Two Wolves

by Tristan Bancks

  But Ben said nothing.

  ‘Useless. Come back when you’re a man.’ Dad released his grip and walked out of the cabin, shouting into the night like a crazed beast.

  ‘Everything will be okay. I promise,’ Mum whispered. She was running her fingers through Ben’s hair, tears falling hot and heavy down her cheeks.

  Ben was tucked in bed, eyes closed but wide awake, fully clothed. It was after midnight. Dad snored. Olive made sweet thumb-sucking sounds from time to time. Mum sat on the edge of Ben’s air mattress. Ben wanted to open his eyes and tell her about the hole that he had sawed, ask her to come with him, but she would stop him. He knew that. There was no way she would let him run alone. Her tears fell on his face when she pressed close.

  ‘It’ll be good when we leave here. It was a mistake to come. We’ll go someplace better. I promise.’

  Ben listened.

  ‘Things will be different from now on but we need to stick together.’

  Stick together.

  ‘You must trust me, okay?’ Mum whispered into the darkness. ‘It’ll be all good.’

  Trust.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ Ben asked.

  She was silent for a long time. Then she said, ‘It’s like having a Lotto ticket where you know you can’t lose. But you know you can’t win either. I don’t know what else to do.’

  ‘Yes, you do. Don’t listen to him. Listen to yourself.’

  She cried in short, painful sobs that shook Ben’s air mattress. ‘I don’t think I know how.’

  Ben turned over, away from her. It felt like a terrible thing to do but he had heard enough. His decision was made.

  Soon she stopped stroking his hair. She stood awkwardly, stumbling, almost falling on him. She lay down on her own bed.

  Someplace better.

  Trust me.

  It’ll be all good.

  Ben didn’t like it when people said ‘it’s all good’. People only said it when things were not good at all.

  $7.2 million.

  You could do a lot with seven million dollars. You could buy lots of stuff. Maybe they would buy him whatever he wanted, to keep him quiet. Offshore account. That’s what the article had said. Wherever the offshore account was, that was where they were going, Ben was certain. He didn’t want to go anywhere. Only home. Maybe they would live in Switzerland. Or the Cayman Islands. In movies, wasn’t that where people hid money that wasn’t theirs? . . . Mistakenly deposited the funds . . . If the bank put it into their account by accident, even though Mum and Dad transferred it out, wasn’t it theirs? Didn’t it belong to them now? Wasn’t that just bad luck for the bank? Finders keepers. Maybe Ben’s parents could keep it. Was Ben a millionaire? Technically, he was. Could life on the run with millions of dollars be good?

  Maybe.

  Sure.

  Yes.

  But if your parents were criminals, did that mean that you were more likely to become a criminal too?

  What would Sam Gribley do? The kid in the book. Sam Gribley would run into the mountains and live in a hollowed-out tree and survive off the land. Sam Gribley would eat tubers and weird berries and make a fishing hook out of a twig and train a falcon. Ben wanted to do these things too. Even though he didn’t know what a tuber was. Sam Gribley would do what was right, Ben was sure of it. Sam Gribley would run.

  And that is what Ben would do. He would do what was right. He would run, and he would tell someone what he knew. He didn’t want to leave Mum but she had made this choice, not him. The choice to take the money. And Dad. They chose this.

  His decision made him feel sick. His breathing was tight, measured, silent. He waited like this in the darkness, every muscle tensed. Fifteen or twenty minutes passed.

  If he was going to get away it needed to be soon. Before Dad woke up and made them get in the car. Dad was a faster runner than him. He had leg-length. He could take Ben down like a wolf chasing a rabbit. Eat him alive. Black and crispy on the outside, raw in the middle.

  Ben could hear his mother sleep-breathing now, deep and slow. Dad began to snore again. This was his chance. He carefully, quietly peeled back the sleeping bag. He tried to mould it into a human shape, which might buy him a few precious moments if they woke.

  Ben rolled off the end of his bed and reached around to pick up a small bag of snacks and water that he had hidden behind the metal trunk. The bag rustled. He got up on his knees and looked at it in the soft light from the moon. Plastic. How could he have been so stupid? Ben looked over at the mattress with the two sleeping lumps. And to Olive’s bed next to his.

  Olive.

  He couldn’t take her with him. It would be dangerous.

  But leaving her behind could be too. Ben’s parents were wanted criminals.

  She looked so innocent, her face calm and open. Ben felt bad for all the horrible things he had ever done to her. He wished he had been more kind. But he would leave her. He couldn’t take care of her. And he could not face telling her the very bad thing that their parents had done. They would have to tell her.

  He reached down for the plastic bag of food with both hands. It hissed at him. Ben prayed for it to be quiet but it crinkled with every move, a burglar alarm that he had set himself.

  Ben let go of the bag, thinking. He could leave it here but he was already hungry. He could open the bag and remove the contents and pocket them. That’s what he would do. He carefully peeled the bag open but every tiny rustle sounded like an explosion. When the bag was halfway open Dad’s snoring halted. Ben stopped. He heard a guttural throat sound, like a plughole letting out a small amount of water, then two snorts and a rollover.

  Ben was going to have to leave it. His stomach stirred and groaned deep down but he couldn’t risk everything on a few scraps of food. He stood and a floorboard creaked. Why had he not noticed that sound in the day?

  Pale moonlight rubbed the edge off the darkness. He could see vague shapes of things – the shadow of the workbench, the table, the cupboard at the back, always hanging open. Ben was sure that something was watching him from that cupboard but there was no time for fear.

  He took a step back. Another board creaked and Mum made a sound. He waited, mid-step, one foot in the air, balanced, too scared to lay the foot down. Three minutes on one foot. He felt like one of his own clay stop-motion figures, waiting for someone to take a still frame and move his leg. He wondered if this was the longest that anybody had ever balanced on one leg. Ben felt great compassion and admiration for seagulls. Eventually he dared lower his foot. Silently.

  He bent down and tried to lift the metal chest that covered his hole. It felt heavier in the dark. His right hand squealed with pain from the sawing he had done. His shoulder ached. Ben squeezed his fingers beneath the green metal chest and lifted one end of it a few centimetres off the ground, then swung it aside. He put the chest down but the tip of one finger was jammed underneath – his left pinkie. It pinched him so hard he had to let out a quiet, breathy scream, then he grabbed the handle on the side of the chest and lifted, releasing the trapped finger. The trunk banged to the floor.

  Mum sat up straight in bed. Ben lay low. His blood stopped flowing.

  Ben’s body was pressed flat to the cool roughness of the timber boards. He could see the black shape of his mother as she sat up in bed. How would he explain why he was lying, fully clothed, next to a hole in the floor after midnight?

  He waited for her to rock Dad and wake him. Dad would sit up and grab his rabbit gun. Mum would snap a torch on, point it at Ben and see where he had cut the floorboards. They would know that he was trying to escape, that he was going to tell their secret.

  Cool air blew up through thin cracks between the boards, tickling his eyes and nose. The floor smelt like old cheese and onions. He lay there, listening, waiting for the end to come.

  Why did I do it?

 
Then, as quickly as she had sat up, Mum lay back down, rustled for a moment and was still. Soon, she breathed steadily again. Ben matched his own breathing with hers.

  A long time passed before he dared sit up. Stillness. Then an odd noise from outside. A tinkling, rustling and a dull thud. He listened. Nothing more. He had to get on with this. Could not stop for every sound or movement. He felt around on the floor, his fingertips touching the roughly hacked line of his escape hole.

  He stuck his fingernail into the crack and lifted a board. It came up with a squeak and a twist of nails. The next two boards came away silently. He rested them against the wall next to the hole. Night air rushed in, filling his lungs. He breathed in the deep, dark wilderness.

  Ben looked over at the bed. Maybe he could hold on a little longer, escape once they were back in civilisation. But he couldn’t deal with not knowing where they were going next or for how long. This was the moment when he could take charge of his own thoughts and actions. Until now, his parents had been the ones in control. But now they were out of control.

  Would she go to jail? Or just Dad?

  He heard more sounds outside, odd sounds, but he had to ignore them. Had to go. He dropped his backpack into the hole, gently swung his feet down and lowered his legs. His sneaker soles hit the hard-packed dirt a metre below the floor. He pushed his body through the hole, scraping his sides worse than before. He kneeled and the night washed over him. Trees stood darkly shadowed against the faint glow of moon. Crickets and frogs croaked and buzzed nearby. The creek said, ‘Shhhhh.’ Mosquitoes attacked his arms and he scratched their bites. He had to get moving.

  Ben Silver was free.

  He looked up at the hole. It would be so easy to go back. Easier than to go forward. He closed his eyes and wished that everything was going to be okay. He wished that he could rewind time. He wished that they had never come to the cabin. He wished that he was still at home, before the police had knocked on his door and set this in motion. He wished that he was making his movie, and only pretending about thieves and forests and being on the run.

  This was it. Clouds must have smothered the moon, because suddenly the night looked even darker. The only things he knew out there were the creek and his raft. He had already decided that he would use the raft. But what lay beyond? Further downstream? This was stupid. ‘Better the devil you know.’ That’s what people said. If there were two choices and they were both bad, you should go with the one you knew. Your own family. Flesh and blood, said the voice in his mind, the voice he could not control.

  There was a jingling sound and a Kshhhh.

  Ben looked to his right, squeezed his bottom lip. He quietly, carefully crawled to the edge of the cabin and looked up toward the clearing. It was dark and still. He watched. Listened. Sticks and leaves crackling underfoot. Something up there. Someone. Ben did not breathe. For a full minute he waited, only his eyes moving, like an owl’s.

  Kshhhh. A radio. That was the sound. Like his orange-and-green walkie-talkies at home. Like the one on Dan Toohey’s belt.

  Then the shape. Behind a tree about twenty metres from the cabin, at the bottom of the final steep hill on the dirt road. The figure motioned to someone further up the hill. Then there were two shadows at the base of the forever-tall pine.

  Had they seen him? He did not think so.

  Were there more of them? He squinted, looking further up the dirt road.

  What to do. Would he run? Olive. He thought of Olive.

  On the corner, up the road, he saw white. The front of a white car.

  This decision could change his life. Would he run alone like the zombie thief in his movie? Would he surrender? Or would he listen to the voice at the back of his mind and wake them, warn them?

  Flesh and blood.

  Ben pulled slowly back from his position and crawled beneath the hole in the floor. His knuckles pressed into the dirt. His foot kicked an old bottle. His eyeballs throbbed in time with his pulse. He felt tears in his eyes, his body supercharged with adrenaline. Fight or flight. That’s what they called it. Would he fight or fly?

  He needed to tell his parents. They should escape too. Through his hole. He would still run but he could not leave them to be caught. No matter what they had done. He needed to help them.

  Were the men behind the tree police? Or people after the money? Were they wearing uniforms? He could not see. Hats? He could not remember. Radios? Certainly.

  Ben looked up. He reached into the hole. He stood and squeezed the top half of his body into the cabin.

  ‘Psst,’ he whispered quietly, flicking a look up to the window, expecting dark shapes to appear.

  His parents lay still.

  ‘Psssssst,’ he said a little louder.

  No response.

  One more time, he thought.

  ‘Pssssssssssssst.’

  His mother stirred. She sat up.

  ‘Mum,’ he whispered.

  She looked around. ‘What?’

  Too loud, Ben thought.

  ‘Down here.’

  She turned to him, to the dim, moonlit outline of the top half of his body.

  ‘There are people outside. Police, maybe. You have to come.’

  The next few seconds happened in a heartbeat. Mum alerted Dad and they were silently up and out of bed, and Olive’s half-asleep body was being passed down through the escape hole to Ben.

  ‘What are we doing?’ she grizzled. Ben’s instinct was to put his hand over her mouth but he knew it would upset her and she might start screaming. So he simply leaned very close to her ear as Dad dropped the grey sports bag with the black straps through the hole, and Mum lowered herself down.

  ‘We must be very, very quiet,’ Ben told Olive. ‘It’s hide and seek. Can you be quiet?’

  Olive nodded her head sleepily and sucked her thumb, then she took a sharp breath.

  ‘Where’s Bonzo?’ she whispered.

  Ben panicked. ‘He’s hiding,’ he whispered, close to her ear. ‘We have to find him, but we must be so, so quiet. Rabbits have very good hearing.’

  She nodded a small nod in the darkness. Mum huddled close to Ben now. Dad’s legs were through and he grunted quietly as he pushed his hips and bottom down. The tiny metal studs on his jeans scraped on wood.

  Ben heard more noises from up the hill and he passed Olive to Mum and crawled to the edge of the cabin, looking up to the tree where the two figures had stood.

  They were no longer there. The white car bonnet could still be seen up the dirt road and through the trees. But where were the men? At the cabin door? At the window, watching his father escape?

  Wood splintered with a crack as Dad twisted and squirmed to pull his arms and shoulders free through the hole.

  Finally, all four of them were under the cabin. Their family. Dad handed Bonzo to Olive and she hugged Dad’s arm to thank him.

  Ben motioned for his father to join him near the edge of the cabin. He placed his hand on his father’s shoulder, whispering very carefully and quietly in his ear.

  ‘I saw two men here.’ He pointed. ‘Car up there. They had radios.’

  Ben could not believe he was helping his parents escape when he should have been turning them in. Culpam Poena Premit Comes – the police motto. It had to be something about honesty, truth, abiding by the law.

  Dad scanned the bush. There was a sound from above, at the front door maybe. Dad turned to crawl back beneath the cabin and, as he did, he hit his head on one of the timber beams supporting the floor. This sound set off a chain of events.

  An explosive crash came from inside the cabin. A light went on, a moving light. A bright torch. Shouting, several voices at once, the kind of raid that Ben had seen on TV.

  Dad whispered ‘Come!’ and motioned sharply. He and Mum scurried out from under the far side of the cabin, opposite where Ben had seen the
figures behind the tree. Ben watched his parents run off toward a large pine tree further down the slope. Olive lingered at the edge of the cabin, not knowing whether to run or wait for Ben.

  The shouting and loud footsteps continued on the cabin floor above. Within seconds they would see the hole, look down and find them. Ben’s parents had escaped safely and now he would run. Down the hill toward his creek, to his raft and away into the night. But would he take Olive, or leave her? He looked around toward the hole in the floor one final time and he saw something. The grey sports bag. It was lying on the ground directly beneath the hole, the moving, swirling light of the police torches illuminating it in fits. Dad had left the bag. Ben crabbed backward and picked it up.

  ‘Let’s go, Ben!’ Olive whispered.

  Police above, little sister to his left. Holding a bag filled with what he thought was a million dollars. Would he turn them in, run, or follow his parents who had done the very bad thing? In that brief moment, crouched, panicked, one side of his face lit by flickering torch beams, the other in darkness, Ben no longer knew if he was a detective or a thief. His dream was to be an officer of the law, but his reality was very, very different.

  I’m me, said a voice in his head.

  Not now, Ben thought.

  I’m me, said the voice again, but they are me too. My own blood.

  He felt paralysed. He could just make out the shape of his parents about thirty metres away, behind the tree, motioning for Olive and Ben to follow. But would he? All of these thoughts and actions happened in a matter of seconds but it felt like minutes to Ben. An annoying sister and criminal parents who lied to him, locked him up, showed no remorse.

  Run, said another voice.

  But they were his family, the only family he had.