Loving, Faithful Animal (6 page)

She's walking there before she knows she is, to Les, taking the back route, the tramped-down path through that skirts paddocks and the backs of houses. Along the fenceline, some animal reek. Tufts of brindle fur snagged along the barbwire. Leftovers from where boys had strung up the remnants of fox and rabbit carcasses.

Bait, Lani had explained to her, matter-of-fact.

Bait?

Panther bait.

Oh come off it …

Her daughter had only shrugged. Not meeting her eye, dark lines etched into her lips from a gruesome shade of lipstick she'd been made to wipe away.

She finds her brother-in-law at work on something—
always something—dismantled electrical guts spilling over yesterday's newspaper. A radio, unshelled, that he shifts off the table.

Whose's that?

No-one's yet. Take your fancy?

Before they moved here. When they were just visiting. The first time she'd met Les—though he'd been introduced to her right away, from the get-go, as Tetch—he'd poured her tea into an eggshell-frail cup, placed it into her hands like it was alive. And she'd let herself get swallowed up, ballooning belly and all, in the big cord-upholstered armchair in the lounge, thinking, Okay, this will do. Something like this … she could stomach it. The big windows and his vegie patch and the bookshelves lined with outdated, leather-bound
Britannicas
that had never heard of Maggie Thatcher. And then by some magic the house had come up, within spitting distance. Dog's will, Les had called it, that shaggy grin of his, that odd warmth.

What's changed since then? Some things plenty, though here, in Les's kitchen, hardly anything at all. Only that of late her brother-in-law has a way of looking at her. Clear and piercing. Not unkindly. More than kindly, if she's honest. And it's harmless, she's sure, but loud as a spoken word. Which word, exactly, she doesn't know. But alone with him she needs small useless things to do with her hands; the fingering of a skirt hem, the turning up and rolling down of a sleeve. Needs places to look that are not him, his grey-blue eyes. Her gaze flicking around the small kitchen (Weet-Bix box, souvenir plate from Broome …) as though her whole body might be stammering its response to a question she's not even sure she's heard right. When all either of them can manage to say aloud is:

Cuppa?

No, thanks all the same.

Something cool, then?

Really. She feels a thirst but asking for anything, accepting anything now seems treacherous.

He places a stumpy bottle of ginger beer in front of her and says, Well it's there looking at you anyway.

Oh. Ta. She uncaps the drink, listens to it hiss at her.

He's waiting for it, she sees. Whatever it is. There are his hands, resting neat upon the table. The barely interrupted span between the thumb and middle finger. She takes a swallow so she doesn't have to speak yet.

Hit the spot? His clear eyes, the harsh weather of his skin. Heat always close to the surface, a few days' pale stubble coming in around his lean jaw.

She feels a sharp, clean panic, and looks at her own hands. Sees how high the veins are running, how dark, standing out from her still-thin wrists. She feels betrayed by her body, by her blood. Thinks: Who wants to be seen clearly? Who wants that so late into things?

I figure you'd tell me, but. Well. I know there's loyalty and all that. So I thought I better just ask. But you haven't, have you? Heard anything?

He regards her a moment. From Jack? You don't think I'd tell you?

Well, loyalty and all that. Sorry, I shouldn't have even. Shouldn't have asked. She swigs from the ginger beer.

I would tell you, he says. She sees his jaw working on nothing and tries to tell if he's lying to her, then decides she doesn't care. Or that she does care, but it doesn't matter.

The truck is out there, in the drive. Reliable. She could manage it. And absolutely, he
'
d lend it to her, no question. She realises with little wonder that he
'
d probably give her anything she asked, anything he had. What to do with that? There isn't a thing in the world to do with that.

She could find Jack herself, without too much detective work. A single morning in St Kilda, maybe Collingwood. That
'
s all it would take. A bit of door-knocking, asking around the sleazy soakholes with the rusted-on types who'd call her
girlie
and
darling
, thinking that what she was after was to feel young. She could track him down, could probably shame him home. Bring his rough hand to her belly, tell him, This time. But no.

A horse'll run itself to death.
A useless fact, if it was one
.
Well, frigging let it then.

Thank you, she says. For the drink. Pushing her chair away from the table, handing him back the half-empty bottle. Seeing herself as Les must: a bratty child who has what she came for. She tries to fix it, babbles moronically about her dad's crystal set, knowing she's only making things worse.

She walks home the long way, along the roadside, across front yards when they appear. Parked cars crowding drives, barbecue smoke lifting into the cooling air.

Before it gets to twilight, before fox o'clock she sees to the rabbits, to getting them fed and shut away safe. Last year's birthday present from Stell.

You could breed them if you wanted to, was Stell's reasoning. Spruik them to people at the girls' schools, in the
Trading Post
. Earn a little something for yourself. They're pricey bunnies, let me tell you.

An-fucking-gora, more mouths to feed. Jack again.

But they don't need so much, really. Mostly she just pulls up fistfuls of thistles from around the forty-gallon drum of rusty rainwater, likes to watch their grass-stained mouths work at grinding it away, pulling it all in like stock-ticker tape. Simple little clockwork creatures.

She brushes her fingers through their long silky fur, trying to comb out the tangles and burrs while they're distracted with their eating. They don't like that, though, try to shimmy away from her hands, her fingers still sticky with thistle-milk.

I should just shave the two of you, she murmurs. I should knit jumpers out of you little dolts. That'd be something.

III. Breakwall

first light, early december.
Warm summer storm and no smokes. Three sleeps till pension day. Drove the wet black Hume right down to Melbourne. Looking for tobacco, found her big sunglasses in the glovebox. Nothing for her to hide now anyway.

Take take take.

Parked in a leafy side street, one of the rich suburbs. Sat there waiting for the shakes to let up, listening to rain on the roof. Remember that was comforting once. The sound of rain, the smell of it. A long time ago.

Ten days sleeping in the car. Shaving in the servo, buying McDonald's coffee just to use the shitter, till a room opened up at the Regal. Real smartarse on the stairwell said the last bugger topped himself. Found last bugger's lighter behind the chest of drawers. A girl in a red bikini but when you go to light a smoke her togs disappear. Very classy.

In case there is any misunderstanding, I think I should say, sir, that we decided in principle some time ago—weeks and weeks ago—that we would be willing to do this …

Payphone on Grey Street. Could call her. Say,
Happy Christmas, darling
. Then what?

Waking with a palmful of cigarette burns. Not sure how they got there. Or even who put them there. A copy of
People
left under the mattress. The centrefolds getting too scrawny. Like little girls. Sick.

Thinking of maybe looking up Foxy. Thinking of maybe getting a hit but who in their right mind trusts the stuff these days. Cut with glass and milk sugar and Christ knows.

No place to be alone here. No way to get away from the people and the sound of St Kilda throwing up on itself. Front bar of the Esplanade like a tin of shit-faced sardines. Beach not much better. Idiots splashing naked into the grotty water. At your own peril, arseholes. Stood a while on the pier, feeling old—forty-fucken-four, is all—then lit out for Brighton. Ten klicks on and ten years back to where she's standing on the breakwater. Not so far away, either way of looking at it. Not too far.

When you think of happiness, what picture do you have in your mind?

A chopper flying over. Sure, that'll do it. Channel Seven chopper, and all the rest. Car backfiring in the street. But also the smallest, friendliest things. Silver thermos like an artillery shell. Certain smells. Ev rubbing Tiger Balm into Ruby's achey little back. That'll do it. Sunsets and sunrises, a particular colour in the sky. That right there is what war does. Takes a tyre iron to beauty. To the smallest, friendliest things.

What was there before? Walking the dam wall at Maroondah. Jody holding her damp hair up off her sweaty neck. A scruffy white dog running after a car. Race days and sprinklers turning lazy circles. Road-tripping all the way up to Broken Bay to see Pat and Maile in oyster season, and the big moon hanging huge and leery above the Hawkesbury.
Rabbit moon
, said Jody, standing on the dock and pointing out the ears and paws. Her long pearly arm outstretched. Telling the story of how he jumped straight into the fire to cook his own scrawny self for a poor man's dinner. Girl knew some strange stuff. Somewhere out there people are still living these things. Backyard cricket. Little cubes of cheese speared on toothpicks. All at the wrong end of a telescope. So small it could be covered with a hand.

Dear Sir, I am writing to inform you, in relation to your liability

Only won the lotto once, and that was it. Happy birthday. Prize was a medical examination and a free trip on the Vung Tau Ferry.

The mess Tetch made of his hands. Didn't even bother to make it look like an accident.

Black leopard at the Pucka barracks. Sociable little bastard. Name meant Chief in some Asian language. Or maybe it was Latin. Never was much chop with languages.

that you are required, in accordance with the provisions of the National Service Act

Kepala
, that was him. General. Big boss. Even though he was only the size of a terrier when he was smuggled in. No-one knew the first thing about panthers. Or black leopards; there a difference? Didn't matter. He grew burly on mess scraps, chicken carcasses. Cookie said he liked rat-pack beef best. His enclosure a cute little training project for the sappers.
Don't forget the spa bath, boys
.

Let me repeat, in simple terms, why we are in Vietnam.

Turned twenty-one propped up on a sandbag in a rubber plantation.
You too, hey?

Yeah, and Foxy
, said Wilson
. Trifecta.

See these little pricks today with their caps turned wrong way round. Smart-mouthing outside the supermarket. Wanna give them a belting and a haircut and another belting.

Trifecta alright. Hope whoever grabbed those marbles got himself a lotto ticket.

Well I hope he got syphilis. Black syphilis.

One year. One stinking year out of forty-four, and a lifetime of four hours' sleep on a good night, waking to the same dark dread every morning, same lead in the belly. Life split in half, a neat whack with a hatchet, into the Before and the After. Good things still happened in the After but it was like they were echoes. Shadows of things from the first two decades. Things that got ripped to rags trying to sneak across that one-year wire.

What're you waiting for Burroughs? Written invitation? In you hop, boy-oh.
That's where it started—Jackrabbit Burroughs, tunnel rat. Pisser. Remember going in. Wet webbing across the face, gut like a sack of live snakes. Don't remember climbing out. That poetry? What the head-quacks would say to that.

We are there because we believe in the right of people to be free.

Smell of hexamine. Dragging arse through the light green and someone singing
Blue Bayou
. Miserable cunt.

Foxy asking, like an idiot,
What do y'reckon we're doing here?
That started them.

We're here, Foxy my darling, because Ho Chi Minh kicked over Mr President's tricycle.

Boredom and rain. Some of the guys learnt to whittle linking chains from dead branches or wood salvaged out of trashed villages. Foxy could get them up to a couple of feet. Just something to pass the time and pass the time … But it came to be a kind of code.
How is it today? Oh, it's a six-link day
. Meaning:
Here we all are in the sweet-fuck-all.

required, in accordance with the provisions of the National Service Act, to submit yourself to medical examination before a Medical Board

In Queensland Finch was studying marine science, but in Vietnam he studied coin and card and knife tricks. You name it, he'd mangle it.
Is this your card?
And 'course it never was. He'd be holding up a two of clubs when Papa Dickson had pulled a seven of spades.

We are there because we want peace, not war …
doing his best Harold Holt.

Seppo jokes left over from World War Two. Hand-me-down humour. What do you get when you cross a … Where does a Yank keep his … Beer like sex in a canoe. How do ya separate two mating crocodiles?

Letters home lousy with white lies. Then big fibs. Then nothing.

Looked up one night, and there was that jackrabbit moon riding over the Song Dong Nai. So glad to see that little bastard. Should've guessed then; Dear-Johned first mail after Balmoral. Not much to do about it. Have a few bottles of tiger piss and get defoliated.

We are there because we do not believe our great Pacific partner, the United States, should stand alone for freedom.

Letters from home saying useless things, soft things. Remembered Tetch as a kid. Crying and pissing himself over a love tap. Just a love tap. How Mum shielded him, swaddled him up in cotton wool. And he wasn't even hers. And look at what good it did.

Our great Pacific partner? Jesus. Hope the bitch puts out.

Reed collapsed a burrow of baby mongooses while he was digging a shell scrape. Mamasan Mongoose off at mongoose work. One of the pups got cleaved in half by the entrenching tool, but Reed wrapped the other three up in his dirty singlet.
Hey, who wants some cobra repellent?

1. a.
   Your Sense of Feeling. A feeling of irritation in the eyes, nose or throat or on the skin is an urgent warning to protect yourself.
   

Protect yourself?

Smell of decay in everything, of wet creeping rot. Creeping right into guts.

Her initials still there, hidden under the black of the panther.
J
L
dug in deep with an upholstery needle and coloured with biro ink. The ghost of them showing through sometimes. Why only sometimes? Wondered what it meant. As if everything had to mean something.

Finch slicing himself with his balisong in the process of a double rollover. Foxy shaking his head,
If I was a crook dolphin, I'd cross my flippers and hope for a different fish doctor
.

Rikki, Tikki and Tavi. Of course. Even the regs had read Kipling. Can't remember whose was which. One disappeared overnight. Another got sick after Wilson fed it stuff-all but powdered milk. It grew too weak to hold its sorry little rodent head up, and Wilson had to stomp on it. The only one that stuck it out was Reed's, tame enough to ride his shoulder. At night it would run around his hootchie snacking beetles and wolfing up chomper ants.
Hey, Wilson. Betcha wish you'd shared ya camp pie.

Reed had been a sign writer, would go on back to being a sign writer once he got home to the Great Back There. But during that shitful year he sketched portraits on the gold paper from cigarette packets. On wrappers from rat packs, on the backs of leaflets the VC and NVA scattered around the place.

G.I.—don't shoot. You will return home safely.

Paper as thin as bible pages. Papa sticking out his bottom lip,
G.I.?
Why don't the VC send any letters to us?

Operation Ranch Hand. Ta much for the field manual, Washington. Patrolling through the defoliated rubber trees. Looked just like the aftermath of a bushfire, before the epicormic growth kicks in. A whole different planet.

True magic. Hand of God. Whatever you call it; felt it sometimes. Like when a mortar fell six feet away and didn't detonate. Why?

… all chemical agents used in Vietnam have been fully exonerated from causing veterans' subsequent ill health, with the partial exception of the anti-malarial drug Dapsone, whose status has not been resolved …

Still have one somewhere. On one side it says
U.S. Armymen. Why and for whom are you 10,000 miles from home to live a helluva life and die on this soil?
And on the ot
her there's Reed's fading pencil sketch of a man—a kid, really—cleaning his SLR. Cartoon speech bubble:
Helluva life alright.
I'd give my left nut for a Jack 'n' Coke.
Probably would've.

1. b.
   Your Sense of Smell. You will learn rapidly to identify those odors which are common to the battlefield … Most chemical agents have very faint odors or none at all.
   

Hard to describe the stink. Like a fishtank that hasn't been cleaned in a long while. Sometimes in the height of summer there'll be a whiff of an old storm drain, the city's rotten guts, and it comes close to that.

Radioing in for the dustoff, then picking his teeth and jawbone out of the dirt, like he was still going to need them. Crazy thinking. Contagious.

Hiss and stink of piss hitting hot metal, only way to cool the gun barrel.

Souvenirs: Small china duck. Chain of three-and-a-half links. Woman's tortoiseshell comb. Dream of her face at the window. Don't ask.

Finch:
You got twenty dong?

Papa:
Yeah but if I wanted it to disappear I'll go for a stroll in Vung Tau and let a girl get her hand in me pocket.

They'd Medivaced him out in time but there wasn't much left to work with. That handful of teeth and jawbone—what happened to that? Remember someone saying to put them in an envelope and post it to Johnny Gorton.
Nah, Gorton got his face fucked up when he was RAAF. Send it All the Way to LBJ.

Blokes losing it over weird shit. Driving over guys in APCs without batting an eyelid, or joking after Finch tripped a jumping jack.
For me next trick
… But Reed didn't want to say goodbye to his weaselly little pet. Sooking and chucking stones as it rippled off into the jungle.

Coming home to
The Price Is Right
and
I Started a Joke
. Coming home to
Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh
.

All those months spent charging sandbags screaming
Nog
, screaming
Gook
. Then Simon says,
Game's over now, son.
Simon says,
Get ya shit and shake hands, boys.

The first hot shower. Couldn't leave. Even after the water went tepid. Tetch rapping on the door: knock, knock, knock. Knock, knock, knock.
Mum? I reckon he's died in there.
Could've. It was that good.

Smack was like that. The long, hot bath of it.

Wasn't like he ever bit anyone, just a big kitten really. But the whiny civvies. So that was that, he had to go. To the zoo, poor fella.
Hell, rather shoot him than send him to the zoo.

My Lai all over the papers. Calley striding across the front page on his way to Fort Benning.
How can you say you didn't know
? Foxy in the front bar, speaking into his pint.
Well, that's well and truly fucked us. Tarred us all with the same ugly brush.

Taxi driving, two months. Wouldn't have been so bad except for all the bleeding penitents. Like piloting a confession booth on wheels.
The things I've seen, the things I've done …
Boo friggen hoo.