His Illegal Self

53

The boy and Trevor were digging behind the hut. When the hole was finished you would be able to lie in it and see all the way, above the roof of the hut, to the broken yellow strokes of road. That was the plan, being presently executed with great urgency. In the hut Dial could feel the regular thud of Trevor’s pick.

Behind the sink there was a thin lead-light window through which she could, depending on where she stood, see the boy with his head down in the hole scratching dirt behind him like a dog. Gravediggers, she thought, and that was pretty much her mood. She, Anna Xenos, had brought all this about. If only she had not done this. If only she had not done that. Everything she touched was broken. As Rebecca had said to Trevor, Why doesn’t she just bomb Cambodia?

It was Trevor’s conviction that Phil would quickly confess the boy’s location to the New York cops. Who wouldn’t? he said and in the hard glaze of his eyes she saw sufficient bitterness to trust. By tomorrow morning the Brisbane police will be out here, he said. Just before dawn. Wait and see.

It was already late now and the valley had lost the sun, and although it was worse than gloomy inside the hut, Dial thought it wiser to not light the lamps. Did the Alice May Twitchell Fellow really believe that they were being spied on from outer space, that her alarm clock was her key to freedom, that she needed to crawl into a muddy hole to keep her liberty?

She changed into a tank top and a pair of shorts and walked barefoot up the hill where she found the boy naked, lying on his stomach, digging with his hands. Trevor, wearing underpants out of some perverse politeness, was shoveling, grunting, the muscles on his back shaded with dirt like charcoal on good linen.

There had been sufficient rain to make the path slippery with mud, but all that rain had not penetrated far below the surface of the hill. It was the dry season, and after a few inches of moist earth there was hard yellow clay which had already broken the boy’s fingernails.

Are you OK, baby?

I’m OK, he said, but she thought of trapped animals gnawing off their limbs. He had to go, to be released, but first they must survive the night, so the three of them worked awkwardly together until it was necessary to bring hurricane lamps up from the hut. It was still not finished when the boy was dead eyed and droopy and she took him down to wash. Then he sat on the countertop with a towel around his hunched-up shoulders, and they both listened to the scratch and scrape of Trevor’s shovel as she made a kind of ratatouille with pumpkins and potatoes, a bastard thing without a name.

While the rice was cooking, they went up hand in hand and found that Trevor had already roofed the hole with a sheet of tin and covered it with dirt and Wappa weed. He had lined the inside with the black plastic from the garden.

Won’t the police find us here? she asked.

They’re afraid of the bush, he said. Trust me.

They ate their dinner in darkness on the deck of the hut and afterward they showered and dried themselves and put on what clean clothes they had. Finally they carried and dragged blankets and cushions up the hill, bringing with them twigs and leaves and spiders swept up in the dark.

They crawled down into the cushioned dark, the boy between Dial and Trevor, and although their positions suggested some familial protectiveness, Dial could not forget how she had hurt the boy, screaming like a harpy at his grandmother in that sweaty colonial post office. She imagined her own teeth like de Kooning’s mama, growing up into the base of her nose, the criminal auntie, rattrap jaws to mince him up. But of course what she wanted was not this desperate criminal last stand but to take him like a poor injured bird and place him in a box of cotton balls and feed him warm milk from an eyedropper. She loved him, loved his smooth brown skin, the leafy smell of his tangled hair, most of all the eyes which were once more open, limpid, filled with trust. He loved her too.

God bless Phil and keep him from harm, the boy said, and in the stunned silence that followed the prayer, he fell asleep, sliding into a whispery almost silent not-quite-snore.

The hole was tight, the blankets tangled and the boy kicked as usual in his sleep, but Dial fell asleep quickly and did not stir until Trevor shook her shoulder, once, very hard. As she woke, he placed his earthy hand across her mouth and she understood the boy was sitting up. All three of them could see through the gap between the roof and the earth: yellow headlights and brighter, whiter quartz lights sweeping over the hut. They heard men’s voices, suddenly very loud, as the unlocked door of the hut was broken open and lights brushed everywhere inside, like mad swooping things with sharp glass wings.

The worst was the breaking of the door, the malice of it. She held the boy and covered his small flat ears and he pushed himself against her but he must have heard the true splintering, cursing, stamping boots, the discordant choir of radio instructions. She was her father’s daughter as she waited for the men to come. They laid his hands on a pillow before they shot him. She could have burned them all alive.