His Illegal Self

31

She could have just left him outside a police station. But she could not leave him anywhere, not even, finally, with Trevor Dobbs. She hated being a good girl, but that was what she had always been, the one who would work the meat grinder late at night, or deliver the sausages up and down I-95. She was a dog on a leash, even now, walking up to the oil drums and then back again to the net and back to the drums. She was tied to this little rich boy. At the same time she knew she could not, would not, permit this to be her life.

She squatted with her back against the trunk of a gum tree, but this caused bits of peeling bark to fall down her back. Then small black ants crawled up her legs so she returned to Trevor’s compound.

From the doorway she could clearly see the missing Che Selkirk loading black hairy matter onto a sled and dragging it along a path to a vegetable plot where he pulled the load apart. He was a strange little thing. He had a gorgeous sly shy smile, too much like his father’s. She was touched by his seriousness, how he placed the weed on the freshly watered soil. Thinking him safe she finally walked back down the hill. After only a short time she began gardening herself, but the soil dried so quickly and she had no seed. She could not concentrate on anything. Every little while she went back inside to check, but there was no boy, only a heavy viscous emptiness, a blanket of air, inert surfaces from which tiny black flies rose, her furies.

Back in the garden, Buck caught a frog and tormented it until she had to kill it with a spade and the frog cried and then was still and mashed. All small forms of life, in their wiggling squirming resistance, were like the boy.

When it was very hot she lay beneath the mosquito netting and Buck meowed until she picked him up and let him in. Bell or no bell, he had a blue fluffy feather in his mouth.

Dial slept too long. She was running the instant she left the hut, down to the road, up the hill. Raw throated, dry lipped, she slipped through the nets of Trevor’s bunker. There they were, sitting outside the trailer, the boy in a big barber’s chair, the man on a fruit box. Trevor took a knife and sliced a watermelon which he held out, a huge dripping slab, toward the boy. The murmur of the boy’s voice brought a spasm. Did he ever talk so much to her?

She did not know how real mothers did anything, how they could live without being driven mad.

So she crept away a third time, believing that a mother would not wait like a lump of dead fish inside her hut while the valley slowly lost its light. It was almost dark when she finally walked back up the hill and by now she was angry with the boy for tormenting her and with Trevor for not knowing he should send him home by dark, and with herself for being so careless with her life.

Dark caught up with her on the road. Just past the rusty Volvo she was forced to hold her hand out to feel her way in lurching space. After a while she saw a light weaving and shining through the silky pale-trunked trees and at first she was pleased but then the light went out. She waited for it to come on down the road and find her, standing in what she wrongly judged to be the middle of the track.

Then the light was on her, blinding, blue as lightning in her face.

She held up her hands against its brutal flood.

Who is it?

No one spoke, but the light was hard and cold as ice. Once more she was afraid.

Trevor?

Hello Dial, said the boy.

Oh you little bastard, cried the mother. You little shit. Those were her words. Plus she struck out at him, and knocked the flashlight so hard it bounced and rolled into the ravine, twirling and spinning through the bush until it was nothing more than a glowworm in lantana, far, far below, and they had to walk home in dark and bitter silence.

I’m sorry, Dial, the boy said.

That’s OK. I’m sorry too. She could feel his frailty, his beating small boy heart.

Did you hurt your hand.

She could not speak, shaking her head in the dark, shamed by him.

In the hut he showed her what he had been carrying on his back, papaya and melon and pumpkin and eggplant. As he lay the gifts across the table she lit the bright hissing propane and saw his sideways smile.

So, she said, as she set to work on dinner. What did you and Trevor talk about?

Nothing much, he said.

Did you have a nice time?

It was OK.

She was dumb enough to be hurt by his reticence. She was smart enough to know that it was dumb. She made a ratatouille but he was asleep before it was ready, his arm thrown sideways off his cushion, his wide red-lipped mouth almost exactly like his father’s. He was about a billion dollars filled with buzzing secrets and she told him, quietly, secretly, she loved him, and carried him off to the other hut where it was easier to get him into bed.