Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

What?

The milk. I don’t like it either. This Sam had a thin face and beaky nose like a bush animal, a possum, with big dark eyes and very crooked teeth.

Tastes of bum, he said. His voice was all tight and curled up like wood shavings. It came out of his nose and mouth all at once.

Say something else, demanded Sam. His way of speaking made everything into a puzzle you had to peel and flatten out. Say something else American, he demanded.

Can I have a glass of water?

They had been pressed tight around him and now they all sprang away. The Puddinghead came back with water.

I’m Sara.

He nodded, suddenly very pleased.

The boys brought bread and butter and a bowl of honey. Rufus cut a slice of bread with a knife maybe two feet long.

The boy asked, Is that a dagger?

It’s a machete.

Yes, but is it a dagger?

No one knew what he meant. Rufus silently cut a thick slice of bread and covered it with butter and honey.

The boy was not exactly happy, but much better than he had been in a while.

We thought you was dead, mate, said Sam. We reckoned you was a goner.

The boy did not understand.

Rufus asked, Did you sleep in the bush?

Yes.

Was it scary?

No, said the boy. I’m used to it.

You must be tough, said Rufus at last.

The boy said, My dad is pretty tough.

Then he asked for another slice of bread and honey and as he ate it he began to look around, trying to locate where he was and what he really felt. He was eating great bread and thick honey but he was thinking about Trevor, his snotty nose, his rounded shoulders, his heavy trudging walk as he set off up his road alone.

When the boy was a man he would be known as someone who took large and reckless actions, and he would often think that he had first been like this at Rebus Creek Road where he had first gone beyond what he was brave enough to do and changed himself because of it.

Coming back to Dial’s hut he found it changed as well-made beautiful with flotsam, jetsam, linseed oil. There was a twelve-foot wooden ladder, painted yellow and secured by butcher hooks above the sink. It hung parallel to the floor. Above the sink it held pots and pans, but the ladder went much farther along the golden wall and above the cushions it held no more than a single mustard scarf.

The boy could not know that this was the echo of a room at Vassar, a lost life with a Tabriz rug.

She was nice to him, but careful now, and sometimes playing cards he felt a cloud of sadness settle on them both, like bugs around a lamp. She didn’t love him the same as before, that’s what it felt like, as if he had stretched or broken something without meaning to. He was sorry for all the mean things he said. He wanted her to lay her hand on his shoulder, not that she didn’t, but less often, or not in the same way. She did not yell at him at all, as if she didn’t know him well enough for that.

Have you seen Trevor? he asked her.

You should visit him, she said, keeping herself apart from him, beyond his proper grasp.

But he had stolen from Trevor who had been his friend. He had gotten caught as well.

And yet these were also the best days he ever lived so far. Better than Kenoza Lake, better than being sad about his swimming grandma and standing in the blue moonlight listening to her breathe. In Sullivan County he had seen redneck boys through the windshield of his grandma’s car, kids throwing stones below the creek or bashing their bikes down through the woods. He had thought he would have to live behind the windshield.

But now he was the kid who had lived in the bush at night; he instructed the hippie kids how to make shelters in the bush, digging down in the black soil of the rain forest. They laid fishbone fern as he ordered, then sticks and branches on the top. He had never done this in his life before but no one knew that. He was a prince of liars. He won two dollars underwater. He could stay on the bottom beneath the waterfall and pick up pebbles in his teeth. The water was cold but it tasted of bracken and something else, maybe gold. He thought so definitely. The hippie kids were wild things with feet as hard as leather. They ran along the lacework trails. He made a divining rod from a wire coat hanger and then a map showing where there was gold and water. The gold he marked red, the water blue. As he drew it, he knew it would come true.

He got the last of the black dye cut off. His hair went curly from the water and was bleached white from the sun, like at Kenoza Lake.

Rufus had red hair. Sam had black. The boy and the Puddinghead were both the same color. The boy announced to them they were a gang.

He and his gang climbed the steep ridge behind Dial’s hut and went north as far as Cowpastures, as it was called. The boy led them back by Trevor’s which was pretty much the point of the adventure. That was when the boy discovered everyone was scared of Trevor. All the boy thought was how Trevor had been beat and broken and had no mother of his own.

But Rufus said, He has a gun, man, and would not go inside.

The boy entered on his own, recognizing all those smells of rotting and growing and the rich awful smell of blood and bone and Wappa weed. He discovered Trevor lying naked in his hammock listening to the war.

Can we have some carrots, Trevor?

Trevor cast his eyes at him, like a dog, embarrassed. How’s Dial, he asked.

She’s good. Can we have some carrots.

Help yourself, he said, closing his eyes.

The boy washed the carrots under the green hose. Trevor never told him not to.

I’ve got a gang, he said, to make Trevor look at him. Trevor kept his eyes closed.

That’s good. Who’s in it.

Sam and Rufus. As the cold water washed across his feet he missed the days when Trevor was his friend, and when he threw the green tops in the compost it was like doing something precious he would never be allowed to do again.

Who’s the other carrot for?

His eyes seemed closed.

Sara, he said. Where’s that ol’ horse? he asked.

I’m the bloody horse, said Trevor.

The boy stood in front of him begging to be seen. In his pocket he had the hundred dollars and all the other money he’d stolen from him. He could not carry it any longer.

I’ve got some money of yours, he said at last.

Trevor’s eyes stayed shut. I know.

I brought it back, he said, surprising himself.

That’s good, said Trevor.

Where will I put it?

On the table.

And that was all. The boy put one hundred and twenty-one dollars on the folding table with the melon rinds and took the carrots out to Rufus and Sam and the Puddinghead.

Squatting, eating carrots, in a state of indignation and relief, he heard that Trevor was a former sanitation worker, had a gelignite bomb below the road. He knew that anyway. He learned how Detective Dolce led a raid on him one Easter morning, and he learned the names of casuarinas, turpentine, flooded gum, ironbark, wattle, jacaranda, flame tree, lemongrass, bluetop, lantana and groundsel where the bees harvested their honey for Sara’s father. He ate lentils for lunch, got to put his head inside the steel boiler where Rufus’s father dried pawpaw to sell at the health food shop. It did not taste too good with all its water gone.

No one told him all this had been vacation and that Sam and Rufus would soon go back to school. Suddenly, there was no one left but the little Puddinghead.

Why can’t I go to school? the boy asked Dial.

Dial stood on a big metal drum painting the end wall with another coat of linseed oil. She splashed a lot of it around, on her shorts, her long strong legs, frowning very deep, squinting crooked. She did not even look at him until he came out with his question.