Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

Can we, Dial?

She looked into his eyes and wondered if an equal and opposite rage was burning in that perfect little head.

Can we? Please.

She was already tense about how they would get back to Remus Creek Road. She had no license, could not drive a stick shift.

Can we?

He hung off her finger with his fist, marsupial. How can he have endured all this? In the car she found a crumpled oil-stained map.

Here, she said, what’s this?

Is it the sea, Dial? He pushed closer to her, and brushed his cheek against her arm.

We’re really near the beach, she said. It was the first time she understood where she had taken him. Would you like that, baby? She lay her hand on his head, the engine of his soul contained within her palm.

And stay in a motel!

Why not! She was not broke yet. She had Huck Finn inside her bag. They could play poker and eat pizza and swim all day.

OK get down on the floor, she said. She was insane, of course, even now, particularly now. Get down on the floor? The little creature didn’t even argue, just curled himself with the kitten, in among the dust and matches on the rubber matting.

Then she drove, best she could. Wrong side of the road.

As for the boy, he did not seem to mind the sneezing dust and deadhead matches, did not seem irritated that she kept moving her hand from the gear stick to his shoulder and back again. The confused scampy cat soon went off to sleep on the back window ledge, but the boy stayed hiding, knowing the mother loved him once again.

Did you really drive to Montana?

That was his real mother he was talking about. I’m not used to this car, she called. I’m sorry.

Did you have a map then?

It’s a stick shift, she persisted. I’ll get used to it.

Dial?

Yes.

With his stubborn quietness he was forcing her to look at him. She turned briefly, actually frightened of his seriousness.

Are you scared they will arrest me, Dial?

Don’t be silly, she said. She was driving way too slow. She could see the cars behind her and she was looking for a place to pull off the road.

We’re underground. That’s why I’m on the floor?

Don’t talk now. I’m concentrating.

You said I had to lie on the floor.

Shush! she said. There was a tractor yard up ahead and she pulled off. She counted seven cars pass by. Did she have to tell him now?

It’s safer on the floor, she said. Just generally.

Can I get up if I put on my seat belt?

Sure you can, she said, pulling back onto the road.

This was how you drove my daddy to Montana, right, Dial?

How the fuck did he know all this stuff.

It was an automatic, babe.

It was a rental, Dial. And with a bullet in your arm.

It was as if he was taunting her. In a minute he would want to see the scar.

Look, she said. This is so pretty. They were traveling between walls of green sugarcane. Above the giant grass towered a small wood house on stilts.

It was a.32, right?

The sugarcane gave way to a forest of thin raggy-barked trees, their white trunks like chalk marks drawn on darkness.

Right, Dial?

Cameron told you all this nonsense, she said at last. How old is Cameron?

He’s sixteen. He’s a Maoist.

Well, she said, the press is full of lies. He should know that.

She was pulling off the road, unable to go on. She could not look at him. She stopped beside a mess of churned-up gray soil and broken trees, a sad forest, cut off like a knife.

What are we doing?

She almost told him, I’m not your mother, but she got out of the car, pretending to look for something. She could not live like this, day after day. Some barbarian had been through these woods with bulldozers. There was not a flower to pick, nothing but these spooky injured trees with flaking skin like psoriasis. She tugged at the bark, and it came off in a long sheet, like paper.

That was it. She would take that back to him.

Look, she said. Isn’t this cool?

He looked at her more than at the bark. Did he know she had gone mad? What is it, Dial?

Australian tree bark, baby. You can write on it.

He turned it over in his hand, frowning. What do you want me to write? he asked at last.

Draw Buck, she said brightly, back behind the wheel.

I’m going to write a word, he said.

Let me see when you’re done.

She could feel him laboring beside her, serious, dogged.

Are you done?

He had written ANA.

She thought, I can’t stand this. It has two n’s, she said.

Are you angry with me again, Dial?

No, baby. I love you.

She kissed the top of his head. You know, some cats really love the beach.

Are you Anna? he asked.

Look, she cried. They had come onto a rise and there was the sea, miles and miles of it with yellow beaches disappearing into the chalky mist.

Beach! he said.

Tired and burned and sandy, they coasted down onto the plain to the west of Coolum, and the tops and bottoms of paperbark trees were already drowning in the melancholy night. The sky was still dark green. The headlights were on but the mother had had trouble seeing through the smeary insect glass. Below the sky was nothing but a smudge of road, wormy white trunks showing in the scrub.

The light made the boy homesick for his grandma. In the evenings the pair of them would drive like this, side by side, into Jeffersonville to Ted’s Diner. For a while one summer they would take his bike and he could ride around and around the empty parking lot at Peck’s.

There were local kids but they were not friends to him. They had short hair and hard squinting eyes and once when he was eating in Ted’s Diner they stole his bike. He knew who did it and where they lived so on every trip to town thereafter he walked up into the little backstreets around Pete’s Auction Barn and on one of these occasions, just after dusk, he finally saw his bike lying on a little lawn. No question it was his. It had black electrical tape wound around the middle of the crossbar.

He was wheeling it away when the kid came out and asked him what he thought he was doing.

It’s my bike.

Bullshit!

Yes it is.

Liar.

The other boy was maybe eight but when he came down onto the lawn Jay dropped the bike and flew at him so hard he knocked him over and he dropped on him with his knees and smashed him with his fists and he did not stop until the kid’s father pulled him off.

Christ, what you doing?

He stole my bike.

The father was a tall wiry man with tattoos up his arms and on his neck. He had wild black sideburns and pouchy eyes.

Hey, boy, he said, it’s just a goddamned bike.

Yes sir.

The boy had never been hit. He waited for it. Instead the man put his arm around the shoulder of his weeping son and together they walked up onto their porch and the boy saw a woman rush, like a moth fluttering in the light. He cried then, a kind of ugly hiccup.

Back at Ted’s he saw his grandmother.

You found it!

He should have told her, I gave it to him good, some stuff like that, but he was ashamed and dirty and did not know what to say. He kept seeing the father, the tenderness in his dull eyes as he put his arm around his son.

Are you awake, said Dial.

I’m OK, he said.

The Peugeot coughed one last time and threw itself a yard farther into the deep dark beneath the overhanging acacia and lantana. Ahead there was a home light burning.

He now had Huck Finn in one pocket of the cardigan. You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The kitty was in the other pocket as he carried him up the path through the deepest pool of dark-between the two huts-and up the steps beside the papaya, and then into the big hut where it would just be them, and blankets, and a book, nothing better to imagine now. There was a weak yellow light inside, not sufficient to break through the murk of ceiling, just enough to show strange faces at the low table.