Settlers' Creek (21 page)

The front passenger door was open. He put one hand on the door and bent and looked down at the woman sitting there. She was staring straight ahead at the planks of the unpainted fence.

‘What’d you do that for, you prick?’

‘Do you know where Tipene Pitama lives?’

She nodded slightly.

‘Yes?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I want you to give him this. Tonight, straight away.’

Box took a folded envelope out of the back pocket of his jeans and passed it to her. She glanced at it as she took it from him, but then turned her head and went back to staring straight ahead.

‘Okay?’

‘Yeah.’

He closed the car door carefully and walked across the car park to where his ute was sitting. As he climbed in he could feel the pain starting in on in his lower ribs, where he’d been punched. The left side of his face was hot and his vision in that eye was already down to a hazy rectangle. What was it that Pop used to call getting a black eye? A mouse. That’s right, someone had hung a mouse on him. God knows why a black eye was called that. Whatever you called it though, Box hoped to hell that his eye socket wasn’t fractured.

As he drove slowly past the parked Subaru he took one last look. The plain woman was out of the back seat and
leaning over the guy with the broken nose. The woman in the front was still sitting there. She stared at him as he drove slowly past. There was enough light that he could see the hatred in her eyes.

Some time during the fight the light spit of rain had finally hardened. His clothes were damp where he touched them. Box was still buzzing; his whole body felt charged. He was alive with released fury.

In the rear-view mirror Box saw a grinning madman, bloodshot leering eyes, gums drawn back, teeth white. For a moment he wondered who the hell he was looking at.

Box crawled the ute past the gate of the marae. It had been half an hour since the fight in the car park. His left eye had puffed up to the point where it was like looking through a narrow viewfinder. Between the eye and the darkness, he could see little of the marae except the carved wooden gateposts and a partial view of a large wooden building — the main meeting house? Maybe.

That might be where they were keeping Mark. But then again, he knew two-thirds of piss-all about Maori protocol. He wished that he’d paid a little more attention in fourth form social studies. He could see that people were coming and going, moving around inside the compound.

Box drove up the road, then turned and went back past the marae, but he saw nothing new or useful. There was a large park about half a kilometre back down the road. He drove to the far side of the park and pulled over. He sat there for another half-hour but nothing happened. Not so much as a bicycle went by. He’d been hoping to see Tipene’s red SUV.

It was cold in the unheated cab and his body was getting stiffer and sorer by the minute. His eye throbbed now and his ribs on the left sent out sharp jolts of pain whenever he shifted his weight in the seat.

Still no sign of Tipene. Maybe the woman hadn’t even taken the note to his house. Maybe there’d been no one there when she did. Tipene’s cellphone might be flat for all Box knew. Or he might not even be at the marae this evening.

In his note Box had written that he wanted to meet Tipene at the house up the coast. He’d included enough detail that Tipene would know he’d been watching the house.

And then there it was, bright headlights coming towards him. Box slumped down in his seat as Tipene’s SUV flashed past. Box waited for a minute, still slumped in his seat, then got out and went around to the toolbox. He fumbled in the darkness with the padlock, and finally hauled out the five-litre plastic container of petrol he always kept there, just in case he ever got caught short. He would certainly describe his present circumstances as qualifying.

As he walked out over the wide expanse of unlit grass the heavy plastic banged rhythmically against the outside of his leg and the petrol sloshed with a mercurial counter-rhythm. The rugby goalposts were a capital H raised in the darkness, the white paint faintly luminous. H for have to, he thought. Have to do what I have to do. H for help. H for horror. H for shut the fuck up, said an angry part of his brain. And the chirpy childish chorus hushed. H for that too.

At the far edge of the park was a playground. Near the middle of the bark chips a wooden fort had been built over three levels, a flying fox strung from the top level. Box saw that this wasn’t your standard council kitset playground.
It had the feel of something put together from community grants and numerous weekend working-bees.

A big tractor tyre, a monster of a thing, was hung between two wooden posts, like a hole suspended in the darkness, big enough for three or four small kids to sit in and swing. Fun as all hell on a summer afternoon among the scream and rush of the other kids. Box went over and gave the tyre a push. It swung reluctantly against its own inertia, the wrist-thick ropes stretching and creaking like pack-ice in the darkness.

There was also a kid-sized wooden tunnel, which led under the fort. Box had to bend almost in half to get along it and the effort was hell on his bruised ribs. At the end of the tunnel was a rectangular cavern, black as a coal mine.

‘Is anybody there? Hello.’

Nothing.

He felt around with his feet in the small space, just to be doubly sure. Among the crinkling plastic wrappers and Coke bottles he caught a whiff of salt and stale potato chips. Something slipped beneath his shoe and he reached down to touch something bulbous and cold and slickly wet. It took him a moment to realise that he was holding a used condom. He made a disgusted noise deep down in his throat and wiped his hands on his jeans.

So that was the other possibility. He’d thought some local nutter or druggie might be sleeping under here. It hadn’t occurred to him that he could be disturbing a couple of horny-mad teenagers, rooting in the earthy dark like rabbits.

But tonight there was no one.

Outside again, he picked up the container of petrol and climbed one-handed up a wooden ladder. Halfway up he lifted the petrol above his head, slid it onto the boards above
him and clambered after it. Using the same technique, he climbed another ladder to the top level of the fort.

There were maybe a dozen private homes ringing the inky no man’s land of grass. Light spilled out from the windows, frilling the edge of the park, but none of it came anywhere near the playground. From up here he could also see the lights of the marae.

Box poured the petrol over the wooden boards, working carefully so as not to get any on his clothes. When he’d emptied about half of the container he climbed down the ladder. He sloshed more over the next level.

On the ground again he poured out what was left, dousing the base of the wall and spreading the final drops over the bark. The petrol smell was a rising fug that made his head feel light. He thought of the streetkids he’d seen back in the city with their faces buried in plastic bags of petrol or glue, swimming through their lost days. This must be how they felt. Box screwed the top back on the container and threw it up onto the fort, where it handed with a hollow clatter. He wished he had more petrol.

Somewhere out on the rugby field a magpie made a short coughing cry. Box swivelled and looked out into the darkness but could see nothing.

There was a box of matches in his pocket. He stood holding them and wondered what Liz was doing right now. What the hell would she say if she could see what he was about to do?

‘Sorry, love.’

He struck the match. A barely perceptible breeze blew it out. Box swore and lit another, this time crouching and shielding it with his free hand. The flame jumped and twisted between his thumb and finger. He lobbed the
match the short distance towards the fort, didn’t expect the flame to keep burning all the way through its arc. He’d probably have to get closer. There was a loud whoosh and a sudden nova of light. Box staggered back on the bark in a tangle-footed dance. The heat licked at his face and curled the hairs on the back of his hands.

‘Christ!’ Any closer and he would’ve been toast. He inspected his body, doing a visual check to make sure that his clothes weren’t actually on fire. No.

Box stood, a dark effigy, like a Guy Fawkes dummy, in the orange glow, and watched as the flames hurled light and heat, twisted and wrapped themselves around the wood, blurring straight lines, instinctively clambering higher as if intent on scaling the fort all the way to the top and launching themselves into the sky.

People were spilling out of the houses around the edge of the park. Box drove past an old guy wearing a dressing gown that looked as though it belonged to his wife. He was standing out on the footpath staring, mouth half open, towards the flames. His naked feet were pale. A few houses down, a young couple were by their letterbox, the woman holding a baby on her hip. A small fat guy was in his doorway, talking animatedly into a cellphone.

Box was passing the gate of the marae again when he heard the high wail of a siren start up. It was calling for the volunteer firefighters to drop whatever they were doing and report to the station. The long keening notes washed over the town, rising and falling, as though Kaipuna was forties London being attacked from the air.

Box drove past the marae. He did a u-turn and parked in the shadows about a hundred metres away, close enough though to see when the people began spilling out of the gates like wasps from a panicked nest. He counted twenty-three. Most of them headed on foot towards the park, where the fire was clearly visible behind the trees as a bright orange glow licking upwards. No one seemed to notice him sitting in the darkness. The siren was still giving its high drone.

Box waited another five minutes, then started the engine and drove down to the marae. He turned the ute in through the gates and wheel-crunched down a driveway of crushed shells that shone pale in the headlights. The small shards of shell caught in the tread of his tyres and hailed up into the chassis of the ute.

A large wooden carving guarded the entrance, lit from below. A taniwha, a Maori water dragon. Even Box knew that much. Each of the statue’s four legs ended in three claws as long as Box’s arm. The wood was silvered and split from the sun and from the salt winds whipped up off the bay. Its eyes, each the size of Box’s head, watched as he drove slowly past.

Box pulled up in front of the biggest building. He grabbed an old woollen army blanket that he’d already taken from his pack and put on the seat next to him, and got out, looked around but there was no one. He walked quickly across to a deep porch and then to the front door. A sign told him to take off his shoes, but he didn’t bother. Be buggered if he would. Anyway, he wouldn’t be staying that long.

It was a single large room with a high peaked ceiling, the walls lined with woven flax panels, red and black. Round-eyed tattooed faces above truncated potbellied bodies squatted one on top of the other all the way up the support posts to the high ceiling. Paua-shell eyes glinted from the faces of the carvings. More watching him from the shadowed corners and from the walls and from above on the cross-beams. Even a Pakeha boy like him knew that that these were images of the tribe’s ancestors — the leaders and the heroes, stretching back six hundred odd years before the Europeans even came here.

Well, fuck ’em, he thought angrily. Let them stare. He’d come for his son and these wooden-faced pricks could like it or lump it.

Mark’s body lay in a dark wooden coffin at the far end of the room. An old woman was sitting on a chair next to the head of the coffin, her back almost against the wall. Her eyes were closed, her chin, etched with moko, tucked into one shoulder like a plump wood pigeon. He recognised her as the woman who’d been making the dinner up at Tipene’s place. Maybe she was his mother.

There were half a dozen chairs arranged around the coffin where, up until a few minutes ago, people had in all likelihood been sitting. When Box came right up to the end of the coffin, the old woman’s eyes flickered and opened. Her head jerked back and she peered up at him.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m his father.’

‘Eh? What?’

Louder. ‘I’m his father. I’m taking Mark with me now.’

Her eyes flicked from Box to the body. ‘I don’t understand. What do you want?’

‘I’m taking him home.’

She was even older than he’d thought — maybe even in her nineties. Her body, lumped and formless as an old kapok cushion, began to move, trying to manoeuvre itself out of the chair. Fat spilled over the top of her ankles, contained within heavy brown stockings like sausage meat inside its casing.

Box turned away from her and laid the army blanket on the floor next to the coffin. It wasn’t the same coffin that his son had been lying in back in the funeral home. Tipene’s lot had been smart enough not to take that one. Stealing a body wasn’t a crime, not according to the law anyway; ripping off a fifteen-hundred-dollar coffin was, though.

‘What are you doing? We don’t need that there.’

‘It’s okay.’

The coffin was on the floor and he had to bend low to grasp his son.

‘You can’t do that. Stop it. Stop!’

There was a heavy walking stick propped up against the chair. She grasped it and again tried to pull herself to her feet. Box ignored her.

In and out quickly was the only way this was going to work — fast and discreet, like a Catholic priest at a brothel. Box bent and hooked the crook of his left arm under Mark’s neck, his fingers grasping the shirt under the far shoulder, bunching the material in his fist. The other arm went under the boy’s legs. The body was stiff and cold. With his face this close his nose was full of a sweet cloying smell.

Box grunted like a power lifter, straightened his legs and tried to haul Mark up in one jerking dead-lift. (Funny joke, he thought, but the boy was more lifeless and unwieldy than any weights Box had ever lifted.) Sharp pain flared
up again along Box’s ribs. Behind him the old woman was keeping up a steady tirade in both English and Maori.