Sing Fox to Me (23 page)

He watched in silence as the tiger's unnaturally large jaws opened, almost beyond the frame of his face. Benjamin barked once, and warmth spread over Clancy's groin.

He looked down at his lap. Dry, but he wasn't free yet. He thought of the keeper forgetting to lock Benjamin in his hut for the night. All of a sudden, the tiger was River on the night she disappeared. Cowering, frozen, hungry. Clancy saw again the way Benjamin darted back and forth along the edge of the cave, following a chicken in the keeper's hand. Back and forth, back and forth, and that was River too.

Outside the house, the kookas started up again. Clancy glanced out his bedroom window, but he couldn't see any in the trees.

‘So unless a tiger is found soon,' finished the newsreader on the wireless, ‘the species will officially be declared extinct. This has been –'

From somewhere further up the mountain, Clancy heard a devil shriek like a howling ghost. It started the rest of the animals off. Laughing turned to cackling, and cackling turned to screeching.

Clancy laughed too. He laughed until his eyes were filled with water. He laughed until his mouth could no longer hold his voice. Finally he understood the kookaburras, those buggers at the end of their fucking tethers. Those damn birds knew he should have been laughing with them all along.

Then he stopped, and the laughter inside him was gone, maybe forever.

Rubbing his eyes, Clancy took a deep breath and sighed. That was it then. Proof. Proof he'd been a mug. Proof there was nothing hidden in the scrub. Proof that River and Jonah had just shot through.

He switched the wireless off. The room fell back into silence, and he fell into a blank sleep.

When he woke, it was still dark. He stood, walked across the room and opened the door to the verandah
. It was a cold night for summer, especially for a Queenslander. Clancy wondered what Jonah was eating, and how he would keep warm. The pelt was thick, but the boy would be getting hungry by now, and hunger made the cold more dangerous.

In the verandah light, Essie's lawn surfaced from the darkness. A wallaby turned, saw Clancy, and flung itself back through the gate into the murky bush. Clancy walked down the front steps and checked beneath the verandah. No Queenie.

Something clicked in the darkness behind him.
Scrape, click
. George's lighter. ‘Reckon you're flogging a dead horse there, mate,' he said.

Clancy straightened up.

‘Heard the news?'

Clancy didn't answer. He'd known George would come. Maybe he had even been waiting for years to rub Clancy's nose in it.

‘It's soon to be official. No tigers left.' George was standing on the edge of the verandah, in the same clothes he'd been wearing the night Clancy found him with Essie. They were dirty and tattered. His hair was damp. He looked sick. ‘Join me?' he asked. This was the other George. The drowned George.

‘You shouldn't come like that.'

‘It's who I am now.'

‘I would have pulled you out,' said Clancy, and the memory he'd tried to push out of his mind forever forced its way forward. Dark curls undulating in the slow-moving water. Not much rain that year, so the creek was sluggish. He was face-down, still wearing his boots, but his Akubra was long gone. ‘George?' Heart attack, the doctor said later, but Clancy could never shake the feeling that George had been overcome with loss. His Essie, his Murray and his River. Maybe he even lay down on the creek bed and held his face in the water. ‘I would have pulled you out,' Clancy said again.

George smiled. His teeth were grey. ‘Liar.'

‘Why did you come back?'

This time when George laughed, Clancy couldn't hear the difference between the kookas outside and his mate beside him. ‘Because she didn't want to,' he said. Water dripped from beneath his clothes and pooled on the floor.

‘It's my fault,' said Clancy slowly.

‘Follow me.'

They walked to the laundry. ‘What do I do?' asked Clancy, his hands shaking.

‘Start again,' said George, gentle. He pointed to a can of petrol in the corner next to the washing machine.

Clancy nodded. ‘I've thought about it.'

‘Of course you have.'

‘I could start again.' He picked up the can. ‘Somewhere else. Couldn't I?'

‘You could. Just walk away, leave all this mess behind.'

Clancy followed George back outside to the fence. They walked it together, Clancy pouring the petrol, and George steadying his hand. Clancy wouldn't get it wrong this time. He took George's lighter from inside his pocket and flicked the wheel. Flame sprung out of the top. He pressed it to the base of a fence post and waited. Fire rippled from the ground like hair in water, cracking loudly and spitting embers into the night air. Everything smelt like cigarettes.

He heard his own voice again. ‘Why didn't you help her?' ‘I'm sorry,' said David. He picked the boy up by the collar and shook him, and in the shaking he couldn't tell if it was David or Jonah. ‘Where is she?' he shouted. ‘She ran out.' ‘Where?' ‘I don't know.' Later George told him it wasn't his fault, but Clancy couldn't hear him over the cackling kookas.

George didn't follow as Clancy walked back up the stairs and went inside. ‘Just walk away,' he murmured. He got into bed. ‘Let it all go.'

Samson was in an uneasy asleep when something dark and dangerous crept under the windowsill and into his room. He sat up in bed and sniffed the air.

Smoke.

He opened his eyes, shoved back the blankets and climbed onto Jonah's neatly made bed. He opened the window and looked outside. The air was black, but there must have been light coming from somewhere because Samson could still see the smoke. It poured past the window, covering the house and lawn like early morning mist, only it wasn't mist. It was dark, angry smoke, and it smelt like death.

Samson pulled his head back, closed the window, and ran out of his bedroom and down the hallway as fast as his legs would go. ‘Come on,' he urged them. ‘Come on.' Through the kitchen. Open the door. Across the verandah. Down the stairs and out into the wind and smoke.

Samson stopped. The fence surrounding his granddad's house was engulfed in flames from the gate all the way around to the water tanks. The driveway and path were cut off. He turned. Their only option would be to run into the bush. He thought of the Ash Wednesday bushfires a few years before. He and Jonah had sat cross-legged in front of the telly while their dad watched from the kitchen as he made tea. Their mum came and went. Only so much she could take, she said. As they watched the footage of the fires, taken from a helicopter high above the ground, their dad told them they were the worst bushfires in Australia's history, and their mum said she could almost feel the heat coming through the screen. It didn't last long, but one after another, people died. Samson asked why South Australia was burning.

‘The heat, darling,' said his mum. ‘And drought.'

‘Some mongrel probably lit them,' his dad said. ‘Some mongrel always lights them.'

Samson stared around the mountain. It wasn't drought this time. The lawn was damp and water had soaked through his socks. The fire cracked, and one of the fence pickets crumbled into black shards. The fire sprang, spat and stretched up, desperate to move beyond the fence. Hungry for something more.

Maybe he was too. He moved towards the flames. Maybe he wanted to stretch up and away, to finally outrun the three hundred burning foxes, to outrun his brother and his parents and the mountain. Maybe he wanted to burn them all out of his hands and start again. He reached towards the flames.

‘Samson!' Mattie screamed from beyond the smoke and darkness, but her voice sounded different than it had in the caves. It was still deep and round, but it no longer seemed trapped. His name flew from inside her across the flames and into his hands like a homing pigeon. He peered through the grey and black but couldn't see her.

His skin caught up, and the heat sizzled across his palm. He pulled his hands back from the flames. ‘Here,' he answered her. ‘I'm here.'

Clancy waited on the sidelines for the race to start. He and Essie were out together for the second time, and he was nervous. Her long red hair was tied up and almost hidden beneath a new blue hat that she'd bought especially for the races. It was a warm day, and Clancy wanted to take off his Sunday jacket but didn't want her to know he was already sweating.

‘It's so beautiful here,' she said.

Clancy spread his arms across the back of the bench the way his da used to do before a race. He wondered if his da had been trying to dry his armpits as well. Essie misunderstood and moved in closer to him.

‘Do you come here all the time?' she asked. She was wearing a navy dress covered in pink flowers.

‘Whenever I'm in Hobart.'

Essie snuggled in and rested her chin on his shoulder. She smelt like lavender. ‘I like you,' she said, and she kissed his ear.

Clancy felt something creeping up behind him. He looked out towards the racetrack again. George was standing there, waiting. The horses thundered around him, but George didn't move. He didn't even seem to notice them.

‘Can you smell smoke?' asked Clancy.

Essie kissed his neck. ‘No.'

‘I can,' he said. Essie's breath was warm. ‘I can smell smoke.'

‘Clancy.' Her hand reached into his lap, and she pressed her fingers against his groin. Clancy could feel the pain in his leg.

‘Can you smell it now?' he asked. He lifted his trouser cuff. The Rorschach of veins. Essie's tongue slipped into his ear, and his entire body shuddered. This wasn't how it happened. He didn't have broken, angry veins yet.

‘Clancy,' George called from the racetrack, and he pointed over his own shoulder, saying something else.

Clancy couldn't hear him. ‘What?' he shouted, and the racing ground was silent.

‘Behind you!'

Clancy sat up and almost immediately smelt smoke. He looked out the window. ‘Shit!' He swung his legs out of bed, his crook leg buckling underneath him. It was ice-cold and stiff, but Clancy didn't give it any other choice but to carry him down the hallway. He started yelling before he'd reached his grandson's room. Empty. ‘Samson!' Clancy ran outside as fast as his leg could take him. His grandson was standing inside the flames, watching them as though he didn't understand they were dangerous. ‘Samson!'

The boy turned, and for a moment his eyes burned red like those of the Tyto.

The house was surrounded.

Samson ran past him, back inside the house.

‘Clancy!' called Murray. He was on the other side of the flames, a dark green blanket over his shoulders. There was someone with him, also covered in a blanket. Clancy couldn't make out who it was. The smoke was already too thick and the fire too high.

‘Stay back,' shouted Clancy, though he knew Murray wouldn't listen. He was George's son, after all.

Murray stopped beside the gate, and the fence near him was already black. He took a pair of gardening gloves from his back pocket and put them on.

‘You stay back,' shouted Clancy again. ‘Hear me?'

‘Not fucking likely, mate.'

The figure beside him came out from under her blanket. It was Mattie Kelly.

Murray grabbed her shoulders, brought their faces close together and yelled slowly. ‘Stay here.'

Even though she couldn't hear, the girl seemed to understand.

‘Keep the blanket on.'

She nodded.

‘Don't come any closer. You understand?'

Mattie nodded again.

Then Murray's body and face dipped beneath his blanket. He hunched over and charged towards the fence. The gate splintered around him, but he still stumbled.

‘Murray?'

The blanket moved. Murray's boots were visible. He kept running. A straight line, though he couldn't have been able to see ahead for more than a few steps. He almost ran right past Clancy, but Clancy reached out and grabbed the lad by his forearm and swung him into his chest. He held on tight, and they might've fallen, but Murray grabbed him back. ‘What bloody good was that? Now we're all stuck in here.'

‘I'm not leaving.'

‘It's okay,' said Samson. ‘I called the fireman.'

‘Fat lot of use they'll be, all the way up here,' said Clancy.

‘Nicely done, mate,' said Murray. ‘Come with me, we've got to get the water out of these tanks.' Samson and Murray ran around to the back of the house.

Clancy was about to follow them, when he saw something in the flames. ‘Queenie?' The dog turned to look at him. Yellow eyes. ‘Come here, girl.'

He heard Murray start chopping. One, two, three. He'd taught him right. The tanks would be down in no time. Everything would be alright. Everything would be the same.

Then, there she was.

Samson watched as Murray hacked into the stilts beneath the first water tank with an axe. The wood was old and had started to rot. Chunks of timber sprayed over the axe head. Samson was in charge of the hose, but the water pressure was bad and the jet of water barely reached the fire.

Murray chopped almost through each stilt on the outside of the tanks, leaving the inner stilts and platform between them untouched. ‘We've got to get them falling in different directions,' he shouted, but his voice sounded dull and wet inside the crackling of the fire. ‘But it's taking too long.'

Samson wasn't sure what to do. He stared past the house to the edge of the mountain. The dawn sky was a mix of ice and navy blue, white and peach. It was beautiful and different to anything he had seen since they'd arrived on the mountain. The wind swept up over the side of the rock and across the fire towards him.

He dropped the hose.

The hole inside his heart opened, and this time he didn't know how to close it. He thought of the Other Samson. Hair cut off, strength taken, Delilah missing, and his eyes stabbed out. Everything burned as three hundred foxes hurtled into the trees, lighting the path behind them. The Other Samson didn't care if it killed him. He used his last bit of strength to bring the pillars down.