Owen Marshall Selected Stories (51 page)

‘But he wasn't prepared to leave his wife.' Naylor was unsure if he wanted any rehabilitation of his father's reputation. In fact he'd been somewhat relieved to strike him off.

‘I was nineteen, he was forty-two and with a family. What future
could there be in it? We cried a lot, and although the sex was like a drug there was a sort of desperation about it which we never acknowledged, but which made it sad. Secretly he wanted to be a war correspondent, not a polytechnic tutor. Stuff was going on overseas and he was always talking about it and wishing he was there. He felt his life was on too small a scale, I think: that he could do more if he just got an opportunity.'

‘So after the pregnancy and the money you never saw him again?'

‘No, but I went to the place one last night without telling him. The garage's back door was always unlocked, and I went in and sat in the car and bawled for a while, with just the smell of fish and macrocarpa to remind me of everything. Then I went home. Put your mistakes behind you: that's what my mother kept telling me. Put your mistakes behind you. Maybe she never was in love. I can't hate him, you know. Even now I don't hate him. I'm not much older now than he was then, and often I'm no more satisfied with my life than he was with his.'

‘He'd be an old bugger of seventy now,' said Naylor. ‘Have you thought of that? You wouldn't want to run across him now even if he was alive.'

‘He was always a good-looking guy.'

‘I wondered where I got it from,' Naylor said. He didn't want things to get too heavy. In truth he felt an absence of curiosity regarding this father, rather an increased loyalty to Greg Campbell, who could also be seen as an old bugger of seventy-odd, with heart failure imminent, but whom he loved. The half-sisters were another matter altogether, one too difficult to even consider for the moment — maybe ever.

He would be gone in a few hours. The full sun of the day would come, the zoo would begin its public function, Frances would be cheerfully practical again and he would take the ferry across the harbour and then take to the skies to return home. He would return,
having met his birth mother, and with the new knowledge that he had sisters, so rather than things being solved, or finished, they grew more complex and more emotionally demanding. But then that is the nature of a family. In each other they had met something of themselves hitherto missing, and felt strengthened by it, even as they recognised the challenge.

T
he virtues of my father's character, which I recognised as a boy, became obscured by their familiarity and my arrogance as a youth. Now that he has been dead for quite a time, those virtues are clear to me again, and I realise that he was a fine man. Sometimes in the night I see my father in his prime, and what forms most commonly is the image of him standing on the veranda, with the sleeves of his white shirt half rolled up, and that inward smile on his long face.

My father was a policeman, a detective in fact, in the days when the qualifications for entry were still demanding. He was six foot one, and he never went to fat the way a lot of other policemen did. He ran in the evenings long before that became fashionable: he was the instructor at a fitness class set up for the city police force. He took pride in his physical capability and appearance, not from vanity, but self-respect and because in his job he expected a lot from his body.

I can remember when my father was a uniformed policeman, but more typically I recall him in mufti when he'd been promoted to detective. He was detective inspector in the end, but I was long gone by then. Sometimes he wore grey slacks and a Harris tweed sportscoat, sometimes his dark blue suit, but always a white shirt, and a grey hat when he went out. The hat, I think the style was called fedora, had a dark band and a dint in the top, which my father would sometimes correct with a chopping action of his right hand. Most men and women wore hats in those days when going out, of course. In the image that comes at night of my father on the veranda
in his prime, the sleeves of his white shirt are always rolled up in a particular way: not twisted tightly right up onto the biceps, but just two or three folds so that the material lay about halfway between wrist and elbow, and the brown skin of his forearms showed, with the thick, black watchstrap on the left one. When we were together, when he was talking with me, he'd often rest his left hand on my shoulder, and his strong forearm and big, plain watch would be close to my face.

My father was a family man. He and my mother were disappointed, I think, that I was their only child, but that gave me an even greater sense of being loved and being secure. My father often worked long hours, and odd hours too. That's the way it is in the police, but Mum and I always knew how important we were. Once, he promised to take us to see my mother's brother who was sick in Auckland. They told me he was sick, but they knew he was dying, I suppose. Just a couple of hours before we were due to go, the station rang and the superintendent wanted my father to come in urgently, and he wouldn't. The telephone was on a table in the hall, with no chair beside it. People used the phone quite differently then. And I heard my father say that he had expressly asked for this day off, and that it was important for his family, and unless he was given a written order he was going to go. And we did go. My mother saw her brother, and he died of some intestinal thing quite soon after.

My father was very strong like that. He formed his own convictions; he trusted his own judgement, not in a dismissive way without paying heed to the views of others, but because that's how he thought a man should be. A man should be able to form a reasoned and fair view of the world and act accordingly, rather than going along in an unexamined fashion.

My father wasn't a great one for books, although he read the newspaper carefully, listened to radio broadcasts of the news and sport, and encouraged me to read. Immediacy was the priority in
his job and his life: he was directly involved with the forces that promoted stable societies and those that threatened them. I think he would have been a good reader if he'd had time. He had a very clear mind and reduced things to order, without forgetting that people have emotions, and that not everything is accessible by logic. He would see things in a month, that the dentist, or city councillor, wouldn't see in a lifetime in the same city. Some must have been awful things and they accounted for the few times when I remember him white faced and silent in the house.

Those of us brought up in a secure and loving home have had one of the great advantages of life, and I'll always be thankful to my parents for that, and make certain allowances because of it. Apart from the few times I remember my father showing particularly the stress from something in his job, he was cheerful, and a good talker. And a good listener as well. He was a positive man who knew all about the malice, deceit, hard luck and cruel desperation out there, yet thought the community had benefits which outweighed them. If people just stood firm for their principles and each other then he believed things would be okay. There was little cynicism in my father, despite his profession being one that encouraged it in some.

When I talk of my father being in his prime, I suppose I mean when I was fourteen or so, and the pensioner murders were all the city talked about, and big national news too. Three old ladies all bashed to death in separate incidents in six weeks of summer, and things done to them that the newspaper reports only hinted at. After killing Mrs Donalds the murderer sat down in the same room with her and cooked himself the fish she'd been saving for her tea.

My father wasn't home very often during that time, so much was going on. They brought in extra detectives from other districts, but my father said local knowledge would be the answer. Almost always there's someone besides the perpetrator who knows enough to make the difference, he said.

Russell Roddick and I talked about it a good deal in the second
storey of the old woolstore, overlooking the overgrown river path from the reserve. We'd found a squeeze-through entrance on the railway track side, and had a place among the wool bales for our beer, chocolate, magazines and books. Russell reckoned the murderer wasn't after money because pensioners never have much if they're living by themselves, and he must just like kicking and punching old people to death. Russell asked me if my father had said much about it, and I could honestly say he hadn't, because that would have been unprofessional. He did say that anyone who could do a thing like that, and not just once, was far worse than an animal. But then everyone in the city said that.

Russell was a good mate, and we remained friends right through secondary school. He became a seismologist, of all things, and the last I heard he was in Turkey with plenty to study there. In the old woolstore hiding place we used to talk a lot of rubbish, but also at times we got on to topics that now surprise me to recall — whether our school went on too much about sport instead of academic subjects, whether we should go overseas after university, or stick to New Zealand. Both of us finally made the same choice.

I think my father knew all along who the guy was. In a place that size the police would have a pretty good list of criminals and odd people of one sort or another, and soon narrow the suspects down. It must have been a matter of getting sufficient evidence to justify an arrest.

There was nothing in the paper, nothing official, but not long after school went back, it became known the police were looking for Gil Dipport, who'd been in prison several times, and had bad blood in him, so Russell's father said. I asked my father about it one evening when he, Mum and I were sitting on the veranda after tea. ‘Well, he hasn't been seen around since the attacks,' my father said, ‘and we need to talk to everyone with a record. Someone must know something.'

‘You've got more on him than that though, surely,' my mother
said. She understood the code of understatement that was my father's way.

‘Well, yes we have,' my father said, but he wouldn't go any further than that, and I don't think he would have said much more to my mother even if I hadn't been there. My parents were close and loving all their lives, but he tried to leave the police work at the door as much as he could. Some families of policemen suffered, he said, because it got about that they knew a lot of what was going on.

‘Anyway,' said my mother, ‘he'll be well away by now.'

‘Gil's never been more than ten miles from this place in his life,' my father said.

There's only one other thing to tell, because all I remember is quite clear and simple really, not a long story. Well, it's absolutely clear and unequivocal in my mind's eye, though perhaps not so simple after all. Two evenings later I went down to meet Russell at our hideout. I ran in the drizzle through the shunting yards and metal scrap yard, and squeezed through the secret entrance. I went up to our place on the second storey. Russell hadn't arrived so I smoked a cigarillo very carefully, because we could easily have set the place on fire, and watched through the dirty window the creek and the track from the reserve which was almost hidden by the clumps of fennel and lupin in some parts, and clear on the creekbed in others.

It gave me a start to see my father walking slowly from the town side. His white shirt showed clearly and he wore no coat, no grey hat. The fine, drifting rain was just beginning to stick the shirt to his shoulders, so he couldn't have come far. He stepped behind one of those half-fallen willows which still continue to grow, and I thought he was going to take a leak. Then I saw a stooped, bald man coming the other way, from the reserve, in and out of view among the lupins. He carried an axe handle, or something similar, and I knew it was Gil Dipport. Why else would my father be waiting there?

And when my father stepped out, Gil Dipport didn't try to run back the way he'd come. I guess he knew my father's capabilities. He
just backed into a clear bit of the creekbed and waited with the axe handle, or pick handle, or whatever.

I noticed my father had slipped off his shoes to give him better grip and balance. Maybe they said things to each other, but I was too far away to hear, and almost at once my father began walking up on Gil. He got hit on the arm and the neck, the bruises were there for weeks, but he soon got the better of Gil and wrenched the wooden handle from him, sending him onto the ground where he sat dazed with his legs out in front as if he was at a picnic.

Then my father took a good grip of the axe handle and hit Gil with it the way you would a dog, all the strength of his arms in the last foot or two of the blow. I've never told anybody before. That's the other image I see sometimes at night, as well as my father on the veranda with us in his white shirt with sleeves rolled up, and smiling.

I think my father was a fine man, an exceptional man, I really do. I can't think of a better family man. He's been gone a good many years, and when in the night I have this unbidden memory of him I tell myself it was too long ago to be sure of things now: too long ago and too close to childhood to bear any scrutiny.

M
y criminal apprenticeship was served with Buster Marrot, and though I never achieved even journeyman status later in life, and the skills decayed, two trade attitudes have remained strong with me: a proprietorial view of the possessions of others, and a disregard for authority.

Buster was fourteen, and not at all fat despite his nickname. He was dark, smiling and catlike in movement and essential independence. Buster came about the middle of a large Catholic family which lived three houses from us by the bridge on the main road out of town. The Marrots had a gaunt, two-storeyed house all of weatherboard, and fitted in two lodgers as well as seven children. One boarder was always out when I was there; the other was a man called Stokes who had been an alcoholic shearing contractor, but was just an alcoholic by the time he boarded at Buster's. He had so little, and was so easily deceived, that Buster hardly bothered to steal from him. Stokes finally drowned by accident, or design, in the river close by, but that was years after I'd moved, and my recollection is of a quiet, smiling man with washed-out eyes, who would stand with Mrs Marrot in the kitchen and peel vegetables for her. Buster's dad was a casual slaughterman at the works: something of the executioner's presence hung about him, and I always felt my breath constricted when I saw his narrow, sharpened knives laid out on oilcloth on the workshop bench. Buster said his dad could kill easily with just his hands, but still had to slit throats to bleed the sheep.

Buster went to the Catholic school, and was a year older than me. A year is nothing between adults, but it's a clear distinction at fourteen. I don't think Buster would have bothered with me if he'd had any of his school friends living close, and in the weekends I didn't see much of him. Without any discussion between us it was understood it was a ‘don't call me, I'll call you' situation. Yet Buster never put me down when we were together, although he was the leader by seniority and nefarious vision. ‘You're a bloody quick runner all right,' he'd say after we'd scarpered from some difficult situation. ‘You've got a good head on you sometimes,' he said when I suggested selling the eggs we'd stolen from Mrs Philips to the Egg Floor. Mostly I remember him calling in the evenings of summer weekdays, our crimes played out in warm twilights, but there were earnest winter sorties as well.

I never saw any viciousness in Buster, but all his energy went to extort benefit from the world. He was unashamedly amoral and the risk of getting caught was the only consideration and deterrence in any of his plans. He seemed to have bypassed the interests which preoccupied other early teens — Scouts, balsa wood aeroplanes with real engines, rugby — but not yet moved on to sex. Buster was a materialist. Money and possessions were his goals, and he knew them interchangeable. Stolen money bought him what he wanted, and stolen items he didn't want he could flog off for money. He never passed a shop, or a works yard, without casing it for advantage, and he had several regular places that he milked, rather than making just one big hit, which would be noticed.

Borrell's Light Engineering and Metal Scrap in Cook Street was one of them. Borrell's had heaps of roughly sorted iron rusting in their back yard — old stoves, dismembered farm implements, girders, railway tracks — and a wooden barn which had lead and copper piping, brass and bronze fittings, stainless steel taps and basins, laundry coppers, stacks of ornamental wrought iron like that which decorated the Marrots' veranda and ours. Buster knew how
to get into the barn through a high window and unbolt the side door. We'd come into the yard from the rough section at the back which had piles of power poles amid the long grass and lupins where we hid Buster's cart. In the dying light we'd sneak out some of the more expensive metals, but nothing that was distinctive enough to be remembered. Copper piping and lead sheet flashings were two of Buster's favourites. Some bits we sold back to Borrell's several times over. I admired Buster's restraint. He knew just how much and how often the trick could be pulled without arousing suspicion. The yard man once said that he liked our enterprise in fossicking stuff out and earning a bit for ourselves. He didn't realise the extent to which his company supported that initiative.

Buster was a bit of an artist in his felonies. He cut a rectangular hole in the pages of the library copy of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
into which he could slip a packet of Pall Mall, or a chocolate slab, and close the cover. He had a bull-dog clip on his shoulder blades held by a string around his neck, and it was my job in the stationer's to attach a
Wheels
mag or
Batman
issue beneath his jersey, and he'd saunter out, often stopping to talk to the sales girl just for the hell of it.

Sometimes he organised a big heist, like the three yellow railway tarpaulins he stole right off some wagons loaded with boxes of vegetables in the sidings. He sandpapered off the logos, and sold the tarps for over a hundred dollars to the owner of a crayfish boat. No wonder Buster always had money in his pocket and rode a bike with blue metallic paint and gears. I wasn't there when he got down on the tarpaulins, but I was when he burgled Acme, and the outcome is clear in my mind.

Acme Warehouse stored a lot of the bulk supplies for grocery shops and dairies in town. It was a long concrete and corrugated iron building between the RSA and a yard of yellow and red agricultural machinery. Acme were in a different league to Borrell's in terms of both opportunity and security, and Buster was determined to find
a way of getting regular access to so much good stuff. We sat in his father's workshop while he made a list of the most desirable and easily disposed of items. The workshop was our usual den, because Buster shared a bedroom with two brothers.

Buster was especially interested in cigarettes. He hoped to be able to take a couple of cartons every fortnight or so without them being missed. That was Buster's calculating and far-seeing nature, even as a fourteen-year-old. At the time I didn't realise his vision of criminal possibility was precocious. Tinned goods were high on Buster's list also: baked beans, pineapple slices, asparagus tips, salmon, tongue. Buster had placement sorted out for them all, and the juvenile anticipation I felt at the chance of gutsing barely registered with him.

The modern Acme building was a considerable challenge to Buster, and he worked on it. He spent a good deal of time in unobtrusive observation, and even went in and spoke to one of the storemen on the pretext that he thought he was able to buy things in bulk for a Christmas Sunday school party. The warehouse had an alarm system on the main doors, Buster said, and no windows. There was a large extractor fan high on the side away from the road, and for a time Buster wondered if we could find a way of removing the fan at will. We did a recce in the early darkness of a July night, carrying a plank surreptitiously through the back streets and then leaning it against the warehouse. I held it while Buster monkeyed up and checked the fan mounts with a torch and crescent. He decided it was too big a job, and besides, there would be too much risk coming and going with goods through such a visible and difficult route.

Buster switched his interest to the dwarfed, glass-fronted office annex to one side of the main doors. It had its own access to the store, and Buster reckoned that, as an add-on, it didn't share the concrete pan underlying the warehouse. We had several sessions sitting around his father's neatly laid out and whetted knives in the workshop, during which we drew in Buster's maths book possible tunnels from
the RSA shrubbery and the machinery yard. Reluctantly we decided the plan was too risky and too slow. I suggested somehow getting an imprint of the key on a piece of soap, a comic book fantasy which Buster put aside without ridicule. In fact he said it reminded him that the office had a Yale lock with an inside snib, and this gave him the idea of hiding in the office until after closing time.

We began close planning by taking my father's binoculars down to the RSA shrubbery after school, and lying concealed there on damp, cold ground to spy on the dark-haired office woman. We learnt she spent a good deal of time doing her fingernails, and more time on the phone. She liked to eat white chocolate and take her shoes off when the sun was bright through the armour glass. There were no cash transactions that we observed, although lots of lists from the storemen and delivery drivers. Buster said there would have been lots of cheques in the morning mail which we never saw, and that they'd be in the squat iron safe, the key of which she kept in her purse. We also discovered that the key to the door from the office to the main store was kept beneath a potted cactus on the filing cabinet. The first time Buster saw her through the binoculars take the key from its hiding place to lock up, he gave a long, low whistle. I knew then he'd seen something important. It meant we could move on to the next stage of the plan.

The thing was that the office had only one possible hiding place, and Buster was too big for it. The annex was very small with just the dark-haired woman's desk, two high filing cabinets, the safe in a wooden cupboard, and the shelf with pot plants, vacation postcards and the electric jug. One of the filing cabinets was angled in a corner so that the woman could reach it from her desk, and in the recess of that angle Buster reckoned I could squeeze and hide. I had misgivings, but these were balanced by the pride I felt in being necessary for success, able at last to perform something that was beyond Buster himself.

Buster went to the office and asked if Acme might have a job for
him after school. The woman didn't bother to consult anyone and said no, but Buster confirmed that the office door had a Yale snib lock, no alarm that he could see, and that the gap behind the filing cabinet should be big enough for me. That's how I ended up late on a blustery afternoon waiting around the side of the Acme building for Buster to signal from the RSA bushes that the office woman had gone through to the warehouse. It was in some ways the most tricky stage of the whole thing, even though Buster said that most of her absences he'd watched had given enough time for me to get in. Buster told me to pretend I was having a fit if she did come back before I was out of sight. I thought a fit might come quite naturally in those circumstances.

Buster gave the thumbs up from an RSA bush, and I was round the corner to the office without any conscious decision. I stepped onto the desk and then the filing cabinet, for a moment thought the space between it and the wall was insufficient, but then with the energy of fear wedged myself out of sight, my shoulders and head hard in the corner, my knees splayed for room.

On the small patch of blue carpet between my legs was a thin scurf of dust, debris and dead insects, including a bumble bee almost as large as a ping pong ball, dried flower petals, a brass drawing pin, a used tissue. I tried to relax and breathe with my mouth open to make less noise. There was no way I could know if the woman had returned, until I heard her cough at the desk and then take a call from a shopkeeper impatient to receive an order of cereals. To pass the fifteen minutes or so before closing time I imagined the most attractive tinned foods piled high in the warehouse: stacks of fruit salad, corned beef and sweetened condensed milk. And I thought of Buster's praise for my part in the carefully planned operation. I hoped I wouldn't need to sneeze, or fart, tried not to think of the consequences. The dark woman's perfume was heavy in the confined office.

I heard one of the storemen say he was on his way, and soon after
there were the sounds of the office woman preparing to go home: the key turning in the door to the warehouse, its scrabble under the cactus pot, the clicking catch of a handbag, and finally the light turned off, the surprisingly loud slam of the office entrance door and a rattle as she checked it was secure. I relaxed mentally, but was so physically constricted that little movement was possible. I decided to count to three hundred before puting my head up. It was almost black behind the filing cabinet once the light was off, and I knew that even outside, a winter night would be coming fast.

After three hundred I gave an awkward push upwards, but nothing happened. Maybe I would be stuck there all night and die, while Buster looked through the window without being able to help. A desperate struggle, and I got my top half out and was able to lift myself over the steel cabinet, and drop beside the desk where I was shielded from the full-length glassed side of the office looking out to an asphalt park and then the road. The RSA bushes were indistinct wind-blown shadow, and I knew the interior of the office would be even darker to anyone outside, yet I hesitated to move about openly. I counted another hundred for good measure, in case the second storeman was slow to leave. I went to the outside door and released the Yale lock so that the door was pushed back strangely on my hands by the invisible wind. I put my left hand out and gave the thumbs up for Buster, not knowing if he'd see in the dusk.

Buster was there almost immediately, breathing heavily not from nervousness, but the sprint across the parking area. ‘Bloody great. Well done,' he said, and closed the door behind him. I told him how much of a squeeze it had been. ‘I knew you could do it. Shit hot,' he said, and put the binoculars carefully by the door. ‘We've got to remember these.'

He took the key from under the cactus, opened the door leading to the warehouse and we went through. Just enough light spilled in from the unlit office to show the outline of two forklifts and the monolithic racks beyond. With a small plastic torch, Buster led the
way down the first of the alleys between the store racks. The place was Aladdin's Cave. In the blade of Buster's torch mountains of wealth rose up disguised in sombre cartons and pallets. The racks had printed tags to identify the stores — sanitary products, pet foods, beverages, tinned soups, spices and essences. You could have spent a whole life in there and not wanted for much, I reckoned.