His Illegal Self

4

What had gone wrong was not explained to him. Did the TV cause this or not? All Dial said was-We’ve got to go.

Tomorrow?

Right now.

When they fled Philly he had still not gotten his surprise or called his grandma. He had never been in an airplane and then he was bouncing around the sky above the earth, living in black air belonging to no place. He had flown to Oakland to a motel which turned out pretty good. He did not know exactly where he was. They did not watch TV but she read him all her book, out loud, the one with the fighting dogs. He thought The Call of the Wild must be the best book ever written. Dial never said anything but she had lived at Kenoza Lake and knew he came from a house almost identical to Buck the dog’s. The judge’s place stood back from the road, half hidden among the trees, through which glimpses could be caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around all four sides. So Jack London wrote.

They ran across the highway to the pizza place and back. They ate so much pizza the whole room smelled of it, and they played Uno together which turned out much better than you would think. He did not mention poker yet, but they played Uno for Days Inn matches.

Dial tried to call Grandma but she did not answer. The boy listened to the phone himself. It rang and rang.

When they were nearly out of cash they went to Seattle and Dial got a heap of money and after that they flew to Sydney, Australia. She told him it was a long way. He asked was the secret still OK. She said it was. He did not mind then. He beat her at poker. Then she taught him solitaire. Plus she had so many little tricks and puzzles in that pack of hers, rings you had to learn to pull apart, another book by Jack London, and all the way to Australia he was happy. He had been busted free by parents, just as Cameron had predicted.

Sydney turned out to be a big city so they got a bus to Brisbane. He got bored with that, they both did. Brisbane was really hot. Dial went looking for a head shop and he assumed it related to his dad but all that happened was they met a fat freak girl and learned that if they went north they would find places not even on a map.

Turn on, tune in, drop out, the fat girl said.

Later Dial said, I never want to hear that hippie shit again. He did not tell her Cameron said that all the time.

But Cameron could not imagine the boy hitchhiking in this world beyond the Clorox stairs-the foreign sky, bruised like cheekbones, heavy rain streaming in a distant fringe. A spooky yellow light shone on the highway and there was a fine hot clay dust, dry on the boy’s toes, mud on his now homeless tongue, powder on the needles of Pinus radiata plantations.

It was one hundred degrees Fahrenheit more or less. They kept on walking.

Two black lanes north, two lanes south, some foreign grass in the middle. To the east and west were neatly mown verges about thirty feet wide and then there were the dull green walls of the Pinus radiata plantations, sliced by yellow fire roads but deathly quiet-not a possum or a snake, not even a hopping carrion crow, could ever live there.

The boy had no idea where on earth he stood. He understood the names of hardly anything, himself included.

In this entire continent he knew only the big-faced, big-boned mother with her bag full of entertainments. She was two long strides ahead-long, long hippie skirt, T-shirt, rubber flip-flops, walking way too fast. What he really knew about her, he could have written on a candy wrapper. She was a radical, but that was as obvious as the exit sign ahead.

The boy spelled out the sign. Caboolture?

A town, she said, it’s nothing. She would not slow.

What sort of town?

His strong hair was now disguised, dyed black, cut like a hedge, revealing a band of pale untanned skin around his neck. He rubbed at the crown and squinted up at the sign-CABOOLTURE-dumb black letters on a dumb white board, an ugly redneck sort of thing, he thought.

What sort of town, Dial?

Come on, she said. An Australian town.

He should have asked other stuff, Where is my father, where is Grandma, but sometimes it seemed she was sick of him already.

Morons, she shouted at the passing car. I hope you drown. She was so tall, so pretty with a big farm boy’s stride. His cup of tea, his flesh and blood, forever.

No one is going to pick us up here, Dial. They’re all going the other way.

Thanks, she said. I hadn’t noticed. She was not used to little kids.

The cars on the southbound road were bumper to bumper, their yellow headlights glowing the color of the Pan Am Building at dusk. It was sometime around noon. He wished she could find a place to curl up with jet lag.

We could go to that town, he said, or words like that. Maybe there’s a motel. That was what he loved the most, just to be with her cuddling while she read to him, her hair tickling his face.

There’s no motel, the mother said.

I bet there is, he said.

She stopped and turned.

What? he demanded. What!

Her hair had so many shifting tones you could never say exactly what it was, but her eyebrows were plain black, and when they pressed down on her eyes, like now, she was a scary witch.

OK, she said, that’s enough.

She had done this once in Port Authority. She had scared him then as well.

Around this time, a beat-up 1964 Ford station wagon, its paintwork gone powdery with sun and age, paused at the exit of the Golden Fleece service station on the Brisbane side of Caboolture. The driver revved the engine once and a flood of oil-blue smoke spread slowly across the pump island and dispersed into the scrubby field where two itchy-looking horses stood, their bony haunches directed at the fleeing cars.

Look at the bloody lemmings, said Trevor.

The boy did not know Trevor but he would be familiar soon enough, and for a damn long time after that as well, and he would always connect the name to that particular body-a strong man, sleek as a porpoise, sheathed in a good half-inch-thick coat of fat which seemed to feed his brown taut skin, giving it a healthy fish-oil kind of shine. He had a mashed-up ear, a short haircut, as short as a soldier’s, reddish brown, smelling of marijuana, papaya and mango. When Trevor was not naked, and he was naked every chance he got, he wore baggy Indian pajama pants, and when he smiled, like now, at the fleeing tourists, he revealed a jagged tooth.

They reckon destructive winds off Caloundra of two hundred K’s, said the driver. This was called John the Rabbitoh but was really Jean Rabiteau, of so-called French extraction. No one knew where he came from but he was a drop-dead handsome man of maybe twenty-five. He had high cheekbones, long black hair, brown eyes and a whippy wide-shouldered narrow-waisted body. He had a broad nasal accent and he smelled of cut grass and radiator hose and two-stroke fuel.

Bang! Trevor made a pistol with his hands which were as broad and stubby as his strong barrel of a body. Bang! Bang! He showed his chipped tooth and shot the drivers one by one.

Turning up the road toward the storm, the Rabbitoh stayed quiet about Trevor’s murders. He had his own thoughts involving the damned souls and the wrath of God. He hunched over the steering wheel peering up into the lowering sky and the nasty yellow light around its smudgy skirts.

We’ll be back in the valley by the time it hits.

This was a good guess, but it would turn out to be incorrect because, as the Ford passed the Caboolture exit, they saw the mother and the boy trudging north.

It was Trevor who called stop, Trevor who lived in a stockade at the top of a very steep unfriendly road, whose most common expression was “your alarm clock is your key to freedom,” who woke every morning at 5 a.m. and hid out in the bush until it was clear the police would not raid him, Trevor, who saw spies and traitors everywhere, said, Pick her up.

By now they were two hundred yards down the road, but John stopped.

Back up.

No need.

Trevor turned and saw Dial running at him, her yellow hair rising in snaky waves, her titties like puppies fighting inside her shirt.