His Illegal Self

43

Trevor, in a breathless fury, found Dial, lying like roadkill beside her drive.

Get up, he said, all arrows and orders, pointing at her car.

Drive, he said. Not there, he said. There, he said.

The roads laced through the bush.

The day would soon be hot and sultry but for now the light was cold and sad. Dial stayed behind the wheel while Trevor called up to the hippies in their homes. The best of these were like cocoons made from glued-together sticks, the worst of them like Buckminster Fuller, fired from Harvard, far away.

The Peugeot engine was running rough, pumping out white poison. The hippies descended from their perches, sleepy birds with trailing blankets, egrets in the exhaust smoke mist. She thought, Some of them are graduates. They peered at her. Yesterday she had killed the cat. Now she had lost her son.

She drove Trevor some more.

The starved-chest girl emerged from an ugly A-frame, came right up to the car and tapped on the glass. Dial slowly rolled the window down. When the girl hugged Dial she was all bones, warm from sleep, perfumed with patchouli and poverty.

A chain saw started with a raw hard cough. The two women waited while the saw did its work. Soon they saw five men walk out of the bush, each one carrying a fresh cut pole. They walked in single file down the track, not looking at the car.

She asked the girl what they were doing.

They’re going to check out the creek.

In her confusion Dial wondered were they fishing. The starved-chest girl lay her raw-knuckled hand on Dial’s arm.

They’re going to find your little boy, she said.

What are the poles for?

Dial saw the transparent freckled terror-dumb fear that the girl would be forced to name the dreadful thing that would be done with the poles.

They’ll go to the swimming hole too, she said.

Oh. She wanted to throw herself back on the ground, lie in the dust until she was squashed or killed. The men were calling out.

What are they calling?

Coo-ee.

No, his name is Che.

Yes, the girl said, we know his name.

Dial recognized this dreadful sympathy. She gazed distractedly at the signs of hippie industry, beehives, potted rain forest plants beneath shade cloth. When Trevor came back to the car she expected they would go to the swimming hole but instead he told her to wind down her windows and drive very slowly along the road. She could hear the tiny grains of gravel sticking in the tires, a soft rolling noise, and the echoing foreign cry, as sharp as knives: Coo-ee.

At the ford she stopped, looking with dread at the wash of water which flowed around the tires and washed toward the swimming hole.

Up the hill, said Trevor. He was leaning out the window, staring into the bush. For fuck’s sake, aren’t you looking on your side?

She did now, as she drove on up the steep hill, and then again as they bounced along the logging tracks. Trevor, his head out the window, cried Coo-ee. There was so much bush, beyond acres, beyond hope or forgiveness.

They arrived at a high spot above the creek, almost the end of the track, when Trevor said, Stop. Turn off the engine.

He called, Coo-ee.

A call came back to them.

Of course it was not Che. It was nothing like a boy, but she still insisted that he reply.

Trevor left the car without so much as looking at her. He ran across the flat barefoot, jumping fallen timber, Coo-ee.

Coo-ee, there was an answer.

It’s not him, Dial thought, but she left the car. They were parked on a kind of bluff above the creek. On another day she would have found it beautiful, but today it was a horror and when they came upon a man with a blue car and trailer she was angry that they had wasted time.

Let’s go, she said.

Trevor lay his hand on her arm and spoke to the man who had glasses thick as soda bottles and hair oiled flat on his little shrunken head. Trevor stroked her shoulder, so gently she could have cried. The man’s neck was thin and did not fill his collar and he poked his nose forward, sniffing. Dial’s arm, in the palm of Trevor’s warm hand, was chicken skin.

The old man was a retired schoolteacher who had been cutting loads of firewood to sell in town. He had seen Che. Oh yes, indeed, he said. He saw him very well. Little fellow, a good set to his shoulders.

Dial tried not to be frightened by his hands, about one inch wide at the knuckles.

Don’t you worry, Mum, he said. She let him take possession of her hand, it was like being inside a big warm bag, or being in touch with God or aliens.

He’ll be back, he said.

He had been dead. Now he was alive. No one was going to prod his bloated white sausage body with a pole. She ran back to the Peugeot so quickly that by the time Trevor arrived she had turned the car around.

Trevor took his seat, but left the door open, one bare foot resting on clay.

Let’s go, she said.

He looked at her wearily, his eyes squinted. What’s the plan?

Furious, she drove down the track and he had no choice but to close his door.

So what’s the plan?

There was no damn plan except she could not go into the valley and be stared at. She was beyond the pale. She killed her cat. She killed her boy. When she came back on the road she swung left toward Yandina, looking out the window at the wiry scratching undergrowth, and when they came to the Cooloolabin fork she swung away from town. She could not bear to be looked at. She drove past the house where the boy had drunk the milk. She did not know she had come down this road, so short a time before, hundred-dollar bills sewn inside her hem.

Turn here, he said. She did not recognize Bog Onion, but she obeyed, her stomach churning at the steepness of the track, the precipitous drop along its edge.

Suddenly Trevor was like a dog with its ears pricked.

What is it?

He leaned forward, resting his forehead against the dusty sun visor, peering ahead and to each side.

Stop, he called.

She slammed on the brake and the Peugeot locked and sledded. Oh God, she said. What is it?

But Trevor was already out and stumbling, running up the hill. She pulled on the hand brake, but it would not hold. In the spit-smeared mirror she saw Trevor pick up something-candy wrapper, that’s what she thought. He jumped back in the moving car and handed it to her.

Ben Franklin. One hundred dollars U.S.

His eyes were slitted.

Drive, he said.

Brake light all the way.