When Colts Ran (18 page)

Garbage fires burned where Tub Maguire and his relations lived in tin humpies. Going back to childhood any boil or infected cut experienced by Normie was traceable, according to Jenny, to the times her son rode with his father into the dark people's camp. Most of those times Normie stayed in the car, holding germ-free to the doorhandle while kids jumped on the running board, streaking their noses on the window glass, while Vince conducted the Gum Tree Sunday School. It was not very Christian of Jenny to knock these folk but a cold, congealed feeling in Normie's stomach came from her and there was no breaking out of a mother's way of being. The others Normie's age had mostly left school and, though he'd played cowboys and Indians with them when they were younger and dragged billycarts in the dirt, they were strangers now who lowered their eyes greeting Normie back from uni with a low howdy passing through town.

‘That woman is back,' said Jenny. No need to ask who. Normie knew it, she'd been on the train.

Kingsley Colts drove her to the cottage the Slims had bought after Jack's transfer to Sydney so that Eddie could stay on. Eddie had long finished school and left, but his mother kept returning. ‘Our Colts is paying attention to Mrs Slim,' said Vince. Colts left the house after midnight – was reported as a tomcat in the darkened streets. Now when Vince drove her Pamela sat in the car without speaking and he sat white-knuckled at the wheel. Normie knew all about it without having ever experienced it or even knowing such jealousy existed – in this way, at this age, in their position – the upheaval of vituperation in his father never clearer than when Normie saw Mrs Slim reach over and touch his father's hand; there was no great meaning in it, but saw his father's fingers grip hold and hang on. Saw the
please
on his lips. Saw the absurd knowledge, the
no
in The Crow's whole body as she stiffened, drew back and said
Thank you, Vince
, and closed the door when they dropped her off; saw the heaviness in his father's eye dragging his gaze after her.

‘What's eating you, son?' his father said as they drove away.

‘Nothin'.'

And it would be nothing too, but not quite yet. A nothing as fathomless as the depths of the longing heart. Just you wait Vince Powell in the frost-gardens of the Isabel, in this rugby season, when a man past sensible age plays second row in a game beloved of Heaven for the reason of grace descending in the trajectory of a leather ball.

For here is Vince now turning out for training on the shortest day of the year. His steady brilliance in the scrum and sudden, powerful passes from the forwards way out to the winger mark him best and fairest. The boys, Normie and Tim, are with him in their striped, shrunken, hand-me-down jerseys and aluminium-cleated boots, which they love to crackle on the concrete apron of the grandstand. Here is their lanky coach, Kingsley Colts, more willing than the broad run of men to do his bit; the consoler of grass widows leading them in slow breathy circuits of the oval under the bare branches of elm, now semaphoring his arms down to his toes with rapid scissoring ease, now up over his woolly-haired head. A couple of lonely floodlights press against the high, cold dusk.

All week Norman has blocked his father's attempts at pleasantry.

‘Put that to use in footy practice,' Vince declares.

With a scowl Normie takes him up on the Tuesday, when the forwards have done with the scrum machine and the backs are finished at callisthenics and Colts calls for the scratch game to begin, seven a side.

Normie is a nimble player who doesn't mind getting hurt. This evening he's wearing an armour of defiance and might do anything. Tim Knox joins him in the spirit of opposition and the two make coordinated attacks every time Vince gets possession. Away the boys go, getting nowhere, Vince flinging them off like fleas from a dog's back and laughing as he does in an argument about faith, where he is the Chosen One of an inflated leather ball. They attack him on either side but shepherding, Colts calls it, whistling the two back and corkscrewing his heel in the turf. The rule Colts applies amuses a couple of visiting players, big happy men, one a lesser cousin of the Knoxes from up Boorowa way, the other a New Zealander on a study tour of Upper Isabel studs, world famous to those who know about them, but looking like ruins to those who don't. The moment comes when the boys stand back panting and what they merely attempt is resolved. Harvey and Maltman are the names of the vengeful comedians. They capture Vince, still powering in their arms, and oblivious to the sound of Colts calling a halt with his trilling whistle they restrain Vince like a slippery bean and rotate him arse in the air and bring him down headfirst, breaking his neck.

Not a twitch, nor a stab of pain did Vince Powell feel after his body settled around him. A last cockatoo squawked in the trees. He was to speak of it later, describing a woozy feeling ushering in a life sentence. A beetle crawled in his ear and he couldn't scratch it. Just for that moment the whole field ran on and left him alone contemplating the first star. ‘Don't move him,' somebody shouted after the pack wheeled and returned standing over him.

‘Can't yer walk?' Maltman and Harvey asked.

Something broke in his son pushing through – ‘It's me, Dad, Norman. I'm here, I'm the one!'

The one what, it was interesting to wonder, as Normie didn't know which one himself, in cold panic he was, unless he meant the one who loved his father more than words could say, better, realer than the son of God who wasn't there for this.

Colts restrained his anger at the two attacking players. He clutched the offending whistle, tore the string from his neck and stamped the whistle into the mud.

‘It wasn't anyone's fault,' was being said in the back ranks, where Harvey and Maltman lingered, kicking at grass with appalling unease. It was the game young men of good family played in New South Wales and put above themselves. Sometimes the worst knock only defined rugby's brilliance.

Young Dr Macintosh came thrashing through the muddy gates of the oval in his Mini Minor. There were those who said he couldn't do enough and those who said he never did anything much. Answering no questions Mac unlaced Vince's boots, pinched his toes, examined his eyeballs with a pencil torch, arranged a blanket over him and placed a hand on his brow until the lights of the ambulance appeared. Next day Mac travelled to Sydney with Vince by plane, getting him seen by the best available at Royal North Shore, a brilliant orthopod whose secret was he walked the hard mile beside the stretchers of the disabled and about a year to eighteen months later farewelled his quadriplegics from rehab into a cessation of progress.

Somewhere in the scriptures the sick were told to take up their beds and walk. The halt and the lame to throw away their sticks, Jesus of Galilee walked upon water. There by the side of the road He tended the injured, the defiled, and from a few loaves and fishes fed the five thousand. A theology was founded on the idea of burdens being removed, it spread through history the antithesis of evil and spoke of itself 1,963 years later in Vince Powell's bedsores, in his problems with ventilators and nights of neglect when nobody checked his terrors.

*

Home on the Isabel they make an interesting pair: Vince Powell and Tub Maguire, the paralysed and the paralytic. Hardly a day passes without Tub nosing through the shrubbery along the back wall of the District Hospital and fooling the nurses with birdcalls, tawny frogmouth booms and Australian owlet-nightjar trills, and with imitations of Doc Macintosh's nasal orders. Swift as a stinko rat kicking the chocks from under the wheels of Vince's chair, Tub pulls him out of the place and goes racing, head lowered and bootsoles flapping. They drop down the hill into town at unsafe speed.

One day rattling over the forecourt of the church Vince is jolted clear of the seat and tumbles uselessly on the bricks, his head twisted sideways and his nose aligned with the cracks where weeds and ant mounds flourish. Another day he chokes in the coils of smoke that rise from Tub's fires.

On a scorching day during a phase of Vince's overstretched lifetime the two men take to the river.

Normie taking a break from writing up his PhD thesis, blazing achiever at twenty-two, fishing under ribbon gums on the opposite bank, head full of contesting theories relating to the everyday, sees them, the ugly wooden chair tilted on the grass and what Normie takes to be an apparition rising from the bank.
What the Jesus fuck
, he wonders.

It is Tub holding the wasted Vince Powell of football fame in his drunken arms with the intention, Normie is absolutely certain, of drowning him. They slither the gravel bend of the Isabel and sink into a deep, clear pool laughing. Tub drunkenly dunks his burden, noisily swearing, and Normie with cold certainty wills his father to die. It would be better.

But Tub is washing Vince, getting the shit off him, and that is all it is. Would that Normie knew what it meant. The thought hits him with the intimacies involved, the hairy bumcrack flashing and the flaccid balls of the man so bloody senseless. He doesn't understand his father and never will, and as for his being the face of courage, defiance, the badge of heroism carried for the burning sailors of the Indian Ocean, forget it.

Normie packs his fishing gear before he is seen. Another five pages before nightfall on the entotic lungfish theory. How they heard the dry land calling.

There comes a flailing, gasping sound and Normie turns to see his father swimming – spouting water like a fountain and restored to his sporting life.

Normie watches for a long while taking it in. Too bloody late, old man. Then he gathers his things and goes.

Not yet, nor for a long time yet, is Normie aware of his father's happiness inhabiting him. During Vince's sermons, so studiously ignored, Normie had no idea. Through the games with their hard-won advances and peerless, territory-gaining punts and faces in the mud tackles something snapped off. It grew another stalk. It learned to play and display on water. Now when lifting a leaf, following animal tracks, slicing through a bed of ants or watching a mob of kangaroos reclining on a hillside, notating their stand-up fights and leaps of mating ritual cross-referenced on graph paper tables, or advancing the lungfish theory, his recent insight, Normie knows how it happens. Through every small opening in life, through the tiniest, most restricted nerve ends, through rips and tears and tatters, life pours.

ELEVEN

FROM THE ROAD THE FOOD
was carried up to the climbers' camp site by Normie Powell and Claude Bonney in Mountain Mule packs weighing fifty to sixty pounds each – cheese, smoked oysters, chops, tinned meatballs, tinned spaghetti, red wine, Scotch whisky. These blokes were – Claude Bonney was – legendary for doing it hard. Fred Donovan could not believe it. There were plum puddings and powdered custard mixes. There was raisin loaf heavy as stone. There was camera gear and coils of rope and metallic climbing equipment. Some was carried by girls. Fred, wearing a rainbow headband, had carried none of it; he'd pranced along, leading the way. What he'd remembered as a brief scramble to the foot of the cliffs as a thirteen-year-old turned out twelve years later to be a mass of successive ridges, each steeper than the last and scattered with immense boulders among thickets of tea-tree, lomandra and prickly bush.

All Fred had was an army surplus haversack slung crosswise on his hip holding brown rice, nuts, dried fruit and a jar of gritty wheat sprouts. It was made to impress, Spartan being the word for going bush imparted on those occasions, somewhat mythical in their power being so few, when Buckler and Fred – permission for contact granted – had packed blanket rolls and taken their long drive south from the Near Far West, beaten their way through this same lump of bush to these same rocks rearing like pagan shrines east of the Great Divide.

That was back when Isabel Walls had no name, that anyone much used, but had a feeling about them, stately, beckoning, as the old man reported the first time he saw them – when he'd passed under their shadow on a winding dirt track, on his way home to Mrs B – saying he had something to show him.

Now these cliffs were known as a stash of hard pitches in the dripping clouds of mountaineering legend. Here you came to make a name for yourself.

Germans had come to the Walls, men who'd scaled the North Face of the Eiger and slogged up Carstensz Pyramid in Irian Jaya. They'd camped with Claude Bonney and made a fretwork of arrogant first ascents recorded in an exercise book placed in a tin box held down by rocks on a trig point. One of them, Wolfie Keuper, had stayed, becoming a wild-eyed, stringy-sinewed New Australian cherry orchardist on one of the lower ridges of the dirt road leading back towards the Junction. Bonney cursed him for not being where he'd said he'd be and when. The haughty alpinist had offered to set up fixed ropes. Claude wanted to show him off: a true curiosity of the human species. Game, these Krauts had insisted on eating, believing Australians made no sense leaving marsupials off the menu, which was where Dr Normie Powell had provided, with his zoology dissecting skills, cuts of small slope-shouldered, pot-bellied wallabies that abounded in the thickets, butchering them on a flat rock where you could still conjure a dark lichen of blood.

A blazing camp fire lit the overhang of the Isabel Walls Hilton.

Normie said, ‘What are you looking at, Freddo?'

Excess food was spread on the flat rock.

‘I'll admit, I'm starving.'

‘Take whatever you like, then.'

‘What's that sausage there next to the cheese?'

‘Salami,' said Normie.

‘How do you cook it?'

‘Cook it?' said Normie, unsheathing a knife with a heavy curved blade and a serrated spine for sawing bone and gristle. ‘You grill it. See here – take a slice, make it thick.'

‘Do I leave the skin on?'

‘Take it off or it won't swell, now get a stick, pin the salami to the end of the stick and hold it over the flames, not too close.'

‘Like this?'

Fred crouched over the smoking fire with a stick in his hands and watched the disc of meat sweating in the dim light. He had an audience of glowing grins around the fireplace stones.

‘You'll know it's ready when it starts swelling,' said Normie. ‘When it gets to the size of a golf ball, take it out of the flame, blow to cool, pop it in your mouth, swallow.'

Fred watched the meat shrivel and char and burn away. He mimed a gigantic tear over missing his tucker.

Before dark the still incomplete party, ten in number – eight men, two women – stood out from the overhang with their backs to tree ferns and the valley already inked by night and crisscrossed by gliding, carolling currawongs. Tipping their heads back they watched sunset withdraw from the vertical rock face, a fading blush. They ate and drank and talked as darkness thickened. Some planned the routes they'd take in the morning, who'd lead, who'd belay. The cameraman and his assistant drank rum and looked sullen. Their job would be to hang from fixed ropes in bosun's chairs while Claude and Normie found plant and animal curiosities in clefts and crevices, holding them to the lens. Fred watched a girl sidelong, Erica Molinari, who said she would stay in her sleeping bag. Morning mists were ferocious along the range, smeared thick as sheep's wool leaving a treacherous damp on the rocks until the sun burned through. Fred might even stay cocooned there himself, one eye on this Erica with her short blonde hair.

He asked, as they filled their tin cups at the spring, ‘You've been here before?'

‘No, Claude talked me in to coming. You have?'

Fred nodded, a little glumly, so Erica was on with Claude? Earlier when the party collected Fred from the all-stations at Lone Gum siding nothing seemed sorted between the sexes. Or that was Fred's hopeful impression, at least.

‘Yes, and I've climbed them,' he said, adding, to belittle the greats who were gathering: ‘On my own, solo.'

‘Gee.'

‘I was thirteen,' he said, telling her how he'd nimbled crosswise for the whole three hundred feet of vertical knobbly conglomerate to the top terraced ledge, where there were snow gums and a view back over the district wide as a fabled kingdom, Dunc Buckler the witness, that stocky old boast with his hands on his hips, watching wordlessly and shrinking away below until from Fred's perspective he was just a round hat with two feet poking out.

‘God,' said Erica. ‘Jesus. How could he bear to watch?'

‘He's like that. He won't say what he expects of you. But you feel it all right.'

Fred pointed to the gully where he'd come glissading down, to the spot where treetop to branch to ledge to sandy pile of leaves he'd swung himself down acrobatically to get the old man's nod. Later they were all drinking and milling about and he saw Erica staring at him across the fire, wondering as to his truth, no doubt. He worked his way back beside her with animal watchfulness. There was something keen, a jolt in that look of hers, unguarded. It left Fred wondering what she wanted from him. Then he saw that she shot an even more open glance at Claude. So maybe it would be on tonight between Claude and her, maybe that was the tension, in that strong man, knobbly-nosed and handsome, who left a gap when they sat together, even when Erica gave him what might have been a come-on whack with her hip – as if they had a conspiracy building, only to be gained by a mating ritual played off against a third-party bystander.

‘So you're an actor, Fred?'

‘Sometimes.'

‘That whole thing with the salami was brilliant, the way you set Normie up.'

‘But I didn't know,' said Fred.

‘That's even smarter, then, to hold your own, and get a laugh.'

‘It got a laugh,' he agreed.

‘You've no idea how great that is.'

Her hand touched his knee as she talked, but she kept her grey-blue eyes on Claude and his movements around the fire. ‘Have you heard of the Southside Players? They're famous for doing elaborate big-time productions –
Kiss Me Kate
,
Annie Get Your Gun
, along those lines – actually, something more ambitious now –
West Side Story
.'

‘Hmmm?' said Fred.

‘I tried for Maria, and guess who I got? Consuelo, Shark girl with dyed blonde hair, Pepe's girl.' She tugged a lock. ‘This isn't my real colour.'

‘It suits you but,' croaked Fred. ‘Starlet of the amateur stage.'

‘I'm not sure how to take that.'

He was sorry he'd said it – implying a loose interest in attraction, reciprocal without too much bargaining, something he'd found that had broken his heart last year (and might again). There was no personal judgement in it, who could blame longing, anyone's, but he couldn't hide knocking musicals and suburban drama groups for their predictable repertoire and synchronised group actions (dances, duets) dedicated to the frothing up of solidarity, a part for everyone who wanted their hour before footlights. There was no place in it for the absolute cry of lone transcendence that was the actor in Fred or maybe the architect, his other vocational urge.

‘We had devon at home,' he said, ‘wurst or fritz they called it in some places. I lived in pubs, the permanents made their own lunches on Sundays, sandwiches, they had the run of the kitchen. There was always cold meat and sausage. The worst – that's not a pun – was made from donkey meat and sweepings from abattoir floors. That was salami, or so I was told. I never ate it. That's where Normie had me, all I knew was it was raw and what's raw gets cooked.'

He could hardly see her face, then a flame would lick, a flashbulb puff when someone threw dry bracken on the fire. He felt his breathing rasp, his sinuses thicken. He wanted to throw himself on her.

‘More I'm an architect,' he said, ‘but I do that tour, Shakespeare for Schools, you might have heard of us, bringing culture to the backblocks. Next stop: Woop Woop.'

‘More you're an architect?' she threw his words back at him. She would have heard, perhaps, that he worked as a station assistant at Central Railway, the lowest rung of worker wearing the monogrammed belt buckle, tie, waistcoat and enamelled badge of the ARU unionist on the basic wage.

‘Architect, architecture – well, I studied architecture but failed third year after repeating second, when funds dried up. Help was denied me for my own good. Where money comes from's always a struggle: it comes, when it does, mostly from my father's wife, who blocks her ears to my existence but holds sway over me via the dole even though we've never met and never will if she can help it.'

‘Poor orphan Fred.'

‘I do have a mother,' he said. ‘Rusty, you'd like her.'

Erica sucked her lower lip as Claude came around the fire towards them, filling tin mugs with Four Crowns claret, frothing it purple with a low laugh, pouring Erica's, pouring Fred's, then moving away again with steady geniality.

‘He doesn't know I exist,' said Erica.

‘But he stood on your toe,' said Fred.

‘You noticed that?' said Erica. ‘I'm showing all this interest in you. You haven't asked me too many questions about myself, Fred Donovan.'

‘I know you're something at the museum with Norm.'

‘I'm totally and completely slave to Norm.'

Fred took his chances: ‘So where does Claude fit in?'

‘Norm offered me to Claude after hours. Lent me, gave me, threw me in his way. Now Claude wants me to stay with him. I have to decide.'

Fred looked at her. There was a sting of pleasure in the rhythm of her complaint. She couldn't mean what she said, the way it sounded – threw? lent? gave? – a starlet of the amateur stage wearing out the stairs to the Public Health Officer's rooms as the gon was a notifiable infection? Could that be her, like last year's girl slamming him around in a KO sequence of punches to the aorta before moving on to the next bloke?

‘I'm an illustrator, a naturalist-illustrator,' said Erica. ‘Claude's got a book, a documentary film and a TV series coming up – educational, with the ABC. He draws, outline of animal postures, and they're good, alive, you should see his mating kangaroos.'

‘I have.'

‘But more is needed and he can't do it all. I'm not sure I love nature as much as I'm meant to. As much as he needs me to. Or even if I love drawing for that matter.'

‘I'll bet you're good.'

‘I'm slow. Claude's always moving on to the next thing, all go, he's driven. I'm not sure I can keep up. All night in the darkroom's par for the course for Claude. As for Norm, lab work, field trips, writing it up, analysing on two or three fronts with the Barrier Reef thrown in, that's just lifeblood for Norm. He's the youngest PhD they have. If he leaves the museum it will be for a university chair. He's the next Alec Chisholm or Ronald Strahan, the next Jock Marshall or whoever. Everyone says so. Everyone loves him. Then there's little me. I'm just very, very ordinary.'

‘You're beautiful,' said Fred.

She said nothing, then said, ‘Thank you.'

Firelight softened and mingled the shapes of figures around the rocks. Erica sat on her rock with a stringbag as a cushion, wearing a sleeveless bush shirt, khaki shorts, her knees together, her elbows on her knees, her strong chin cupped in her hands and her eyes inadvertently shining.

‘I drink with them on Thursdays at the Gladstone Hotel,' said Fred. ‘Fast rounds. It's always schooners. Claude's told me everything I didn't know about anything I don't, but I've forgotten it already,' he trailed off.

‘Like what for example?' said Erica, as if this might be about her, or someone else, a rival he was told not to mention. He wished it was. Claude had the dilemma of a Shakespearean king – he had the queen; but other men wanted to murder him.

‘Sugar gliders,' Fred said, caught in a situation where – but this was Fred – he was fundamental to the drama but irrelevant to the climax.

‘Sugar gliders, I love them. Petaurus, rope-dancers, lovely things.'

‘Rope-dancers,' Fred saw the word, and Consuelo jiving with Pepe like a lovely snake.

‘Girls don't get asked on Thursdays – have you noticed? The boys come round to the flat later, drunk, throwing pebbles at the windows, begging to be let in.'