Nice Shootin' Cowboy

by Anson Cameron

  ‘I’ll go to Melbourne and knock off Seven Elevens.’

  ‘No, really Have you got any plans?’

  ‘Really. Hard times you got to pass on to get rid of, like a chain letter. So I’m going to rob all-nighters. Pass my hard times on to them. No bullshit.’

  She drops that subject like I’ve been rude to her. We both stop for a drink. I’m sweating pretty heavily myself now, and there are strands and dust of broken wicker clinging to us.

  ‘You’ve turned into a soak over summer,’ I say.

  ‘Well, you need some fringe benefits on these wages.’ She takes a swig and tells me this far from a toilet she should drink spirits. I wave my hand at the sea and she laughs and tells me it’s all right for me, pissing in the sea is easy for me.

  ‘I won’t be pissing in the sea from now on,’ I tell her.

  Her face closes right down when I say this. I go back to cracking the craypots up. I know where to hit them by now so the last ones come apart quickly, the wire ripping through the wicker, boning them. When I look back at her she’s taken a black hairband and tied her hair back. Fantastic long neck, along with everything else.

  ‘Will you drop me off the beach in front of the surf club?’ she asks.

  ‘I’ll put you on the pier if you like.’

  ‘No. I feel like a swim. Half a K off the beach will be good. Where are you going after that? To do your dirty deed?’

  ‘I’ll head round to The George. I’ll need a beach to swim up on myself.’

  ‘You don’t want me to help you?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t reckon it’d be the ideal way to kick off a legal career, would it?’

  ‘Not the ideal way to kick off a life of crime either. Sort of signalling your intentions,’ she says.

  ‘Come on, Angie. At least piracy’s got more romance about it than the Seven Eleven circuit.’

  She’s too good-natured not to smile when she’s called on to. I start up the engine and am glad the silence is gone before her smile, and without me having to chip away at it with my pretence at good nature.

  Some of the kids who man the Seven Elevens at night are bound to have good things like sheds full of boats, and sunny days on rivers and beautiful girls like this one in their heads. And some of these things will be shrunk to puny when I jam the sawn-off end into their mouths and the metal wisps the hacksaw blade has left on the end of the barrel slice into their gums and their mouths flood with blood and their minds flood with terror. But that’s recession. It leaves its high water mark in the psyche of the people. We’ll all have our stories to tell when it’s over.

  I’m not off scott-free myself. When you come down at the thirtieth of thirty-six payments, you come down with a serious thud. But I won’t dwell on it. Misfortune’s a hot handful. Pass it on quick, I say. And I will. Instead of hauling up crays I’ll be shaking down nocturnal Melbourne from now on. Despite Angie and her beautiful youth. I can’t be blackmailed into being a victim by other people’s beauty. I swear here and now not to let the beauty of strangers hold me down. No banker ever looked into my soul and waived a payment.

  I point the bow of The Doris at the hills of Lorne and we ride the swell in toward the salty cloud blowing back off the break. Before we are under it she signals me to stop. I cut the engine and walk toward the stern and she meets me half way and quickly stretches up and kisses my lips as her bra brushes my chest. As well as everything else, I feel the stare of every retiree ranged up and down the hills of Lorne who owns a pair of binoculars. It’s the attention of these old suspicious minds, and my contempt for them, that makes me especially composed now. Balanced enough to return her kiss. So I’m glad they’re there. They strengthen me. But I step back quickly, anyway.

  ‘Good luck at uni.’

  ‘Good luck in the Seven Elevens.’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t go shopping after dark.’

  ‘Shopping? I’m thinking of getting a job in one. They’re all manned by students at night, you know.’ She winks at me. She still thinks I’m joking.

  Then she takes a quick step up onto the side of the boat and dives a flat dive at Lorne that slides into the green water with no hint of fucking up and breaking out into actual splash. She surfaces and is swimming strongly, and I’ll bet her school had its own pool as well as all those boats because no one who hasn’t swum competition can punch out a metronome mule-kick like that. I only hope she’ll kick against the pricks in her future with that sincerity.

  About fifty metres from The Doris she’s stopped by a desperate shout. It’s me.

  ‘Angie. Angie. Hey, Angie.’ She stops and hangs in the water looking back through dripping hanks of hair.

  ‘Don’t spend your life making millionaires happy’ is all I can think to offer her. She doesn’t have anything to say to this. She starts swimming again and I wish I hadn’t yelled it.

  In a heap on the deck is her singlet. Sky blue with a gold school crest spouting muffled Latin out of its folds. I pick it up and inhale her as far as my lungs go.

  I look toward the beach, but she’s hidden somewhere between here and there in a hissing valley of surf. I’m going to go to the wheel. But before I do I raise my stubby to her. I drink to Angie Dayou because this is the recession of the nineties, and I don’t know where it ends. And I only hope it ends before she twigs to its killing ways.

  LEST WE FORGET, BABY

  IT’S NO matter how urgent the Greek on the loudspeaker presses you onto the train, there’s always a wait while they shuffle the carriages. It’s like they couldn’t have assembled it beforehand, when it was empty. Like the engine driver needs an audience for his best shunt. We don’t applaud. We whinge and bitch about the time and the whiplash.

  Then the train starts north. And it’s fast over puny cement backyards full of window frames and dirt-filled pots and fence-sat cats and train-frenzied dogs. Sometimes a stocky woman hanging clothes, always with her back to the train. Through these suburbs three shirts is yard wide.

  It’s out to the wider backyards and the concrete-sided creeks before the zip-lock bags taped to my stomach get sweaty and I realise I forgot to double-fold a hanky between them and me. My stomach starts to itch under the plastic.

  The old man sitting across from me doesn’t look any more at ease than me. His wife probably insists he wears those boxers she first saw on, or off, a GI in 1943 and still thinks are sexy, but that ride up and lock onto you with the sway off the badly laid tracks. She’s purple-haired and frocked. He’s in a cardigan and a forties tune, poised to launch a journey’s-length reminiscence on me at the first eye contact. I don’t give him that. I read the treacherous report. He hums, with the bounce of the train getting into his tune.

  That’s public transport. And I’ve got to cop it when I’m working. Normally, in leisure hours, I’d cruise up the highway in my BM, just under their limits, alcohol and speed, and not care if the cops pulled me over and finger-jabbed my pectorals for me being unlicensed, fast and high. I’d open wide every compartment in my factory-smelling car that the star tattoo on my left ear-lobe told them to search. I’d smile and invite them to go fetch those specially sensitive one-man hounds of theirs that in a less evil world would spend their days sniffing for truffles.

  But when I’m working, tripping a few grams into the outlying districts, I ride the rails with the pensioned-off, the freeway-frightened and the bowling-clubbed. Avoiding their eyes and thirties childhoods.

  Margie will be weaving through Coburg by now, gunning the BM at the lights, impatient for the freeway. Always wanting the country running fast around her. Forever saying she didn’t know how I stood prison. It would kill her like stillness kills a shark, she says.

  She’ll be in Seymour in time to take the white from me when the train rocks in to the station. We do it this way for the simple code that you never drive drugs up a major highway. Not with facial scars and a nocturnal pallor and when it’s the dream of every traffic cop to be in Vice and Nikes. I ride the copless rails a
nd she connects with me in the towns and disperses what I’m carrying.

  I’ve spent time in these towns. On nights in hotels, in bright streets that loom up out of vast irrigation grids, I’ve watched their local TV Seen their ads for farm machinery and concrete tanks. So I can see their need of a little cocaine, these country kids. Because when the urgentest thirty seconds the adult world can shine on you is about concrete tanks, then there is no good or evil. These kids know that. They’re not hanging out for the epiphany or full employment. They’re hanging out for me. For my drugs. And being at the end of a trade route they’ll pay top dollar.

  Outside there’re green hills pitching and falling under red and white cattle. The morning sun is sucking slow currents of steam off their hides. I kick my feet up onto the seat across from me before the old girl thinks to move in there next to the window for the view now there is one. And I put the report up in front of me to cut eye contact.

  It’s about me. A4s full of lies and libels with sad half-truths dropped in to make it stand up. It’s a confidential report from my parole officer never meant for my eyes. Photo-copied and smuggled to me by Lorna, his consulting psych, who turns out to be a passionate recreational user of drugs and crooks.

  I can hardly believe my think-of-me-as-a-friend parole officer has penned this evil stuff about me. Ford is able to off-load guilt by strange and fanciful connections and attributions that show a layman’s knowledge of psychiatry.

  Off-load guilt. An unfortunate thing to say about a man who just pleaded guilty and took a two-year stretch for an insurance fire on the chin.

  The train goes from hum down to rattle and into Kil-more, where no one gets off in the quiet, but two soldiers get on. The old couple invite the soldiers into our compartment by smile. The older of the soldiers slides back our door.

  ‘Morning,’ he says, at my feet up on the seat. I drop them and push upright. The square of belly under the drugs itches wildly.

  They put their duffle-bags in the overhead racks. The older, ranking soldier sits across from me with the view. The young one sits beside me. I’m the only one in the compartment not wearing a red poppy. I feel like a traitor. A fucking immigrant.

  ‘Off to Pucka?’ the old man asks.

  ‘Wreath laying in Seymour,’ the older soldier says.

  ‘Went through Pucka myself. Back prewar, I did.’ And here he has the door open for an old story or two that the soldiers couldn’t stop if they tried. He starts on New Guinea. Sails up to it aboard a zero-buzzed troop ship in his seventeen-year-old innocence.

  The warship he’s on has Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda on the bridge. The young soldier’s happy to listen. But the older soldier isn’t copping World War II. He’s into his Vietnam stare. His glazed, hell-and-back boast. A jungle-cutting, been-there glare he’s been oppressing privates with for years.

  I stare, too. Vietnam for me happened in my home town. But it happened hard enough to give me a stare.

  In those days what was tipping me and my best friend Mick Eva to life being pretty fucking silly was our town getting officially nicknamed ‘Fruit Salad City’ and having to go festive all Australia Day weekend in a giant celebration of orchard produce. Our mayor dressed as a peach, certain professionals rigged out as pears, a fire-crew bunch of grapes, women wearing strategic leaves. And fruit piled high in the main street. Pyramids only days off fermentation, being boasted over and danced around.

  And while these dances went on, someone in Canberra pulling my brother Gary out of a barrel for a tour of Vietnam. And him becoming quickly a hippy and a pacifist and not accepting what he called ‘their thoughtful invitation to slope opening’. And the fruit-dressed people looking down their noses at any Ford for miles. And me getting comments and fights at North Tech.

  The only thing in our favour was the fact of my uncle Napper Ford being a war hero from another war. Napper was what we had for a father for story-telling and boxing lessons and shooting trips — and for nothing else. And despite he was a drunk and a mess he had the Victoria Cross. And with the disgrace of Gary, I used to head out the settlement side of town to see Napper and get him to tell me war stories. Link me up through blood to bravery. Him seeing I needed the link.

  The other reason I went to see old Napper was to sell coke. Even in those early days me being beggared into dealing by a moral probity and a bad back that wouldn’t let me burgle houses. And alcohol having him so fearless in his outrageous atheist ways all these years, but lately not doing the job so well, he needed something else. And coke getting him strong enough to believe nothing again.

  We used to sit drinking and snorting with him up on his sand hill. Looking down across box-thorn paddocks into the abos’ see-through houses. Cursing them for the gaps in their walls where they were known to pull off the boards to burn in winter. Burning up the tax dollars our Uncle Ray, who had a job, paid. And we’d have to pay too, if we got jobs.

  The day of the war story I really needed, Mick Eva and Napper and me were out back of his house with folding chairs set up on the wooden floor of what used to be a shed until Napper was flooded in July of sixty-four and he found the frame and the walls were built of a eucalypt that would glow in the hearth all night. Now it was just floor. We had our shirts off, taking sun, gulping beer and doing lines. Swallows were cutting insects out of the air over our heads and dodging our occasional hip-fired shotgun blasts.

  I was drunk and begging Napper for the story of how he got his Victoria Cross. A story he was famous for never telling. The afternoon went with him refusing to tell and me insisting he did tell. Until he could see I had to know, had to have some knowledge to counter the flak I was getting over Gary and his pacifist gene. He glowered down into his mirror with a hard-rolled fiver poised, twitching at the reflected swallows as they zapped across his lines.

  He had Mick reach some beers out of the round-shouldered fridge that stood humming out in the sun.

  The medal story is this, he said. When I was a prisoner of the Japanese on the Burma railway I had a pet monkey that had wandered out of the jungle. There was this one guard, Yukio, that used to come into our hut and steal our smokes and offer my monkey bananas. The monkey would reach out to take a banana and Yukio would burn its arm with a cigarette. Until I’d make my move to stop him and I’d cop a belting. But a belting that made me feel better.

  He did it for months, old Yukio. Till he’d taught the monkey fear and me hate. Till he’d hold out a banana and the monkey would shrink and shiver and whimper … and I’d have to take another beating just to feel good.

  Later that year everything started to get scarce and there were no cigarettes or bananas any more so Yukio’s bastard hand was stilled. But I knew there’d come a time for boot’s-on-the-other-foot bastardry. A time I could get back. So I hid a pack of Craven As away for then. For that time. And for two years I kept that pack buried. I listened to endless wailings for a pre-amputation smoke, and endless whimperings for a post-amputation one. And I kept those Craven As underground through it all.

  Until, in 1945, we heard on our clandestine radio about the bomb. Heard the news long before the camp authorities. That day I dug up my Craven As and lit one up and its smell was pretty soon all through the camp. And Yukio turns up with his face twisted in fury and nicotine lust. And as he reaches for the pack, I ask, isn’t he from Hiroshima? Doesn’t his family own a printing press there? Isn’t his sexy little wife something of a calligraphy star in that town? Then I introduce him to the nuclear age. Turn his loved ones into footpath shadows.

  Here Napper explodes a swallow with a lucky shot that was only punctuation for his story.

  We don’t say anything. We usually communicate well with Napper. There’s no generation gap. So when we’re silent we’re saying that this thing is too big for words. We hold our memorial minute.

  But eventually the question has to be asked. So I take a swig of beer and ask. But why did they give you the medal, Napper?

  For having the courage not to
smoke those Craven As, he says. And for poetry.

  On the way back into town I ask Mick what he thinks of an awesome story like that. Mick says if they give medals for bullshit, poetry and monkey-love then Napper probably had one, but other than that, no.

  I say I believe old Napper.

  Mick says he has an announcement. The announcement is that I am finally snorting enough coke to be bullshitted by deros.

  I tell him I’ve seen the medal.

  He says he’s seen my death-before-dishonour tattoo with the snake around the dagger, and all it proved was I had money to pay a tattooist.

  Then I feel lonely. And I feel the need for Napper to be real. And I love the way he avenged his monkey and hunted down his Jap. So I lean back and land a righteous punch on the side of Mick’s head. He goes down deep into the Paterson’s Curse where he has a lucky find of one of those beautiful Coke bottles of the seventies. As a weapon it is the real thing. He lays it across my face hard enough to make me see that I will take dishonour first.

  Before we even get the shame of Gary off our backs, Mick spreads it around that the war-hero business is bullshit. Napper doesn’t argue. A week later he gets coked to the gills and burns down a camper van with a family inside. The van was Japanese. The family was Tasmanian.

  I felt everyone had a case against me with old Napper a hero no more. I left town with forty-seven stitches in my face. The last I heard of him he sent me a bottle of expensive Spanish champagne from Pentridge for my twenty-first, which shows how thoughtful he was.

  He sees himself as having survived a series of tense and dramatic storms.

  Over the top of my report I see the old woman is holding out a tin of chocolate crackles to me. Pungent little things out of my past, when my old dear was alive and cooking and copying recipes off cereal boxes in supermarkets to prove she was a good mother underpaid. Everyone else is eating. A chocolate crackle has stopped the old man talking. I shake my head.