The Mary Smokes Boys (21 page)

The fiancé thought it was at him. He pushed Grey and Grey tried to hit back but missed and fell backwards down the stairs. The next he knew, he was lying in the car park and the fiancé was kicking him on the ground and Vanessa was screaming for it to stop. Grey managed once to get to his feet and was knocked straight back down.

He sat on the dirt against a car wheel with a buzzing head. People were talking all around him but he heard nothing they said. Then someone had their arms around his shoulders. Then he was sitting in the back seat of Vanessa’s car watching the fiancé where he stood on the veranda of the hall. Grey was dazzled by the headlights of cars that were pulling away, carrying people to the showgrounds and the melancholy annual cabaret.

 

AT THE SHOWGROUNDS Grey felt better and apologized and
even thanked Vanessa for the lift. Vanessa was crying into her hands.

He saw Matt Thiebaud sitting on the grass, listening to the band.

“You look like hell!’ said Thiebaud.

“Thanks for showin up at the dance.”

“I was goin to. I’m gettin bored with this here anyway.”

“Let’s go somewhere then.”

“Where?”

Grey almost suggested heading north to Kilcoy, but then he remembered they were not welcome in that town on account of Eccleston’s last trip there. He did not want to go back to the bars and poolrooms in Mary Smokes.

So they stayed where they were.

The band played on a truck deck. The steel guitar, squeezebox accordion and violin played a long and ebbing tune. The crowd was thin and scattered. Thiebaud and Grey sat up close to the truck. Grey watched the bonfire beside the trailer, children skirting the edge of the flames. A small boy poked, touched, pulled away with too hot hands, then grabbed quickly and held a bit of wood burning at one end and circled the fire letting sparks fly behind him before throwing the wood back. A merry-go-round turned at the edge of the plain.

“What are we doin here?”

“What do you mean?”

“In this town.” Grey breathed deeply and closed his eyes. “I’m twenty-five years old.”

“We’re makin our way.”

Thiebaud took out his pouch and pinched the tobacco and rolled Grey a cigarette and then rolled one for himself.

“But I know what you mean, Grey. I know what you mean, all right.”

So they both felt it tonight. Their tribe, the wild boys of Mary Smokes, was failing so suddenly.

“What have we been fighting against?”

Thiebaud looked into the dark. The burning end of his cigarette glowed against the outskirts of town that might as well have been the beginning of a howling waste.

“I don’t know,” he said.

What they had been fighting was uncertain, but both boys knew that somewhere in the night, even at the asking of the question, they had lost something unnameable and irrecoverable. Time overflowed with lost tribes. Why should this one of a half-caste, a simpleton, two poor boys and one’s arcane young sister be different?

The band left the stage. The boys’ sad reverie was broken by the end of the music.

“Where’s Ook tonight?’ said Thiebaud.

“Where is he ever, lately?’ Grey drew on his cigarette. “Did I tell you I’m thinkin of moving to the city?”

“And that you were goin north to get work on a trawler.”

“Did I say that? I might do. Next year.”

“I don’t much like the idea a workin three months straight.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“You don’t mind now. Wait till you’ve been doin it for a month.”

“You’re just lazy, Thiebaud.”

“That’s true.”

They sat quiet again, listening to the bonfire. Talking about future plans with someone who believed in them made Grey feel a little better, and the emptiness inside him grew smaller.

“It’s town’s big night tonight, isn’t it?’ Thiebaud said.

“And tomorrow night.”

Thiebaud dug a hole in the ground with the heel of his boot.

“But I know what you’re sayin, North. Tell the truth, I am gettin sick of this same old thing year after year. I feel it most now in the winter.”

Their home was sedated through the long months of summer. It slept and dreamt, waking suddenly in May when the air was filled with expectation and the chill promise of escape.

Grey wondered what would happen to Raughrie Norman if he and Thiebaud left town. He mentioned this. The two boys decided Eccleston would never leave Mary Smokes.

“Same work and no work, same people, same joints every year,” said Thiebaud. “Runnin round here after whatever girls haven’t moved away yet. I’m leavin town, all right. Get myself set up a bit.” He took a long drag of tobacco and blew it out the corner of his mouth. “One day we’ll all be set up, you see. You will and I will, and even little Irene will.”

Thiebaud could not hold Grey’s gaze. He looked away, then back at his friend, and then Grey knew that he knew; that the secret of his sister was no secret at all.

“I think Ook loves her, Grey. I don’t say that’s right or wrong. But then he told me he found her on the road the other night talkin to some boy. Probably some poor kid from school. I don’t know who it was, but I think Ook might. Last I saw him he told me he was sortin it out. So perhaps he’s leavin her alone.”

“He should have told me.”

“I think he wanted to.”

“And she … Does she–?’ He turned his eyes to the ground.

“I don’t know. She’s strange, Grey. You know that. Once Ook thought she did. But she told him some other had made her a promise. Probably the boy he caught her with. I spose kids make promises to each other all the time. You shouldn’t be surprised. She’s the prettiest girl anyone’s ever seen. Someone was bound to fall in love with her one day.”

Grey shut his eyes and sighed deeply.

Thiebaud put his hand on Grey’s shoulder.

Grey wondered who the boy was. At once he felt the need to drive home and secure his sister and then find Ook and go wherever was necessary to put an end to this. But then he let it pass. There was nothing to do but let it pass. There was nothing to do but accept. Despite her solemnity and strangeness, she was a child, at times a childish child; just a girl who would one day be a woman. And the other? Some poor rosy-cheeked boy in her
class at school who had spoken to her gently, or even if it was Eccleston she cared for most … Either way, a boy she admired. Someone who treated her as a regular girl: the daughter of her father; the possession of no one but herself. He felt guilty. So guilty he convinced himself he must be satisfied without knowing who the other was.

Thiebaud put his arm around Grey’s neck and shook him.

Though he could not force a smile, Grey felt someway pacified. What had been happening with her these last weeks, this must be the natural way of things. It must be. And there was nothing truly wrong. It was a girl’s right to grow up, however awkward and ungentle the process might seem. So he had been inventing it all. That part of him that had been growing into the monster in the woods and at the house with her, that wanted to fight against everything no matter what damage it caused, that part was burning him out so quickly. And that was what they called childishness. There was comfort in the knowledge it would eventually pass. The world would forgive him his youth, so long as he outgrew it. Now he must harden himself to a new degree to be equal to his inheritance.

 

THIEBAUD DROVE HOME and Grey walked the minuscule sideshow alley by himself, wanting to hold onto the armistice in his heart a little longer. After he had walked the alley twice and there seemed nothing he could do to prolong the night, Jack Harry came and slapped his back.

“Guess what I just saw?”

“What’s that?”

“Vanessa Humphries and that bloke who hunted you outta the dance hall before. Over there behind the marquee near the sideshows. And he starts tryin to press her up onto the wall of the thing and she hit him! How about that, eh? Bloody hell, did she hit him!”

Grey smiled.

“It’s just coquetry. She’s playing.”

“Hey? Nah, nah, she hit him. Did she hit him! Anyway, that’s just deserts. Son of a whore. Comin to get a beer?”

“I’ve been drunk once already tonight. The second time’s no fun.”

Jack Harry shrugged and left him, and Grey decided to take one last wander about the night’s diminishing entertainments. Anticipation had taken hold of him and was spoiling his peace. Without admitting it to himself he was looking for her. He found her standing before a stall of grinning clowns and grotesques. Under the stall’s orange light a showman watched her little brother place ping-pong balls into the mouth of a clown. When the balls were gone the boy turned around pleading. Vanessa forced a tired smile and gave him a handful of coins to play again. She looked very sad. She saw Grey and sighed and looked down at her shoes and then took her brother’s hand.

“Come on, Billy.”

Grey followed her off the sweet-smelling sawdust, out of the alley and through the horse floats and caravans where wood smoke hung above the cold flat. They were back behind the closed pavilion in the dark, the place where she supposedly hit her man. She stopped and they stood staring at each other. She let go of her brother’s hand. She turned around and looked like she was going to cry.

“ Why are you following me? You’re making yourself ridiculous, you know. There are plenty of other girls around. You don’t have to come chasing me like an old dog.”

Then she pursed up her little face and cried and could not be tough or proud or dignified anymore. She reached for his hand.

“Come on then.”

They went out onto the highway and walked to her car.

 

AT HOME IRENE was asleep at the table with her head on her arms. She must have been very tired as she did not wake when Grey came in. It was dark but the embers in the stove glowed and he stood still and stared at her sleeping face. The night before,
the mere sight of her was enough to pull his chest tight like a drum and make his insides hollow. But lying here now … he told himself she was just a girl, his sister, but a girl like any other. He noted her long greasy hair, pallid skin and stick thin arms … the tears that stained her cheek. These were capable of breaking his heart if he let them. Why, he wondered, have I only ever loved the small, the weak, the estranged: his worthless father, his suffering mother? Perhaps that was unnatural–one of those things he must change. And he felt he could change it. His heart had already become easier. Before it had burned with dark fires that promised neither light nor warmth and never let him rest.

He wondered if she had waited up for him tonight. Perhaps she had waited to tell him the thing that until very recently he had most wanted to know. The thing he had made so tremendous for her. It could wait now, he thought.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered in her ear while she slept. How I must have wounded her heart, he thought. How I might have–He dared not think. He felt pressure leaking out of him like fluid draining from an infection.

He went to the sink and ran a glass of water and went to his bedroom without waking her.

For the first time in months he did not dream of his mother or his sister: those dreams without words that haunted his nights and left an uncharitable ocean residing in his heart. He was amazed at how tired he was. So tired he thought he might shut his eyes and never wake, at least not for the longest time.

 

THE BLACK MAN ECCLESTON HAD MET IN THE BAR PULLED off the highway ahead of him and pointed down a dirt road. Eccleston got out of his truck and walked to the black man’s window.

“Half a mile down. Over the creek.”

Eccleston nodded. Then the black man drove off.

He waited on the side of the highway and smoked while the night deepened.

He rolled down the dirt road in the dark, idling when he could and without headlights.

He crossed the dry creek on foot and stood in a gully beside the fenceline. Three hundred yards distant were horses. He crawled through the fence and walked across the flat. The horses stirred. He got close enough to see the smoke of their nostrils, close enough to see the smoky-black thoroughbred colt standing above a white mare.

He whispered under his breath, “Damn it, Grey.”

He drove back to the highway hotel where he was staying and dialled the operator and asked for August Tanner of Mary Smokes.

“I know where your horse is.”

Tanner spat down the phone.

“I knew it. You filthy black son of a whore–”

“Shut up, old man. I can get him to you in two days.”

“Bring him tonight or there’s trouble.”

“There’ll be no trouble. You listen. There’ll be no trouble. You’ll have your horse in two days.”

“Get him here by tomorrow.”

“I can’t. I need another man.”

“You bring him tomorrow.” Tanner’s voice trembled.

“What’s wrong, old man?”

There was no answer but Tanner’s troubled breath.

“ What’s wrong?”

“There’s a boy been hired.”

“What?”

“By tomorrow night it’ll be too late. That’s all I can say …’ But Tanner stammered on. “There were signs, reasons, that made me reckon it was you and North. Then my client started puttin the screws on me. He knew I wasn’t tellin him everything I knew.”

“What boy’s hired?”

“My client’s picked him out. My client’s comin round tomorrow
night. I had to be seen to be doin somethin, Eccleston. You pushed me too far.” The old man sounded close to tears.

“You damn fool, Tanner. Call him off.”

“You don’t understand. I’ve held him off this long–held him off as long as I could. But I don’t know where he is. I don’t even know his name. You bring me that horse, so I can ring my client and promise him he can come round and see him tomorrow. He alone’d be able to call the boy off now.”