Arms Race (22 page)

There was movement ahead.

Euchie!

She looked up. Mum, she said, and the sadness took her away.

It was everything Fran feared. She could see the shadowed form of a landing craft
on the beach. Men were dragging Euchie up the bank, her dress torn, flesh exposed.
The men
were weeping with abandon: infected, all of them.

Fran called Euchie's name, and the strength seemed to go out of her daughter. Her
legs buckled and she dropped to the sand, her handbag spilling open. Below on the
beach the battered prow of another boat crunched ashore. It was too late. The invasion
had come.

Fran stumbled down the sandbank. The men ignored her, they were so far gone. She
enfolded Euchie's thin shoulders with one arm, and with her free hand rummaged inside
the handbag lying on the sand.

She thought about what she had to do and a wail broke from her, and the sound brought
forth Euchie's own keening. Their voices wove a song above the beach, soaring and
falling, an echo of the
karanga
that sang ashore the first boats, centuries before.

The new arrivals began to drop over the side of their craft into the shallows. Their
sobbing carried on the breeze, a terrible chattering grief, scorched and dry. Ghosts
of their parched cities across the Tasman. A sunburnt continent, abandoned.

Fran's fingers closed around the gun. It glowed warm and solid in her hand. She looked
at the men, and at her daughter, and wondered how much courage she had inside herself.
How much courage, and how much love.

THE CULLER

NEW ZEALAND, JULY 1968

HE WATCHES the moon lifting huge and pale behind the cut-glass teeth of the Spencer
Mountains. The changing light is a miracle. Colour leaches from the midwinter valley,
and the ridgelines fold in black like velvet.

There's something else, something he can't quite grasp. Not long ago he would have
dropped hard on his belly, safety off, rifle to shoulder. But he's getting better.
When the spike of panic goes in he simply stops, breath curling out of him, trying
to home in on the feeling.

The air is cold and still. His eyes drift down, from the mountains to the snow-crushed
forest and the tumbling river with its mossy bouldered flanks. Mist is ghosting in
above the water. In the half-light there's no movement. Nothing.

He's about to move
off when it comes again. Not a smell, but the memory of a smell. Smoke. The war is
twenty years past but his instinct is good. People.

When he comes across the grassy flats of the Waiheke he sees the moon high above
the blue bulk of Mount Ajax, and below, candles burning in the window of the hut.
The structure is an ancient pile of rough-hewn logs so ripe with moss it looks to
have grown from the earth. He uses it because no one else does. But thirty feet out
he gets a hot salty gust of bacon, and voices, smoky and rich—American. He's so tired
that the sounds and smells have become one and the same.

He approaches downwind and out of sight, rifle automatically against his far flank
so it won't catch the moonlight. At the hut he leans to the fogged glass. There are
young fit men ranged around the hearth, sprawled on the sacking bunks. By the fire
a man with sandy hair holds a silver tube that looks like toothpaste. He squeezes
the contents into his mouth and sluices them around. The others laugh. He swallows,
throws the tube in the fire and grins. His voice comes clear through the cracks in
the walls.

Okay, you bastards. Now gimme some bacon.

There's a man at the fire holding a frying pan. Uh-uh, he says. No bacon where you're
headed.

The culler pulls back from the window. His instinct is to keep moving. But it's six
hours to the next hut and he's already exhausted. And he's not one for curiosity
but there
it is, tugging at him like some old, half-forgotten cruelty. It's too cold
and remote for trampers. If they were hunters there'd be rifles outside the door.
He watches embers sweep from the chimney into the brilliant night sky. Easy, he tells
himself. They're only people.

He doubles back, unloads his rifle and removes the bolt, then crosses the frozen
ground in full view, whistling the first few bars of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner'.
He learned them from a GI in the back of a camion out of Cassino. Eighteen hours
jolting, and them all too ruined to say a word except for this sack of a man with
a big slow laugh, patriotic for sure but none too bright. Only knew those first heroic
bars. Whistled them over and over like an idiot bird.

O say can you see—

He's halfway to the hut when the wire latch opens. Light fans the ground.

Hey there! a silhouette calls. It looks like the man with sandy hair.

Gidday, the culler says. His voice sounds like a rusted gate.

Come on in, zero-one-niner. Bet you weren't expecting us.

Can't say I was.

Well, the fire's on. Come and get warm.

The hut is ripe with bacon and sweat. There
are six men in all, half his age, focused and lean. It occurs to him that they might
be soldiers. There's a chorus of greeting, all
hey
and
howdy
. He leans his rifle
in the corner and crosses the room with eyes down. He can feel their gaze, and it
takes all his concentration to feign calm.

There's no one on his bunk, but someone's draped a kind of heavy-duty helmeted suit
across it. For a moment he stands and stares. He's never seen anything like it.

Sorry, pal. I'll get that. The sandy-haired man heaves the suit onto the top bunk.
There ya go. He turns and extends a hand. I'm Neil.

The man has a galaxy of freckles across his nose and cheeks. His eyes are a hopeful
blue. Face to face with another man, the culler is suddenly too aware of himself:
the bloodied deer tails tied to his pack, his filthy beard, cracked nails and hard
hands. He lowers himself abruptly onto his bunk, leaving the man's offering hanging
in space.

Good day? Neil asks, undeterred.

I've had better, he says, busy with the straps on his pack. He pulls out a good-sized
haunch, cut from a young spiker he'd hit clean through the neck a good half-mile
out. He can still make a shot like that out here, away from the drink. He unwraps
the fresh meat, and there are whistles and claps.

Look at that. Beautiful.

There ya go, Neil. You don't like the food up there, take a rifle and shoot your
own.

The culler takes the haunch and lays it on the bench to start cutting steaks. He
risks a glance around. The men's packs are square and hard-looking. Leaned beside
the fireplace is a huge American flag, and there's a metal contraption beside him
on the bench that might be a camera. Perhaps they're making a movie.

Hunter like you must know the area well.

This from the man tending the frying pan. He seems to be in charge. He's older than
the others; just as fit, but thickening round the waist.

Culler, he says.

Excuse me?

Culler. Hunter does it for laughs. Parks Board pays me per tail.

The man is studying his army-issue rifle leaned in the corner. Where'd you learn
to shoot, he asks. The war?

Yeah, the culler says, though he's lying. It wasn't shooting the war taught him.
He pulls his frying pan from under the bench and the men make room around the fire.
He pushes the pan down into the coals. He can't keep his curiosity in.

What are you doing out here? he asks, and wishes he hadn't. The men's sudden quiet
is intimidating. He has broken cover, feels himself about to draw fire.

We're scientists, Neil says.

The culler stares at him. Neil doesn't quite meet his eye.

We're with the National Alpine Sciences Association, the older man says. His voice
is clear and precise. In for a fortnight's field testing in remote environments,
and this here is about the remotest environment on earth.

The culler's heard that sort of thing before.
Field testing
. None of your damn business,
more like. He drops a steak into the pan with a squelching hiss. You using this hut
as a base? he asks.

The man takes his meaning. Just passing through, he says, turning the bacon in his
own pan. Leave you to it. We're heading to Falling Mountain. Know it?

The culler nods.

What's up there?

Rocks.

Rocks?

Mountain came down in a quake. It's like the moon up there.

That right? the man says. He pulls his pan from the fire. Say, you want some bacon?

The culler grunts a negative, but something in his face gives him away. The man has
already flipped six fat rashers onto a tin plate and added a slab of bread.

Here, the man says.

He can't refuse. After weeks of venison and damper it smells like heaven. He feels
them watching him eat,
crabbed over the plate, piling the slick and salty food into
his tired body. He has to force himself to slow down.

Neil holds out a plate of his own. C'mon now. My turn?

Focus, the older man says. Have another tube. Right now you're a hundred thousand
miles from any such bacon.

Neil doesn't argue. He takes another silver tube from his pack and sucks it down.

What's that? the culler asks.

Food, Neil says. Weighs nothing, and good for you too. Pity it tastes like hell.
Here. He tosses a tube across the room.

The culler catches it, and squeezes a little paste onto one calloused finger. He
touches it to his tongue. Peanut butter and something else, meaty and rich. Not too
bad, he says. Lighter than potatoes.

I bet the Russians take potatoes, someone says.

Yeah, another says. Spudnik.

The hut fills with laughter. The culler doesn't get the joke, but he senses it is
not at his expense. The bacon has calmed his hunger. He finds himself cutting his
steak into chunks. He offers the plate around and five of them take a slice. Neil
ruefully shakes his head.

Twenty-one hundred hours, the older man says. Fifteen to turn-in.

The men pack their gear without a word. In minutes the room is tidy but for the white
suit hanging on a nail
and the six identical packs lined up beside the door. The
men step outside to piss, return and put in earplugs, blow out their candles and
climb into bed. Their snoring soon fills the room.

While he waits for a second steak to cook, the culler tries to read. He watches his
icy breath send shadows down the page. He can't concentrate. Scientists. Bullshit.

The door nicks open. It's Neil, late coming back from outside. He unrolls his sleeping
bag on the boards. It occurs to the culler that there are only six bunks, and one
of them is his.

Short straw? he says.

Something like that.

Go cut yourself some bracken. Better than those bunks. There's plenty up behind the
hut.

Thanks, Neil says. But I'll be fine. You ever hear of method acting?

The culler looks at him. Neil shrugs, and climbs into his bag. He reads a notebook
by firelight. His lips move, repeating phrases over and over in a whisper. Above
the snapping fire and the river's distant drone it sounds like gibberish.
One's mall sleep
foreman. One gaunt sleep firm and kind.

After a few minutes Neil looks up. Have a listen to this garbage, he murmurs.
This
is an historic moment, to be remembered as the triumph of a great nation's industry
and vision.

Who said that? the culler asks.

Me. Well, I'm supposed to say it.

What's it all about?

Neil thinks. Imagine you were the first person to climb a mountain. Everest, say,
and you had to make a speech for the cameras on top. That's what it's about.

How'd you get a film camera on top of Mount Everest?

Well, Neil says, that's a damn good question.

The culler takes his pan from the coals and slides the steak onto his plate. So,
are you a scientist, or a mountaineer, or what?

Neil doesn't reply. There's a look on his face the culler recognises from the war:
when a person's brimming over with what they know. Then the young man's gaze strays
to the sleepers in the adjacent bunks, and he shakes his head.

Tell me, he says, how long you spend out here? On your own?

The culler shrugs. Long as I can.

You're damn far from the world. How do you stay sane? The culler slices the steak
in two and holds out the plate. He keeps his gaze lowered when Neil grins and takes
the piece. There are times he's had a deer in his sights and not squeezed the trigger,
because he gets a sense that the animal is important. He's done the same with men.
He can't decide if that makes him sane, or the opposite.

You weren't regular army, were you? Neil asks. Sniper?

The culler nods. He's used to the question from
wet-mouthed drunks, turned on by
talk of headshots. Neil's curiosity seems different.

You worked by yourself? Same as out here?

Yeah. Why?

Just wondering. What was it like coming back?

Like coming back from outer space.

He'd come off the ship at Lyttleton, and followed the others into the pubs. He hadn't
known where else to put himself. He wore the uniform everywhere, even to his father's
funeral. Around the grave's raw edge the civilian crowd seemed ragged and disrespectful.
At the wake his brother said to him, You need to move on, and he thought his brother
was already speaking of their father. He'd meant the army. After the homecoming parades,
the failed reinventions and third chances, the streets were still full of maimed
drunks. The uniform earned no respect. He had a VC for bravery and he was afraid
to sit in a parlour with his trigger finger crooked through the handle of a china
teacup.

Too hard? Neil asks.

Hard enough.