Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

A town, she said, it’s nothing. She would not slow.

What sort of town?

His strong hair was now disguised, dyed black, cut like a hedge, revealing a band of pale untanned skin around his neck. He rubbed at the crown and squinted up at the sign-CABOOLTURE-dumb black letters on a dumb white board, an ugly redneck sort of thing, he thought.

What sort of town, Dial?

Come on, she said. An Australian town.

He should have asked other stuff, Where is my father, where is Grandma, but sometimes it seemed she was sick of him already.

Morons, she shouted at the passing car. I hope you drown. She was so tall, so pretty with a big farm boy’s stride. His cup of tea, his flesh and blood, forever.

No one is going to pick us up here, Dial. They’re all going the other way.

Thanks, she said. I hadn’t noticed. She was not used to little kids.

The cars on the southbound road were bumper to bumper, their yellow headlights glowing the color of the Pan Am Building at dusk. It was sometime around noon. He wished she could find a place to curl up with jet lag.

We could go to that town, he said, or words like that. Maybe there’s a motel. That was what he loved the most, just to be with her cuddling while she read to him, her hair tickling his face.

There’s no motel, the mother said.

I bet there is, he said.

She stopped and turned.

What? he demanded. What!

Her hair had so many shifting tones you could never say exactly what it was, but her eyebrows were plain black, and when they pressed down on her eyes, like now, she was a scary witch.

OK, she said, that’s enough.

She had done this once in Port Authority. She had scared him then as well.

Around this time, a beat-up 1964 Ford station wagon, its paintwork gone powdery with sun and age, paused at the exit of the Golden Fleece service station on the Brisbane side of Caboolture. The driver revved the engine once and a flood of oil-blue smoke spread slowly across the pump island and dispersed into the scrubby field where two itchy-looking horses stood, their bony haunches directed at the fleeing cars.

Look at the bloody lemmings, said Trevor.

The boy did not know Trevor but he would be familiar soon enough, and for a damn long time after that as well, and he would always connect the name to that particular body-a strong man, sleek as a porpoise, sheathed in a good half-inch-thick coat of fat which seemed to feed his brown taut skin, giving it a healthy fish-oil kind of shine. He had a mashed-up ear, a short haircut, as short as a soldier’s, reddish brown, smelling of marijuana, papaya and mango. When Trevor was not naked, and he was naked every chance he got, he wore baggy Indian pajama pants, and when he smiled, like now, at the fleeing tourists, he revealed a jagged tooth.

They reckon destructive winds off Caloundra of two hundred K’s, said the driver. This was called John the Rabbitoh but was really Jean Rabiteau, of so-called French extraction. No one knew where he came from but he was a drop-dead handsome man of maybe twenty-five. He had high cheekbones, long black hair, brown eyes and a whippy wide-shouldered narrow-waisted body. He had a broad nasal accent and he smelled of cut grass and radiator hose and two-stroke fuel.

Bang! Trevor made a pistol with his hands which were as broad and stubby as his strong barrel of a body. Bang! Bang! He showed his chipped tooth and shot the drivers one by one.

Turning up the road toward the storm, the Rabbitoh stayed quiet about Trevor’s murders. He had his own thoughts involving the damned souls and the wrath of God. He hunched over the steering wheel peering up into the lowering sky and the nasty yellow light around its smudgy skirts.

We’ll be back in the valley by the time it hits.

This was a good guess, but it would turn out to be incorrect because, as the Ford passed the Caboolture exit, they saw the mother and the boy trudging north.

It was Trevor who called stop, Trevor who lived in a stockade at the top of a very steep unfriendly road, whose most common expression was “your alarm clock is your key to freedom,” who woke every morning at 5 a.m. and hid out in the bush until it was clear the police would not raid him, Trevor, who saw spies and traitors everywhere, said, Pick her up.

By now they were two hundred yards down the road, but John stopped.

Back up.

No need.

Trevor turned and saw Dial running at him, her yellow hair rising in snaky waves, her titties like puppies fighting inside her shirt.

Inside the Ford were smells which the boy could not have named or untangled-long wisps of WD-40 and marijuana, floating threads of stuff associated with freaks who made their own repairs, dandelion chains of dust and molecules of automotive plastics which rose up in the moldy heat, 1961, 1964, 1967.

At Kenoza Lake he had gotten accustomed to moldy paper, books with yellow pages, the rotting leaves in late November, the smell of dairy cows across the lane. As he scrambled across the busted sunken boneless backseat of John the Rabbitoh’s wagon, he tried to like where he had come. His dad would maybe smell like this exactly, underground.

You OK, baby?

I’m cool, he said.

As the first fat raindrops splatted like jelly against the windshield, the mother pulled him close against her generous breast. She was all he had for now.

Trevor, said the snaggle-toothed passenger, not looking at the boy. His skin was smooth and taut but his edges were all raw and poor, like he had crawled along a drainpipe to arrive here.

Dial, said the mother.

Trevor was now offering drugs and the boy was certain that he was through the doorway which had been waiting for him all his life. His grandma had always fretted about it, being stolen back by revolutionaries. She never spoke directly to the subject, so he had to listen through the wall-his history in whispers, brushing, scratching on the windowpane.

The edge of the storm took the car like a kitten in its mouth. The driver stared into the rearview mirror. Where you heading? he asked the mother who was already dealing from the pack.

She answered, North, which made the boy certain it could not be true. He had three wild cards which were very good. He drew his finger across his throat to tell her he would win.

The lemmings are going south, said Trevor.

What’s with that? She matched the discard pile, red on red.

Cyclone, said Trevor. Going to wash Noosa Sound back into the sea. Bang! Bang! Those houses are going to be walking round the sand like crabs.

Beach, he thought. He was down to three cards already. The mother’s hand was getting all weighed down.

You’re American? Trevor asked her. What we call a cyclone, you call a hurricane.

Uno, cried the boy. Triumphant.

I can’t read or write, Trevor announced, frowning at the card. He asked the mother, How far north?

The mother hugged the boy to her and he hid from Trevor’s inquiring stare. I don’t like to plan, she said.

She did not deal another hand. Instead she held the boy as they traveled through the storm, whispering that she loved him, stroking his head.

When he woke the car had stopped. It was raining on his legs and the mother was not there. Three doors were open shaking violently in the wind. Outside was dark, and the storm came inside the car and lifted the Uno cards and slapped them around the windows.

Dial!

He was alone, illegal, “on the lamb.” The rain hurt his legs like needles.

Dial!

He pulled himself into the seat, his bare legs retracted, his back straight, his hands balled into fists. He was way too scared to cry but when the mother finally returned he shouted at her.

Where were you?

Shush, she said, reaching out for him, but he drew away from her bony cold hands. Behind her the bushes slashed and squabbled in the dark.