Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

“Pig parties have been an open sore on this campus for years. You said it yourself. They’re loud, lewd, and degrading to women. Somebody had to bring it down.”

“The parties may be sophomoric but they’ve gone on quite awhile with no major damage done. But that’s not true anymore, is it? Nearly two dozen futures smashed up and one poor shlub looking at serious jail time. Thanks to you.”

“With your help.”

“True, and that’s what bothers me the most. That I came here looking for a fresh start and wound up wrecking a lot of innocent lives.”

“Puhleeze!” she snorted. “There was nothing innocent about that party.”

“Emily was innocent. God knows what’ll happen to her now. The pig party was idiotic, but it was just one night. The fallout from the raid will go on for years. I can understand your wanting to end it, but I can’t believe you sent Emily in there, knowing what might happen to her.”

“Believe what you like,” she said acidly. “If you want more money, maybe we can work something out. But if you try to go public with this crock, my editors will sue you into the poorhouse.”

“Don’t worry, Sara, I can’t talk without throwing Emily to the sharks and she’s suffered enough already. I don’t want to hurt anyone else. Not even you.”

“As if you could,” she sneered, rising. “Good luck with your career, Malloy. Maybe I’ll look you up sometime. If I need a drink.”

And she walked away. The prettiest, smartest woman who’s ever asked me out, or probably ever will.

And the coldest.

Oddly enough, I think I preferred the Sara from the party, braces and all, to the perfect, plastic Barbie doll she’s become.

Beauty’s a tricky business. We all think we can define it, but one guy’s woofer is the next guy’s true, true love. In the years between, I’ve watched the mating game play out a thousand times and I’ve decided real beauty comes down to character. When people respond to each other, soul to soul, everything else suddenly becomes very small change. A plain woman in love can take your breath away. A cover girl without a heart is only a picture. And a flat one at that.

But if beauty’s complicated, ugly’s a lot easier. Because looks don’t have a damned thing to do with it.

Pig-party rules are simple. Bring the ugliest date you can find.

For most guys, that means a plain Jane or the Wicked Witch of the West, not a media babe like Sara Silver.

As for me? I’ve only been to one pig party. Wildest night of my life.

And I definitely took the right girl.

© 2008 by Doug Allyn

Since Cheryl Rogers last appeared in EQMM she has won the 2006 Henry Lawson Award and sold stories to several Australian and U.K. magazines. Some terms that might be unfamiliar to U.S. readers in this tale set in the gold-mining country of New South Wales are “mullock heaps”: the debris from gold mines; “Metters No .2”: a type of wood stove; and “humpy”: a settler’s hut.

Such rage of honey in their bosom beats.

Forrester hadn’t expected the sight of a bit of rust and red dirt to bring a lump to his throat. He thought he’d prepared himself, spending the best part of three weeks circling the vineyards and the timbered hinterland before homing in on the old gold-mining town. It was the wagon step in the ringlock fence that threw him.

“Leave it, boy.” His father’s warning flew at him out of the mullock heaps, across the nodding heads of wild oat. Through time. “You want to leave a bit of past for them that come after us.”

The words bit sharp as the sting of the wild bees whose hives Forrester raided. In the woodland outside Mudgee he’d stirred up a swarm of robber workers. They’d been tucked up in a chimney, in an abandoned rabbiter’s hut. He’d heard the mud bricks rattle with their rage. But he’d stayed calm. Reached for the smoker and topped up its burner with dry pine needles. Gently puffed in the cool and fragrant suggestion of burning pine to soothe their troubled souls.

Yet now the apiarist found his hand reaching for the step, rubbing at the rust with the flat of his thumb. He wondered at the leather — work boots, moccasins, the odd feminine heel — that had dished out the forged iron. Wondered at the prospectors, fortune hunters, and downright gold diggers who’d hitched a ride in the wagon, now reduced to one rusted step hung in ringlock in a fenceline jagged as a bushman’s smile.

And as the flakes peeled away, Forrester felt the years slip away too. He was a boy again, scooping armloads of autumn leaves from the avenue flanking the road into town, pretending to bury the youngest of his screaming herd of sisters. Trapping crayfish in Tambaroora dam. Blackberrying the snarl of thicket skirting the hills and selling the pickings in punnets from a trestle table at the edge of the road.

Remembering his father’s warning, he stopped rubbing as abruptly as he’d started.

“...leave a bit of past for them that come after us...”

The words rang clear as the inland sky on a summer morning, yet Forrester couldn’t have been higher than his father’s gun belt when he’d first heard them. Couldn’t have realized that he’d be one of those “... that come after us...”

But now he understood why he’d spent the past twenty days circling loops around the heart of his boyhood.

Like a bee.

Dancing.

Every Friday night old man Kelly followed the same ritual. He’d eat tea — he didn’t hold with calling the evening meal “dinner” — early.

Then he’d let the fire in his Metters No. 2 burn down to nothing. And when the heat had all but gone and the chimney was cool enough to touch, he’d turn the key in the lock of the only door on the weatherboard humpy others tried to pretend was something it wasn’t.

“Your cottage really should have a back door, Mr. Kelly.” The pretty little Welsh nurse who came every day to dress his leg ulcer had been a picture of concern on her first visit. Thirty something, homely, running away from a broken marriage. “What if there was a fire?”

“Then I’d fry,” he’d informed her, and congratulated himself when her frown deepened.

“Don’t want you frying now, do we, Mr. Kelly?” She’d at least had the optimism to give his arm a playful slap before raising her blond curls and taking a hard look around her. Oil lamps, enamel mugs, hunting knives, a bedroll neatly folded on a low camp stretcher.

She’d pretended not to notice, or perhaps, he wondered later, she had genuinely found nothing remarkable in his austerity, for all she’d said in her lilting accent was: “Besides, with fittings like these you must be heritage listed.”

It was only when he was sure the lock was safe that he’d allow himself to reach up into the breast of the chimney and remove the loose brick.

On this particular Friday he stood the brick as he always did, on the side of the hob next to the pan of potatoes, carrots, and peas he’d cook up as bubble and squeak for breakfast.

Then, using both hands, he reached up again and pulled a faded khaki satchel from the dark hole. The weight of it brought a smattering of soot and dust down on the remains of his hair.

Kelly’s hands, weathered brown by his passion for working dirt, shook a little as he brushed cobwebs from the bag and loosened the drawstring. He tipped the contents onto a scrubbed pine table and smiled.

Like a schoolboy poring over a particularly pleasing collection of cats, jacks, and queenies, he picked up each piece of gold-veined quartz and each gleaming nugget in turn. He held the treasure up to the late-afternoon sun streaming through the dust-smeared window in the humpy’s west wall and turned it until threads of gold danced in the light.