Absolution (12 page)

The boy put his hands over his eyes as you reversed, braked, revved the engine and sped forward, knocking Bernard flat. The collision threw you and Sam forward and then back against the seat.

You reversed again, revealing the fat man’s twitching body, pink shirt stained dark, his mouth working, a gash of blood spurting from between his teeth. You shifted back into first gear, turning the wheel so the full weight of the truck ground into him.

‘Keep your eyes closed,’ you said, and drove back and forth over him until he was still. Each time, the truck bounced less violently, flattening Bernard as if something large and manmade had dropped on top of him, from out of the sky, from the dark clouds overhead.

To think I once said you lacked the mother’s instinct.

At least, that is your version of what happened, the reason you give me in your final notebook for the change in your plans, and the responsibility you took for the child. Somehow, it is not a version I can believe. I try for another, one that fits with what I know you were capable of doing.

Bernard went on snoring, never regaining consciousness as you brought the stone down on his brow, over and over, until your arms and face were covered in a thick splatter.

So one could get blood from a stone.

You had done worse things in your life.

Taking the keys from the ignition, you shut the door, walked around the cab and opened the passenger door. You grabbed his feet and pulled him out of the cab, knocking his head against the four metal steps. It left a red trail, speckled with stars of pale tissue. Sam was hyperventilating, his eyes large and dark, and without warning he convulsed, vomiting onto the ground, his body wracked with heaving until only foam dripped from his mouth.

You dragged Bernard’s body into the ravine, hiding it in the same thicket of thorns where Tiger lay dead. Scavengers would clean up most of the mess before nightfall. You washed yourself at the standpipe, cleaning your arms and face, scrubbing the bite on your right leg, making yourself feel nothing. It was a talent you had developed.

Sam stared at you, his face and shirt splattered with vomit.

‘Can you wash yourself?’ you asked, putting your hands on his shoulders.

‘Yes.’ He splashed his face and hands, wiping his shirt with wet palms, getting himself wetter than he intended.

‘Do you have any other clothes?’

‘I have a bag. In the truck.’

‘Go and change.’

‘It’s sticky,’ Sam said, peeling his hand from the brown vinyl upholstery of the cab seat, a film of blood covering his palm.

‘Wipe it on the floor.’

As you pulled the truck onto the highway, the rain started. You switched the cab’s ventilation to recycle, to keep from breathing the worst of the fumes rising off the water that coated the windscreen, resisting the wipers that fought to clear a view. It would be impossible to drive at night if such rain continued. Sam pushed and pulled his bloody fingers apart, spat on them, rubbed his hands like someone trying to start a fire with friction,
and bent double to wipe them on the cab’s rough carpet, finger-painting in the pile. When he had exhausted this game, he sat up again, examined his hands, and tried to clean the arcs of dried blood from under his fingernails.

‘I’m hungry,’ he whined.

‘Get in my rucksack. Have some fruit.’

Sam reached for the dates and ate four, watching your reaction to be sure he did not take more than his share. He flicked on the radio and looked at the map. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Back the way we came. Into the storm.’

1989

He had only one picture of his parents together, with him in his mother’s arms, and it was taken when he was only a few months old, and through everything that happened he kept it in his bag in a plastic sleeve between the pages of a book so that it wouldn’t get bent or torn or broken. In the photo his mother’s wearing jeans and a yellow T-shirt with a man’s green head printed on it and his father’s wearing shorts and nothing else, because it was January. Anyone could see from the picture why they would have fallen in love with each other. They’re both tanned, nice bodies, nice faces. What is a nice face? Everything in the right place and the right size and smooth skin, but his father had a scar on his cheek, a scar that he loved. His father was strong and supple and the boy would kiss his father’s scar whenever he was there to put him to bed, which wasn’t very often because of the work that took him away from the house most hours of every day. He remembered the taste of that scar on the tip of his tongue. His parents were not bad people he was sure but maybe they were not very smart people even though they read books and knew all about the world.

When Bernard stopped the boy woke up.

I’m going to sleep over there. You stay in the cab. Lock the doors and don’t let anyone in but me you understand?

What if–?

But Bernard was already walking away from the truck to the only shaded spot. He had a towel and spread it on a patch of ground near a half-dead tree and then put a magazine over his face. It was hot in the cab and the boy was sweating so he rolled down the windows. They were half a kilometre from the road
and there weren’t any houses around, just fields in all directions. Bernard had left the keys in the ignition. The boy knew how to drive because his father had put him on his lap but Bernard didn’t know that.

The boy waited until he could hear Bernard snoring and then opened the door of the truck and without getting out tried to pee onto the ground outside but little came out. There was nothing to drink in the cab and nothing to eat. There was an ablution block because it was a campground but the boy would have to walk past Bernard to get there. He wondered how long he could last without anything to drink. Was it two days? He didn’t have a watch and the truck didn’t have a clock, so the only way he could guess how long he’d been sitting there was by watching the sun, but even that didn’t help. He’d never paid much attention to the position of the sun so that days might have gone by like that, and he wouldn’t have known except for the coming of night. But he didn’t last until night.

It looked like it might be midday and he edged the door open again, took the keys, locked the cab and walked towards the ablution block. His stomach was making empty noises and Bernard was snoring and there were pied crows fighting over a trash bin that hadn’t been emptied in a long time, and over all that was the sound of wind blowing the dirt around and there was a red-brown layer of it on Bernard’s body and collected on the bodybuilding magazine covering his face. A picture of a man who was naked except for a little green bikini flexed his muscles on the cover. Bernard’s snores vibrated against the pages and the man’s green bikini and his flexing muscles moved like a cartoon.

The boy went into the ablution block and tried the taps at the sink but no water came out so he went into the showers and when he pushed the chrome taps they didn’t give. No one had camped here for years because it wasn’t on the way to anywhere nice and the place itself wasn’t nice so what was the point? The only water was in the toilets but he wasn’t going to drink that. Half-dead
flies were bouncing off the floor and the ceiling. One of them landed on his arm and he caught it with a slap, squirting blood against his skin.

He remembered that they’d passed a petrol station before they stopped and there would be water there and food, but then he remembered he didn’t have any money. What had happened to his parents’ money? Bernard would have it because he was the boy’s uncle and guardian, because the boy was
his parents’ sole heir
, because he was too young to be trusted and then he began to wonder what Bernard might have done with the money, which was
his
money, not Bernard’s to spend on beer or the new truck he bought after the boy came to live with him. Was the truck his inheritance? Bernard had never said anything about the money but the boy knew there would’ve been some, even a little, from the sale of the house, and money from his parents’ insurance – he knew there was insurance, he had heard his parents talk about it. All that money had gone somewhere.

He started walking away from the campground to the open fields and took off his shoes. In the distance a group of men were walking in the other direction like they were half-drunk or exhausted or just couldn’t care where they might be going. He wanted to run and join them, but knew he could not. There was nothing those men might do to help him.

His father had always been busy with the work he was doing, which was important work that was going to save everyone, and because it was important the boy had forgiven him for being away so much. His father most often wore shorts, even on a rainy winter day, and he said a house constrained him, so first thing after kissing the boy’s mother he would pick up his son and carry him outside, lying down on his back and placing the boy on his chest facing him, either lying stomach against stomach, or with the boy’s short legs straddling his ribs, under the fig tree in the small back garden.
What has my boy done today?
At first the boy could only laugh, but as he grew older, he would
say,
I ate breakfast
or
I read a book
or
I played with Sandra
, the girl who lived next door and was the same age as him. When he got older still he would tell his father about the books he’d read and about his friends at school and his teachers, and his father would say,
You’re getting too big to lie on top of me, you’re going to suffocate me
, and the boy would press all his weight into his father and the man would gasp and they would both laugh. After ten minutes of this comfort, which was the best medicine for loneliness and a perfect balm for cuts and small traumas, he would lift the boy from his chest, place him on the ground, and walk him back inside the house.

Sitting at the edge of the field the boy watched until the sun started to go down and the clouds over the mountains were turning red. He felt dizzy and his eyes were scratchy in their sockets and his tongue was furred and heavy. He helped himself up and went back into the campground where Bernard was still asleep and he thought of kicking him. He’d stopped snoring but the boy could see he was still breathing and he was sorry for this because all he wanted was for Bernard to go away. How nice it would be if he died in his sleep. The boy sat down next to him for a while, watching him breathing and wondering how long they would stay like this the two of them. This was not the life his parents had promised him. This was the life that insurance was supposed to protect him against.

When it was dark the boy got back in the truck and turned over the engine. Bernard moved in his sleep. The boy put the truck into gear and accelerated. He was afraid that starting the truck would wake Bernard but then the wheels were on top of him before the boy knew it and before Bernard knew it. The branches of the half-dead tree were scraping across the windshield and the truck collided with the ablution block and it trembled and rocked away from the truck towards the field and almost collapsed. The truck was the boy’s inheritance. He was only taking what was his. He didn’t think what he was doing.

He reversed, rolling back over Bernard and then up toward the road and there was less crunching than you might have thought. It was a big truck and Bernard was only a small man, hardly bigger than the boy but so much stronger. The boy was moving the truck forward and then back. For a moment he thought he might have only pushed Bernard into the earth and he switched on the headlights and Bernard looked like he still could have been sleeping except for the rose at his lips and the strange way his arms and legs went like a spider.

The boy turned off the truck and left the keys in the ignition and the headlights on and walked through the yellow light to look at Bernard and said,
Bernard? Bernard? Are you okay?
But Bernard didn’t say anything. The rose turned into red bath bubbles at his mouth and his eyes were open but couldn’t see when the boy put his hand in front of them. If they were open then maybe he did wake up. The bodybuilding magazine was torn on the ground next to him. The boy leaned over and felt for a pulse like his mother had once shown him, and felt for Bernard’s breath and listened for a heartbeat, but he knew that Bernard would make no more noise and the boy was happy and then he was surprised at being happy and cried and shouted and stamped the ground. He couldn’t think of anyone left in the world that cared about him.

He sat down next to the man and put Bernard’s left arm in his lap and held it for a long time, pressing his fingers against the dead wrist and looking at the hairs that went gold in the headlights. Bernard wore a signet ring on his pinkie. The boy stroked the man’s arm. He could see the wallet in Bernard’s jeans and took it out and counted the money and then took the ring off the finger and the gold watch and removed the new leather boots that were too big for the boy though he knew he would grow into them soon. The jeans and shirt were ruined so he left those and put the magazine back over Bernard’s face. He folded Bernard’s arms in a cross over his chest and straightened his legs. There was
no one to see him do it except for a crow in the tree and even she was asleep.

The driver’s seat in the truck was wet and the boy saw that his pants were also wet and he stood outside drying off for a while and looking at the wind pick at the magazine and the hair that was sticking out underneath. He put Bernard’s watch on his own forearm and the ring on his right ring finger and the wallet in his front pocket.

Bernard had no family apart from the boy so no one was going to miss him, only maybe his friends and the people he worked for. But here was a problem. The boy could drive but he had no licence and if someone saw him driving the truck they would call the police and if the police caught him they would stop him and look at Bernard’s licence and know that the boy was not the man and the truck was not legally the boy’s even though Bernard was his mother’s half-brother. It was too dangerous to walk back to the petrol station alone after dark so the boy decided to sit out the night in the cab of the truck and figure out what to do in the morning, knowing already he was going to have to give up his inheritance if he was going to live.