The Legend of Winstone Blackhat (18 page)

Outside the shadows of servants criss-crossed the dust of the yard and in a circle of torchlight the bare feet of a child hurried to fire the lamps and a fat moth fluttered to the flame.

I’d say the day’s about done, said the Kid. Wouldn’t you?

But our fiesta is just beginning, El Rabbitoh said and he smiled. Are you so impatient to be gone? That is an ugly quality in a guest.

Nossir, the Kid said, I aint.

Then stay, El Rabbitoh said. Stay and join us. Ride with us and grow rich. Look around my friend – do we not have everything a man could want here?

The Kid looked around at the food on the table and the fire in the hearth and bandit fingers began to pluck a guitar and the Kid’s eyes fell upon the nape of the neck of a brown-haired girl as she leaned to pour the wine.

That’s mighty kind of you sir, he said to the Bandit King. But the thing is I got business.

Ah, said the Bandit King. The light of the candleflame flickered on his cheek as he watched the Kid and the Kid watched the girl and the girl as she straightened met the Kid’s eyes and she smiled before turning away and the Bandit King saw all.

Why did you do what you did today? he said to the Kid.

I gave you my word, the Kid said, I wouldn’t run.

You could have let that assassin shoot me, El Rabbitoh said. Why did you not?

It didn’t seem right, the Kid said. Ridin in an killin a man like that. Not even callin his name.

No, El Rabbitoh said, it does not seem right.

The Kid was silent.

Consider my offer, El Rabbitoh said. I am a generous man. Among my men there are many I love as brothers and none that I trust. But you. You would be as a son.

A son, the Kid said.

The son I would wish to have, the Bandit King said, if I were to choose my heir.

How do you know? the Kid said. About me.

I read men’s hearts, said the Bandit King. Call it a gift. What I see in most does not help me to sleep. But you are different.

I aint sure what you’re offerin me, the Kid said.

All you see, El Rabbitoh said.

The Kid looked down at his empty plate and with the tip of his knife he pushed at the heap of pheasant bones as if his fortune might be read there.

Do not speak now, El Rabbitoh said. The day is not over until the new dawn. I will give you your answer tomorrow. Then give me mine.

Winstone sat and felt the breeze off the dam on his face and looked out through the shredded tin at the empty shore. They’d had a caller. The hunters. They’d had a thing that made a sound like a goose. About halfway through the day he’d seen them blow it.

He got up and wiped his arse with the paper the hunters had left and he pushed open the pierced dunny door and walked down through the grass and the silence and thought that before you got excited about the cavalry it paid to recall which side you were on. On the beach he picked his way through the goose-shit and the cartridge shells and the down and he tucked a brown feather behind his ear.

Then he climbed the rocks behind the Red Hut and stood there under the purged blue sky and he thought about those big geese blowing their own last post and he looked down into the water.

THE DOORS OF
the bandit hall stood open to the night and beyond them was music and laughter and the colours of fire and unnoticed by those within the Kid walked into the cold blue night and the sound of crickets. The yard was empty. There was yellow light below the line of the stable door and the Kid crossed the yard and opened the door and the horses shifted their feet and turned their ears and the palomino raised its nose from the hay.

The Kid walked down the line of stalls and the palomino whickered at his approach and the grey stuck out its head.

He aint here, the Kid said to the grey. I don’t know where he’s got to.

The Kid stopped at the door of the palomino’s stall and the horse nosed his arm and blew out its warm hay breath on his sleeve.

You like it here, the Kid told the horse. You like it bettern dodgin rattlesnakes all day and sleepin on the ground.

Oh he likes it fine, said a voice behind him.

The Kid turned around. From the stall across the aisle the mule looked back at him with one long ear pressed against its skull and the other standing upright. The mule backed away at his approach and the Kid looked over the loosebox door and sitting there cross-legged in the straw was the barefoot boy in the ragged shirt he’d seen two days before. The boy was mopping up table scraps from a tin plate on his lap and he looked up from the plate at the Kid and licked his fingers.

The Kid looked at the boy and he looked at the mule and the mule flattened both its ears and tested the back wall of the box with its hoof.

Anybody ever shoot at that thing?

Nobody yet, the boy said.

The Kid rested his elbows on top of the loosebox door and then he folded his arms and leaned upon them. What are you doin here kid?

The boy took the pheasant bone he was sucking on out of his mouth and shrugged. As you see, he said.

I meant how’d you come to be in this place?

The boy lifted his chin. El Rabbitoh brought me, he said.

Brought you, the Kid said, from where?

From a place I had no wish to be.

You don’t have no kin?

The men here are my kin, said the boy. El Rabbitoh cares for me.

Is that so? said the Kid.

As you see, the boy said again.

An what is it you do around here, the Kid said, when you aint tending mules?

I do many things, the boy said. I am of great service.

I’m sure you are, the Kid said. Does the job pay well?

My reward is to come, the boy said and he picked up a pheasant wing from the plate and began to gnaw it.

The Kid watched the boy chew. I guess so, he said.

I know so, the boy said wiping his hand on his shirt. One day I will be a bandit prince.

Is that so? said the Kid.

It is so.

What makes you so sure?

It is not a matter for doubt, the boy said. El Rabbitoh has told me.

The Jacksons had time fenced up like a grazing plan into neat parcels of hours each one exactly sized for its purpose. All that was necessary was to follow the arm of the day as it swung around and you’d be delivered back where you started from lacing up your shoes in the early morning grey one ear out for the bus hardly knowing how you got there.

Be at the mailbox by eight-ten. Feed the dogs at four. Help Debbie until teatime. The first week or so Winstone had to hold his breath as he cleaned the dog runs out but it wasn’t the dogs’ fault they’d been eating and sleeping in their own shit all their lives and didn’t know any better. After he got used to the smell he liked feeding the dogs and right from the start he liked helping Debbie.

He liked the way she sang along with the radio and talked to the cat and the sure way she had of picking things up and setting things down as if the world had an order and she knew what it was and she always had. To look at her full on was too much and as far as he could he avoided being caught in that way just as he tried to evade the beam of her full notice which turned on him burned him up with every bad and dirty thing he’d done in his crusty snot-picking miscreant life and where his hands had been that morning. But he liked Debbie being there. He liked her moving at the edge of his sight and the swing of her square-cut
hair against her turned cheek and the sound of her voice behind him. He liked scrubbing vegetables elbow to elbow with her at the sink. He liked seeing her standing there at the bench when he looked up from the table and sometimes he wished he was Jemma and just as small and could go up behind Debbie and hug her leg and push his face into her thigh.

Ow Jemma don’t, Debbie used to say, it’s not nice to bite, and she was right, it wasn’t.

Winstone dug potatoes for Debbie. He coaxed baby carrots from the mud and hunted out lost eggs and brought in firewood and herbs. But the job that mattered to Debbie most and the one he liked best was looking after Jemma. Keeping her out of trouble happy quiet safe. Every weeknight from feeding the dogs until her father came home she was Winstone’s responsibility. Sometimes she liked to draw and when she did she liked him to draw with her. She drew slanting Haskett-houses sprouting unnamed growths in colours that houses shouldn’t be while beside her on the paper allotted to him Winstone demarcated white squares with straight lines of black and red and on the table in the middle of papers and felt-tipped pens the cat settled and folded its paws and purred.

On the other side of the living room door there was a cold hall leading to the front of the house and colder bedrooms. Along the hall there were shelves and with tatty books and magazines and forgotten toys on the shelves were photographs of Debbie and Todd and Debbie and Jemma and Todd and Debbie and Todd and other kids, boys and girls of various ages. Winstone passed the shelves every time he went down the hall to his room or to the bathroom and every time he came back and he had a lot of questions about the kids in the photographs that he did not ask and chief among them was how long the kids had stayed and where they’d gone next and if theirs were
among the sticky fingerprints all over
Llama Llama.

How long am I going there for? he’d asked Ros, and she’d looked at him and tapped her pen and said they’d see how things worked out.

In the hours he looked after Jemma all the while outside the light would be running west and in its absence the cold rose out of the ground and filled the garden to the top of the hedge and spilled out over the valley and the colours of the valley sank to grey and violet and the smoky blue of stone. About then he’d hear the door of the Pajero slam like a clapperboard wrapping up the day and they’d all watch the door and just as the panes of the kitchen windows completed their slow fade to black Todd would walk in with his beanie pulled down over his ears and the stubble standing out on his cheeks and the skin of them glowing.

That was the end of Jemma time. She forgot about Winstone for a while then and he didn’t hold it against her because after that the times allotted for tasks drew in and ran hard and fast on each other’s heels and he needed to concentrate so he didn’t trip up and cause a collapse Debbie turning with plates and the table not cleared not set everything all mixed up and one thing tumbling into the other.

Making food had looked easy for Zane but Debbie made it hard and it took a long time and most of the bench every night and Winstone never did find the courage to tell her about the many good things you just heated up in the packet.

After tea things slowed down again and they watched the weather report to the end and then it was time for Jemma to go to bed and Winstone to load the dishwasher and make tomorrow’s school lunch and after that he could watch TV for an hour and a half but he didn’t get to pick the channel. There were no exploding trucks or ice roads or fake tits in the reality shows Todd and Debbie liked just a lot of cops of various kinds and nurses and
hospitals and occasionally polar bears or sharks and at the end of the week
Coronation Street.

At nine o’clock he closed the door on the TV and the fire and Debbie and Todd and the living room with its dinner smells and he went into the bathroom and washed his face and brushed his teeth even though he’d done both of those things in the morning. Then he dried his face and his hands on the dark green towel that was his and he stepped out into the hall and switched off the light behind him and walked down the gallery of kids who hadn’t worked out to the room that was becoming his room but was not his yet with no locks on the door and the light on waiting for him and an echo of old damp in its smell and faded tank engines on the duvet and in the small orange glow of the light he put his emergency home pyjamas on and at ten past nine he got into the bed.

He carried the cold of the room into bed on his skin and he turned his face to the wall and pulled the duvet tight and closed his eyes and waited for the cover above and the electric blanket below and the blood inside to warm him through. He closed his eyes and lay still and quiet alone and he didn’t think about the people with whom he’d shared rooms and beds the ones he’d maybe see again and the ones he would never see because ten past nine was the time for going to sleep and not for thinking. He closed his eyes and lay still in the bed and every night he asked that the dreams not come. Almost always the dreams did come but he had no other plan on which to fall back and so he went on asking.

What frightened him most about the dreams was that they’d make him wet the bed. Sometimes he dreamed he’d started to pee and he rose out of sleep on that helpless tide, the exact and soothing warmth of his blood, to surface suddenly in panic. Then he’d throw back the duvet and pat down his sheets and in
the blunting chill of whatever small hour of the night it might be he could hardly grasp that they were dry. In other dreams Marlene was back in his bed and she wet it for him.

The dreams didn’t stop coming and he did not wet the bed and after a while he got used to Marlene being as she was now, or maybe she did, and the horror faded out of the dreams and he quite enjoyed hanging out with her there. Things between them went back to normal except for when he woke up and remembered that none of it had happened and couldn’t happen and never would. So he stopped waking up in the middle and dreamed the dreams to their end or until Debbie called him out of them in the small close darkness of seven o’clock when he lay for a moment or two in the dry bed while the tail of the dream slipped away in the dark and he tried to pinpoint the unreal thing he knew had been contained in the dream that had made it a dream and not true. Then at 7:02 he removed his hand from his pyjama pants and climbed out of bed and went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth and showered and got dressed and put on his shoes.

By the Sunday he went to Queenstown enough days had swung round that Winstone couldn’t recall which one of the Sundays he’d spent at the Jacksons it was and all he could say, looking back, was that it must have been the weekend after Debbie bought the new couch and she thought it was pick-up from Clyde and it wasn’t it was Frankton. So they had to go, just him and Todd in the Pajero with the back cleared out and the seats folded down, and get it.

Omakau, Todd said. Chatto Creek. Clyde.

Otherwise silent with the windows open through thin-skinned bandit country cracked and crusted by rock and buttressed by clouds the colour of fire-blacked steel and a taste
of metal too on the air rushing in charged up with the threat of a storm and cold off the hydro lake and the lake’s surface a rough iron plate wind-riveted above the drowned valley floor.

Cromwell, Todd said. Bannockburn.

The last after they’d turned off the highway and into the canyons, a cream dust detour to see a man about a pump and the man not there and Todd pulled over texting by the side of the road with the dry slopes rising around them dotted with rabbits and thyme and above the vineyard terraces just breaking leaf and the crumbling earth warm and the smells of all those things stirred together and contained within the clay bowl of the canyon walls and the Pajero’s tin cab and Winstone tasting the breeze and thinking of a pot hung over a willow-wood fire and that a desperado might get a lot less desperate in that country.

Back on the main road first the orchards and fruit stalls and then the valley floor fell away and the road humped its back as if taking a breath and sidled the rock wall gritted and black with damp through shadow the sun hadn’t touched in half a year while below the river’s slow fury coiled and uncoiled as it ate out the path and the blue water ran slick and fat with the dust of the country it was chewing.

Gold miner’s hut, Todd said, and Winstone looked and among the bluffs on the river’s far and unreachable side there was a small area where the schist was piled with greater purpose and above the piled schist some broken ribs of timber. To Winstone’s surprise Todd continued to speak for a while and he said that miners had come from as far away as California looking for gold in the river and they’d broken the hills and broken themselves and some got rich and many didn’t get rich and never went home and in the end it was the miners and not the river that was exhausted. After that Todd was quiet again leaving Winstone to settle the foreign badlands beyond the river’s frontier with characters of his own
choosing. He brought the women and little kids in by covered wagon train and the men on horses and for himself he choose a palomino with glossy honey-coloured hide and its loose mane and tail foaming down pale as falling water.

Around noon they crossed the river on a high iron bridge and left its course and came into a valley hatched red with bare vines and at the valley’s end they crossed the river again between towers of rock and entered into different country.

They came to Frankton and found the house and a woman in furry slippers came out and opened the garage and showed Todd the couch and Todd bent his neck to one side and he looked at Winstone and back at the couch and he sighed and reached out from his pocket a fold of notes already counted. Todd backed the Pajero up to the garage and he and Winstone wrestled the couch inside while the woman stood and offered advice and then they thanked her and drove away.

When they reached the highway instead of going back the way they had come Todd turned left and there was the big lake with its shifting shades of blue and rising from its edges willows and houses and hills and the snowbitten mountains bruising the sky and they followed the shore of the lake into town and drove through McDonald’s and Todd supersized everything and then he parked the Pajero and they took their brown paper bags and carried them down to the wharf and sat and ate and wiped the sauce from their faces and hands while under their feet the wash of the lake thumped against the wharf piles and the light of it shone between the boards.

Winstone looked across the lake and there was a steamship coming puffing black smoke and he looked back and there was an old stone hotel and he could almost hear the slide of shot glasses along the bar and the piano playing inside. Todd looked at the hotel too and he said the name carved into the stone and
he said that he and his mates used to drink there when they were kids. Not that much older than you, Todd said, and he smiled. Winstone asked if he wanted to drink there now and Todd said no and besides it wasn’t that sort of place any more and then he turned back and watched the steamer come in and they talked about that for a while.

They watched until the steamer docked and the passengers got off and Winstone asked Todd what sort of people they were and Todd said all sorts and that anybody could buy a ticket and go for a ride and Todd didn’t suggest he and Winstone go and Winstone didn’t expect him to.

They drove home and the rain hadn’t come and by the time Todd said Omakau again the shadows were stretching over the dry chipseal and the sun sat high on the fenceposts.

Winstone hadn’t felt anything fall. It wasn’t until he was getting undressed for bed that he realised the red phone wasn’t in his pocket. Maybe he’d lost it while they were shifting the couch or maybe it had slipped out when he leaned down over the side of the wharf to see the trout flitting in the water but really it could have happened at any time and he couldn’t say. There had been no credit left on the phone and the battery had died months before and he probably could have got a new charger and topped it up if he’d asked but then he would have had to explain and so he’d just carried the phone around as it was just in case it could somehow be brought back to life or maybe worked remotely.

To be on the safe side he searched Todd’s Pajero the first chance he got but the phone was nowhere inside and he hadn’t thought it would be. He knew straight away it was gone for good and Winstone thought about the phone lying red among the stones beneath the lake and he felt a lot of things but mainly lighter.