The Complete Stories (29 page)

Jack still spent the day with his friends down at the beach, but in the evenings he and Milt played Chinese Checkers or Fiddlesticks, or the three of them played Euchre, or Milt worked with him on the crystal
set he was making while his mother read. They went fishing at Deception, roller-skating at Redcliffe, and some afternoons he and Milt went off alone to the Redcliffe Pictures. Milt was crazy about cartoons. He sat with his long legs drawn up, cracking peanuts, and afterwards acted it all out again for Jack's mother—Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Goofy, Pluto—running about all over the room being a rabbit, a tom-cat, a mouse, and reducing her to helpless laughter as she never would have been by the real thing. Once, walking home the beach way, he told Jack about the fossils he wanted to study: palaeontology—bones. He got excited, threw his own bones about, arms and legs, and Jack had to run backwards on his heels over the wet sand not to miss any of it, since so much of what Milt was telling was in the dance of his Adam's apple, the electric spikes of his crew-cut hair.

“How do you do it?” Jack shouted, excited himself now and breathless with trying to run backwards fast enough to stay in front. “How do you work it out? What they were like? If they've been extinct for millions of years? If all you've got is a few bones?”

“Logic,” Milt told him, looking wild. “There are laws. We don't get this way by accident, you know. We aren't just thrown together.” Though the way his limbs were flying about, as if they were about to dislocate and break loose of his frame, might have denied it. “The body's got laws, and the bones follow ‘em, just like everything else. It's a kind of—grammar—syntax. You know, everything fits and agrees. So if you've got one bit you can work out the rest, you can—resurrect it. By logic. But also by guessing right. There's a lot of guesswork involved, hunches. You've got to think yourself inside the thing, into the bones.”

It had all gone too fast for Jack. Running backwards wasn't the ideal way to hear something so important and take it in. But he felt, just the same, that in this shouted exchange he had got hold at last of an important clue, one that convinced him because, in some obscure part of himself, he already knew it. When they fell into step again, saying nothing now, just letting the fall of the waves fill the silence between them, they were together, and in a way that utterly settled him in his own skin.

It was a happy time for Jack's mother too.

A lively girl with ideas of her own, she had been brought up
to despise a view of women in which dependency and a sweet incapacity for everything practical were the chief attributes of the eternally feminine.

“For heaven's sake,” she was fond of saying, "what's the advantage, I'd like to know, of sitting around in the dark until some
man
comes along who can fix a fuse.”

She knew how to fix a fuse, and use a soldering iron, and how to bowl overarm and putt a ball. She had done these things when Jack's father was there, and when he was gone had taught Jack to do them, but with some concern that in having only her to learn from he might be missing something, some male thing, beyond the mere acquiring of a competence, that would ground him in the world of men. So she was glad to have Milt around. Glad too that Jack had taken to him. He had a new sense of himself that she found attractive—she had found it attractive in his father, whom he more and more resembled—and she was grateful that Milt, out of a natural generosity, should have reserved for Jack something that was special. It was part of Milt's instinct for things that he knew how to draw back and leave room for something special between Jack and herself as well.

“No good asking you to play,” she would tease when they set up for cricket. And her mocking tone, which Milt only pretended not to recognise, kept him lightly in view, even as it lightly excluded him.

It was a tone Jack had never heard her use till now. And once he was alerted to it, he noticed something else as well. A little shift in her way of speaking—it was only on certain words—that was an imitation, a mockery perhaps, of Milt's. It occurred to him, but so fleetingly that he was barely conscious of it, that if he could determine which words, he would have a clue to what they talked about, Milt and his mother, when he was not there.

Meanwhile Milt's replies, all Yankee ceremony, had an edge of their own.

“No use at all, ma'am. None at all.” And as he said it he would lie back, extend his long legs and, with his arms folded under his head, prepare to take a nap.

He was grinning, so was Jack's mother, and Jack had the feeling that their game of two-man cricket was not the only game in play When his mother got hold of the bat she hit out with a flair, a keenness and accuracy, that had him running all over the yard.

In time he came to feel uncomfortable with all this. There was something in his mother's heightened glow on these occasions, when Milt lay sprawling in the grass, a loose spectator, not playing but none the less exerting a quiet attraction, that was more disturbing to Jack's fixed idea of her than other and more obvious changes—the ribbon she wore in her hair when they went skating, her acceptance now and then of a stick of gum.

He had a good think about it.

Milt, he decided, lying off to the side there, broke the clear line of force between batsman and bowler. His mother was too aware of him. Even more, he unsettled the map Jack carried in his head, in which the third point of their triangle, however far out of sight it might be, was already occupied.

They would be out on the pier at Deception, all three, their hand-lines trailing, stunned to a heap by the sun and with the glare off the water so strong that when you looked out across it everything dazzled and disappeared. Above the lapping, against the piles, of waves set off by a distant rowboat, Jack would catch a voice he could no longer characterize naming the peaks of the Glasshouse Mountains on the opposite shore: Coochin, Beerwah, Beerburrum, Ngungun, Coonowrin, Tibrogargan, Tiberoowuccum. Smokily invisible today in their dance over the plain, but nameable, even in a tongue in which they were no more than evocative syllables.

“Hey, kid! Jack! Don't jerk the line like that. Take it easy, eh?”

That was Milt. And his voice, with its unmistakable cadence, was sufficiently unlike the one Jack had been listening for that it was a comfort. It so plainly did not fit.

A
MONG
J
ACK
‘
S
special friends this year were two brothers, Gerald and Jamie Garrett, who were new down here. Tough State School kids, they swore, told dirty jokes, and could produce prodigious gobs of spit that they shot like bullets from between their teeth. But what gave them a special glamour in Jack's eyes was their father's occupation. Back home in Brisbane, Mr. Garrett was the projectionist at the Lyric Pictures where Jack went on Saturday afternoons, and was responsible as well for putting up the posters that appeared in three places on Jack's
way to school and which on Monday mornings he read, right down to the smallest print, with an excitement that cast a glow over the whole week ahead.

What they proclaimed, these posters, was the existence of another world, of such modernity, such intensified energy and speed, of danger too, that their local one of weatherboard houses and bakers’ carts, unweeded pavements, and trams that filled the night sky with electric sparks, seemed by comparison flimsy and becalmed. America, that world was called. It moved on numbered highways at a hundred miles an hour. It was twenty storeys high, all steel and glass. It belonged to a century that for them was still to come. Jack hungered for it, and for the dramas that it would unfold, as for his own manhood.

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.