Before long one of the group of lane-ten hoods nudged my sister and she and her hooligan broke apart and looked over at me, he through the gap in his hair and her radiating anger. He bucked her off his lap and began to walk my way.
Even a violent criminal couldn’t just punch a kid in the face in a public place. I knew that. And then I didn’t know that. I blinked my eyes, trying to make the tears go. Time to be tough now. I made my mouth mean.
He squatted down in front of me, a pack of Camel tight in his Miller shirt pocket right at my eye level, and ‘Jane’ tattooed on his wrist. ‘Anson, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How ya goin’? Benny.’ He held his hand out for me to shake. The hand attached to the wrist with ‘Jane’ on it. Debbie’s middle name was Jane. Had this man tattooed my sister’s name on his arm? She would have to go away, live in England with an English aunt, surrounded by tweed and peonies.
The only kind of fame available to a young male in Shepparton was infamy. And Benny Zambrano had infamy … and was reaching out to shake my hand. I put my hand out and he shook it softly. I was in this too now. I felt as if I’d joined a gang.
Wallster was watching from the pinball machines, his own machine oddly silent, his fingers raised off the flippers, letting the silver ball ricochet dead without a fight. I knew Wallster would tell the town. Camo shook the hand of Benny Zambrano. I tried not to smile at the thought of all that might come of it. Camo knows Benny Zambrano. Don’t mess with Camo, Benny Zambrano’s going with his sister.
‘You want a milkshake, Tiger? And a Crunchie?’ I barely nodded. It seemed outrageous to accept gifts from such a person. ‘What flavour?’
‘Chocolate.’
‘What about your sister there?’
‘Strawberry.’
His hand was surprisingly soft for a thug. He had called me ‘Tiger.’ He came back with milkshakes for Vicki and me. ‘Thanks, Benny.’ It seemed a wildly intimate thing, to thank this infamous teenager for what amounted to a bribe. But I wanted those two words to mean a lot, I wanted them to mean, ‘I don’t care what the cops or my olds say, Benny. I’m on your side. Even in gunplay or truancy, I’m on your side. Us. Outlaws forever.’ When a desperado befriends you it is a far greater patronage than when a plain old nice person does. This twisted sharpie has come down out of an habitually dark mood to be agreeable to me. Has made the gruelling pilgrimage into niceness – for me.
Having bought himself some time he went back to kissing Debbie. I sucked on my shake and fondled my Crunchie. The chocolate bar was a dilemma. Crunchies were a favourite of mine. But if I ate it I no longer had it to show off to my friends and to casually mention it was given to me by Benny Zambrano to pay me for unbuttoning my big sister’s bell-bottoms. Trying to have my Crunchie and eat it too, I ate half of it and tied a knot in the wrapper, before realising this would be too obvious a prop, too clumsy a way to start a conversation about my notorious new friend. So I bit through the knot and ate the second half.
Benny Zambrano delivered Vicki and me gifts from the kiosk regularly over the next few hours. By now I was talking to him easily, eagerly. ‘Hey, Benny, what’s it like to get a tattoo? I’m going to get a tattoo.’ ‘Hey, Benny, have you ever stolen a car? I’ve shoplifted heaps of shit.’
‘I never stole nothin’, Tiger,’ he winked. What sly insolence. A denial of vast crimes overlaid by a simultaneous secret admission to those very crimes. Wow. This guy had all the wiles of a major bandit. A Great Train Robber. Right here in the Star Bowl he denied a life of crime while admitting to it for those of us smart enough to get what the wink meant. And it raised all sorts of bank heists and hold-ups in my mind.
He went back to kissing Debbie and I practised my wink. I could only do it with my left eye and had to screw my mouth sideways showing teeth, but told myself the mouth thing emphasised the irony of the wink. I began to wink at Vicki and Wallster after everything I said. ‘You guys want some Twisties?’ Screw-mouthed wink. ‘What are you doing this arvo?’ Screw-mouthed wink. Until Vicki told me, ‘You can’t wink at everything, Boyboy. It doesn’t make sense.’
By mid-afternoon I’d watched Benny put his hand up Debbie’s t-shirt, undo the top button of her bell-bottoms, snake his tongue into her ear and flay it on her braces, then stand her up against the wall of lane ten and try to grind her through the brickwork into the clear light of day. I was a fan of the show too. I’d been paid well. And I was thrilled to know a criminal who dealt in irony via deft winks. I was barracking for him to use her in whatever way he could think. But after three hours they were played out in this theatre, nothing more could be done. And both Vicki and I had bellyaches from his bribes.
As we were leaving the bowl he lifted me up and put me on his shoulders and carried me down the front steps. It near broke my heart that nobody of note was there to witness this. Debbie was right to kiss him. Benny was cool. A good guy misunderstood and forced to live under a town’s heavy preju dice. ‘See you soon, Benny. Thanks for all the stuff.’ He put a finger to his lips to make me promise silence, then he leant his head to the left so the hair fell away from the left side of his face and winked that revealed eye. I would go to war for this guy. This guy stood tall in the rankings of the town’s most magnificent people. How had Debbie attracted a cool, winking major criminal like this?
When we got home the bones of the Frigidaire chicken lay in a splintered monorail around the lip of the bathroom basin and around the lip of the bath itself. Each had been sucked for marrow. Mrs Flanagan had evidently invited a pack of famished wolverines into our family home. Mum would be hearing about this.
Our sated sitter sat in her favourite armchair, her lower face glazed with the piquant marrow of Frigidaire poultry, watching tractor ads on GMV-6 while she waited for the Matinee Movie to light up and take her away from the here and now. The TV guide in the Shepparton News had advertised a tale in which a talking mule named Francis joined the United States Marine Corps and she drew our collective promise there would be no chatter during this treat.
She had no inkling that under her care my sister had been defiled by one of the town’s premier hoodlums. Had been pressed against the wall of lane ten and dry humped in her bell-bottoms by a tattooed long-hair. And looking at her making rolling motions at the TV with her forefinger to hurry the tractor ads past and usher forth the wondrously droll mule, I doubted she would have cared. A dangerously neglectful babysitter, I decided. I would sort her out.
Three days later détente between Debbie and myself was shattered, as it usually was, by Debbie being a bitch. I had wanted to borrow her bike for Pigsy, because his had a flat tyre. We were going to ride over the back of the levee and shout abuse at people sating illegal lust with the cramped cross-denominational sex practised in borrowed Holdens. But she caught us riding out the gate and slapped Pigsy across the nose off the bike onto his back into the white gravel of our driveway. As he lay there blinking, she called him a thieving little dick and told him to go home.
Pigsy, bleeding from both elbows, was angry with me because he was scared of Debbie and it’d taken me half an hour to convince him she’d said he could borrow her bike. Which he should have known she would never do.
As he walked across the vacant block that separated our houses, first cradling his right arm in his left and then his left in his right, he called to me that I was a liar and he wasn’t going to play with me anymore. ‘She said you could use it,’ I shouted back. ‘Then she changed her mind. That’s sheilas.’ But it wasn’t sheilas. It was Debbie. She’d broken my best friendship and probably bones in my best friend and she was going to get hers.
When Dad got home from work he changed out of his suit and opened a can of beer and got Mum a whisky and soda and then he ate some cheese and biscuits. I challenged him to wrestle and he said not tonight and I called him a chicken, so he said okay, but only two bouts. He got down on his hands and knees on the rug in front of the TV and I charged at him, feinting so he lunged clumsi
ly and I got him in a headlock. His hair smelt of lavender pomade and he gurgled. I always won. I knew a lot of holds from watching Tarzan on crocodiles and neat little chops from watching Smart on KAOS. My strength was such that the man gave off zoological wails of pain. First I flipped him on his stomach and put his arm up his back until he hooted like a monkey’s ghost and yelled, ‘I give in. Don’t bust my arm.’ In the second bout I knocked him out cold with an elbow to his ribs.
He went down on his back with a hoomph, eyes glazed, then flickering shut. This gave me the feeling I’d reached life’s one and only summit, this moment of glory, this proof of my worth was so undeniable that from here nothing would ever be so valid again, and nor would it need to, after this miraculous thing I’d done. I felt like this about once a week.
As he lay there unconscious I leaned in close to his face to check for signs of life and to surreptitiously smell his breath made of beer and cheese, the beautiful scent of Dad wrestling. As I was leaning in, only a hand’s breadth from his face, he opened his eyes and said, ‘Righto, Boyboy. I’m going to watch the news now. Go and help Mum set the table.’
Since Guy had left home we remaining five ate dinner in the kitchen at the Formica-topped table. I’d beg Dad to do the fork trick and if I promised to finish my whole meal he’d spread his hand on the tabletop and stab his fork into the gaps in his fingers, bang, bang, bang, fast back and forward never touching flesh. He had scads of daredevilry like this.
Mum was a good cook with a global range of dishes and cuisines – unheard of in the Anglo world we inhabited where people were getting just flat out aspirational and uppity if they wanted more than lamb chops and mashed spuds and a salad of lettuce and tomato and, occasionally, the cosmopolitan foray of spaghetti Bolognese. Often Langdo or Pigsy would be stopped by an exotic smell in our kitchen, a bubbling French cassoulet, a steaming Spanish paella, beef Stroganoff. They’d wrinkle their noses at the new scent, mystified. Was it a good smell or a bad smell? ‘What’s that smell?’
‘Dinner.’ They’d grab at their throats and make choking noises. ‘How come your dinners smell so weird?’
‘I dunno. Mum uses ingredients.’
‘Our mums use ingredients too.’
‘What sort?’
‘Chops.’
‘That’s why your dinners smell like chops.’
When the others were out Mum and I would cook together. She would be chopping or mixing or sifting and I would be pushing green beans through the bean slicer, a handle that had an aperture on one end with blades inside. Push the beans in and they came out sliced. I would stand on the yellow pouf so I could reach the bench. Our heads would bend together, just cooking, her hands quick, mine slow, me questions, she answers, until we got the job done.
Mum was lonely, I think. Women didn’t get to choose their own friends in those days. They became friends of the wives of their husband’s friends. So their friendships were served up to them as a fait accompli and must have been, at times, shallow and perfunctory, and as a consequence Mum must have felt she wasn’t really reaching anyone. There was nothing wrong with Mum’s friends. But they probably weren’t the women she would have chosen for herself.
I had planned a tit-for-tat payback for Debbie. She had broken my friendship with Pigsy by slapping him onto the gravel. And even though this friendship broke irretrievably about once a fortnight, this break seemed more irretrievable than usual. So, a commensurate revenge was required. I would ruin her love life.
Let’s say it was a pot roast. Pot roast was a dish Mum did perfectly and one of Debbie’s favourites and will serve well enough as her condemned love life’s last meal. We sat at the table, Dad at one end, Mum at the other, Debbie on one side, Vicki and I on the other. Easy questions about our day from Mum and Dad. Habitual evasions and lies from us. Did you get a star for spelling? How was softball training? What did Mrs Benson say about the length of your dress? Gorging potatoes, nibbling cautiously on meat, hiding carrots in my shirt pocket and balancing French beans under the table’s rim where generations of desiccated beans lay like Frenchmen in a catacomb. Waiting for the right moment.
‘Did you pass your seven times table, Boyboy?’ Dad asked.
‘No. No I didn’t, Tiger.’ I stopped chewing and looked at him and winked, which meant twisting my mouth and revealing some half-chewed carrot I was storing in my cheek chipmonk-wise to spit into my top pocket when no one was looking. A shade of shock passed over his face before he laughed.
‘Why not?’ Mum asked. ‘What happened?’
‘You don’t need to know what seven times seven equals to steal cars, Tiger.’ I winked a flash of carrot mulch at her too.
Dad wasn’t laughing now. ‘What’s this winking and “Tiger” business? And stealing cars?’
Debbie was staring at me, radiating warning. Her eyes and mouth had gone thin and her lips lost colour. She was trying to head me off. ‘Benny taught me to wink,’ I said. Debbie lowered her face. ‘He’s going to teach me to hook cars too.’
‘Who is this Benny?’ Dad asked.
‘Benny Zambrano.’ I said it matter of factly, as if I didn’t know I was making a foul revelation, as if he was just another teenage boy in a line of teenage boys. And if I didn’t know I was revealing a crime, then I couldn’t be accused of dobbing, could I.
Mum laid her cutlery down hard and put one hand to her mouth.
‘Benny …? Where have you seen Benny Zambrano?’ Dad asked.
‘At the Star Bowl. Where else? He gives me lollies so he can feel Debbie up.’
I had never, until now, looked at it from their perspective. Their first little girl, made of ribbons and mispronunciations, fallen now among lascivious low-life. Feel up. Felt up … that expression fairly spits gynaecological implications.
‘You go to your room right now,’ Dad said.
‘But I …’
‘Don’t say a word. You know full well what you’ve done. I’ll speak to you later.’
Vicki was sent to bed as well. We listened from the landing on the stairway. From there a window looked down into the kitchen. They began to question Debbie, and then to accuse her of lies.
I had no idea that a young woman’s identity was so invaluable and vulnerable. Apparently the whole reality of Debbie could be snuffed out and reincarnated in demonic negative by spending half an hour alone with Benny Zambrano. What she had risked was a kind of death. I had the sudden, unworthy thought that with so much on the line, with Benny being the vector of an incurable shame, he should have been paying me higher bribes to let him unhook my sister’s bra. Milkshakes and Crunchies were a rip-off. Roller skates and an air gun would have been a more fitting payment. After all, my sister’s life was apparently at stake. If Vicki ever straightened her curly hair and got attractive enough that hoodlums wanted to feel her up I would ask for more.
The main fight turned out to be between Mum and Debbie. The Benny Zambrano liaison hurt Mum more than it hurt Dad, it seemed. It was a direct assault on her teachings and ways. She understood how easily a girl could be taken down. Mum began shouting accusations at Debbie about her clothes and habits and where she was heading and what she was likely to become and what she was doing to the family. Dad took up defending her. Told Mum, all right, all right, go easy. Mum called her a hussy, which I made a mental note to call her myself when next we got into an argument, and Dad told Mum not to say it, just don’t say it again because it’s not true. From there it became a fight between Mum and Dad, vicious, with tense silences. On the landing Vicki stared at me, pouting, tears leaking from her eyes.
It became an epochal dispute, during which I realised my family was mortal, had a lifespan, would end, and was, in fact, fleeting. I suddenly knew the fragility of my world. And I felt the hollowness of freefall in my gut as that world began to drop away with the adults and teenage girl in the kitchen yelling and crying. My parents are only together because they agree, every day, to be together, I realised. Maybe I had brought this agreem
ent undone. I began to wonder if I’d broken the family.
I waited, staring long hours at darkness, and listening as they all went to bed. The creaking of footsteps, the plumbing banging in the walls, the flushing of toilets, the brushing of teeth, the putting out of dogs, the doors slamming. Dad didn’t come to my room. He never spoke to me about my part in the bust-up.
Our family stayed tense, the many bright refractions of ease and trust within it doused. Within two months Debbie was sent away to The Hermitage, an exclusive boarding school in Geelong. A fortnight after leaving, a parcel was posted home containing her tight purple t-shirt and her bell-bottoms with a note from the headmistress explaining they contravened the dress code.
It should have felt like I had won. Slain the tyrant who had kept me under all these years. But it didn’t. I missed her. Who did I have now to play new records and tell me of new bands and brands and show me new fashions and dances and, most of all, to turn a sneer like a laser onto other kids who thought they were as cool as us?
And Benny? Briefly erotic, briefly heroic, and briefly demonic to various Camerons. Benny didn’t become much more than the tattooed hoodlum and gentle handshake he was that day at the Star Bowl. The following year he brought a brown paper bag containing a hank of his own hair into Cameron and Cameron and took that hank out and laid it on my father’s partner Johnno’s desk as proof of police brutality and demanded that Johnno, as his lawyer, do something about it. Johnno skewered it on the end of a black-lead pencil and dropped it in his waste paper basket and told him, ‘That’s not proof, Benny. That’s hair. Don’t bring hair in here.’
Not long after, Benny was tooling along in his Charger with the cops in pursuit when a young dead-eye fresh out of the academy leaned out the passenger window with a .38 and popped his tyres, rolling the Charger into a tree and torching him young. Kids my age took this as the naturally miraculous dexterity of justice. The kind of comeuppance delivered by James Bond. Further proof that physics was morally grounded and a good guy working for justice could gun down a baddy from over the horizon with his eyes closed. We brought Benny’s death into conversations as often as we could for a while, just to weigh it up to see what it meant. There was something glorious about cops killing baddies.
Boyhoodlum Page 17
