Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

The boy cried out.

Trevor roared, rolled, a mouse, a cockroach.

Dial would not permit him escape. She thudded him twice more, across the ribs. The boy watched the big man curl up like a baby. Then he rolled clear off the deck. Onto the smelly dirt where Adam used to pee.

Dial looked down into the stink, timber in her hand. No one spoke.

Trevor whimpered. She threw the wood on top of him and turned away. When she wiped her nose and stepped toward him, the boy did not know what to do.

Come here, she said, but the boy ran out into the night and down the hill, past the car, and on the dark road below he smelled papaya balm.

Are you there? he whispered.

She stacked the wet dishes, crying quietly. There was nowhere to store them in this slum.

Her mother would have died to see her genius in a dump like this. She did die. Anyway. Of Ajax, Mr. Clean, Murphy Oil. Died of the knives and forks of Patricia Van Gunsteren who never knew who her housekeeper was. They had not the least idea, is what Dial thought. No clue. She pulled hardwood splinters from her hand while the propane light hissed in a white fury at the empty hut.

No one has the least idea of who I am. Not that little bratty boy who stole her heart and ran. Not Trevor, not Chook, not Roger, not scrawny chicken Adam. How could these B-list hippies understand that Dial was an SDS goddess. Who could see that? Hardly herself.

In Cambridge she had covered herself with peasant dresses, bits of mirrors, sheep’s wool boots as if she were the corrupt princess of Nepal. Harvard babies did not see the contradiction.

They called her Dial because she said dialectic had been invented by Zeno. So they mocked her, idiots. She was the truth teller. She only lied to the boy to keep him from hurt, and for her sin her intestines were pulled from her on a Catherine wheel.

She stole the boy. Is that what she had wanted? She did not think so. Maybe she wanted to make love to his pretty daddy or did she want to hurt the daddy, make him burn in hell, the creep?

She took her own papa to the house in Somerville and dear George walked across the Persian rug in dusty boots. He was five foot four, his greased-back hair standing high up from his head. He did not even notice the baby, baby Che, sweet Jesus in the crib. But he shook pretty Dave Rubbo’s hand. You want to know about the revolution, comrade?

George Xenos had bullet wounds in the middle of each palm, his fingers crabbing so he held his knife and fork like a trained bear. He was not ashamed. He would show you, comrades-how he had been forced to place his hands on the pillow of a woman’s bed. The fascists shot him with a Mauser. He would tell you the caliber. Not German bastards. Greek bastards. He laughed. Even his missing teeth appeared heroic.

He came to Somerville in September ’66, a few weeks before the McNamara visit. There was mud on his boots, clean white socks turned over, his strong short legs shown off in summer shorts.

Comrades, he said, not knowing why they called his daughter Dial. Comrades, he said, choosing not to see the new hair on their boy lips. But he too had had soft boy hair once, sixteen years old, baby fluff, a fighter in the mountains of Macedonia.

Fuck Stalin, he told the leaders of SDS. Fuck Churchill too. By 1945 the comrades had won Greece. They were betrayed first by the British and then the USSR.

You don’t have no revolutionary situation, he said. This is America. God bless America, he said, and still they loved him, a workingman from Southie. He could say there was no revolutionary situation in America and they did not stone him. They drank his ouzo, played knuckles, arm wrestled on the floor.

Papa flirted with Susan and Melinda and the leggy Smith girl who had VD. Two weeks later Mama was dying in St. Vincent’s.

He had asked the Harvard comrades to visit his yard, admire his illegal sausage factory. Two days later he sent word not to come.

So they were saved, Susan Selkirk, Mark Dorum, Mike Waltzer, all those people who were later in the newspaper, saved from grappling with the dialectic which was his life.

By the end of 1966 his two sons had run off, one to be a drug dealer in New York City, the other to have sex with a widow in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He was left only with the scholar, and it was she who drove to Southie from Cambridge at night and on weekends and did what her brothers should have, boning the scrag ends, working the grinder, lining up the casings in their sticking dispenser. She could lift the big plastic vats of scrap meat from floor to bench. She could have arm wrestled those Harvard boys flat to the floor.

Who was going to tell them? Not cute Dial. Someone else would have to teach them-do not please be romantic about the working class, no matter what you think of the stigmata on poor Papa’s small square hands. For the working people he risked his lovely boy skin in the mountains, but when some Irish fellows tried to renegotiate a price after he had delivered, it was George Xenos who took his wrecker’s bar and beat their refrigerator so hard the cockroaches fell in showers from catastrophe.

This is how we renegotiate in Greece.

Get in the truck, he told his daughter. You drive.

She turned up the propane so it roared. On my father’s knee I learned it, she thought, weeping, at my mother’s breast.

She thought, If you are watching me from outer space, watch this, boys.

She took a fistful of nails and fed some into her mouth and dropped the remainder in the crumpled paper bag. She picked up the hammer and a long whippy yellow length of paling and she rested this against the wall, on top of the piece she had previously pinned in place.

And then she nailed it in. Straight in. She could build a proper home for him. Are you watching, boys?

Two nails at every stud, one at the top and one at the bottom. And that was pretty much how she continued all that night, working until there was morning mist across the floor and even then she could not stop, not because it looked so fabulous but because she knew she would die of grief if she did not continue, because her eyes stung and her throat closed over and the pain came in huge sweeping waves, during which she could barely stand. She would have him, she would feed him, she would watch him grow. There were lives way worse than that. She knew them personally.

No one loved him. He removed his shorts and underpants and folded them carefully. Then he squatted above the pit and looked down across the dammed-up valley full of mist and white-veiled trees. He was gooseflesh, head to toe. The birds were pretty quiet, but he could hear a tap-tap echoing far below.

He did not know how he could ever get back to Kenoza Lake.

When he had wiped himself he poured an ice-cream tub of lime and a second scoop of sawdust into the pit and closed the heavy-hinged lid.

A magpie gargled as he turned to go. Trevor’s alarm clock rang as the boy came back beneath the roof.

Trevor? He watched the open mouth and broken foreign teeth. Do you want to wake up?

Trevor showed a bloody crocodile eye, groaned, rolled and revealed his beaten back-black and purple like an old lady’s dress. The clock engine unwound. Trevor began to snore.

He would make her buy him a plane ticket. That’s what he was thinking when he squatted beside the bed of cauliflowers and drove his arm beneath the mulch. With his cheek pressed flat against the soil, his fingers found his buried blue banana bag.

The sun was striking the trees above the mist, waking up some birds who brought down a loud shower of bark or seeds on the tin roof. By the time he smelled the papaya salve, it was too late.

You cunning little bugger, said Trevor, and kicked at the mulch with his big toe and exposed his secret to the light. He had money in that bag and other stuff as well.