Here Come the Dogs

by Omar Musa

  The man looks at his children on the floor, as if they might provide an excuse or answer. They look like twins, perhaps four years old.

  Mark looks back to Aleks, as if seeing him for the first time. ‘You gonna do this in front of my kids? Mr Janeski, it’s no good for them to see their father —’

  ‘Father?’ Aleks’ voice suddenly loud. The children look up. ‘Father? Frying yourself up on a glass barbecue all day. Look at yourself. Look at them. Haven’t eaten in days by the looks of things. Half high off the fucken secondhand ice smoke. And you’re handling fifty large. Fifty thousand bucks and your own kids are starving. You fucken disgust me, mate.’

  However, Aleks nods to Wil, who ushers the children into another room. For a few moments, there is only the sound of the fan and cicadas, before Wil returns. Aleks feels like a cigarette but smiles benignly and speaks to Mark in a low voice. ‘This is the way it starts again for you, brother. Give and take, give and take. That’s what the world’s about right there.’ He suppresses a cough. ‘I once knew a man who was a soldier. He had two kids, just like yours. And just like yours, these kids had never done sin, never even thought it. Their father went for a walk to the market one day and when he was gone, another soldier came to their door. But this soldier, he was from the army their father was fighting against. He was starving, wounded, begging for water. These children led him into the house, gave him bread, drink. They let him sleep. As he did, they tied up his hands. When the soldier woke up, they’re sitting there, watching him. At first he was confused, like what the fuck’s goin on? But soon, he’s full of poison, brother. He spat at them, cursed their country with every name under the sun, cursed the diseased cunt they were born out of, called their mother a whore, a Jezebel . . . Those children, they’d killed him by the time the sun went down and their father returned. The point? There is no point, brother. It’s just a story.’ He smiles for a moment but then his face becomes grim. He wants to ask the man how the fuck he got in this situation, how he had squandered all of his opportunities, but instead he says, ‘So, brother. You’re gonna co-operate, aren’t ya?’

  Mark looks out the window. Then he slowly places his hand on the table, smiling as if he’s merely playing along with a prank.

  ‘Good boy,’ says Aleks.

  Wil pulls out a length of rope and tourniquets Mark’s arm tightly from the wrist, winding it up and out so that the hand is almost white and bloodless. Wil hands Aleks a cleaver. The type they cut up smoked ducks with in Chinatown. Aleks holds it to the light and looks at both sides, then inexplicably, sniffs the metal. It’s sharp enough to shave with. Dave comes back into the room, holding a bag. Wil holds Mark in the chair now, as he’s started to struggle, realising that the situation is real, and Dave seizes the bound arm and holds it on the table. Mark’s eyes are wild, looking from Aleks to his hand to the door of the room where his children are. The door like a blank piece of paper.

  The man’s mouth isn’t working properly and his vowels sound misshapen. ‘No. No, please! Aleks. Mr Janeski —’

  ‘Just relax, all right brother? Spread those fingers. That’s it. Don’t worry, brother. I won’t take it off at the knuckle. I’ll do it right here so they can sew it back on. No problems at all. That’s right, brother. Relaaax.’

  * * *

  The men part ways with handshakes, no words. Wil still has vomit on his chin.

  Aleks goes for a long drive. He then makes his way to a suburban tavern and sits behind the wheel for another hour. He finds a hat at his feet and pulls it low. He climbs out and stares for a minute at the gym bag next to the tins of paint. He hadn’t even had to use it – fear always the strongest weapon. The carpark is mostly empty, besides three cars and a motorbike that appear and vanish in irregular blinks of light from a streetlamp. Behind them a pale copse of eucalypts, the limbs upflung like ballet dancers.

  As soon as he enters the tavern, the bouncer asks him take his hat off. Aleks stares. The man’s mouth twitches with recognition and he shrugs his shoulders deferentially. His voice is way too high for a man of his size. ‘Sorry, mate. They’re just the rules.’

  ‘Rules?’ Aleks grimaces then takes his hat off. He pats the bouncer on the shoulder and for a second feels sick, really sick, as if he might faint. All this violence. For what? ‘No worries, brother. You gotta earn a living. I understand.’

  He buys a beer and exchanges a fifty-dollar note for coins. He heads straight for the pokies, sits down and his face is lit by the lurid buttons. There are fluro pyramids floating on the screen and for a moment he wishes he were somewhere else. But where? He keeps drinking and there’s something therapeutic about the rise and fall of his money in the poker machine. He is tapping the pokies with one finger. He stares at the finger and slowly shakes his head. He takes a break to smoke outside and the stars are dizzying. The streets veer off in every direction, lined with the abstract shapes of buildings and bushes. He stares upwards for a long time, then says to himself aloud, ‘Neznam.’

  I don’t know.

  He buys more cigarettes, withdraws more cash, drinks more schooners. It takes the edge off, but only slightly, like a headache tablet for a deep wound. There is an old man playing the pokies who looks like he has endured a lot of pain, or at least witnessed it. He seems at peace somehow but Aleks pities him nonetheless.

  Aleks rolls the bead in his other palm, the gold flecks demonic to him now. Yes, surely it is hell that lives within the bead, broken pieces of a gold mirror reflecting his private hell. He wishes he could split it between his thumb and forefinger like a nut and crush what is within. But he can’t. It’s too beautiful, too unbearably beautiful.

  Some lads, all wearing high-vis work jackets, come in and one of them recognises him. They’re drunk already and talking loudly. ‘Oi. It’s Janeski,’ says the youngest of them. Aleks hasn’t seen this halfwit in a long time.

  ‘Aleks! Kako si?’

  ‘Dobar, brat.’

  ‘Kay si be?’

  ‘Eve be.’ Aleks tries to smile. Once, when both were on holiday in Ohrid from Australia, Aleks scored some Albanian coke for him so that he and his dumb cunt mates weren’t beaten senseless looking for it. The younger fella, it seems, wants to pay back the favour.

  ‘Zhimi maika brat, I swear to God, bro, I swear on my mum’s life, nah nah nah, I swear on your mum’s life. We could invest in a whole kilo. Pure white.’ The boys laugh.

  Aleks, even in his drunken state, stares at the lad as if witnessing a thrown boxing match where the loser is unintentionally but fatally injured. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, champ. I think you got the wrong bloke.’

  ‘Oh . . . yeah.’ The bravado instantly gone. ‘Sorry, Janeski. Sorry.’ For a moment there’s nothing but the bleep of poker machines, then Aleks looks at him.

  ‘Got any on ya?’

  A sly smile in return. ‘Course.’

  Between trips to the bathroom and more beers, Aleks starts chatting to a man who is selling tickets to a meat raffle. The man, it turns out, is a chiropractor, whose wife beside him is Lebanese. Aleks tries to engage her in a conversation about Islam. He tells her about the Cross Mosque in Ohrid, how when it had been a church it was devastated by earthquakes again and again until the priest had a dream that, if Muslims and Christians could both worship there, it would never fall. ‘The man attached a crescent to the cross and the building has not fallen since. Can you believe that?’

  The Lebanese woman tells him she is an atheist but her family is Maronite Christian. Aleks, confused, begins to talk in labyrinths. He taps his fingers on the tray of meat and tells them how you can’t get good meat in Australia, that it’s full of chemicals and not organic. ‘You can only find good meat in villages. The chicken tastes better in Macedonia. Tender, sweet. Bloody orgasmic. Not just meat, but the chillies, the bananas too.’ He counts on his fingers. ‘The air itself, brother, the water!’ Eventually he slams a beer on the table and says it’s important to believe in God.

&
nbsp; The wife smiles awkwardly and the man asks, ‘So how about a ticket in the meat raffle, mate?’

  What happens after that is unclear, and unfolds in flashes.

  His hand around a young man’s throat.

  A bloody face . . . in the mirror?

  A plateful of cocaine in a microwave.

  Lines on lines on lines.

  A steering wheel.

  Blackness.

  When he comes to, he’s floating in water, swallowing it, choking. He sees red and blue lights bobbing all around him and hears a man’s voice yelling. He sees his Hilux, nose down, full of water. Then a wooden fence with a Hilux-sized hole in it. Then a policeman holding up the gym bag. Aleks realises he is in a suburban swimming pool, up to his chest in water, and floating all around him are sausages and schnitzels and steaks. He begins to laugh, madly and with gusto. He doesn’t stop laughing, even when they come to take him away.

  18

  A low, pale dusk.

  Jimmy is at the window this time, watching through a chink in the curtains. He has a brick in his hand. He swears he can smell Hailee’s moisturiser and shampoo through the glass. Her body itself some kind of unfairness. He examines her throat, her mid-sized breasts, tight under a T-shirt. She looks like she’s going to take the shirt off. He leans closer. She’s just adjusting the waistband of her gym pants. A glimpse of peach-coloured skin.

  When he sees her leave the room, he heaves the brick as hard as he can through the window, like a shot-putter. The window explodes; there is a single shriek and the cascade of glass, but he is already walking away, fast. Fucken bitch. He rounds a corner, crosses a road and walks through the park before looking back. No one has followed him.

  He buys a frozen pizza and an energy drink at the supermarket, a headache spiderwebbing on the inside of his skull. He’s already forgotten the brick and Hailee. The streets are as silent as a field after a gunshot. Or before one. There seems to be dust everywhere today, but he’s not sure where it blew in from. It’s in the trees, in the grass, in the gutters. Enough to drown the world.

  Be good to have housemates, ay? He rented the duplex for himself because he thought it would be good to have privacy, but he gets lonely. As soon as he opens the door, a beast leaps at him from the dark. He falls on his arse and scoots backwards instinctively. He puts up a hand to push it away but the beast nuzzles up and starts licking his nose.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  Mercury Fire.

  The dog licks his face and its alert eye strikes him as compassionate, wise. He wipes saliva off his face and and walks through the house, switching on lights. As each one goes on, it lights up a different feature of the house. The cream carpet, the rack of cassettes he is so proud of (arranged in alphabetical order), his crates of vinyl, the signed Immortal Technique poster and a framed Shem RDC sketch – everything as it should be. Then, in a carved wooden frame, there is the black-and-white photo of a young Ulysses Amosa astride a motorbike, the one he crashed on the sandy roads of Savai’i. Jimmy remembers how Ulysses used to carry him and Solomon around the block, one on each shoulder, until the pain in his bad knee became too much.

  Mercury Fire follows at his heels the whole way, excited.

  Jimmy hears music from the garage – A$AP Rocky, who he can’t stand. The garage is spare but for raw concrete, a Malcolm X poster, a wardrobe and Solomon lying on a bench lifting the weights Jimmy never uses. His shirt is off, his arms still considerably muscled, his skin shining. Once lean and fatless, he now has a small but obvious gut. The expression on his face is one of fury. Jimmy watches with pleasure. This cunt.

  Jimmy stares at the Malcolm X poster. It was a present from his biological father. It’s Malcolm in his later years with that longer red beard, after he left the Nation of Islam. Jimmy knows that Solomon would say Malcolm X was his personal hero. What a joke. Malcolm X: a disciplined and pious man. Solomon Amosa: a hedonist, a libertine who had lost any sense of discipline to booze, women and MDMA years ago. Solomon told Jimmy that he reckons Malcolm was a great man because he changed and eventually realised the true Islam as one of acceptance and peace. But Jimmy always liked the early Malcolm more – angry, militant, fuck the white man. When people die young, you don’t get to see them become boring old fucks, lose their principles and become sellouts. We’d probably roll our eyes at Malcolm if he was still alive, that 2Pac woulda been a politician or doing Viagara ads or some shit. Better to die young, ay.

  Solomon is grunting and breathing hard as he pushes the weights up, sweat lathering his skull. The bassline and 808 drums bounce around the raw concrete. On the last rep he looks dizzy and as though he is scared he’ll get trapped under the bar. Jimmy doesn’t move to help him. With one last yell Solomon pushes the bar up onto the rack. He sits up and swears, gulping for air. Jimmy’s headache is gone now.

  ‘Hard workout, mate?’

  Solomon turns around and sees Jimmy in the doorway. ‘How fucken long you been there?’

  ‘A while. Looked hard,’ Jimmy smiles.

  ‘Not too bad. Been a while. You give it a go.’

  ‘Nah. Needa cook dinner.’

  ‘Of course not, ya gronk.’

  Jimmy smiles again as Solomon dries his face on his shirt.

  ‘You heard that new Maundz?’ Solomon says.

  ‘Nah. Not yet. Any good?’

  ‘Yeah, bro. Kills it. Mad wordplay.’

  Solomon’s smug now. Jimmy tries to keep up to date with everything. How did he miss it? ‘There’s a new Drapht clip out, but. I seen that,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, true? Didn’t see it.’ Even though Solomon doesn’t like Drapht, he looks crestfallen. Got ’im.

  ‘You hungry?’ says Jimmy.

  Something is up. Solomon is unusually fidgety, almost nervous. He pats Mercury absentmindedly, but the dog ignores him and begins sniffing around the garbage bin. Jimmy lets him out into the backyard, puts the pizza in the microwave, sets up his Ipod and Action Bronson comes out the speakers.

  ‘Bro, I need to ask you a big favour,’ says Solomon.

  ‘Yeh?’

  ‘I can’t look after Mercury anymore. It’s doing my farkin head in. Mum’s on my case about it everyday. Reckon . . . reckon you could take care of him?’

  Jimmy’s resentment dissolves. He almost wants to hug his brother. He gets on his computer and googles ‘how to look after a greyhound’. Jimmy looks back at Solomon grinning and sees a vague look of shame on his brother’s face turn to relief.

  ‘This is the best present I’ve ever got, bar none.’ He punches Solomon on the arm. For a moment, whirling movements in his brain are halted, slowed down at least, and he looks through the window and can see Mercury Fire staring right back, head cocked to one side.

  ‘We gonna take over the world, Mercury Fire,’ he yells out the window.

  You always know when Solomon is about to leave – he looks for a mirror.

  ‘I broke up with Georgie today,’ he says.

  19

  On the television,

  live from Parliament House.

  Damien Crawford.

  He is immaculate

  in a shark-grey suit

  and smiling confidently.

  He is talking about the plight of ordinary Australian families.

  He says that we need to demand a better standard

  of compassion and tolerance from ourselves,

  that, as Australia becomes more and more part of the region,

  we need a better level of understanding between each other.

  Then he stares right at the camera,

  right at me,

  and says,

  ‘That is one thing we can all agree on.’

  Only a week has passed,

  but there is not a single mark on his face.

  PART TWO

  A red glow pulsed like a barbarous heart.

  It emanated from a bark hut that stood on the edge of the limestone plains. A hand that gripped a hammer was black with smoke, and
sweat ran down a blackened face. Embers whirled up from white-hot shapes that were being clanged into the wherewithal to create a Town – rakes, spades, tongs, bayonets, rifle barrels.

  The fire in the forge burned on.

  1

  The answer

  Allen Iverson retired today,

  so I’m in my old 76ers jersey.

  A bit tight around the belly, ay?

  Ooosh, remember

  the maze braids, the cross braids,

  the tatts, the cool, the crossover?

  Kids these days,

  man, they don’t even know who A.I. is.

  I bounce the ball hard, excited,

  remembering game one in the finals against the Lakers.

  Even though I’m a lot bigger,

  I always wanted to play like A.I. –

  cool, but with heart.

  As I handle the rock,

  I look at my hands.

  Scarlett paints her nails coral red,

  ‘Helps with depth perception,’

  she reckons.

  Forget that now.

  All I care about is the court,

  the ball,

  the net.

  Phantom defenders –

  talk to em,

  break em,

  spin around em,

  shake em.

  Ball –

  lace it behind back,

  between legs,

  under knees,

  cat’s cradle it,

  manipulate it,

  roll it off fingers,

  put English on it,