The Mary Smokes Boys (19 page)

He sat on the veranda and waited for Irene. The breath of the horses became smoke in the dusk. There was nothing to account for her absence.

He watched the road. He watched the land dim and turn a thousand nameless shades of blue and watched the lights of cars divide the dark until he could barely see. Then, just north
of Eccleston’s drive, a car slowed and sped off. Then there were two darkened figures standing where the car had been.

 

SHE HAD WAITED for him with Amy Minh at the restaurant. After that she had walked up and down Banjalang Street, hoping she might see him. At last she decided to walk home on her own. She was already out of town when she realized a blue truck followed her. The truck idled twenty yards behind and came no closer until she was nearly home.

She had been about to run when she saw Eccleston on the side of the road. Then the truck swung back onto the asphalt and sped away. Eccleston came from his house with the crowbar he had been using to lift a rotted post out of the front fence. He had seen the Holden truck and then seen what he thought was a young girl in its headlights. At a distance he thought the truck was Grey’s. But then he thought about what had happened two nights ago, when a truck had sat waiting for her on the side of the road in front of his house.

He did not reach the road in time to make anything of the plates or the driver before the truck was only red tail-lights disappearing toward Highway 54.

So now they stood together on the road again.

“What are you doin out here by yourself ?”

Her quickened breath broke her words.

“Walking home. Where’s Grey?”

Eccleston looked across the way. There was not light enough to see Grey’s movements from that distance, and there were no lights on in the house. Only the firedrum.

“Over there, I spose. Someone lit that fire.”

Then he saw how shaken she was. Her hands trembled along with her voice.

He sighed and swore under his breath.

“Was that the truck from two nights ago?”

She nodded.

“It followed me.”

“Was it the same boy? The blond one?”

“I’ve seen him before, but I don’t know where.”

Eccleston looked down the empty road.

“How long did he follow you?”

“Half a mile.”

“Did he say anything?”

She shrugged and looked away.

“What did he say?”

She shook her head.

He sighed.

“Did the car stop? Did he try to touch you?”

“It didn’t stop.”

“I saw it stop, Irene.”

Her eyes fell and her hair fell across her face.

“I didn’t let him do anything.”

“But he tried, didn’t he? And last time too.”

Eccleston grabbed her arm. He wanted her to tell him everything. His short breath made her think he was about to cry, though she had not seen him cry in all the fifteen years of her life.

He let go of her arm and gathered himself.

“Don’t tell your brother. Not yet. He might take it to heart and do somethin stupid.” Eccleston remembered the ten-year old boy who had taken on men in a human ring at Tanner’s. He kicked a clod of dirt off the road. “I might too.”

She nodded.

He leant toward her, to hold her. Then he stopped himself. He put his trembling hand on the top of her head.

“Leave it to me. But don’t walk on the road alone. Don’t leave the school ground unless Grey comes to get you. And if Grey’s not home in the day, lock the doors of the house. And if he’s not home by nightfall, well, you come to me.”

He leant down to kiss her. She turned her face and let him kiss her cheek. He sighed heavily. “Go home.”

He stepped off the asphalt and walked back up the way to his house.

 

HER FOOTSTEPS SOUNDED on the gravel. She came as far as the foot of the stairs and she still had not seen him sitting at the top of them.

“Where have you been?”

“Grey? God, you frightened me!’ She did not let her eyes meet his. She walked past him. She took off her shoes. “At Amy’s. I told you I was going there. And where did you go last night?”

“You walked home?”

“I had to. I was worried sick about you. Someone said you were in a fight?”

“You shouldn’t be walking on the highway at night. It’s dangerous. But then, maybe you didn’t have to walk far.”

“What do you mean?”

“I saw you out on the road with Ook. You think he’s some kind of saint, don’t you? You know, I’ve seen him beat hell out of a man for money. Stand by watchin horses caught in wire, tearin themselves to bits to escape a fire he lit. He spent the night in a whore’s arms at the Workers’ Club a month ago.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she whimpered without looking up at him. “But you’re all right, and that’s what matters to me. You haven’t made dinner?”

“I was waiting for you.”

“You’re such a child. Why don’t you turn a light on?”

He followed her inside and she turned on the kitchen light and lit the potbelly stove and she saw his face.

“What happened to you?”

She went to him and put her hands on his cheeks and ran her fingers over the wound.

“Don’t touch me.”

He caught her hands and threw them down. He had made her cry again.

“Grey, I can’t stand this! Why do you hate me?”

“Because you’re worthless. Because you’re just as worthless as everything else.”

“Grey, stop it. Please–”

He picked her up and sat her down on the table. He rucked up her skirt.

“What’s this, Irene?”

She pushed the skirt back over her legs and hung her head and would not look up.

“It’s not what you think.”

“Why would you let someone touch you like that if you weren’t worthless?”

She held her face in her hands. Grey’s mouth twisted with pain.

“Why would you let a man hurt you? Why? Did he tell you this was love?”

He slammed his fist down on the table beside her.

His eyes filled with tears. It was painful with the swelling in his cheek.

“Tell me who it is, Irene. I know already. But you say it. Tell me and I’ll right it. I’ll deal with him. Men will harm you if you let them. You don’t know them like I do. They don’t know what you are.”

Tears streamed from her eyes. Then from his.

“Tell me you want me to stop it.”

He ran the back of his hand along the length of the cuts on her leg and leant his broken cheek upon hers.

“I don’t know,” she whimpered. “I don’t know … I don’t know.”

She caught his hand and turned quickly when they heard Eccleston’s truck on the driveway. The white headlights came in through the kitchen window. Irene got down from the table and smoothed her crumpled skirt. Grey wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

Eccleston had driven the Valley Highway to Highway 54 and seen nothing. No sign of the blond boy and the Holden truck. When he got to the T-junction he got out of his cabin and looked east and west along a synthetic river. The lamps and glinting electrical pylons that kept sentry beside it seemed a parody of
the Mary Smokes boys and their vigils at the creek. The blind watch of the highway lamps was ceaseless. Their light obscured the dark and the truths of the dark and even the stars. A road-train roared past. Then a speeding sedan that was followed by another. Eccleston sat down in the cabin and shut the door and turned his truck around.

And now he had pulled into Grey’s drive.

Grey walked down the stairs to meet him at the firedrum. Eccleston’s horses were huddled near the drum and shielding each other from the wind that was bitter cold now at the approach of night. Eccleston breathed smoke.

“I’m thinkin of going away for a day or two.”

“What for?’ Grey asked.

“Look for a horse.”

“What horse?”

“You know what horse.”

Grey glanced up at the sky, at the unravelling smoke.

“Don’t be stupid, Ook. That’s done.”

“Maybe.”

“What do you mean ‘maybe’? Do you know somethin?”

“No. Just a feelin that we should get that horse back.”

“Then leave it.”

“Don’t worry. No one can track me. Come with me, in case we have to steal him back?”

“No.”

Eccleston sighed and looked into Grey’s eyes and then looked into the dark and spat.

“Send Irene to stay with Angela in the city for a night or two and come.”

Grey shook his head.

“Right now, worst comes to worst, we’ve got Tanner to deal with. I reckon we can handle him.”

Eccleston nodded and stared at the firedrum, at a spark flung up to the stars.

“Then look after Irene while I’m gone.”

Each fixed the other’s eyes.

“I always do.”

“I know.”

“Have you got somethin more you want to say to me?”

“No. Nothin.”

“You know she’s a child, Ook.”

Eccleston breathed deeply.

“I know. So I’m sayin look after her.”

He turned and walked back to his truck.

Grey sat on the stairs and watched him go. He went back inside.

Later that night the telephone rang with an offer of work.

RUSTY’S WAS AN INDEPENDENT ROADHOUSE BETWEEN towns on Highway 54, and the only lonely accent on that nighttime stretch of plain. There were petrol and gas pumps in front, two diesel pumps on the floodlit dirt at the back, a kiosk and cafeteria, and a totem pole of neon lights hard by the road beaming “RUSTYS”–“24HOUR”–“89.9 CENTS”–“ROADHOUSE ” into the dark.

At half-past five Grey was out the front stacking bagged firewood. The light failed fast behind him and when he looked up he saw faded blue day, copper dusk and dark night and stars in a line. A railways friend of his father who moonlighted at the roadhouse had left town for the weekend and needed someone to fill in his shift. Grey had worked at Rusty’s twice before. He was glad of the excuse not to stay in Mary Smokes. He was glad to be alone.

A dozen roadtrains and twice that many tourists’ cars invaded his solitude and for two hours together he was busy. At nine the cafeteria cook went home. She left fried potatoes, boiled peas and slices of roast beef in the hotbox and left the big auto-brew coffee pot full. She made Grey a toasted beef and mustard-pickle sandwich before driving off toward her waiting family. He finished the sandwich with sweet black coffee then swept out the cafeteria, hosed oil off the cement and stacked milk and bread crates out back on the graded dirt.

Soon there was nothing to do in the ever-lengthening
spells between vehicles but sit at a table in the cafeteria and stare out the window. He watched a ragged middle-aged man come down the road, suitcases in hand, and sit at an outside table without coming inside. The man had dyed-black, brylcreemed hair and wore grey pants and a tartan jacket with white-capped leather shoes. He looked like he had spent all his life living in motels and ten-dollar rooms above bars. In a while he walked to the edge of the highway and sat on his bags before the ash-grey plain. He waited a half-hour, eyeing the highway east, before a McCafferty’s bus stopped and carried him away.

An hour passed and Grey saw no one else. There was a television mounted in one corner of the cafeteria and when boredom got the better of him he turned it on. He poured himself a black coffee and watched a black-and-white comedy to its end.

A bus stopped and delivered two boys who stood joking with each other on the concrete in the dry cold. When they tired of the cold they came in and bought cigarettes. They told Grey they were business students on holiday. Grey asked what kind of business. The boys laughed at the question. Then a horn blast issued from a late model sedan and the boys ran outside and were gone.

The clock measured another lonely hour and Grey made himself another coffee and smoked a cigarette. After midnight a buzzing, watery-eyed fatigue took hold of him. It felt like being drunk without the sense of wellbeing. It did not normally begin for hours yet. But he had been tired at the outset tonight.

Suddenly an old man was sitting at table in a dim-lit corner of the cafeteria. He was mumbling to himself and looking up every so often at the graveyard shift soap operas Grey had unintentionally left playing on the television. Grey sat down at a table next to the man and offered him a cigarette. The old man slid his chair across the floor and asked Grey what he thought about the war. He was not drunk. Not just drunk. Grey could tell he was crazy. An old man whose mind was too convoluted to let him
sleep. Grey tried to figure out which war the old man was talking about.

“And I’ve still got me issue, elmet an rifle an all. They tried to take em off me but I kept em! I keep em in me ome. And a grenade too, undetonated under me bed … ”

But an unlikely station wagon pulled in for fuel and Grey had to attend it, leaving the old man telling the story to himself. The station wagon carried a small sleeping family. The wife was dozing in the passenger seat and three blond children were nestled in the back. The husband got gingerly out into the cold to fill the tank. Grey kept his eye on the old man through the cafeteria windows while he wiped the windscreen. The old man still sat at the table talking to no one. Grey sighed with a little envy at the family who seemed so out of place here this late at night, as though they had taken a wrong turn, driven here from some distant other world.

When he got back inside, Grey made the old man a coffee and a roast beef sandwich. The old man drank the coffee with a half-dozen spoonfuls of sugar but only toyed with the sandwich. He was off the war now. He was talking about something else, but Grey could not make it out. The air became cold even in the cafeteria and Grey went out to the truck to get his jacket.

When he returned the old man was gone.