Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

Morning, he said, shaking out his trousers as he settled in.

The suit was daffodil yellow.

Hi, she said, but she could not look at him. She thought, He’s going to get cigarette ash all over it. They set off back up toward Eumundi from where they would take the Bruce Highway to Brisbane Airport, and all this time Dial could feel her passenger waiting to talk about his suit. She should have told him, Take the freaking thing off. Burn it. Where in all of the Sunshine Coast would you find a zoot suit? American Negroes wore them, Negroes long since dead.

Why did she not tell him? Because she did not want to hurt him? Was that really true? By the time she was dealing with the bullying trucks on the Bruce Highway, she had sunk into depression. The pleasure of the last few weeks turned out to have been the pleasure of very short-lived things, luminous wisteria, precious for being almost gone.

She had watched the boy collecting every moment of his self. He laid out his blocky dogged drawings of the garden and the beach. She did not ask the obvious, Won’t you miss all this. Won’t you miss me most of all?

For better or for worse she drove Phil to the airport, two hours to Eagle Farm, every minute of which she was tensed against the suit.

He was going down around Greenwich, he told her, and she did not correct him, to look up Max Gordon and maybe sit in at the Vanguard. Every restaurant in New York had huge plates of food. The white people were uptight, he said as if he himself were blue. Americans had no sense of “irony.” The spades were cool. He was going to hang out at Brownies where you got toot right on the bar but you got thrown out for swearing.

She passed the wide-verandaed store where they sold mud crabs to the businessmen about to catch a Melbourne flight. Phil told her all about this, the crab that had escaped and almost crashed a 727. She slid in beside the curb at Brisbane Airport, gave him his expenses in an envelope, and kissed his bristly oddly perfumed cheek.

After Dial got back from Eagle Farm she loudly wished that she had never asked Phil to do a thing. The boy wished too. He was not allowed to say how much.

But a week passed and nothing happened, then another, and after a while all that remained of Phil was Dial’s rolling eyes, and her drawings of the zoot suit, way better, he thought, than anything he could do.

Dial and Trevor and the boy went to the beach six days in a row. They found the best avocados on the Sunshine Coast, hidden from the road behind a stand of Pinus radiata on the Coolum road. Then, the next week, on the road in from Bli Bli, they came across an old foreign guy selling little fish, not sardines, but small. Dial got watery eyed and cooked the fish like she once cooked them for her father who, she said, was exactly five foot four.

Next morning there was rain on the roof and everyone stayed in bed for hours. Then there were a couple of days of steady rain and the boy witnessed the silky pale green stalk of pea unfolding, pushing aside the crumbling soil. In mud and drizzle he mulched the peas with Wappa weed the way he had learned from Trevor long ago, bumping up the paths with his pallet piled high. He patted down the black stuff, leaving a hole so every curling baby could reach the sky-feathery clouds, high and icy in the sci-fi blue.

No word from Phil.

The three of them walked up the hill. Trevor’s tanks were getting nice and full. That night they went to a moon dance at the so-called hall and the boy danced with Dial and then with the little Puddinghead. He learned an Irish jig although the moon was covered up by cloud. He wouldn’t be dead for quids. That was a fact.

Through all his happiness, the boy still carried the shame of the tooting horn. He could not say that he no longer wanted to go back to Kenoza Lake.

If Phil found Grandma he would send a secret telegram to say Dial had been forgiven for her crime. Hamid the postmaster would write down the telegram and put it in a pigeonhole. It would stay there until they asked, Is there a telegram? No one delivered telegrams to hippies.

He stayed in the car when Dial and Trevor went into the post office. When he saw them returning empty-handed his whole body went loose as a puppy’s neck.

There was more rain and Trevor’s tanks spilled over and the ford was flooded and they were just at home playing canasta when they heard the little Puddinghead crying Coo-ee and running over the sodden ground, splash, thump, as she landed on the back step of the hut, no Tinker Bell, her legs what you might call solid, scratched, soft white down all over her. The sodden thing balled up in her hand was the nasty thing, the telegram. Her dad had been given it the week before and he had come home to find the goats among the vegetables.

Brian says, the Puddinghead announced, shivering and holding out her dripping arms. He says, she said, it doesn’t look too urgent.

It was dark and overcast outside, dark inside too. The boy felt Dial shiver and saw her hold her arms around her breasts. She did not say a word.

Trevor lay down his canasta hand, faceup. Then Dial rose to her feet. She took the telegram from the small blonde girl.

Shit, she cried, and flung it on the floor.

The boy’s heart panicked inside its cage.

Dial said, Airhead.

The boy did not know what an airhead was but Dial looked like an earthquake, her wide mouth torn apart. She struck her head against the wall and a plate fell on the floor and broke. What a moron, she cried.

The Puddinghead turned and ran and they heard her splashing down the hill, bawling.

Trevor retied his sarong and walked to where the crumpled telegram lay dying by the doorway. He passed it to the boy to sound it out for him.

MET J. J. JOHNSON.

Yes, what is it?

He has met a trombone player, Dial said, kneeling beside the broken plate.

What does that mean.

It means he is a flake.

The boy thought, Maybe this is good.

The boy saw it happen-the telegram changing Dial’s mind.

He felt the heat of her blood as she rushed out the door. She came back with pearls over her chest and mud on her calves. Her court shoes were in her hand. She climbed up into his loft and came down with the jar of twenty-cent pieces.

Who is J. J. Johnson?

A trombone player.

Her hair was frizzed and mad looking. She wiped her calves with a dishcloth and asked Trevor where they should call from.

Is he really a trombone player?

Shush. Yes.

Trevor said there was a phone box up in the ranges beyond Maleny and this part the boy understood, or almost understood, i.e., the random pattern is your key to freedom. Do you understand?

Not really.

You scattered your dope plants through the bush. You did nothing that could be seen or heard from space. Do you understand?

It was yes, no, sort of.

Come on, baby, Dial said now, we’re going to take a ride. All this alarming activity brought back the bad feeling from the airplanes. He watched her huge long legs, galloping down the hill toward the Peugeot 203.

Trevor took the backseat and was very quiet, not eating, not winding up his radio, leaning forward so his little mouth was near Dial’s ear. He was as alert and watchful as he had been when the police crept across the paddock in their truck.

Where are we going?

Shush.

The boy thought, I am being sent back. His stomach got tight as he listened to them.

He can have my fucking money, Dial said.

Who, Dial?

Shush, she said, talking to Trevor quiet and fast. She would send him extra. He could spend all night at the Blue Note. Or the Gate. And get himself beat up on the A train if that is what he chose. He was way too big a flake for this. She always knew.