David Malouf - The Complete Stories

He had looked for some reflection of all this in his mother's escorts. But once you had got to the end of whatever magic could be extracted from “Santa Fe" “Wisconsin” “Arkansas,” they had turned out to be ordinary fellows off farms, or small-town car salesmen or pharmacists’ assistants. As for Milt, he was just Milt. But in Mr. Garrett the power of that projected world was primary, and he found it undimin-ished in Gerald and Jamie as well, who would have been astonished to know that in Jack's eyes they were touched with all the menacing distinction of the gun-slinger or baby-faced killer.

There was a third brother. Arnold he was called. A year older than Jack, he was spending the first three weeks of the holidays at their grandfather's, out west. Gerald and Jamie, as if they needed his being there to know quite how they stood with one another and the world, were for ever evoking his opinion or using his approval or disapproval to justify their own. Before long the tantalising absence of this middle brother had become a vital aspect of the Garretts as Jack saw them, and he too found himself looking forward to Arnold's arrival. “Arnold'll be here next week, eh?” Then it “Saturday.” “this arvo.”

But Arnold, when he got off the green bus and was there at last, was not at all what Jack had expected. The quality he found in the others, of menace and tough allure, far from being intensified in this third member of the family, appeared to have missed him altogether. Blond where the others were dark, and tanned and freckled, he seemed dreamy, distant. When they told him stories of what had been, for them, the high points of these last weeks, he listened, but in the way, Jack thought, that adults listen to kids. Not disdainfully, he was too easy-going to be disdainful, but as if he could no longer quite recall what it was like to be involved in adventures or crazes. When he left school next year he would be out west permanently. On the land.

His most prized possessions were a pair of scuffed riding boots that sat side by side under his camp-bed and a belt of plaited kangaroo hide that cinched in the waist of his shorts with a good seven or eight inches to spare. He had ridden buckjumpers. He could skin a rabbit.

He did not boast of these things. He was not the sort to draw attention to himself or be loud. But the assurance they gave him, the adult skills they represented, set in a different light the excitements that had marked their weeks down here; even the abandoned fuel tank that had drifted in one afternoon and which they had believed, for a long, breathtaking moment while it bobbed about just out of reach, might be a midget sub.

“Anyway,” Arnold assured them, "them Japs wouldn’ get far, even if they did land. Not out there.” And he evoked such horizons when he lifted his eyes in the following silence that the walk to Redcliffe or Deception, even the bush way, seemed like nothing.

Arnold Garrett had the slowest, drawliest voice Jack had ever heard. Secretly, high up on the diving-board or in the privacy of his room, he would reach for the growling flatness of it, "Aout theere,” in the belief that if he could get the tone right he might catch a glimpse, through the other boy's eyes, of what it was.

There were times, listening to Arnold and narrowing his eyes in the same heat-struck gaze, when Jack felt turned about. Away from the Bay and its red rocks, away from their gangs, their games, this particular school holidays and everything to do with being eleven, or twelve even, towards—

But there he came to a barrier that Arnold Garrett, he felt, had already crossed.

They were sitting around after a late-afternoon swim. Jack was in the middle of a story, one of those flights of fancy with which he could sometimes hold them, all attention, in a tight group, when Arnold said lightly: "Hey, are you a Yank or something? You talk like a Yank,” and he repeated a phrase Jack had used, with such dead accuracy, such perfect mimicry of Jack's pitch and tone and the decidedly un-local accent he had given to the otherwise innocent “water,” that the whole group, Gerald, Jamie, the Williams boys, laughed outright. Jack was dumbstruck. It wasn't simply that it was, of all people, Arnold who had caught him out in this small defection from the local, but the thing itself. He flushed with shame.

“It's his mum,” Jamie explained. “She goes out with one.” He said this in a matter-of-fact way. There was a touch of scorn but no malice in it.

“She does not,” Jack shouted, and even as he flung the insinuation back at them he saw that it was true.

“Doesn't she?” Jamie said. “It's what Dolfie Schindler said. What about—”

But Jack, his face burning, had already leapt to his feet. Filled with the crazy conviction that if he denied it with his whole body it would cease to be true, he struck out, though not at Jamie. Honour would not allow him to strike a younger boy.

“Hey,” Arnold yelled, throwing him off. “Hey! Are you crazy or something? Lay off!” Then, seeing that Jack could not be stopped, he weighed in with his fists and they fought, all knuckles, elbows, and knees, tumbling over one another on the coarse seagrass and pigface in a flurry of sand. When it was over they were both bloodied, but neither had won. “You're crazy,” Jamie shouted after him as he strode away.

He was still shaking. Not only with the passion of the fight and the hard blows he had taken, but with the shock of what he had discovered, which the furious involvement of blood and limbs and sweat and breath had failed to mitigate or change. He went and sat under the pump where the campers came to fetch water, tugging on the bit of looped wire that worked the handle and letting gush after gush of chill water pummel his skull. He sat with his arms around his drawn-up knees, uncontrollably shaking, and the tears he shed were hidden by the rush of water, and the din it made replaced for a moment the turbulence of his thoughts.

“Looks like you picked the wrong guy,” Milt remarked when he came in. One cheek was raw and he had the beginnings of a black eye.

“Jack!" his mother exclaimed. “This isn't like you.”

He couldn't look at either of them and shrugged his shoulders when they asked if he was all right.

They treated him gently after that. Warily. Trying not to make too much of it. As if, he thought, they preferred not to know why he had been fighting, or not to have it said. It was Mrs. Schindler who tended his cheek. But when she tried to cuddle him, he slipped out of her grip, and when Dolfie, at the end of their meal, waited as usual for him to help carry scraps out to the chooks, he turned his back on him. “You can drop dead,” he hissed. His only comfort was his wounds.

At either end of the beach at Scarborough was a twelve-foot-high slippery-slide, a tower of raw saplings with a ladder on one side, its rungs so widely spaced that you had to be nine or ten years old to climb them, and on the other a polished chute. On the platform between, four or five kids could huddle, waiting their turn and threatening to shove one another off, or sit with their legs dangling while sunlight crusted the salt on their backs.

For a long time Jack had been too young for the slippery-slide. Then, last Christmas, when he was ready, he had been shocked to discover that he had no head for heights. The climb was all right; so was the slide. The bad bit was having to wait on the platform. In his dream he found himself alone up there with a king tide running.

He was in deep trouble. Dark water rushed and foamed out of sight below, the flimsy structure shuddered and creaked. Worse still, the saplings that supported the platform had done their own growing in his sleep, so that when he shuffled forward on his knees to look over the edge, his head reeled. How had he found the courage to climb so high, to make his arms reach across the space between the rungs? No wonder his whole body ached. In the end there was nothing for it but to jump himself awake. It was the only way down.