Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

Then she jumped off the drum and did that crouching-down thing.

What, he demanded nervously.

She brushed his hair with her oily hand.

It’s the law, he said. I have to go to school.

She gave him a lopsided smile that made her nose look big and rubbery. It’s the law, she said, to lock me up for kidnapping.

She was a Turk, she said so. A bitzer. He stared at her, into her strange eyes, not knowing who she was. He wished she would love him again, but when she reached for him, he stepped away.

Where is Buck? he asked.

She did that smile again.

I’m a teacher, she said. I can teach you better than anyone in that town.

He stayed staring at her until she looked away and went back to painting. He stood on the back steps awhile and looked up the hill into the gray tangle of the bush. Flies buzzed around his face and knees as well. He was suddenly, all at once, bored by everything. There was nothing to do but go to the candle factory where he found the little Puddinghead playing with a doll in the dirt beneath the kitchen. Together they walked along the creek, not saying anything, and when they ended up back near Dial’s house, the Puddinghead said, Let’s make a hole.

The boy had invented digging holes and now he was sick to death of it, but he took her sticky little hand and went into the rain forest and began to mess around, pulling rocks out of the tangled web of roots and dirt. It must have been a river once. He didn’t bother telling her. She took off her clothes so they would not get dirty and found a piece of shale to chop at the roots.

While they were digging the boy heard Buck meow. The Puddinghead looked at him but he did not want to talk about Buck. He had been told bad things already. Maybe they were true, or maybe not. Now he heard his meow and he had the idea then that they could make something called a blind. Grandpa Selkirk made blinds to shoot waterfowl.

The Puddinghead thought she would find a dinosaur bone and kept on talking about it. He did not listen but she worked very hard and before too long they started to collect sticks for the roof, going into the lantana to cut flexible pieces you could weave. That is where they were, not six feet from the Peugeot, when a white Land Rover arrived, a blue light on its roof.

Queensland was a police state run by men who never finished high school. They raided the hippies in Cedar Bay with helicopters and burned down their houses. They parked out on Remus Creek Road at night and searched the hippie cars without permission from a judge. So if you thought you came to Remus Creek Road to get away from being illegal, that was just a joke. The boy knew this. Dial must have learned it when the police arrived to add her to what they called their little map.

When the boy saw their Land Rover, he abandoned the Puddinghead without a word. There was no point in warning Dial. He cut across the rain forest to the yellow track. He was a good runner but the hill was steep and the sun was hot and by the time he got as far as the Volvo and the turkey he had a stitch.

It did not take the police long to threaten Dial and get her name and date of birth. Now the boy could hear the Land Rover rumbling and rolling over the rocks and potholes not so far behind him. He had no choice but to slip off the scary steep side of the road and hang on to a wattle root. He heard a voice above the engine saying, Egg bloody sandwich.

If they got to Trevor first the boy thought he could still start the engine on the ice-blue car and have it running. That’s why Trevor had taught him, obviously. He pulled his scratched and bleeding limbs onto the road, and followed the police through a settling cloud of dust. He could only walk by twisting sideways, pressing his hand into his stitch, but when he understood that the police had headed down toward the left he hurled himself into that blurred piece of nothing which was made by camouflage nets and trees. Trevor was chopping up tomato stakes but he let the boy take him by his muddy hand, lifting a fat rucksack off a rusty hook, slinging it across one shoulder, as he followed him through the garden up onto the saddle until the boy tripped and fell. Then Trevor carried him. They breathed together, the boy’s purple eyelids drooping, feasted on exhaustion. They traveled with one mind through the sharp cutting shale and into the paddock with the purple seeds, skirting around the fence line where no satellites could see. Here Trevor lifted the barbed wire and the boy rolled under and then held up the wire in turn. Then they both walked, hand in hand together, down toward the hidden car, ice blue, cyan blue, turquoise-Trevor called it all these things.

The boy expected they would drive now. Trevor pushed him behind the steering wheel. Che touched his fingers against the silver horn ring which held the tiny reflection of his frightened face.

Trevor opened the rucksack and found a bag of dried pawpaw and a khaki water canteen like the one Cameron took to camp.

The cops were at your place?

All the boy could think was, Drive.

Did they ask for me? Trevor was studying the pawpaw, turning it this way and that. Did they say my name?

I only saw their truck.

They saw you!

No! he cried.

Jeez, calm down.

But the boy’s own father stopped loving him when he led the FBI to his door. No, he said. He held out his hands to show Trevor all his wounds.

I know what they did, Trevor. They got Dial’s date and place of birth.

Did you hear them?

It’s what they do, Trevor.

Is it?

Yes, then they turned down the track by the big drums, Trevor.

Trevor poured water into the palm of his hand and spilled it on the boy’s head, patting him. That’s the Rabbitoh’s place, he said. They’ll have a nice long chat with him.

Are we going on the lamb, Trevor?

Trevor sprinkled more water on the boy’s hot skin.

We should get started, Trevor. He opened his door, to let Trevor slide over and take the wheel. He was thinking they could get money for his ticket from the stash. They were together now.

Trevor clicked the door shut. There’s a path all the way through from my place to Eumundi.

That’s what I was thinking too.

It isn’t on the maps. It’s on the old maps, not the new maps.

That’s what I thought.

They’ll go to my place. They’ll steal some vegetables to take home to their wives. They won’t come over here.

But we have to go.

Trevor was chewing on his smile. Don’t panic, Tex. Remember Pearl Harbor.

The boy heard paddy tax. He would have asked but Trevor was slowly lowering the window.

What is it?

Shut up.

Then he heard the Land Rover lumbering toward them and Trevor slipped away like a shadow through a net. When he did not return the boy spilled more water on his face and made his pants wet. He waited a good long time, but no one came back. Then he pushed through the dry brambles to get a proper view. The Land Rover was really close-a man’s hairy leg sticking out the passenger window.

His heart was walloping and whaling as he got back behind the wheel, ready to turn the key when ordered.

He touched the key. He turned it one click, just to have it set up. It was like a.22 trigger, first pressure, then second. He learned that from his grandpa.

He heard a magpie, flies buzzing inside the car. Then voices.

Once more he pushed through the dried brush and kneeled down behind the dead wattles. A policeman was kicking at the grass.

He returned to the car and sat with the glistening horn in front of him. He traced his finger around it and he could see his thumb reflected bigger than his nose. He guessed it had two positions like the key, like the trigger. He pressed to find the first position. The horn blared.