Two Wolves

by Tristan Bancks

  ‘Open it.’

  Ben was suspicious. Dad wasn’t known for buying presents. He left that to Mum. She even bought her own birthday presents. Ben picked up the box. It was small and plain and grey. Ben wondered if there was some kind of punishment or prank inside. He carefully opened a cardboard flap at one end and let the contents slide out onto his palm. A smile washed over his face. He clutched his fingers around it.

  ‘Ray!’ Mum said.

  ‘What?’ Dad asked, wiping mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth.

  Mum clicked her tongue and shook her head.

  It was a knife. Swiss Army. Red with a white cross. A serious one. Chunky, with metal sides that felt cold on his fingers. Ben flipped out a large blade, then another smaller one.

  Mum stood to clear the plates.

  ‘You think you can take care of it?’ Dad asked.

  Ben nodded. He flipped out a saw, a tiny pair of pliers, a corkscrew, scissors, a screwdriver and some small, mysterious, pointy tools. He picked a tiny pair of tweezers and a toothpick out of the side of the knife.

  ‘I want one!’ Olive said, sticking her bottom lip out.

  ‘Ah, for you . . .’ Dad said, taking a large box out of one of the tall paper shopping bags sitting on the floor behind him. He gave it to Olive and she did a dance, pretending to play electric guitar with the box. This was the first interaction between Dad and Olive in over a week.

  Ben was mesmerised by his knife. When every arm had been folded out he sat and looked at his dazzling red, white and silver spider. It was the best thing he had ever owned.

  ‘What do you say to Dad?’ Mum asked, closing up containers, clearing plates, throwing them into a plastic bag.

  ‘Thanks,’ Ben said without looking up. He was already thinking about the raft and how he could cut and screw and saw it with his knife and make it sturdier and take off downstream. He almost started talking about it but something stopped him. He needed to keep his secret world by the creek for himself.

  ‘Awesome!’ Olive said. She was holding a skateboard with a blue plastic deck and red wheels. She had been asking for one since she was four. Ben wondered where she would ride it out here.

  Dad reached into his pocket and placed another small container on the table. ‘My love,’ he said. Ben looked up. He had only heard his father call Mum ‘my love’ once or twice. It sounded weird and uncomfortable.

  Mum turned from where she was crouched packing food into the esky. She stood, eyes wide, looking like a little girl. Dad snapped open the top of the box and Mum’s eyes kindled. She took what was inside and slipped it onto her finger. It was a ring with a diamond in it.

  Mum flung her arms around Dad, kissing him all over his face a thousand times. Ben didn’t really like watching his parents kiss.

  ‘Do you realise that this is the first real present you’ve bought me in fifteen years?’ Mum said. ‘I paid for dinner the first time we went out. Do you remember? I should have known it was a bad omen.’

  Dad pulled a face at her. ‘All right,’ he said, turning to the big bags on the floor again.

  ‘What else?’ Mum asked, admiring her ring.

  ‘Look on the front seat,’ he said. She went outside, opened the car door and gave a little shriek. Through the window Ben could see that she was holding two boxes.

  Dad had bought other presents for Ben and Olive, too. Clothes for each of them in various sizes, just to be sure. Shoes for Olive. For Ben, a robotic Lego kit and a Mad magazine. For Olive, a pirate outfit and a hot-pink remote control pick-up truck that could drive across the sandy clearing out the front. She loved her skateboard best. She rode it around and around the cabin all afternoon.

  It felt more like Christmas than any Christmas Ben had ever known. For that moment, everybody was happy. The way things were meant to be, the way they were in movies. The way Ben always imagined other families being. Maybe better.

  As dark closed in on the cabin, Dad decided to try lighting a fire and they laughed at his pathetic camping skills. Only Mum managed to get a decent flame going.

  Later, as Ben lay on his squeaky new air mattress in the darkness of the cabin, with a belly full of food and his parents outside laughing and talking, he wondered . . . if life was full of good things and presents and they were all happy, did it matter where the money had come from? Did it matter why his father had driven off from the police? Did it matter that his mum had lied to him about selling the business? Maybe he was overreacting. Maybe they really did sell the wreckers. Maybe that old corrugated iron office building and the broken-down machinery and all those smashed-up cars were worth that much money. And that’s how they got the presents. What if it could always be like this? A million dollars could buy a lot of happy.

  Ben’s eyes half-opened. He was cold and had no idea where he was. No roar of cars or semitrailers on highway. No trains. No background hum of electrical tower.

  His eyes adjusted to the darkness. He saw Olive lying on her air mattress next to his. Mum and Dad’s voices trickled in from outside. Not laughing and chatting like they had been earlier. Arguing now. Ben had that knife-in-the-belly feeling that he got when they argued late at night. He lay in the dark, alert, listening. Olive sucked her thumb, making a quiet squeaking noise.

  There were other sounds, too, when Ben listened deeply. Crickets or insects. A frog somewhere. Scurrying in a tree and a screech from high above. Not silence but not sounds that he knew. The noise of trucks and cars and trains was comforting. Known, mechanical things. But here everything was unknown. The only familiar sound was the arguing.

  ‘Why?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Because we have to sit tight. It won’t be forever but we can’t just . . .’ Dad lowered his voice. Ben could not hear the rest of what he said but it was spoken with intensity and Mum responded fiercely.

  ‘Please. Just. Listen to me,’ he heard Mum say. ‘I never feel heard!’

  Ben crawled across his air mattress, crept to the window, peered out.

  A near-full moon shone through the pines and the white-sand clearing gleamed like silver. Mum and Dad sat on their camp chairs next to a few smouldering coals. Dad poked the coals with a stick, sending orange splinters of light shooting into the air. They continued to argue in low voices, silhouettes lined with moon-glow.

  Ben worried sometimes that his parents would not be together forever. But he also worried that they would be together forever. He lay down on his mattress with a grunt, pulling the dark-blue sleeping bag up to his neck. Like the fire, happiness had flickered and died. He looked around at the roof beams, the shelf with the food, the dark cupboard. This was the creepiest place he had ever slept. He felt a sharp bite on his elbow and thought of all the spiders that must be in the cabin with him. And ghosts. If he were a ghost he would hang out in this cabin. It was perfect for ghosts, just not for humans.

  Ben lay still, watching, feeling, listening. He couldn’t count the number of nights in his life that he had gone to sleep with his parents fighting. Too many. Even after all these years, he still got that feeling in his belly, waiting for Dad to get into the car and drive off, wheels spinning on the road. Ben wasn’t a church-goer, but on those nights he prayed that his dad would be okay. He would lie awake until he heard the car shake and rattle back into the driveway after midnight.

  He listened for a while but tiredness crept up on him little by little, covering him like a cloak. He tried to shrug it off but he was losing the battle. The sound of the creek cut through the voices and other night noises. ‘Shhhhh,’ it said, dragging him down.

  I need to know.

  These words came to him and his eyes flickered open. No matter how many pocket knives he was given he still needed to know where the money had come from. He sighed and turned over. The mattress squeaked on the floorboards. He found a comfortable position and closed his eyes again.

  What are they ar
guing about? Why do we have to ‘sit tight’?

  Why couldn’t he just be happy? Everything was good. Everything had been great all day. Let it go. They’ll be fine in the morning.

  He rolled onto his back, arms folded across his chest.

  ‘Shhhhh,’ said the creek but Ben fought it. He would find out. He would stay awake until Mum and Dad came inside. He would listen to their conversation. He would learn where they were heading, what they were doing.

  Ben reached over the side of his mattress and felt inside his backpack. His hand touched a days-old pear from school. He laid the pear aside on the floorboards, then felt in the bag for his camera. He ran his thumbs over the buttons, switched it on and placed it on the green metal trunk. He sat up and framed a wide shot of the cabin. It was very dark but the camera was good in low light. He hit the ‘record’ button and the red light shone. He threw some clothes on top, covering the red light, and he sent out a prayer that he had enough battery to catch their conversation.

  His head hit the inflatable pillow and he tumbled into a dark well of sleep.

  ‘Sometimes I wish we hadn’t done it,’ Dad said.

  Ben waited, his mouth dry. He pressed the video camera speaker to his ear, listening over the burble and swish of the creek. He sat on the bank, his back against a tree. He had escaped the cabin with his bag, camera and a spare battery before anyone else woke. The sky grew orange but the sun had not yet risen over the wall of sandstone on the other side of the creek.

  The picture on the camera’s flip-screen was too dark to see and the sound was low, so he kept the speaker pressed to his ear, swatting at mosquitoes on his ankles and neck.

  ‘Ray, please don’t fall to pieces on me now. You got us in. You get us out,’ said Mum’s voice.

  ‘I hate this place.’

  ‘Welcome to the club,’ Mum said. ‘Why didn’t you think about that before you drove us all the way up here?’ Then, in a quieter voice, ‘What about the kids? What are they thinking?’

  Sometimes the words weren’t clear but Ben filled in the gaps for himself.

  ‘I didn’t have a lot of time. And the kids’re fine. They’re kids.’

  ‘Just because –’

  ‘As soon as we get these papers we go,’ Dad hissed.

  More shuffling sounds. No speaking for a while. Ben listened with every cell, muscles tight, breath short. He wondered if he should scan forward. Someone lay down on an air mattress and it squeaked softly on the floorboards in the background.

  ‘Worst case, we can’t get the passports, we go into the desert, somewhere that doesn’t even exist.’

  ‘Great,’ Mum said. ‘Sounds fantastic. I’ve always wanted to live in the desert, Ray. If you’re falling apart here imagine what you’ll be like out there.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that!’ he snapped.

  ‘I just wish you’d listened to me in the beginning.’

  Ben listened for a long time but there was nothing more.

  Soon Dad snored loudly. Mum must have elbowed him because the snoring stopped. Three short, sharp snorts. Then silence.

  Ben scanned forward but that was it. He rested the camera on his lap and listened to it over again. He pulled his notebook and pencil from his backpack and wrote these words:

  ‘Wish we hadn’t done it.’

  ‘As soon as we get papers we go.’

  ‘Passports’

  ‘Disappear into desert’

  He re-read the notes. Passports. That was the most important piece of evidence. Where were they going? They had never been anywhere before. Dad always said that he knew Australia was the greatest country on earth so why would anyone want to leave. Even when Ben pleaded to go to Fiji or New Zealand like some kids in his class, Dad said no. Ben ran his fingers over the words on the page. He figured that this is what a real detective would do – chew over the evidence, ratchet through the possibilities.

  Maybe it was nothing. Maybe they really were just going on holidays. Maybe they were getting passports for Fiji or New Zealand and were only stopping in at the cabin for a few days on the way to the airport. Dad was probably joking about the desert. Ben let out a breath and bit his bottom lip. Sometimes he wished that his imagination wasn’t quite so good. He could never walk down a dark hallway or put out the garbage or stay home by himself without thinking scary thoughts.

  He went to his raft and uncovered it. He took one end in his hands and struggled down over the rocks, carefully laying it in the water. He crouched and crawled on board, floating at the shallow edge of the creek. Water rushed beneath him. The raft wobbled. Some of the grass ties split with the pressure of his body so he shifted his weight, which made the back of the raft move away from the creek’s edge. He scrambled for balance.

  The ties continued to split. Ben clutched the narrow logs like he was a baby and they were his mama. He fell into knee-deep water, standing quickly, the freezing creek ejecting him. The raft drifted away toward the far side, where there was a two-metre drop over a waterfall into a lower section of creek.

  Ben was not a strong swimmer. He moved from knee-deep to waist-deep water with a sharp in-breath, the cold pinching him. The raft was three metres away now and the same distance from the far bank, where it would be swept downstream and over the falls. He waded until he was chest-deep, the force of the water pulling him forward. He pushed off a rock with his toes and surged toward the raft, reaching for the back left-hand edge with two fingers.

  He caught it, clamped it with his thumb and pulled back, getting a better grip with his other hand. He swam with everything he had, trying to drag the damaged raft back toward the boulders that stretched halfway across the creek.

  The relentless pull of water made Ben panic. He was losing the battle. Just as he decided he needed to let go of the raft or go over the waterfall, his foot touched a rock at the creek’s bottom. He dug in and pulled hard against the current and, finally, nudged up against the large, smooth, mossy boulders that reached across the creek. He hung on, breathing hard, feeling alive.

  After a few minutes he began the difficult climb up the slippery rocks. At the top he collapsed, panting and wet. He laughed. His first attempt at building a raft, at building anything other than clay figures and miniature stop-motion sets, had been a disaster. He slapped at mosquito bites on his neck and face and arms.

  Wish we hadn’t done it.

  Passports.

  ‘It’. What did Dad wish they hadn’t done?

  Ben stood and hauled the loosely connected branches of his raft along the boulders and up onto the creek bank, dropping them next to his notebook and camera. He took the knife from his pocket, flicked out a blade and cut the remaining grasses away. The knife was sharp and worked well. He headed off into the heavy shadow of the trees and came across some tough, root-like vines growing along the ground at the base of a hoop pine. They would do.

  The raft needed bracing, something going across to hold the longer branches together. Ben remembered this from a school excursion to the maritime museum in third grade. He’d seen a giant raft that had been across the Pacific Ocean. It had a sail and cross-bracing.

  He worked as sunrise turned to daylight, wondering if the physical work and the hunger were making him any less fat. He hoped so. Nobody called for him and he heard no other human sounds for a long time. He sawed a branch into three equal lengths, gnawing away at it with the tiny saw blade on his knife. He carved grooves in the longer logs and laid the shorter pieces across to brace the raft. He lashed his new raft together with the vines, working quickly, his body moving constantly to keep the mosquitoes away. They ate his ears and ankles for breakfast.

  It.

  I wish we hadn’t done it.

  Sold the business? Ben wanted to believe it, but he couldn’t. He knew how much his parents hated the wrecking business. They’d started losing money the second Dad b
ought it.

  Ben had done well to record their conversation but now he needed to discover where the money came from, why they needed passports, where they were going. He needed to interrogate his father, to pry and uncover more evidence. He had somehow become a detective years before he ever expected to. It was scarier and less fun than he had imagined.

  He pulled a vine tight and knotted it.

  Bang!

  He ducked, pressing himself into the rough bark of his raft. He had never heard a real gunshot before but that was what it sounded like.

  Ben watched, eyes alert, pupils black and big as marbles, glaring through the gloom of the forest. His father skulked through the trees higher up the hill, kicking pine needles and turning over rotting logs with a brown-booted foot. He twitched and spun at the slightest sign of movement. He was carrying the rifle from the cabin.

  Ben had never seen anyone carrying a gun before, not in real life. He had played millions of hours of games and he wouldn’t have thought that seeing a person with a real gun would bother him, but it did. Dad seemed nervous and unnatural with it. Ben wondered if he had ever held a gun before. He didn’t seem to be holding it the right way. Not that Ben knew what the right way was.

  He wanted to call out from behind the tree but he was struck silent. He thought of his camera and notebook and bent down to gather his things, throwing the notebook into his backpack and slinging it over his shoulder. He turned the camera on, hit ‘record’ and poked the lens out from behind the tree. What was Dad hunting for?

  Me. That was the answer that came to him. But the voice came from the same part of Ben’s mind that told him to run when he was walking back from the toilet in the middle of the night. It was the same part of his mind that his stories came from. The fear place.

  Dad zigzagged down the hill, thirty or forty metres away. Ben kept the camera trained on him. Dad tucked himself in behind a large fallen tree and crouched. He pointed the rifle out into the forest, deadly still. Something moved to his right. Bang! Another shot and the movement was gone.