Owen Marshall Selected Stories (39 page)

Keith and Spruiker flew to Los Angeles on a Big Top from Christchurch. Spruiker first ran at a qualifying race at the Wachumpba spring festival in Fresno. His first prize barely covered expenses, but enabled him to enter the Pan Veteran indoor event at Sac City, Iowa. He came fourth in the final because he was elbowed in the face at the final turn, but it was a lesson learned. He was never less than third in the thirteen regional meets he competed in after that. He won at Savannah, Lubback, Seattle, St Cloud, Saratoga Springs and Troy in Alabama and was a close second to Dan Swarfest in the national final
of the United States Pan Veterans' Athletics fifteen hundred metres at Glameen Park, Chicago. He received forty thousand dollars and a citation, and his name was entered on a copper plaque above the members' cocktail bar at Glameen Park, between that of Dan Swarfest and Wesley Boist Smith, who was third.

Keith was amazed and grateful and interested in all around him. He wanted Spruiker to take it easier, to see something of the country and the people while they had the opportunity, but his father-in-law saw it all as a vast sham that might collapse at any minute. Spruiker insisted they stay in modest motels, and the only friend he made was a seventy-six-year-old ex-miner from West Virginia who was doing all right in the hammer throw. They used to watch blue movies and drink Hills pinball beer together after the meets.

One week after Glameen Park, in unit nineteen of the Saddle Sore Motels on the east side of Beaumont, Texas, Reece Spruiker told Keith that it was time to get out, time for a reckoning.

‘One of my legs is going,' said Spruiker, ‘and I'm fed up with the people. I reckon I've done my dash.' From the motel window they could see a group of young hoods trashing cars in the park of the El Pecho Diner and Bar. The neons were starting to brighten in the dusk. ‘What have we got clear?' he asked Keith. ‘What can we get back home with?'

Keith got out the laptop that he had purchased from their winnings for managerial purposes. ‘In the vicinity of one two five New Zealand,' he said.

‘What vicinity? How much clear when we're back home?'

‘I'd say a hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars,' said Keith.

‘Half for June and half for me,' said Spruiker. Keith assumed charitably that June and himself were seen as indivisible. ‘And I don't want any bugger to know more than he needs to.'

In Caversham Spruiker slipped back into his pre-athletic role as if all the rest had never happened. He was happier, though, because he was certain that he wasn't beholden to any bugger, that he wasn't a
drag on his daughter. Nothing that the rest of the family could bitch about. He let Keith keep his last pair of expensive running shoes in case his son-in-law developed talent in old age himself. Spruiker reduced his exercise to walking again, watched a lot of television, drank rather more beer — all the same sort of things as before. But he decided that he needed to keep on with the massages from Mrs Drummhagen, and just occasionally came out with a turn of phrase which betrayed his American career and friendship with the West Virginian.

Like when he told the plumber that the new bath was as smooth as a prom queen's thigh.

If anyone ever bothered to ask him what was the best thing he'd managed in his life, he always recalled the time he and Buck had won the Canterbury Huntaway Championship at the Windwhistle dog trials. That dog could walk on water, he said.

N
o matter how things prosper, a woman can always imagine better times. For Haydon Collins, though, it was heaven gained to be with Alice under the buffalo horns of a new moon. A cool drift of air from Bruckners' Pond, and Alice's gasp from between himself and the coarse weave of the car rug.

Only at such times, rare times, did he feel all of himself alive and free from the lethargies that otherwise laid hold on some part of body, or spirit. The moon's wry smile glittered weakly on the small, dark ruffles of Bruckners' Pond; the willow ends trailed back, whispering of autumn.

Alice's husband never listened to her, and she was entitled to a sympathetic listener. Haydon was an eager confidant, even to the verbatim account of a meter maid, for Alice had no skill of paraphrase, no awareness, in fact, of any such mode of discourse, so all the episodes she cropped from each fortnight of her life were delivered blow by blow. He'd suggested they meet once a week, but she considered it too physical, too taxing, and she was the coach of an under-fifteen softball team that had prospects in its grade and needed to practise twice a week.

‘I ticketed the harbourmaster's Landcruiser,' said Alice, ‘and his secretary rang me up and said I couldn't do it, not to the harbourmaster in his own precincts. I said to her I could do it in any precincts in the city that has meters: that I could do it to the mayor himself, and I'd ticketed the Civil Defence officer three times
in one week, and because no emergency had been declared he had to pay up like anybody else. That's different, she tried to tell me. The Civil Defence officer's different to the harbourmaster in his own precincts. No difference at all, not at all, I says. All's equal under the local regulations and I know it off by heart. She didn't have an answer to that.'

If Haydon raised himself on his elbows he could see the moon fragments dancing on the surface of Bruckners' Pond, and the whips of willow shaking slightly in the night breeze. Miniature waves slapped the mass of root filaments that made the small bank of the pond. There was a morepork calling from the gully upstream, and Haydon was almost overcome by his good fortune to be lying on Alice in such a night, instead of watching television alone, or playing snooker in Paul Barrett's garage.

‘You've got guts, Alice. I don't reckon the other meter maids would have the nerve to apply the law so evenly.'

‘There's blokes too do the meters,' she said. ‘How many of them do you think would ticket the harbourmaster in his own precincts?'

‘None of them,' said Haydon. ‘You're a bloody marvel. I reckon I should write anonymously to the council and say it too. Someone should do it.'

‘I actually should go and see the harbourmaster's secretary again now that I think about it.'

Haydon gave her thigh a light slap, which sounded barely louder than the ripples on the bank, and blew hair back from her face. ‘What would you say to her? Tell me exactly what you'd say to her.' In such circumstances he could listen for ever.

‘Well,' she said, ‘I've come for a bit of a word with you, I'd say, something of a chat about your harbourmaster in his own precincts. I'm not a person who looks to be awkward, you understand —.'

Haydon wished she would divorce her husband so that he could move in with her and make love after the evening meals, while she talked about her day wearing the civic badge, and upholding
municipal traffic regulations. Alice was a very warm person: he could feel the fresh heat of her body as she became animated in her hypothetical conversation with the harbourmaster's secretary. ‘I'd tell her straight out. Rules is rules I'd tell her, straight out — just stop a minute, there's something hard under the rug: a stone or some damn thing. That's it — no, I'd tell her, in my way of things everybody's equal, whether you're the harbourmaster, or just ordinary Joe Bloggs —'

A noise was coming from the lupins and broom further back from the pond. Haydon could hear it, even though absorbed with pleasure, through the sound of breeze in the weeping willows, and Alice's monologue. It demanded attention not because of volume, but because of eccentricity — it was a noise quite unknown to him. A sound that had something of whirling in it, something of disturbance to natural order, yet also a constituent of powerful personality.

Haydon raised himself from Alice enough to glance behind, and saw the Devil stroll down beside them, nod in a passing sort of way, and then stand on the lip of Bruckners' Pond. He had the goodness to face away for a time, and the moonlight caught his small horns, and the thatch of vigorous, but grey, hair at their base. Haydon and Alice scrambled to uncouple, and then arrange themselves separately on the rug. Alice was very rarely at a loss: she had fronted up to harbourmasters, mayors, media celebrities and Mongrel Mob members in the course of duty. She drew in a full breath to start in on the intruder, but then he turned, could be seen so clearly for who he was, that she let it all out in one long sigh.

‘Overall it's a wretchedly poor creation,' said the Devil, ‘but I must say that a summer's night at Bruckners' Pond, a warm half wind, a little routine copulation: there are worse places.' He had a voice of blandishment, rich with cynical toleration and forgiveness.

‘I beg your pardon!' said Alice, affronted.

‘Not at all,' said the Devil. ‘Think nothing of it.'

The Devil didn't appear to have any trousers, but he wore a long
frock coat of fustian green, mid-calf boots, and there wasn't much gap between. He had side whiskers and a dusky red complexion as if embers glowed within. Despite the night he was quite clearly seen; again the light that made that possible was subtly from within rather than the effect of the moon. He was like one of those unregenerate eighteenth-century squires; bluff, hearty and entirely self-serving in the most natural of ways. The Devil's tail was dark, and heavy on the ground when he moved, and with flukes at its substantial end. Haydon had the odd thought that it would make a great quantity of strong soup.

‘I knew the first Bruckner here,' said the Devil, after he had breathed the lake air deeply. ‘Old Anton, who bought the place in the 1860s with his wife's money, and had a vision of it as a resort in the European way, all chalets and profit. But of course the family lost it one generation before it became really valuable.' The Devil's humour seemed of an ironic turn, and his smile of reminiscence was dusky and emberish. ‘The family were religious, but had a redeeming streak of profligacy,' he said.

‘The Reverend David Bruckner's the vicar here, you know,' said Alice, more assured now that she had got her legs together. She wondered whether to introduce Haydon and herself to the Devil, but it was that sort of awkward situation in which you get too far into conversation with a stranger for introductions to be comfortable.

‘Quite,' said the Devil, ‘and I believe the vestry are at this moment taking a particular interest in the church accounts.'

Haydon feared that he was to be excluded from the conversation with the Devil, and that afterwards his silence would be taken by Alice as a weakness. Remember the time we met the Devil, she might say, and I talked to him, but you had nothing at all to say for yourself did you, nothing at all.

‘Bruckners' Pond belongs to the ratepayers now,' he said.

‘So it does,' replied the Devil equably, but his smile continued to be for Alice.

‘We don't come here often,' she said.

‘More's the pity,' said the Devil. ‘It's not what you do, but who knows about it, isn't it?'

The three of them considered that, and watched the moon and the willows of Bruckners' Pond for a time, then the Devil wished them well and said that he had to be going. He gave the faintest of bows, but with the assurance of the landed gentry, and his coat was a rich, verdigris green for a moment in the moonlight and his face dusky and glowing, and he walked past them and into the bushes.

As Haydon saw the Devil walking on two legs and with a tail, he realised how fitting and natural it was, and that ordinary people on two legs seemed ungainly and incomplete, while the Devil walked with the grace of a tiger, and his tail made a firm and steadying contact with the ground behind him.

The Devil's departure prompted that of Haydon and Alice. You couldn't just carry on regardless after talking to the Devil. The two of them gathered up the rug and pillows and climbed into the off-roader. ‘I'm damned if I know,' said Haydon. ‘What can you say that makes sense of that?'

‘I wish I'd thought of more to say,' said Alice. It was a feeling foreign to her. ‘Anyway, I won't be seeing you again — not like this anyway,' she said clearly. ‘The Devil's quite right you know.'

Haydon was so angry that he couldn't get the key into the ignition, but he kept his voice down because he wasn't sure how far the Devil had gone. ‘What do you mean, the Devil's right?' he said bitterly, but he knew in his heart the absolute authority of the Devil. The Devil had done for him, no doubt about that, had scotched the greatest of his pleasures. ‘What if it had been God, eh?' said Haydon. ‘What then?'

‘Just the same,' said Alice serenely.

P
rof Carver Glower was there, Assoc Prof Teems, Dr Podanovich, Dr Johns, Dr Fell and Eileen the department secretary. Only Dr Allis-Montgomery refused to come, because of a vendetta going back seventeen years.

The English department had just that week completed the fourth and final volume of Antipodean English: Growth of a Variant, and Eileen had suggested a picnic. Prof Glower had appropriated the idea, as was his wont and prerogative, and put it to the faculty. ‘What do you reckon?'

‘Cracker,' said Assoc Prof Teems.

‘Bonzer,' said Dr Podanovich.

‘Yeah, why the fuck not,' said Dr Fell. ‘Out in the boohai, eh. As long as us sheilas aren't expected to bring all the grub.' She preferred not to socialise with her academic colleagues, but knew what was politic in establishing a career. Also she found something generically plaintive in picnics: they reminded her of the desperate efforts her mother had made to placate family disharmony by such occasions. ‘We should have Eileen along.'

‘Bingo, already come up with that,' replied Prof Glower. From the carpark amid pine trees the track led down to the beach of black sand. Because the sand was easily kicked out, the track was almost a ditch, and Assoc Prof Teems stumbled. She couldn't recover her balance because of the open basket she carried, and after wild oscillation she tumbled into the heart of a small gorse bush. Her
apricot muffins were shaken into the marram grass, and the blue gingham cover she'd had over them caught in the gorse and became a taut pennant in the ripe sea breeze and beneath an effulgent sun. ‘Bugger,' she said.

Solicitous as ever, and rendered clumsy by his concern, Dr Podanovich scrambled down to assist her. ‘You did a real header,' he said. ‘Arse over tip.' He began to pluck the gorse prickles from her pale arm and cheek, his fingers long and nimble from subtle play on the computer keyboard.

‘Crapped out badly there,' said Dr Johns, who couldn't disguise that elementary human relief which is a response to the misfortunes of another. He was a small, neat, waxy man, rather like a Belgian detective. ‘Come a real greaser all right,' he said, and gave his quick-fire, harsh laugh. Dr Johns was not essentially a malicious man, but he was suffering from an uneasy conscience, and attempting to assuage it by some acerbity towards his colleagues. Within the department he was normally a somewhat devious, and not fully disclosed, ally of Dr Allis-Montgomery, but he'd not had the courage to join him in boycotting the picnic. It was too unequivocal an alignment for him to commit to, but he half despised himself because of his decision.

Prof Glower picked up several of the muffins in a lordly, off hand manner, and shook them free of sand. ‘No probs, she'll be jake,' he said. ‘Nifty kai, I reckon.' In his heart, though, he was a disappointed man. He led the way down to the beach, and with his fingers combed the remaining long strands of grey hair across the pale luminosity of his head. Already he could feel sand grating there from his hand. Most of his staff were amiable enough, but he had academic respect for none of them, except perhaps Dr Fell, and all the time he felt his leadership under insidious siege by Dr Allis-Montgomery. Prof Glower told himself he should be satisfied with a chair in a New Zealand university, but he yearned for a vice-chancellorship, even more for a professorship at a name overseas institution. Antipodean English was his final play for scholastic distinction, and the first three
volumes had received only qualified critical reception. ‘Let's find a pearler possie out of the wind,' he said in his falsely jocular tone, and looked over the empty, black beach.

The group set up with their car rugs, baskets and chilly bins in the lee of the last dune before the beach. Assoc Prof Teems was immediately absorbed in removing the remaining gorse prickles; Dr Fell and Eileen caught each other's eye and had a long, exclusive smile at the mismatched socks revealed as Dr Podanovich awkwardly sat down and crossed his lanky legs. ‘Just as well we're not wearing our best mocker,' he said. ‘Old dungers for the beach I say.' Prof Glower talked to all, and nobody in particular, about the need to leave their offices occasionally, and Dr Johns rather pointedly yawned and lay back with his hands behind his head.

Assoc Prof Teems was an intelligent, gentle woman increasingly buffeted by the winds of change through tertiary education. Her passion was the poetry of Robert Herrick, but that was treated with boisterous derision by first-year students, so she proffered it only to the occasional postgraduate, and even more occasional Herrick conference. She was English, and her interest in the New Zealand vernacular was entirely a reflection of the department's focus. She disliked gorse, lupins and the coastal smell, which made her think some great kipper was rotting out beyond the swell. But she was loyal by nature, and had a strict sense of duty, and so although seventeenth-century English poetry was her spiritual home, she tried to find a place to stand in a new country. No chance of a place of subtlety, of nuanced reflective comment, or classical allusion, she thought wryly, and ran her hand over her skin to check for more thorns and found none. ‘Well, here's one pommie who's ready to take a gecko at the friggin' beach,' she said.

‘Yeah, let's give it a burl,' said Eileen. ‘Maybe there's a bronzed life-saver there.'

‘More like a cockie with pig-dogs who hates loopies,' said Dr Johns, but he went with them rather than listen to Prof Glower.

Dr Podanovich untangled his legs and stood up too, but not to go down to the beach. Already he sensed the familiar rifts and indifferences within the group becoming apparent: at least that sardonic Lucifer, Allis-Montgomery, wasn't with them, yet the taint of his eternal bitterness seemed impregnated in their congregation, as the fish-splitter carries always some olfactory reminder of his trade. Dr Podanovich retained an idealistic wish for a professional life of mutual support, respect and effervescent enjoyment. ‘I'm going to get a bit of a fire going,' he said. ‘I reckon you can't have a dinkum feed without a snarler or two.' Maybe a fire, that ageless symbol of communal gathering, would bring them together happily. Dr Podanovich went off, stooped even more than usual, as he fossicked in the marram grass for driftwood.

‘Good on you, mate,' announced Prof Glower, and then in a lower voice to Dr Fell, ‘The tight-arse didn't want to cough up for more than supermarket bangers, and now he thinks he deserves a bloody medal.'

Dr Fell permitted herself a knowing smile, but said nothing. She considered Dr Podanovich a sweet simpleton who carried far more than his share of the academic load, and he always topped the students' assessments of their lecturers. On the other hand, she knew she was the professor's favourite, and although she refused to play on that, neither would she deliberately jeopardise the career advantages that might flow from it. She alone was in his confidence regarding his increasing sense of disillusion, and that knowledge mitigated for her his public and empty pomposity. Dr Fell herself was young, had long legs, and professional prospects of even greater extent.

‘I was knocked back by East Anglia for visiting prof again,' said Prof Glower. ‘No hoper pricks didn't even bother to tell me until I sent an email giving them a rark-up.'

‘That's bloody crook,' said Dr Fell. ‘It's not on.' The black sand was warm through her fingers, and her bright red toenails glittered in the sunlight. Through a cleavage in the dunes she saw her three
colleagues walking the surf line, breaking into a scamper up the beach sometimes to escape the seventh wave. Assoc Prof Teems and Eileen were close together, their heads inclined towards each other. Dr Johns attempted to relax, giving his metallic laugh from time to time, but at a distance his essential self-consciousness and uncertainty were obvious in everything he did. It occurred to Dr Fell that maybe when Allis-Montgomery was present, Dr Johns felt more at ease, because he knew he was then not the most unpopular and isolated person of any group.

‘You can bet your arse it was a jack-up anyway,' said Prof Glower. ‘Some Nigerian Hausa woman wearing curtain material will have been appointed, and rabbit on to packed bloody halls about the poetry of political dissent.'

‘You're not shook on African poetry?'

‘Poetry my arse. Everyone's got too bloody windy to say what they really think about post-colonial literature, that's for sure.'

‘The new dean of humanities —,' began Dr Fell.

‘Effing commel,' said Prof Glower. He realised he had struck a sour note, and promised himself not to allow his inner melancholy to be so obvious, even to Dr Fell. ‘Need a bit of old man manuka, eh,' he shouted to Dr Podanovich, who was encouraging the first flames from beneath arabesques of driftwood.

‘Nah, she'll be a bottler,' said Dr Podanovich. He took a black and greasy skillet from a supermarket bag and began to lay pink sausages in it.

Walking back towards the picnic spot with Assoc Prof Teems and Dr Johns, Eileen saw a thin wisp wafting from the fire, barely smoke from such dry wood, more a heat distortion like the thermals in boiling water. She knew that Dr Podanovich would be doing all the work, while the other two watched and talked. Eileen had no degree, but often she felt exasperated with the academics she served: their tetchy self-regard and social naïvety coupled with powerful intellects and obsessive interests. During the years most important for learning
to relate to others in a diverse society, they had spent their time in libraries, isolated cubicles and, less often, with small intense cabals of people like themselves. Often she felt like an ordinary mother with gifted, but difficult children.

‘What's it like down there?' asked Dr Podanovich.

‘Pretty nippy round the pippy,' said Eileen, ‘but we're getting fit.'

Assoc Prof Teems let herself fall back on the warm slope of the dune. ‘I'm knackered,' she said.

Dr Johns came last of the three. He was carrying his black shoes, had rolled his trousers up, and the dark sand clung to his wet legs. He wondered if Dr Allis-Montgomery was working alone at the university, and felt a twinge of guilt. He wished he had brought his own car so that he could have thought of some excuse to go home immediately after the picnic lunch, but then doubted his resolve to carry out something so temerarious. ‘Time for tucker, eh,' he said. ‘I reckon Paddy's a real gun with them sausies — you can put a ring round that.'

‘Yeah, bog in, mate,' said Dr Podanovich. He experienced a sudden, poignant moment of déjà vu. The smell of sausages and burning driftwood, and the astringent fragrance of the sea, occasioned a memory that rose like an ache in his heart: his last fishing trip with his father before the latter's death. Maybe it was an omen that even his father's fishing skills had been unavailing that day, and he'd cooked sausages on the very same skillet. His father had been emaciated by radiation treatment, and although he laughed with his son, he had tragic, imploring eyes.

‘Who's for plonk?' said Dr Fell. She took two bottles of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from her chilly bin. She had forgone an afternoon of flagrant hedonism with her personal trainer to be with the department, and thought she deserved at least a single pleasure at the picnic.

‘Could I effing ever knock back a gargle of that,' exclaimed Prof
Glower. Alcohol was increasingly a solace for him, though he found double malt whisky a more rapid release than wine.

So the English department, minus just the physical presence of Allis-Montgomery, settled with somewhat self-conscious bonhomie to their lunch: al fresco academics ill at ease in a shifting landscape without books, or a dais on which to stand. The contribution of each was a significant reflection of character. Dr Fell's medal-winning white wine and cheese twists; Assoc Prof Teems's apricot muffins and Earl Grey tea; the fresh and sensible club sandwiches brought by Eileen; sherbet trumpets fashioned by Dr Johns in his modern and lonely flat; Prof Glower's salmon and broccoli quiche made by a wife complaisant as to his absence; Dr Podanovich's supermarket sausages and a six pack of Lion Brown.

‘Is this good chow or what,' said Prof Glower.

‘Monty,' said Assoc Prof Teems. She felt a brief frisson of despair at the thought her life provided no better option than this, and recalled her poet Herrick, driven by lack of congenial company to train a pig to drink wine with him in his vicarage garden.

‘Things are cracking up big time,' said Dr Fell. The weather was in sudden change: scudding clouds driven by a building southerly, and the sea, cut off from the sun, turning leaden. The temperature fell quickly; the driven sand scurried in the lupins and grass; the wind made sad orisons along the arc of black beach; the first large drops splattered on sand and foliage, and the spread picnic of the English department.

‘Turning real pear-shaped,' said Dr Podanovich. ‘I think we'll have to flag it.'

All of them hastened to gather possessions as the southerly storm came upon them. They looked to their own welfare, except benign Dr Podanovich, who offered to carry Assoc Prof Teems's basket and Eileen's thermos. They straggled back up the entrenched path that wound steeply to the carpark through marram grass, gorse, lupins and the soft flanks of black dunes that flinched beneath the heavy
rain. Dr Fell, immediately behind Prof Glower, heard several rain pellets strike his balding head with the sound of a kettle drum. Dr Johns experienced a perverse euphoria, for the picnic was ending in disarray, and he'd be home by early afternoon. ‘Send her down, Hughie,' he cried, and gave his barking laugh, not noticing one of his shoes fall from his bundle and roll to lie hidden in the lupins. How Dr Allis-Montgomery would enjoy the day recounted with the sardonic delivery of Dr Johns.

‘Get your arse into gear up front,' shouted Eileen, impatient at the academics lack of athleticism. ‘What drongo's holding us up?'