleeding limbs onto the road, and followed the police through a settling cloud of dust. He could only walk by twisting sideways, pressing his hand into his stitch, but when he understood that the police had headed down toward the left he hurled himself into that blurred piece of nothing which was made by camouflage nets and trees. Trevor was chopping up tomato stakes but he let the boy take him by his muddy hand, lifting a fat rucksack off a rusty hook, slinging it across one shoulder, as he followed him through the garden up onto the saddle until the boy tripped and fell. Then Trevor carried him. They breathed together, the boy’s purple eyelids drooping, feasted on exhaustion. They traveled with one mind through the sharp cutting shale and into the paddock with the purple seeds, skirting around the fence line where no satellites could see. Here Trevor lifted the barbed wire and the boy rolled under and then held up the wire in turn. Then they both walked, hand in hand together, down toward the hidden car, ice blue, cyan blue, turquoise—Trevor called it all these things.
The boy expected they would drive now. Trevor pushed him behind the steering wheel. Che touched his fingers against the silver horn ring which held the tiny reflection of his frightened face.
Trevor opened the rucksack and found a bag of dried pawpaw and a khaki water canteen like the one Cameron took to camp.
The cops were at your place?
All the boy could think was, Drive.
Did they ask for me? Trevor was studying the pawpaw, turning it this way and that. Did they say my name?
I only saw their truck.
They saw you!
No! he cried.
Jeez, calm down.
But the boy’s own father stopped loving him when he led the FBI to his door. No, he said. He held out his hands to show Trevor all his wounds.
I know what they did, Trevor. They got Dial’s date and place of birth.
Did you hear them?
It’s what they do, Trevor.
Is it?
Yes, then they turned down the track by the big drums, Trevor.
Trevor poured water into the palm of his hand and spilled it on the boy’s head, patting him. That’s the Rabbitoh’s place, he said. They’ll have a nice long chat with him.
Are we going on the lamb, Trevor?
Trevor sprinkled more water on the boy’s hot skin.
We should get started, Trevor. He opened his door, to let Trevor slide over and take the wheel. He was thinking they could get money for his ticket from the stash. They were together now.
Trevor clicked the door shut. There’s a path all the way through from my place to Eumundi.
That’s what I was thinking too.
It isn’t on the maps. It’s on the old maps, not the new maps.
That’s what I thought.
They’ll go to my place. They’ll steal some vegetables to take home to their wives. They won’t come over here.
But we have to go.
Trevor was chewing on his smile. Don’t panic, Tex. Remember Pearl Harbor.
The boy heard paddy tax. He would have asked but Trevor was slowly lowering the window.
What is it?
Shut up.
Then he heard the Land Rover lumbering toward them and Trevor slipped away like a shadow through a net. When he did not return the boy spilled more water on his face and made his pants wet. He waited a good long time, but no one came back. Then he pushed through the dry brambles to get a proper view. The Land Rover was really close—a man’s hairy leg sticking out the passenger window.
His heart was walloping and whaling as he got back behind the wheel, ready to turn the key when ordered.
He touched the key. He turned it one click, just to have it set up. It was like a .22 trigger, first pressure, then second. He learned that from his grandpa.
He heard a magpie, flies buzzing inside the car. Then voices.
Once more he pushed through the dried brush and kneeled down behind the dead wattles. A policeman was kicking at the grass.
He returned to the car and sat with the glistening horn in front of him. He traced his finger around it and he could see his thumb reflected bigger than his nose. He guessed it had two positions like the key, like the trigger. He pressed to find the first position. The horn blared.
A hand clamped around his mouth.
The boy would have shrieked but there was no air.
I’ll fucking wring your fucking rabbit neck, hissed Trevor from behind.
Even when the hand was taken away, he could not move, was poisoned, paralyzed, stinging in his shame. He waited to get caught and even after the police engine started and drove away and after the light had gone and everything inside the car was black and sick with dry papaya, he stayed in the same place.
OK, get out.
He got out. He could hardly see. Trevor’s hand was dry and hard. It took his own and led him through the scratchy dark.
Did you want me to get arrested?
I didn’t mean to, Trevor.
Jesus!
He began to say I’m sorry but the word opened up its guts into a howl. He cried and cried and Trevor picked him up and carried him, heaving and bawling, back up to the compound and then down the road past Rebecca’s to the bottom of his own place and here he set him down and, in the darkness, the boy felt him kiss his head.
Good night, mate.
Good night, Trevor.
He stayed in the dark of the driveway and rubbed his eyes. After a while he heard Trevor calling outside Rebecca’s window and then he went back home to Dial.
48
It is a law of childhood that you are seldom punished immediately but must wait in a state of agony for your crime to be known. That’s how it worked for the boy after he sounded the horn at the police. He was ashamed of himself already but he knew the real upset would only arrive when Dial was told, and as he skulked down in the valley and Trevor remained on the hill, this time of torment went on and on. He didn’t see Trevor, although
he must have visited during those long hours when the boy slept, the dusty crocheted hippie rugs pulled over his head to hide him from the light.
It was in the middle of the fourth night that Che came down the ladder from the loft, each rung so square and hard it hurt his toes, and went outside to pee. If Dial had been asleep he could have gone out on the deck and made the stinky earth smell even worse. But Dial was out there smoking so he crept out the back door and found that the season had turned, not cold by the standards of Sullivan County, but cold enough. There was dew, and when he came back inside he made perfect wet footprints on the perpetually dusty floor.
He got almost as far as the ladder when she called to him.
Come and tell your secrets.
He stayed between the workbench and the ladder, hugging himself, wishing he could hide his ugly self.
Come here, baby.
The slats on the deck were also wet with dew. They were colder even than the earth. He saw the valley was filled with mist and blue moonlight, wet leaves, black pawpaws, dark icy sky above the distant ridge. He waited.
You’ve been keeping secrets, she said. He looked down at her and she looked straight back at him with her black brows pushing down onto her eyes.
He has a car hidden in the bush, she said. Don’t walk away.
I’m getting a blanket.
He climbed up the ladder and threw down one of Adam’s quilts.
You knew that, she said. You kept it secret.
He spread the blanket on the floor inside the doorway and then he wrapped himself inside it.
Baby, don’t close your eyes.
I’m sleepy.
Look at me. Were you trying to get Trevor caught?
I warned him, he cried.
Were you trying to get me caught?
What!
Were you trying to get me caught?
No, he cried so loud it echoed around the valley.
Shush.
You shush! The police were here. I ran up to Trevor’s. I warned him. Let me alone. I’m sleepy.
Now she was kneeling, looking down at him as if he was some poor moth she’d tangled in a string. She tried to peel back the blanket.