Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

John and me, Trevor said, we can take care of your items.

The boy thought, Just pay him. Make them go away.

At least there are two of us, said Trevor.

Dial laughed but her hand was wet and slippery.

Trevor raised a pale eyebrow and showed an old scar line hinged across its middle.

No one’s making you do nothing, he said at last. He paused to watch the sun slice across the mother’s great long legs. We can drive you to the bank in Nambour, he said. The big town with the sugar mill.

It was an ugly town; the boy had seen the cruel black stacks, the freight cars of sugarcane rolling through the thunder, a bad dream on the dark side of the earth.

Nambour, Trevor said. You saw it yesterday.

As he spoke, the Ford slid in, pinching its bumper hard along the curb. The Rabbitoh’s elbow was stuck out the window, but what the boy noticed most was a quick flash of silver in his hidden hand.

You can go back to Nambour, Trevor said. If you so desire, babe. We’ll drop you there right now.

The mother looked over her shoulder where the sad-eyed postmaster was sorting out the mail. She said, Can we discuss this somewhere less public?

The boy preferred the postmaster to watch over them, but Trevor took the mother’s hand and led her away from him, down the steps. She held out her hem like a bridesmaid at his cousin Branford’s wedding.

The car’s floor was awash with bad black water from the storm. The boy held Buck inside his woolly pouch. The pair of them, cat and boy, looked down together as the water surged and sloshed. As they accelerated up the highway five soggy Uno cards sailed out from under the front seat. Buck struggled, then went still.

Trevor’s arm lay along the top of his seat like a squeezing snake. They left the highway, drove past five small houses. Then the blacktop ended, and Trevor twisted himself to look back at Dial whose feet were tucked beneath her hibiscus skirt.

You could just fix up the hem, he said. Do you have a needle?

Dial kind of stared him down.

Do you?

Dial did not budge.

Or you can just get out, Trevor said suddenly. He jerked away. I don’t give a fuck, he said. But he did give some kind of fuck because he spun around again. If you go to the bank in Nambour, he said, they’ll call the cops before you leave. Christ, get over yourself.

The boy’s stomach tasted like the inside of a tuna can.

Please, Trevor said, and showed his ragged teeth, you have no fucking idea of where you are or who I am, so don’t be fucking sarcastic. You’re American. You wouldn’t know if you were up yourself.

The car slowed, then stopped. No one spoke. They should have left the car right then.

I’m sorry, Dial said.

In response the car began to creep between the walls of bush, and the Uno cards went under the seat and only three returned, two reds, a yellow.

What’s happening? the boy asked. No one heard him anymore.

The car left the dirt road for something worse, a kind of track which wound up a ridge, along a hillside rutted with deep tire marks.

The mother gripped the top of the seat in front. What’s going on here?

He thought, Just give them money, Dial.

Buck twisted and complained. Trevor told him to shut his mouth. The car smashed against the cutting and an acacia poked in Dial’s open window and left a long line of blood from eye to mouth. They were on a downhill slalom on a long shining streak of yellow mud-plunging, sick and slick, John swinging on the useless wheel, the boy now feeling throw-up in his throat.

There was one last bump and something heavy crashed on the metal floor. They came to rest at a flat place where people had driven in a circle.

What’s this? the mother asked.

The bank, said Trevor.

The boy thought maybe he would not vomit. He heard crows, saw burned-out cars, a lot of sorry-looking charcoal, bust-up fires.

We’ll leave you to count, Trevor said.

The boy’s stomach was a football of bad old air. He stayed with the mother as she slid the money from her hem.

Will you give it to them?

What do you think?

But what will happen to us then?

She put her arms around him and kissed him on his neck. Being squiffy in the stomach, he pulled away.

I don’t have time for this, she said.

She soon gave the hippies money. First she laid it on the hot hood of the wagon. Then Trevor counted. Then John. It was eighteen thousand one hundred American.

The boy said, I have to be sick.

All right, Dial said, where is the safe?

Trevor nodded backward at the woods.

Do we have to walk far?

Leave it to Beaver, said Trevor. The boy watched while he slipped between the saplings, hipless, no butt in his pajama pants. Then he followed, his stomach heaving as he ran.

He vomited in the lantana and across his feet. He held the kitty to one side and threw up along a kind of path-severed stems, cut branches, banana and papaya. Stuff from his stomach, stuff he never even ate, spread across the blackberries.

He had nothing to wipe himself with except the cardigan. He spat. There was a sea of ferns beyond the brambles, like fish bones, covering a wide saddle. He broke off some of these to clean himself as well as he could.

Vomiting was ugly, shameful, mixed up with his feelings about soggy Uno cards and seeds. He told the cat he was sorry for the smell. The trees were wide apart here. They had twisted gray corded bark. Different birds were high up in their khaki canopies but there was another noise, like water, maybe wind.

He stroked the kitten’s bony head but even the tips of his fingers seemed fouled and filthy. He could hear a river, or it was the wind high in the trees, or the two, mixed up together.

He could smell damp. He knew damp. Maple woods in summer, rotting things, black mud. He went farther along the left side of the saddle, not far. Here was the edge of a rough red riverbank, no question. A big tree had fallen, its clay-and pebble-crusted roots naked in the air like dried-out innards. The trunk, which made a bridge between the flood bank and the low bank, was about as big across as a man is tall and he soon found a place, just below the disturbed earth, where you could jump down onto its broad back, like the back of an elephant or a slippery seal, and he walked along it, with the kitten now meowing softly, down to the place where the timber splintered and smashed and speared into the earth. The smell of damp was rich with rot.

Steel pincers pierced his skin.

He screamed.

He jumped to the soft ground. He hurt his foot. He dropped the cat. He ripped at his shirt.

Stay still, said Trevor, who came from nowhere, a nasty-looking groundhog, completely naked, covered in mud and dirt. Stay still.

The boy shrieked in fear.

Trevor took the boy’s shirt off over his head. The pain went on and on without reason.

Got it, Trevor said.

And held a shining ant, two inches long, a stinking, angry, black, plastic-coated, dying Australian thing.

Bull ant, he said.

The boy stayed frozen, vomity, ashamed, his pain still pulsing, while Trevor walked down among the wide tall grass toward Buck, who was drinking something. Trevor found water too, enough to wash some mud from his own body. He shook himself like a dog. Then he grabbed the cat, held it locked inside his arm.

Did you come looking to see where my stash is hid? He had pale blue eyes, hard as broken bathroom tile.

The kitten was afraid, his mouth as wide and pink as dentistry.

No, sir.

Trevor returned the cat and then put both his hands on the boy’s square bare shoulders. He did not squeeze or hurt, but it was a hard and heavy weight without forgiveness.

You wouldn’t want to see.