41
Dial finished burying Buck. She squished up her face and bashed the dirt hard down on top of him. Parrots flittered in the last wash of light, the size of circus fleas up on the tattered ridge. The boy was up there with Trevor, lost to her, that is what she imagined.
Down in the valley the mosquitoes were already rising. They could smell her body gases a hundred feet away.
Which gases, Dial?
Lactic acid. Carbon dioxide.
Except there was no one there to ask her. No one who gave a damn about what she thought.
Her papa was dead. The boy was gone. She had buried Buck. She walked across the rotting-leaf floor of rain forest, finding the shower in the deepening shadow beneath the bedroom hut. She thought, I purchased a slum but at least I have hot water I can waste.
The shower water was like an easy promise, running down the long trunk of her lonely white body, cooling in a puddle around her ugly feet. That is what she thought. Once she had been beloved. She had met the boy’s father in safe houses in four different cities. She had bathed in rose oil. She had been delivered to him like a princess to her groom, trusted servants in Volkswagens, back stairs to a warehouse tower. He kissed her calves, the arches of her feet. Even when she contracted a disease from him, she allowed that he was a man, a soldier in a war, the king.
She had been a goddess, six feet tall, a fool. Who could imagine her made so small and worthless, heartsick for a little boy.
Not till she turned off the shower did she notice anything but her own spaghetti boil of pain. The first cat’s cry was drowned. But the second time she heard it clearly and it thumped her heart, a great electric whack that left goose bumps across her scalp.
She stood naked in the pooled-up soapy water. Something rustled. The water dripped. She hadn’t even lit the lantern in the big hut but when she heard Buck again she ran down into the forest. There was only just sufficient light to see the grave was as she had left it. It was too shallow, she knew it. If it was Massachusetts there would be raccoons or dogs to dig him up and drag him through the night. What was there here? No bears, that’s all she knew. Mosquitoes jabbed their hollow noses through her skin. She dragged the blocky gray carving from in front of the abandoned hut and laid it on top of the loose black dirt.
Lady Macbeth. Exactly.
She ran up to the hut, muddy feet, dead leaves sticking, but no more thought of cleaning up than if she was six years old and scared. Buck cried again. She whimpered. She found the Redhead matches and the propane roared white illuminating her naked skin in all its fright and weakness. There was a pair of overalls by the shower but she was too creeped out to go back down there, to feel banana fronds brushing against her shoulder.
She pulled on Adam’s prickly army coat. Not his war, not hers either. She turned the light down and she sat out on the shadow of the front deck where she could keep watch to see whatever blurry black things the night would bring toward her.
She had killed the cat, taken his life to make a point, win an argument. It was Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale. She listened to the ghost until it stopped which was pretty quickly, but still she had no chance of sleep.
She climbed up into the loft bed and settled in the nest of quilts and shawls. It smelled of boy. She could not sleep for thinking of him, but it was not until just before dawn, when she heard that cat meow again, that it occurred to her that there must be other cats and she had murdered her sleek lovely mischievous Buck in vain.
She tossed and turned until she heard the car descending Trevor’s hill.
Scratchy eyed and heavy headed, she clambered down the ladder and ran to fetch her dew-damp overalls and then, hearing the thump and slam of the car as it bottomed on the track, she sprinted down the hill toward the road, straight through the uncut feathery grass. She heard the bang as its engine slammed the yellow rock, and then she leaped off the cutting and she was in its deadly path.
No headlights.
She cast her hands high in the air and watched the car slide toward her, the front wheels barely missing her, the steaming nose pushed in among the blackberries.
It was Rebecca who was driving, Trevor she saw first, but she did not care about either of them. She wrenched open the back door.
Where is he?
There was nothing there but an unreal shining darkness, black plastic bags. She touched them, immediately imagined they were taking hedge clippings to the dump.
Where is he?
Slap her, said Rebecca. She’s a fucking spy.
Where is he?
Where is who?
Where is my son, she bellowed, and her voice echoed along the valley floor, across the shallow rills.
Shut up, said Trevor. He took her shoulders. Be quiet.
They were both looking at her weirdly.
Where is he? she demanded.
He’s with you, said Trevor.
He’s with you.
She began to howl then properly. It was beyond her, beyond any preparation or understanding.
She’s fucked this, said Rebecca, and went back into the car. She turned on the headlights and began to cautiously back up and turn around.
Don’t go anywhere, Trevor said to Dial. He had his two meaty hands around her upper arms. Stay here.
He got back into the car and he slammed the door so hard it hurt, and Rebecca, with her big tits and hairy legs, took Trevor back up the hill leaving Dial no comfort but the white clay dust which rose from the road and settled like wiggy talcum in her hair. The cat called. The empty day began.
42
The boy had seen two of Trevor’s secrets but he knew Trevor had boxes inside boxes inside boxes. Trevor did not trust banks but he had accounts, in Sydney, Lismore, Tweed Heads. His right hand could not find his left hand. His lungs did not know his heart. There were all sorts of secret stashes—Canadian money in railway lockers, out-of-date Australian pounds, a pack of gelignite strapped inside a concrete pipe buried in his road. The explosive had hung there for two wet seasons so the electrical tape was curling and the pack was dangling, but there were still wires leading up the red clay cutting, lying doggo in the bush like two death adders beneath the fallen leaves. Trevor had a plunger hidden in the rafters of the compound. He was a secret man but so pleased by his secret he had to tell the boy.
Trevor was audiovisual, he said so. He had the Book of Revelation on cassette. He could not read or write but he could imagine the end of the world better than a university professor, also the destruction of Noosa Heads by cyclone, also a police four-wheel drive thrown six feet into the air by gelignite. He would puff out his cheeks and blow his hands apart. He gave the boy bad dreams—fire, sharp black weapons, tree trunks burning like fuse cord in the night.
Rebecca was Trevor’s girlfriend, sometimes.
Was Rebecca also afraid of Trevor? Maybe, the boy thought, must have been, for sure. Who would want to know what Rebecca knew, i.e., the trails, huts, shacks, the individual marijuana plants hidden like buried bodies in the bush. Rebecca and Trevor walked the unmarked bush together, Trevor said so, backpack straps cutting into their naked shoulders. The boy had seen them load up with stinky fertilizer, blood and bone. He knew Trevor was an orphan, invisible to infrared. Not even the spies in outer space could see his true occupation.
Rebecca’s house was at the bottom of the hill, across from the concrete drain and the explosive charge. Trevor had built her a bed. He had put guttering on her roof.
She lay in wait, near the bottom of their driveway, hating Buck, hating Che, hating Dial for being American.
43
Trevor, in a breathless fury, found Dial, lying like roadkill beside her drive.
Get up, he said, all arrows and orders, pointing at her car.
Drive, he said. Not there, he said. There, he said.
The roads laced through the bush.
The day would soon be hot and sultry but for now the light was cold and sad. Dial stayed behind the wheel while Trevor called up to the hippies in their homes. The best of these were like cocoons made from glued-together sticks, the worst of them like Buckminster Fuller, fired from Harvard, far away.
The Peugeot engine was running rough, pumping out white poison. The hippies descended from their perches, sleepy birds with trailing blankets, egrets in the exhaust smoke mist. She thought, Some of them are graduates. They peered at her. Yesterday she had killed the cat. Now she had lost her son.
She drove Trevor some more.
The starved-chest girl emerged from an ugly A-frame, came right up to the car and tapped on the glass. Dial slowly rolled the window down. When the girl hugged Dial she was all bones, warm from sleep, perfumed with patchouli and poverty.
A chain saw started with a raw hard cough. The two women waited while the saw did its work. Soon they saw five men walk out of the bush, each one carrying a fresh cut pole. They walked in single file down the track, not looking at the car.
She asked the girl what they were doing.
They’re going to check out the creek.
In her confusion Dial wondered were they fishing. The starved-chest girl lay her raw-knuckled hand on Dial’s arm.
They’re going to find your little boy, she said.
What are the poles for?
Dial saw the transparent freckled terror—dumb fear that the girl would be forced to name the dreadful thing that would be done with the poles.
They’ll go to the swimming hole too, she said.
Oh. She wanted to throw herself back on the ground, lie in the dust until she was squashed or killed. The men were calling out.
What are they calling?
Coo-ee.
No, his name is Che.
Yes, the girl said, we know his name.
Dial recognized this dreadful sympathy. She gazed distractedly at the signs of hippie industry, beehives, potted rain forest plants beneath shade cloth. When Trevor came back to the car she expected they would go to the swimming hole but instead he told her to wind down her windows and drive very slowly along the road. She could hear the tiny grains of gravel sticking in the tires, a soft rolling noise, and the echoing foreign cry, as sharp as knives: Coo-ee.
At the ford she stopped, looking with dread at the wash of water which flowed around the tires and washed toward the swimming hole.
Up the hill, said Trevor. He was leaning out the window, staring into the bush. For fuck’s sake, aren’t you looking on your side?
She did now, as she drove on up the steep hill, and then again as they bounced along the logging tracks. Trevor, his head out the window, cried Coo-ee. There was so much bush, beyond acres, beyond hope or forgiveness.
They arrived at a high spot above the creek, almost the end of the track, when Trevor said, Stop. Turn off the engine.
He called, Coo-ee.
A call came back to them.
Of course it was not Che. It was nothing like a boy, but she still insisted that he reply.
Trevor left the car without so much as looking at her. He ran across the flat barefoot, jumping fallen timber, Coo-ee.
Coo-ee, there was an answer.
It’s not him, Dial thought, but she left the car. They were parked on a kind of bluff above the creek. On another day she would have found it beautiful, but today it was a horror and when they came upon a man with a blue car and trailer she was angry that they had wasted time.
Let’s go, she said.
Trevor lay his hand on her arm and spoke to the man who had glasses thick as soda bottles and hair oiled flat on his little shrunken head. Trevor stroked her shoulder, so gently she could have cried. The man’s neck was thin and did not fill his collar and he poked his nose forward, sniffing. Dial’s arm, in the palm of Trevor’s warm hand, was chicken skin.
The old man was a retired schoolteacher who had been cutting loads of firewood to sell in town. He had seen Che. Oh yes, indeed, he said. He saw him very well. Little fellow, a good set to his shoulders.
Dial tried not to be frightened by his hands, about one inch wide at the knuckles.
Don’t you worry, Mum, he said. She let him take possession of her hand, it was like being inside a big warm bag, or being in touch with God or aliens.
He’ll be back, he said.
He had been dead. Now he was alive. No one was going to prod his bloated white sausage body with a pole. She ran back to the Peugeot so quickly that by the time Trevor arrived she had turned the car around.
Trevor took his seat, but left the door open, one bare foot resting on clay.
Let’s go, she said.
He looked at her wearily, his eyes squinted. What’s the plan?
Furious, she drove down the track and he had no choice but to close his door.
So what’s the plan?
There was no damn plan except she could not go into the valley and be stared at. She was beyond the pale. She killed her cat. She killed her boy. When she came back on the road she swung left toward Yandina, looking out the window at the wiry scratching undergrowth, and when they came to the Cooloolabin fork she swung away from town. She could not bear to be looked at. She drove past the house where the boy had drunk the milk. She did not know she had come down this road, so short a time before, hundred-dollar bills sewn inside her hem.
Turn here, he said. She did not recognize Bog Onion, but she obeyed, her stomach churning at the steepness of the track, the precipitous drop along its edge.
Suddenly Trevor was like a dog with its ears pricked.
What is it?
He leaned forward, resting his forehead against the dusty sun visor, peering ahead and to each side.
Stop, he called.
She slammed on the brake and the Peugeot locked and sledded. Oh God, she said. What is it?
But Trevor was already out and stumbling, running up the hill. She pulled on the hand brake, but it would not hold. In the spit-smeared mirror she saw Trevor pick up something—candy wrapper, that’s what she thought. He jumped back in the moving car and handed it to her.
Ben Franklin. One hundred dollars U.S.
His eyes were slitted.
Drive, he said.
Brake light all the way.