His Illegal Self

39

Dial fell asleep, curled up in bed, alone with her hammer and her molting pillow and the mosquito net pulled like a veil across her bare carpenter’s knees. The boy was miles away when she awoke. She had no clue, having slept until that hour of the afternoon when the hot sun fell directly on the corrugated iron, heating it until it pulled angrily against its hippie fastenings. Bang-the roof exploded. Who would have known that bloodless things could cry like this.

Her eyes opened to see Trevor Dobbs standing silently beside the bed. She thought-He has come to tell me the boy is going to live with him. She watched his smile, thinking he had no idea how cruel he was, or what he had destroyed. He seemed dry and cool in all this unrelenting heat, an English apple, mottled but healthy.

A fly had found its way inside the net. When it crawled along her neck, she killed it.

She thought, He has come to collect the boy’s clothes.

They want to talk to you, he said.

FBI, she thought. She had been waiting for this.

Trevor pulled aside the mosquito net and she let him take her hand as if she were an invalid. Her mouth was dry as chalk.

They’re your neighbors, he said. You’ve got to talk to them. They can invalidate your sale. He said in-vwelidate, softly.

This caused some considerable confusion as Dial began questioning the legal reach of the FBI.

Your neighbors. Jeez. Who did you think?

So she agreed to meet with the neighbors, but like a prisoner with her hands clasped behind her back, following the weirdly graceful feral in falling white pajama pants. They went through the long grass, across the road, down to the shaded creek and then beside the shallow runs where Trevor jumped lightly from rock to rock ahead of her. Children had made dams, lines of rocks, memorials that caused her to catch her breath.

The stream was just thirty yards from her hut but she had never walked here before. She never showed this to the boy before she lost him to Trevor Dobbs. There were corners of the mossy damp that made her sad. Of course it was her papa. He would have loved this, a damp, green dappled part. He was from Samos, an island with a green half and a dry half. Peaches on one side, priests on the other. In New England he had found a mossy-smelling home, running through leafy tunnels with his beagles and his gun. They had hunted cottontails together.

Remus Creek was a paradise with ferns of all varieties, palms, creepers with the skin of baby elephants, its water shallow but perfectly clear so that the small pebbles shone red and yellow in among the rippling gray. Poor Papa.

They arrived at a stand of flooded gums, tall thin eucalypts with shiny white-green bark and there in front of them were the foundations for the rotting buckled floor and when she followed Trevor up the wide wooden steps she thought of platforms in the jungle, Aztec, Mayan, sites of sacrifice.

The mumbo jumbos were waiting for her in a semicircle and Trevor went to sit at one end next to Rebecca leaving Dial alone, squinting into the sun.

Rebecca said, We have a rule, and in those four words Dial felt the bilious bitter taste of her dislike.

Dial did not answer but she saw that not even pretty Roger would catch her eye. The girl with the starving chest was playing with her toes.

Rebecca said, You know what I’m talking about, Dial. She looked sideways at Trevor as she spoke. Again Dial thought, She’s sleeping with him.

Yes, said Dial, you said you had a rule.

About cats.

Yes, you said that before.

Yes, and you said there was a lawyer who told you not to worry, but he was wrong, Dial. He admits he was wrong, said Rebecca. She held out a letter.

Dial nodded at the letter but went no closer to accepting it. She was thinking, I cannot take this shit. I will not. She was also thinking about the boy who had chosen to live up the hill with Trevor. His clothes would be removed as if he’d died, nothing left behind, not even a plastic toy to break her heart. She thought, I do have to take this. Then she thought, not for the first or last time either-This is where I’ve ended up.

So what do you want me to do? She tried to smile.

Get rid of the cat.

I take it none of you want him?

Ha-ha, said Rebecca.

No one else spoke, but Rebecca stood and walked off the platform with her great fat ass wobbling inside her cotton pants. In a moment a car door slammed and when Rebecca returned Dial could hear Buck. He arrived up on the platform, a prisoner in a metal cage.

Rebecca held out the cage and Dial took it.

Buck was meowing piteously.

I know you think this is cruel, Rebecca said, but considering he’s a murderer…

Dial was reading the metal manufacturer’s label on the heavy cage. FERAL-TRAPPA. She set it down and opened up the wire door and inside she saw Buck’s pink complaining mouth. He stood and sat. His front paw was caught, a sort of mousetrap for a cat.

Feral, she said.

It means wild, said Rebecca. The feral cat is declared as a class two species under the Land Protection Act.

You’ve crushed his fucking leg. He’s not feral. He’s my son’s cat.

He’s not your son, said Rebecca.

Dial looked to Trevor who looked away. She set down the cage and gently lifted the sprung arm of the trap and brought Buck into the light. He cried, and raked his claw down her arm.

You’ve crushed him. You know this won’t mend.

It is a her, said Rebecca.

Dial stood on the platform under the harsh violet sky. The time-warp idiots, she thought. Why don’t you fight for something real?

You can’t look after that cat, said Rebecca. You can’t even look after the kid.

Dial could look after Buck. That was all she knew to do. If you shot a cottontail you often found him wounded, struggling. You picked him up quickly, stilled your heart, stretched his neck. And it was done.

She stood before them. She did it swiftly. In a few seconds Buck was a warm pelt in her bleeding arms.

Go watch Walt Disney, she said to Rebecca.

She turned and walked down off the Aztec platform and passed between the flooded gums, along the shadowed creek with its stones and dams. She was crying then, not loudly. She found a shovel in the garden and carried Buck down into the rain forest and there, before the abandoned hut with the stone gargoyle, she dug down into the soil, chopping through the fresh white wounded roots, laying him in the crumbling black soil and covering him.

She had no prayers, comrade. Dear Papa, that was all.