The Mary Smokes Boys (7 page)

GREY TOOK HIS 1958 FC HOLDEN TO COLLECT HIS SISTER from school. A storm moved swiftly across the plain. Nine inches of rain had fallen already that month and the season’s leafy green sorghum was spread across the land. The sorghum pushed hard against rotting wooden gates at the roadside. Telephone lines sagged as though burdened by the weight of the enormous bruising sky. Leaves sailed to the ground through shafts of golden light, borne upon the storm wind.

There was a bang like a rifle going off and the truck tilted. He had blown a tyre. He pulled off the road. He took his jack from the boot but realized he had leant his wheel brace to Matt Thiebaud. The sky began to drizzle. Then it was pouring. He sheltered at the back of the corrugated-iron Windmill Fruit Market. He took a dark-brown cigarette from a crushed box in the pocket of his jeans and reshaped it. He leant on a pile of blue crates with his back to the highway and smoked and watched the storm empty on sorghum and barley stubble.

When the best of the storm was passed he put the cigarette under his heel and set out walking.

 

SHE HAD WALKED along Banjalang Street in the rain while the town children ran for shelter. She crossed the box girder at the edge of town. Her hair was stuck to her face when he met her on the brink of the highway proper. The colour of her hair seemed
like it should run like dye into her pale cold face. Her dirty, ill-fitting clothes clung to her bones.

She sighed deeply.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She took his arm.

 

SHE FELL BEHIND him. She pulled flowers from the Natal grass that grew along the edge of the highway and her hair blew about her face in the north wind. Dark-blue cloud was banked in the northeastern distance and lightning flashed and made the cloud a lantern. They met Grey’s truck and Irene stood by, watching the road and the rippling grass and the flashing clouds while Grey borrowed a wheel brace from an old ringer at the fruit market and changed the tyre.

 

A WOMAN WITH richly-dyed mauve hair and a swollen red face came charging out of their house when Grey and Irene were on the stairs.

“The restaurant opened twenty minutes ago,” said Angela Teal, tying her hair and scampering past them on her way to a night’s waitressing.

Grey stared out his bedroom window onto the rain-drenched country. The words “You must always look after me” came like pencils of light from that immense emptiness.

And he turned and saw she who had spoken them, standing in his doorway having showered and put on dry clothes. She came to his bed and knelt beside him and looked out the window. Grey smiled and patted down her hair. Then Irene smiled too.

 

THEY SAT BY the window eating melon cooled in an icebox and watching the claw of another northern storm grip the house.

The rain spattered hard on their iron roof and they shouted to be heard above it. The storm swept in gusts across the plain and emptied itself in wild flourishes across the green undulations
that Grey would always call Eccleston’s, whoever held the deed. The rain flooded the gutters and soaked the veranda.

By half-past five the storm was spent and left gilded clouds in its wake.

Through the window Grey saw the houseyard was overrun with milk thistle and buffel grass. The white flowers of a lemon tree fell on the wasted fruit of fourteen winters. Honeysuckle and cat’s claw contended with the wild jasmine for dominance over the jangling fences. Paddymelon vine overran what were once garden beds. These domestic things that had grown wild belonged to the gently-eroding memory of Grey’s mother.

There were few things left on earth that recalled the first Irene North.

Her daughter rarely asked about her. Even the copper-tinged photographs Grey gave her were afforded no special place in her room. They were left in drawers and never viewed. The first Irene’s piano sat idly in the corner of the living room. Her daughter was too flighty to ever seriously sit down to it, and there was no one to teach her and, as she protested, the hammers and strings had decayed and only a few keys either side of middle C were not dead or hopelessly out of tune. Very rarely she played a melancholy melody of her own making on the white keys, a melody that recalled the old church music Grey heard late at night on the radio, attached to strange foreign names like Léonin and Josquin.

Grey kept a single, favourite photograph of his mother, sometimes in his wallet, sometimes in his bedroom drawer or the glovebox of his truck. Occasionally he would sit on his bed on a golden afternoon such as this, in quiet contemplation of the girl smiling out of his barely-remembered past, smiling that eyes-closed-into-crescents smile that made her irresistible. In the photograph she was standing with his father, newly married, in a cheap cotton dress and fleece-lined pink corduroy coat against the winter, looking every bit the child she was. The picture
was taken six months before Grey’s birth. He tried to recognize his mother’s face.

Better than her face now he recalled her voice. Inconsequential phrases came most often to mind, these rather than what should have been the significant things she had said to him: worldly advice, declarations of love … Those must have been spoken, but were all forgotten. He remembered such things as a passing comment about his dirty hair, or a simple condescending joke of the kind that is shared between a mother and child … He remembered one winter afternoon when he had run off after school and not made it home until after dark. He had been lost in the woods. He did not yet know to follow the dry creeks and he had cried, not for fear but because his mother would be upset. At last he found his way home. Irene had searched the woods on the creek then returned to the house in case he was there. She had been about to set out in the dark when she heard his steps on the stairs. “It’s me,” he whimpered when he opened the back door. His mother wiped her tears and held him and smiled: “I know who you are, little boy.”

 

GREY AND HIS sister went to a wrought-iron bench beneath the stringybark in the yard. He dried the bench with an old shirt and they sat down. He rolled and lit a cigarette. Insects rose out of the grass into the golden light that clung fast to the trees and even to the air. The washed air meant a cool night. He did not want to go back inside. He was avoiding their father who would drink very gently and quietly by himself on his days off the railways now, drinking cheap whisky while Angela was at work or visited relatives in the city. Now that the rain had stopped, the man’s heavy presence could be felt within the walls, and Grey was eager for the energy of Eccleston and the boys. Mahony’s Boxing Troupe was in town tonight and Eccleston would fight.

“Please take me along.”

“It’s no good for you.”

But he did not want to leave her alone.

He went inside to tell his father they were going, and the man who was staring out his window and descending fast into the inarticulate final stage of afternoon drunkenness nodded and asked no questions.

HALFWAY TO TOWN WAS SOLITARY HILL AND THE DRIVE-IN movies, and Irene knelt backwards in the seat of Grey’s truck to see the Friday night reel alight.

“Can’t we go to the pictures?”

“Maybe later. Let’s see the fights first.”

“But I don’t like fights.”

“You said you wanted to come.”

She sighed.

“After the fights we’ll do something else,” Grey said.

“See the pictures?”

“Maybe.”

“Why maybe?”

“You don’t even watch them. You just fall asleep.”

She laughed. On another night she would not be dragged to the pictures.

“So we’ll go?”

“Maybe.”

 

THE BOXING TROUPE was set on an empty dirt lot behind the Railway Hotel. The scattered crowd only half-filled the lot. Grey picked out Matt Thiebaud, Raughrie Norman and Hart Bates. Bates was the younger brother of Rod Bates, the boy Eccleston fought on the night of the fires fourteen-years ago. He had taken to tagging along with Raughrie Norman since Norman began
spending three days a week shovelling sawdust at the sawmill for a little less than a living.

Mahony banged his bass drum and called the last of his fighters up to the scaffold where Eccleston already stood beside a shirtless raw-boned boy in jeans. On the other side of the boy was a pot-bellied gas worker who looked more than sixty. Standing beside the challengers were Mahony’s fighters: a young Italian-looking boy; a toothless Aborigine of indeterminable age, who Mahony said had lost his last six fights; and a short, heavily muscled man with grey temples and tattoos that ran the lengths of his arms.

Grey put his arm around Irene’s shoulders and pressed through the loose gathering. Eccleston winked at Irene from the scaffold and she gave him a half-hearted, nervous smile.

Inside the tent the crowd of high-school kids and district farm boys pushed hard up beside a thick rope that made a circle on the dirt. The rope would be the ring and the crowd the ropes. Irene held Grey’s hand tight as he pushed them into a good enough position to see Eccleston fight but not so close as to be dangerous. Often enough at these shows people in the front row were punched squarely in the face or trodden or fallen on.

“Can you see?”

“Yes,” she answered, but the light had gone out of her face.

Once in the ring, the same toothless black troupe fighter who on the scaffold had been on a six-fight losing streak Mahony announced as having won his last twelve by knockout. The silver-haired conman smiled and blew the whistle for the bout. The crowd howled as the toothless black fighter danced around the pot-bellied old man and did not throw a punch. The old man stood square and made circles with his gloves. The troupe fighter threw a haymaker that was intended to miss, and the crowd whistled and howled. He ducked the first serious punch of the bout and came inside with a quick combination, slamming the old man’s face and then stomach. The old man grimaced and bent over to let blood run from his nose and rubbed his
belly with his gloves. Mahony sneered. He did not like the fights to finish too soon. He spoke in his fighter’s ear. The old man shaped up again. Despite his lowered guard, the old man took a blow to the kidneys that was not meant to hurt him, yet he fell to his knees. The crowd jeered but the old man did not get up. He looked very sick this time. Grey looked down at his sister who was no longer watching the ring.

“I don’t like these people.”

She spoke just loud enough beneath the crowd for him to hear.

“All right,” he said, and he knew he had been a fool to bring her. “We’ll just stay to watch Ook.”

There was an emaciated official whose job it was to glove the local fighters, but Eccleston’s gloves were tied in a corner of the tent by Matt Thiebaud. Thiebaud pulled the gloves tight and got Eccleston to squeeze and open his hand while Raughrie Norman stood by to no purpose. Grey caught his sister peeking back through the bodies of the crowd at the broad-shouldered boy she knew well but who seemed strange to her now, slamming his gloved fists together and looking fiercely ring-ward.

The Italian-looking boy that Mahony called Kid Valentine limbered up in the human ring, eyes gleaming with hollow confidence. But Eccleston would not be rushed. When his gloves were tied the fight began.

Eccleston pushed hard and close into Kid Valentine’s body so the boy could not get a decent punch off and was forced to wheel back to regain his reach. With the boy unsteady on his back foot, Eccleston threw a short left hook into his mouth then hit him with his favoured right and blood flew into the air and onto the dirt and the troupe fighter fell into the crowd on his back. Grey felt a pull on his shirt and Irene looked up at him with confused and teary eyes.

“All right,” he said.

 

THEY WENT TO the town’s café and shared a toasted cheese sandwich and an iced coffee. In awhile Grey saw Eccleston come onto the street with the boys slapping him on the back and smiling. Twenty dollars a minute and three three-minute rounds. He had earned a decent purse for the night. Grey knew the boys would go to one or other of the bigger district towns now to squander the better part of the money between them. Eccleston looked around on the street for him. Grey did not call out. Eccleston had seen Irene was with him and would understand.

 

HE PARKED THE truck by the back fence and they walked to Lake Wivenhoe.

He did not expect to find the boys at the lake. He thought they would already be gone. By the time he was aware of them it was too late to turn back.

“Where were you this afternoon?’ Thiebaud called.

“I was there. I left early. Where’s Ook?”

“He’s comin later. He had somethin or other to do with Pos. The whisky run, probably.”

“Easy win?”

“Not so easy in the end. He had some fight in him, that bastard.”

Grey sat down on a hessian sack and Irene sat beside him. Wisps of red cloud drifted under a frayed grey blanket like loosed flares. Drowned eucalypts stood in the shallows of the lake and the rippling water slapped against them. Then the red clouds turned white and were shredded by the wind and the boys sat in a deep blue dusk.

“She go with you everywhere?’ said Hart Bates, leaning back with a bottle of beer.

Grey glanced at his sister. She tried not to look embarrassed. He glared at Bates and the boy turned away and hurled a stone into the lake. Bates said something under his breath to Raughrie Norman. It was not a great insult–only that there was no point carting around girls who were not good for the one thing girls
were good for. Still, Raughrie Norman shook his head and refused to answer.

Thiebaud threw an empty beer bottle that struck Bates on the shoulder. He talked through his cigarette.

“Hart, if you weren’t so clever as you are, you’d be an idiot.”

“Lucky for me.”