Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

A little along, set back into the plantation and guarded by a chicken-wire fence, was a small house with a flower garden in the front. It was painted emerald green and the roof was a rusty red. At the beat-up front gate was a fat old woman with a floral apron and dusty-looking stockings on her creased-up legs. Her face was round and kind.

The woman said hello and asked him would he like a glass of water on account of all the dust. They had such a weird way of talking here, like Hobbits maybe.

He said he’d rather have a glass of milk.

Would you like a bicky too?

The boy didn’t know a bicky was a cookie so he said no.

He waited at the gate, watching bees crawling around inside the black part of the poppies and when the woman returned he drank the milk.

He thanked her, and said he had to go.

She watched him depart, not saying anything, and after he had walked a bit he began to think she could tell someone which way he went. He was up to no good, as his grandma would have said. So he walked back to the gate where the old woman was standing, still holding his empty glass.

Excuse me, he said, is the town this way?

You were going the wrong way, she said. I knewed it.

He said, Thank you, miss. He walked toward the town until she could not see him anymore and then he cut into the pine forest and walked back along the creepy quiet carpet floor coming around behind her house and only returning to the road when he was beyond her view. He was on his own.

He came down out of the pines at the place where the road split in two. He knew the steep scary track was called Bog Onion. At the bottom was the place with the blue plastic bag.

Leave it to Beaver, he said.

The burned-out cars and the broken-up log fires made it clear which way he had to go and he entered the bush at the exact same place where Trevor had cut his way through with a machete. The slash wounds had gone gray and dead looking, but some were now releasing baby leaves and small pink thorns as soft as the rasp of a cat’s tongue.

He pushed his way through the tangle and then into the feathery knee-high sea of fishbone ferns. He headed along the side of the saddle until he found the rough red bank of dirt, the fallen tree with pebble-crusted roots. He took off his T-shirt so he would be able to feel a bull ant’s legs upon his back and he kept his eyes down as he walked along the fallen trunk. He jumped as he had jumped before.

He walked into the soak and felt the mud ooze around his feet and he bent and made a little hole with his hands and drank the water which tasted of bark and blackberry and lantana leaf and dirt. He knew what was behind him, in the hollow of the fallen tree which jutted like a cannon from the bank-you could see a tiny, tiny bit of blue, pushed deep inside. He climbed up on the trunk and pushed his head into the dark hole in the sweet yellow rotting wood. He got his fist around the slippery bag and pulled until it popped out, lumpy and much heavier than he had thought. It landed on the soil and lost its breath.

He waited with his hands folded in front of him, his ear cocked, trying to hear what was hidden by the sighing trees. Then he dragged the bag off a ways into the woods, as if it was something he would eat in private. When he had untied the neck he reached his arm inside and took out whatever his fist closed around. These wads he placed inside his underpants. He did not rush but neither did he count, and he packed the slippery cutting bills against his waist and bottom and tried to arrange them where they would not hurt his penis no matter how far he had to walk.

He had not been there for more than four minutes before he was stuffing the blue bag back inside the tree. As he came out in the clearing by the cars, the crows were crying to one another in the spreading shade, and the kookaburras were flying from tree to tree, marking out the boundaries of their world. He walked beneath their notice.

Dial finished burying Buck. She squished up her face and bashed the dirt hard down on top of him. Parrots flittered in the last wash of light, the size of circus fleas up on the tattered ridge. The boy was up there with Trevor, lost to her, that is what she imagined.

Down in the valley the mosquitoes were already rising. They could smell her body gases a hundred feet away.

Which gases, Dial?

Lactic acid. Carbon dioxide.

Except there was no one there to ask her. No one who gave a damn about what she thought.

Her papa was dead. The boy was gone. She had buried Buck. She walked across the rotting-leaf floor of rain forest, finding the shower in the deepening shadow beneath the bedroom hut. She thought, I purchased a slum but at least I have hot water I can waste.

The shower water was like an easy promise, running down the long trunk of her lonely white body, cooling in a puddle around her ugly feet. That is what she thought. Once she had been beloved. She had met the boy’s father in safe houses in four different cities. She had bathed in rose oil. She had been delivered to him like a princess to her groom, trusted servants in Volkswagens, back stairs to a warehouse tower. He kissed her calves, the arches of her feet. Even when she contracted a disease from him, she allowed that he was a man, a soldier in a war, the king.

She had been a goddess, six feet tall, a fool. Who could imagine her made so small and worthless, heartsick for a little boy.

Not till she turned off the shower did she notice anything but her own spaghetti boil of pain. The first cat’s cry was drowned. But the second time she heard it clearly and it thumped her heart, a great electric whack that left goose bumps across her scalp.

She stood naked in the pooled-up soapy water. Something rustled. The water dripped. She hadn’t even lit the lantern in the big hut but when she heard Buck again she ran down into the forest. There was only just sufficient light to see the grave was as she had left it. It was too shallow, she knew it. If it was Massachusetts there would be raccoons or dogs to dig him up and drag him through the night. What was there here? No bears, that’s all she knew. Mosquitoes jabbed their hollow noses through her skin. She dragged the blocky gray carving from in front of the abandoned hut and laid it on top of the loose black dirt.

Lady Macbeth. Exactly.

She ran up to the hut, muddy feet, dead leaves sticking, but no more thought of cleaning up than if she was six years old and scared. Buck cried again. She whimpered. She found the Redhead matches and the propane roared white illuminating her naked skin in all its fright and weakness. There was a pair of overalls by the shower but she was too creeped out to go back down there, to feel banana fronds brushing against her shoulder.

She pulled on Adam’s prickly army coat. Not his war, not hers either. She turned the light down and she sat out on the shadow of the front deck where she could keep watch to see whatever blurry black things the night would bring toward her.

She had killed the cat, taken his life to make a point, win an argument. It was Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale. She listened to the ghost until it stopped which was pretty quickly, but still she had no chance of sleep.

She climbed up into the loft bed and settled in the nest of quilts and shawls. It smelled of boy. She could not sleep for thinking of him, but it was not until just before dawn, when she heard that cat meow again, that it occurred to her that there must be other cats and she had murdered her sleek lovely mischievous Buck in vain.

She tossed and turned until she heard the car descending Trevor’s hill.

Scratchy eyed and heavy headed, she clambered down the ladder and ran to fetch her dew-damp overalls and then, hearing the thump and slam of the car as it bottomed on the track, she sprinted down the hill toward the road, straight through the uncut feathery grass. She heard the bang as its engine slammed the yellow rock, and then she leaped off the cutting and she was in its deadly path.