Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

No headlights.

She cast her hands high in the air and watched the car slide toward her, the front wheels barely missing her, the steaming nose pushed in among the blackberries.

It was Rebecca who was driving, Trevor she saw first, but she did not care about either of them. She wrenched open the back door.

Where is he?

There was nothing there but an unreal shining darkness, black plastic bags. She touched them, immediately imagined they were taking hedge clippings to the dump.

Where is he?

Slap her, said Rebecca. She’s a fucking spy.

Where is he?

Where is who?

Where is my son, she bellowed, and her voice echoed along the valley floor, across the shallow rills.

Shut up, said Trevor. He took her shoulders. Be quiet.

They were both looking at her weirdly.

Where is he? she demanded.

He’s with you, said Trevor.

He’s with you.

She began to howl then properly. It was beyond her, beyond any preparation or understanding.

She’s fucked this, said Rebecca, and went back into the car. She turned on the headlights and began to cautiously back up and turn around.

Don’t go anywhere, Trevor said to Dial. He had his two meaty hands around her upper arms. Stay here.

He got back into the car and he slammed the door so hard it hurt, and Rebecca, with her big tits and hairy legs, took Trevor back up the hill leaving Dial no comfort but the white clay dust which rose from the road and settled like wiggy talcum in her hair. The cat called. The empty day began.

The boy had seen two of Trevor’s secrets but he knew Trevor had boxes inside boxes inside boxes. Trevor did not trust banks but he had accounts, in Sydney, Lismore, Tweed Heads. His right hand could not find his left hand. His lungs did not know his heart. There were all sorts of secret stashes-Canadian money in railway lockers, out-of-date Australian pounds, a pack of gelignite strapped inside a concrete pipe buried in his road. The explosive had hung there for two wet seasons so the electrical tape was curling and the pack was dangling, but there were still wires leading up the red clay cutting, lying doggo in the bush like two death adders beneath the fallen leaves. Trevor had a plunger hidden in the rafters of the compound. He was a secret man but so pleased by his secret he had to tell the boy.

Trevor was audiovisual, he said so. He had the Book of Revelation on cassette. He could not read or write but he could imagine the end of the world better than a university professor, also the destruction of Noosa Heads by cyclone, also a police four-wheel drive thrown six feet into the air by gelignite. He would puff out his cheeks and blow his hands apart. He gave the boy bad dreams-fire, sharp black weapons, tree trunks burning like fuse cord in the night.

Rebecca was Trevor’s girlfriend, sometimes.

Was Rebecca also afraid of Trevor? Maybe, the boy thought, must have been, for sure. Who would want to know what Rebecca knew, i.e., the trails, huts, shacks, the individual marijuana plants hidden like buried bodies in the bush. Rebecca and Trevor walked the unmarked bush together, Trevor said so, backpack straps cutting into their naked shoulders. The boy had seen them load up with stinky fertilizer, blood and bone. He knew Trevor was an orphan, invisible to infrared. Not even the spies in outer space could see his true occupation.

Rebecca’s house was at the bottom of the hill, across from the concrete drain and the explosive charge. Trevor had built her a bed. He had put guttering on her roof.

She lay in wait, near the bottom of their driveway, hating Buck, hating Che, hating Dial for being American.

Trevor, in a breathless fury, found Dial, lying like roadkill beside her drive.

Get up, he said, all arrows and orders, pointing at her car.

Drive, he said. Not there, he said. There, he said.

The roads laced through the bush.

The day would soon be hot and sultry but for now the light was cold and sad. Dial stayed behind the wheel while Trevor called up to the hippies in their homes. The best of these were like cocoons made from glued-together sticks, the worst of them like Buckminster Fuller, fired from Harvard, far away.

The Peugeot engine was running rough, pumping out white poison. The hippies descended from their perches, sleepy birds with trailing blankets, egrets in the exhaust smoke mist. She thought, Some of them are graduates. They peered at her. Yesterday she had killed the cat. Now she had lost her son.

She drove Trevor some more.

The starved-chest girl emerged from an ugly A-frame, came right up to the car and tapped on the glass. Dial slowly rolled the window down. When the girl hugged Dial she was all bones, warm from sleep, perfumed with patchouli and poverty.

A chain saw started with a raw hard cough. The two women waited while the saw did its work. Soon they saw five men walk out of the bush, each one carrying a fresh cut pole. They walked in single file down the track, not looking at the car.

She asked the girl what they were doing.

They’re going to check out the creek.

In her confusion Dial wondered were they fishing. The starved-chest girl lay her raw-knuckled hand on Dial’s arm.

They’re going to find your little boy, she said.

What are the poles for?

Dial saw the transparent freckled terror-dumb fear that the girl would be forced to name the dreadful thing that would be done with the poles.

They’ll go to the swimming hole too, she said.

Oh. She wanted to throw herself back on the ground, lie in the dust until she was squashed or killed. The men were calling out.

What are they calling?

Coo-ee.

No, his name is Che.

Yes, the girl said, we know his name.

Dial recognized this dreadful sympathy. She gazed distractedly at the signs of hippie industry, beehives, potted rain forest plants beneath shade cloth. When Trevor came back to the car she expected they would go to the swimming hole but instead he told her to wind down her windows and drive very slowly along the road. She could hear the tiny grains of gravel sticking in the tires, a soft rolling noise, and the echoing foreign cry, as sharp as knives: Coo-ee.

At the ford she stopped, looking with dread at the wash of water which flowed around the tires and washed toward the swimming hole.

Up the hill, said Trevor. He was leaning out the window, staring into the bush. For fuck’s sake, aren’t you looking on your side?

She did now, as she drove on up the steep hill, and then again as they bounced along the logging tracks. Trevor, his head out the window, cried Coo-ee. There was so much bush, beyond acres, beyond hope or forgiveness.

They arrived at a high spot above the creek, almost the end of the track, when Trevor said, Stop. Turn off the engine.

He called, Coo-ee.

A call came back to them.

Of course it was not Che. It was nothing like a boy, but she still insisted that he reply.

Trevor left the car without so much as looking at her. He ran across the flat barefoot, jumping fallen timber, Coo-ee.

Coo-ee, there was an answer.

It’s not him, Dial thought, but she left the car. They were parked on a kind of bluff above the creek. On another day she would have found it beautiful, but today it was a horror and when they came upon a man with a blue car and trailer she was angry that they had wasted time.

Let’s go, she said.

Trevor lay his hand on her arm and spoke to the man who had glasses thick as soda bottles and hair oiled flat on his little shrunken head. Trevor stroked her shoulder, so gently she could have cried. The man’s neck was thin and did not fill his collar and he poked his nose forward, sniffing. Dial’s arm, in the palm of Trevor’s warm hand, was chicken skin.