Settlers' Creek (22 page)

In the end Box just hauled Mark out of the coffin, scraping him over the rim of the long box and dumping him onto the floor. It made him sick to see Mark’s body reduced to a farmyard sack. But what choice had they left him? Someone could walk in at any second and then his whole plan would be fucked. This wasn’t some movie where he could fight his way out, fists dealing out rightful hurt. This was real life. Box knew that as soon as he was discovered it was all over.

Working quickly, he dragged the body to the edge of the blanket, rolling Mark once over the material to wrap him.

He was still down on his knees when a heavy blow landed across his shoulders. Box fell forward onto all fours. The old woman was on her feet and she had her stick up above her head ready for another swing. He stood and, towering over her, pulled the stick from her hands.

‘That hurt.’

‘You can’t take Maaka.’ She started to speak in Maori, her tongue clicking, high-pitched.

Box glanced towards the door, afraid that someone would hear. He reached out and took her by the back of her arm. His fingers sank into flesh as warm and pliable as fresh playdough.

‘Calm down, lady.’

‘Don’t touch me.’

‘I need you to sit down and shut up.’

‘Who are you? Why are you doing this?’

‘I’m his father.’

‘Where’s Aroha?’

‘I don’t know who that is.’ He turned her and marched
her back to the chair, where he sat her down as gently as he could. ‘I need you to stay right there.’

Back in her seat, the old woman seemed deflated. ‘You can’t do this. You haven’t been welcomed. You can’t come onto the marae uninvited and take Maaka. Thief, that’s what you are, a bloody thief.’ Her eyes stared into his, smouldering and baleful.

‘Why not? Are only you Maoris allowed to steal the dead?’

She grunted and hurled two stone-hard words in Maori up at Box. He didn’t have to be a linguist to know that she was swearing at him. ‘A bloody thief,’ she said again in English.

‘Look, I raised him from when he was a little boy. I’m the only father he’s ever known. And what about his mother? She doesn’t want him buried up here. What about her, eh?’ The old woman muttered and clucked like a broody hen. ‘Where were you lot when Mark was growing up? You didn’t give a shit then. Now for some reason you think you own him, that you’re the only ones allowed to bury him.
You’re
the bloody thieves.’ Box was shouting now, right in her face, spittle flying. He was still holding the walking stick she’d hit him with, brandishing it. She muttered something else.

‘What?’

‘The boy’s mother, she was the one who took Maaka from us. Tipene wanted to see his son, asked her heaps, but the boy’s mother always said no. It was her said Tipene wasn’t a good father. She said the boy was better off away living with you Pakeha.’

Box blinked. ‘That’s bullshit. Tipene didn’t want to know about Mark.’

‘It was the mother.’

Box took a deep breath and looked towards the door again. This was taking way too long. He didn’t have time for the old woman’s deluded nonsense. He had to get Mark out now. Any misty streak of good luck he’d been owed had long ago evaporated.

‘Stay here. Please.’

He tossed her stick so that it landed a few metres away. The old woman was suddenly sullen, like a spoilt little girl who couldn’t get her way.

With a supreme effort, Box hoisted the grey shroud with Mark inside onto his shoulder, heaving it up in an awkward vertebrae-crunching parody of a fireman’s lift. He grunted through the pain. With his son over his shoulder Box moved back across the floor of the meeting house. The rough wool rubbed against his cheek. He went past the indignant faces of the effigies lining the walls and out through the open door.

The ute was sitting exactly where he’d left it, the engine still chugging over. There was movement over by the main gate: a couple of women standing looking towards the fire.

He slipped the boy’s body onto the flat-bed of the ute. Even with Box working as carefully as he could, Mark landed with the hollow thunk of a heavy piece of lumber. The sound made Box wince.

As he pulled away he noticed the large carving again, the wooden taniwha. It crouched on the edge of the crushed shells between him and the entrance. He felt a sudden surge of joyful defiance. ‘Fuck you as well, mate,’ he said loudly and he flashed it the finger.

As he came to the road the two middle-aged women standing by the gate, both plump as ducks, gave him a curious look. He ignored them and swung the ute right. He
picked up speed as he drove down towards the flickering flames and the flashing red lights of the fire engines.

Box stopped at a T intersection where the road north out of Kaipuna met the main highway, his dented front bumper nosed up over the double yellow lines. There were no other cars. It looked like most of the town was up at the park, either watching or helping to fight the fire. His breath steamed and hung in the cold air inside the cab. The ute was a meat locker. He curled the fingers on his right hand into a tube and breathed warm air into the tunnel his fingers made. He realised that he was shaking again and was sure that it wasn’t just because of the cold. This was as far ahead as he’d thought, the far edge of his plan. Now he was off the map; beyond this lay only dragons.

The truth was, he’d been sure he wouldn’t get Mark off the marae. He had to try but he’d thought they would stop him. Box had assumed that by now he would’ve been in the police holding cell, or in hospital. Now that he had Mark back he had to think about what he was going to do. South, the highway went along the coast, directly back to the city. He could be back at the house in hours, back in the bay forty minutes later. Or he could go south for half an hour and then turn inland. That road went behind the Waimanu Ranges, and came out eventually near the thermal resort town of Ashford. Those were his only choices if he turned south.

Either way, he reckoned it wouldn’t be long before he came up hard against an impromptu roadblock. Bolting for home, head down, was exactly what everyone would expect him to do. It was the obvious thing.

Box wasn’t sure what move Tipene and his people would make. Maybe they would get Brent McKenzie and the other police involved. Box knew he’d broken a number of laws in the last hour — trespassing for sure, and arson (the ghost of his grandfather’s old joke sounded in his ear — ‘and not just arsing around either, Box’). Box’s face stretched in a sick parody of a grin. ‘Good one, Pop.’ Had he just said that out loud? The first sign of madness, eh. But either way, sure as God made little apples, burning the playground fort was something the police would want to talk to him about. He wasn’t going to deny doing it either. But all in good time; they had to catch him first. Or maybe Tipene would keep things in-house, in-tribe. The faces that pulled him over down the road might be exclusively brown, angry and tattooed and taking what he’d done personally. They might have no intention of moving him anywhere as comfortable as the police cells at Kaipuna.

‘So what do you reckon we should do, Tiger?’ He spoke out loud again, using the old boyhood name. He looked into the rear-view mirror, half expecting to see Mark’s face. Of course there was nothing back there except the cracked vinyl of the empty back seat and cold shadowed silence. Box sighed.

It had stopped raining now and the clouds had mostly broken up. He could see patches of stars, tossed scatterings of pale lights, through the insect-splattered windscreen. He didn’t have to listen to the weather forecast to know that it was cold enough for snow to fall some time during the night.

Box turned the wheel clockwise. It looked like he was heading north, after all.

Thirty ks up the unlit highway he slowed the ute to a crawl, then swung into an unsealed road leading towards the ocean. Over his shoulder the mountains were a dark presence. They’d been there almost since he left town. There were no foothills as such, just a gently inclined strip of coastal land just wide enough to run the dairy herds that Box had glimpsed in the headlights as he drove. In places the highway barely had room to edge past where the mountains sank their roots into the ocean, jutting up almost right out of the surf, covered in bush and steep as a church roof.

Box drove slowly. There were rain-gouged potholes and the last thing he needed now was a broken axle. Without passing through any obvious gate, he emerged into an open field. He drove around the edge and then, when he was almost in the far corner, stopped the ute, close to a row of tall poplars. He got out but left the engine running
and the headlights on low so that he had light to see by.

Box knew this place. It was a public camping ground. He’d stayed here once, when the kids were young, with Liz and Mark and Heather. It must have been just after Christmas, or maybe he’d taken some time off in January — he couldn’t remember exactly. They’d stopped at this campsite for a night because Heather got carsick. Liz had worried that the kid had food poisoning, but she’d been right by the morning.

There was an uneasy rustle and squawk from the nearest tree. He looked up and could just make out birds roosting in the branches: big birds, with craning necks — shags. The trees were thick with them, the branches and the ground beneath stained white with their shit. They shifted their long necks from side to side and stretched wide leathery wings. He was spooking them.

Box stood still and listened to the uneasy birds and to the waves on the shingle beach, unseen but very close. The cold offshore breeze carried the rich pong of shit-fouled streams that always seemed to go with dairying. He tried to remember this place filled with summer light and warmth, cluttered with rows of coloured tents and the striped awnings of caravans. But it was dark now and he couldn’t imagine the colours of summer.

A car went by on the highway. Its headlights swept across the trees between Box and the road and for a moment beams of fractured white light skipped across the open space.

Box got his torch out from under the passenger seat. He walked around and checked on Mark. Of course he’d wanted to bring the boy into the cab but Mark wouldn’t fit and there was no way that Box was going to shove and jam. He wasn’t going to perform any more indignities on
the boy, not unless he was forced to. The body had moved during the short drive and the blanket had slipped off in places. Shiny black shoes were showing and half of Mark’s face.

They’d changed his clothes — jeans and running shoes had been replaced by black trousers, black jacket, shiny black shoes. Mark wouldn’t have been seen dead in shoes like that. As soon as Box had the thought a laugh exploded out of him. The birds shook themselves and muttered in the tree.

There were three good tie-downs in the toolbox. Box used them on building sites for securing timber. He folded the blanket back over the shoes and wrapped the first tie-down twice around the boy’s shins. There was a metal buckle that took the free end of the strap and, when it was drawn tight, locked the whole thing in place. Another tie-down fitted around Mark’s waist like a thick belt. The last one went around his neck. This one Box left looser than he could have. Even so, it pulled the blanket taut enough to make out the shape of Mark’s face; his nose and cheekbones pressed up against the wool.

‘Sorry, mate. But at least it won’t fall off now.’

He took the tow rope out of the toolbox and, as carefully as he could, tied Mark’s body to the flat-bed.

When he was finished with Mark, Box pulled out his pack, which was sitting on the passenger’s seat, put it on the grass in front of the headlights and unfastened the straps. He took off the running shoes he was wearing and then his jeans. He put on thermal leggings and his work shorts. The grass was damp and he stood on his jeans to avoid getting his socks wet. His tramping boots hadn’t been worn in almost a year and as he dragged them on
over his socks he felt the ungive of the leather. He did up the laces, then stomped up and down a few times. If he had to walk any real distance he’d probably end up with blisters. But he could treat blisters; the first-aid kit he carried in the toolbox had Band-Aids and Second Skin.

He stripped off the rest of his clothes and for a moment he was standing half naked in the scalpel-cold wind. His skin immediately pulled tight over his muscles. The light from the headlights cut deep shadows across his chest and the visible muscles of his arms. He quickly dragged on his polyprop and then a fresh T-shirt and his bush shirt. Over the whole lot he pulled on his jacket.

Box stuffed his old clothes into his pack, threw it back into the passenger seat and climbed in behind the wheel. He flicked on his torch and opened up the map he’d bought that afternoon at the information centre. It was the best one they had. He found where he was and traced a possible route with his finger. Box sat in the dark studying the map for a long time.

‘That’ll have to do,’ he said out loud.

When he had driven out to the road again Box sat in the cab and looked south. There wasn’t even a flicker of distant headlights. He turned his face north. That way too was dark. There was just the highway running like the back of a huge mythical serpent. No, he thought, that’s wrong, it’s like an eel — a giant eel, black backed and twisting away between the coast and the mountains, stretching out in front of him, waiting to carry him and Mark God knows where.

Box’s plan was simple. On the map he’d found an old farm road that headed up into a narrow valley among the mountains: Cooper’s Road. The thin line he’d traced with his finger turned into broken dots and then stopped completely. He’d take Mark up as far as the road would let him. He had a tent in his pack and a bit of food. He would camp out for a couple of days, two nights probably, tops. Box figured that by then Tipene and his people would have stopped actively hunting for him. No one was going to man a makeshift checkpoint for more than one night. Not in this weather. They’d probably figure that they’d missed him. Then Box would drive back down onto the highway, skirt around Kaipuna — he sure as hell wouldn’t be stopping for a burger and chips — and then take the long route inland through Ashford and back to the city. Simple as. What could go wrong? In the dark, Box smiled ruefully. The movement of his facial muscles made his bruised cheek and eye ache.

The only problem was that he should have found Cooper’s Road by now. Box leaned forward over the wheel, straining his eyes into the darkness. The closest they got to lighting out here was the red glare of reflected light from the eyes of possums at the side of the road. The flattened and gut-burst bodies of their less cautious mates were littered over the highway. When a road finally came up on his left it was on a sweeping corner and had flicked by in the darkness without warning before Box swore and pulled over with a rattle of shingle. He did a u-turn that took him onto the grass on the other side of the road, his rooted CV joint clicking like a desperate cicada.

There was no road sign. He checked the map again. The location was about right. According to the map, this
road should follow a creek up and over a low saddle into an unnamed valley set well in among the mountains. Box guessed that Cooper’s Road, if this was indeed it, serviced one or two farms. He’d give the farmhouses a wide berth. You never knew when you’d bump into another one of Tipene’s cuzzie-bros.

For the first couple of ks the road was narrow but at least it was sealed. The shingle began abruptly and for no reason that Box could make out. The cloud of dust the ute kicked up was visible in the rear-view mirror, red in the brake lights. It was as though the road builders had simply run out of hot tar, or called smoko one day and never made it back. He flicked his lights onto high beam.

On his right was the creek. The road followed roughly the twists and turns of the creekbed, matching curve for curve and the occasional straight stretches. Settlers’ Creek, it was called on the map, though with only the occasional interrogation of his headlights to give him an idea, it looked to Box to be bigger than a creek. The road was climbing now and ahead of him the bush-clad mountain rose up in a wall.

Box glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw headlights back on the highway. He pulled over quickly and turned off the ute’s own lights. Twisting to look over his shoulder he saw that the other car was moving slowly; in fact, it was crawling along.

He got out and stood by the back of the ute, one hand on the side of the deck.

‘Looks like we’ve got company.’

The road he was on must have had more of a gradient than he thought because from where he stood he was looking down on the highway and the coast. To the south
he could see the lights of Kaipuna. He could hear the river, unseen but close by.

The other car was definitely going too slowly for the open road. As it got to the point where Cooper’s Road began the two points of sprayed light slowed and stopped. Box swore. It was too far away and too dark to see if anyone got out but he imagined the two Maori guys who’d come to the motel standing by that red Holden, talking about the headlights they’d seen heading up the usually deserted road into the mountains.

Box stood and waited. The wind was cold.

There was, of course, one big flaw in his plan. If someone saw him coming up here and chose to send a little posse to investigate, then Box was trapped like a mouse in a jam jar. According to the map there was no other way out of the valley apart from going back down the road he was on.

‘What do you reckon, mate? Are we screwed?’

The only answer was the bubbling of the water over rocks in the creekbed somewhere off in the darkness. The cold wind shifted the high gorse on the side of the road with a dry rustling sigh.

The car lights began to move again. They headed slowly north, over the bridge where Settlers’ Creek met the ocean, and then up the coast until they suddenly disappeared, snuffed out behind a spur.

Box stood and stared at the point where the headlights had vanished and listened to the babble of the creek. The best he could do was hope that the car on the highway had nothing to do with him. For all he knew, some salesman heading north had simply stopped for a piss at the side of the road. There was no reason for him to go all paranoid. Apart from the stolen — reclaimed — body in the back of
his ute. And the real likelihood that he was being hunted by angry Maori. Apart from that he was sweet.

Back in the cab Box turned on the lights, and carried on up the narrow road. Within a couple of minutes he’d reached the edge of the beech forest which he knew grew up the side of the mountains as high as the snowline. He drove in among the trees growing on both sides of the road. In places the edges had crumpled and fallen away. He drove slowly, his headlights flicking over the tree trunks, aware of the creek as an open space, off to his right.

An hour later. The ute was still moving — crawling — along the road. He guessed that he’d travelled only twenty ks in from the highway. Christ, he thought, this barely qualified as a road — a track, if that; even track was too grand a description for what the ute was edging along. With every kilometre — every hundred metres — it had become more ragged, slip strewn and water hewn, until it was now just a collection of potholes and ruts that had been strung together between the walls of dark impenetrable bush. The ute shuddered along. Occasionally she belly-scraped over the crest of a sudden dip or exposed boulder. Every time that happened Box grimaced. The old girl wasn’t built for this.

He’d thought that maybe there were a couple of working farms up the valley but it was clear that no one had done any maintenance on this road in years.

Box was resigned to pulling over at the next spot that let him at least get the ute off the road and out of sight, when he rounded a dog-leg corner and the beech trees dissolved away on his right. The moon had risen enough for him to see that in front of him the creek, wide and shallow at this point, cut across the road. He was looking out over
a river valley set between two steep mountains. About a kilometre ahead of him, towards the middle of the open grass area, there was a farmhouse. Box quickly switched the headlights off again but left the engine running.

His shoulders were stiff from the tension of driving over the derelict road, and he circled them in the confined space. His whole body was rigid with cold. There were no lights on in the house. Even from this distance, and seen only in the moonlight, it had the atrophied look of something abandoned.

‘What do ya think, Tiger?’

No reply.

And then Box said, ‘Okay.’ And turned the headlights back on.

The ford was about five metres wide. It looked easy enough. There were no big rocks that he could see. The water was a white rush over shingle with no calm patches that might signal a deep hole. Box edged the ute slowly forward. He kept it in first gear as it lurched into the water, the creek halfway up the tyres. Box took it slowly, inching along until, with a surge, he drove up the rise on the far side of the water and back onto the dry road.