Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

He has to confer with someone, she said, and rolled her eyes.

Can we stay in a motel? Can we?

The dope is worried the pigs will grab him for having U.S. dollars.

Finally, she saw him understand. It made his body rigid. You’re trying to buy it!

Baby, you said you wanted to stop going places.

He jerked away from her. She hardly saw him go, but heard him on the ladder, half falling, landing heavily. As she rose from her blankets the flies rose too and she felt one crawl along her bare arm. She slapped herself.

Che? I’m trying to look after you. She pulled on some underpants so she could decently descend the ladder. The rungs were thin. They hurt her feet.

All I have is U.S. dollars. I don’t have a lot of choices.

He did not answer.

She said, It’s useless to them, you heard that. We’re rich, but the money’s worth nothing.

She took his hand. He snatched it back. Come on, she said. She was pleading with him, really, to understand what had happened to her life.

Come on, she said, show me all the stuff you found yesterday.

He kept his hand to himself but he led her out into the long wet grass and took an obvious sulky pleasure showing her to the so-called bathroom, a rusty four-gallon can inside a square wooden box.

Come on, she said. The place itself is sort of pretty. Let’s look in the other hut.

And it would have been pretty, in photographs, the varied greens, the log-clad huts with their low sagging verandas. Inside the second hut they found shirts and trousers hanging from four-inch nails. A netted bed faced two windows. Between the windows was a door which opened onto a low dark veranda where bats hung like broken rags.

It’s a real jungle, she said. It looked poisonous to her.

There’s another hut down there, she said. Do you want to check it ount?

You said ount, he said.

No I didn’t. She laughed but she hated people doing that to her, pointing out the moments when Boston surfaced. He had done this to her at Australian customs, the little WASP, announcing she was saying mayan instead of mine. Well, he would have more foreign stuff than that to deal with.

This was going to be his home, not just the acres, or the two huts, but this small third hut down in the darkness of the rain forest, creepier than the others, with nothing in it but an empty pickle jar.

Outside, on the stoop, someone had carved a face into a block of stone. It was not exactly sinister, but it suggested superstition, witchcraft and some very lonely lost life reduced to a hidden corner of the earth.

What does conferring mean? The boy pushed the stone over so its face was hidden.

He’s chickenshit.

You should not use curse words, you know.

He was hugely upset. She was hugely upset herself but she was the adult and could not show it.

What’s the matter, baby?

You shouldn’t curse.

Shut up, she thought. She brought him out of the forest, emerging just below the deck of one big leaky shaky hut, beside a bush with shiny leaves and bright red berries which she said was coffee. She wasn’t even sure that this was true.

Go on, she said, peel one. You’ll see.

Inside the red skin was a white, moist seed, slippery and somehow wrong. The boy was peeling a second bean when she heard an engine and saw the dirty blue-oil smoke, then the car itself. When the motor was turned off it continued knocking and coughing. She was expecting Adam, not Trevor. Now both of them walked through the grass toward them, Trevor staring at the boy a little too intently for her taste.

Hello boy, he said, shirtless, oily, hipless in the sun.

Hello Trevor.

She saw how the boy lifted his chin, allowing himself to be silently interrogated.

She said, Fancy seeing you here.

Trevor chewed his smile in the corner of his mouth. Well, someone has to change your money.

Of course, she thought.

The boy also understood. His howl came out of nowhere, like something teased and taunted in a cage. He charged at Trevor like a mad thing. He punched him in his hard hairless stomach and between the legs.

Che! she screamed at him, but Trevor had lifted him up and away and he was still hitting and scratching in the air.

When he was still, Trevor put him back on the ground and the boy looked hatefully at Dial, waiting for her to do something. When he understood she would do nothing, he slashed at the coffee bush and tore a handful of leaves and then he ran through the long dewy grass, leaping with fright at something on the way, continuing through the dense tangle of lantana which would doubtless rip his skin.

I’m sorry, she said to Trevor, but she was frightened now, of everything she’d done. I better go and talk to him, she said.

No, said Trevor, he’ll be fine. You have to talk to me.

And she obeyed. She walked with them up the traitor’s path, thinking of the boy, knowing exactly where he was, what he felt, inside the empty shed with the pickle bottle, curled up on the filthy floor, growing cooler, slowly more ashamed.

Was she really going to buy these mad vines and raging wild lantana, palm trees, chaos, coffee. She might as well have bought an elephant-but you could not hide inside an elephant and you could certainly hide here. That was its single virtue, to place her up a dirt track at the asshole of the earth.

The boy did not like it here, but he could not decide his fate. She was the adult. She followed the two men inside the hut, completely unclear about everything, whether she should buy or walk away, whether they were here to rob or help her. Surely she could defeat them if she had to-one man who could not see and a second man who could not read.

She sat cross-legged in the hut and watched, through a lead-light window, a tiny yellow bird, hovering. It was exquisite, beyond use or understanding.

Adam “located” the tea and “organized” the kettle and Trevor rubbed papaya salve onto the long thin cut that the boy’s toenail had made on his hairless barrel chest. He was a mole, vole, pit bull, otter, seal, just not her type, although he didn’t understand that yet. They all sat on the cushions and Adam poured the tea, smiling at some out-of-focus fact that was his alone to know. He was emaciated as an Indian ascetic, as unrelated to any life she knew as the yellow hummingbird outside the window.

So! she said. Because she wished to appear definite.

So? said Trevor. Was he mocking her?

So, we’re here to talk business, I assume. She was a child playing with money, not her money, but thousands, almost countless.

So, you want to live an Alternative Lifestyle, said Trevor.

He was mocking her, but she was way tougher than he was. Another thing he did not understand.

So, Dial, you know there are problems.

She heard him say vere for there and pwblems for problems. She had a degree from Harvard. He couldn’t speak or spell. She raised an eyebrow.

You pay Adam foreign money, what can he do with it?

You quite like my foreign money. I see you everywhere these days.

Trevor exhaled, as if offended. But of course he was a criminal, one of the shifty classes her younger brother found so admirable.

All right, he said, now listen.

I’m listening.

No, you are being twitchy and sarcastic. You don’t know who I am. You think I am a creep. You don’t understand what I have given up to come here.

What have you given up?

There you go, he said, that’s what I mean. I was in the middle of building a new gate.

Well she had been about to take a job at Vassar. A gate, she said. Mocking him.

A stockade, said Adam, sucking up. A bloody stockade, Dial, he pleaded.