Some of My Friends Have Tails

by Sara Henderson

  He was very humble the next morning when he stepped out of the plane; he didn’t have to say he was my radio companion of the night before, it was written all over his face.

  The girl lived, but did not return to Bullo, at my request. I packed off her friend the domestic and all their belongings on the next trip to Darwin. I found out she was only on marijuana, but the nineteen-year-old was well and truly on heroin. They had no idea how remote the meatworks and the station were, and thought they would get supplies from the nearest town. They had just arrived in Darwin from Melbourne the day Charlie offered them the jobs. It seems that wonderful first day of cleaning was a marijuana-induced high! I gratefully sent her on her way, and hoped for a less ‘out of this world’ type domestic the next time around.

  However, it wasn’t the end of the story. About a month later Charlie’s business partner’s secretary, Kelly, called me to ask if there was a package addressed to my ex-domestic in the mail Charlie had picked up from our mailbox in Darwin that weekend. I checked through the mail and found a small brown paper package. I told Kelly that it was there; I was asked the size and replied it looked and felt like a paperback book. Kelly said that was what the girl was looking for and was quite upset when it wasn’t there in the mail on Monday morning. Could Charlie bring it to Darwin on his next trip.

  After hanging up the phone, the conversation wouldn’t go away. Questions kept coming into my head … what was my ex-domestic doing still picking up mail from our box number well over … I looked up the wage records … six weeks after she had left Bullo?

  I called Kelly back and she confirmed that the girl met her at the postbox every Monday morning and weekly received a parcel. I didn’t like the sound of it. I kept remembering a movie I had seen a few months before where drugs were hidden in a book with the middle cut out.

  I called a friend on the police force in Darwin and said I thought someone was using our postbox as a drug delivery service, and I just happened to have a package in my hands that I thought might contain drugs. I was sworn in over the phone and authorised to open Her Majesty’s mail, on behalf of the police. My hands trembled as I undid the string wrapped around and around the unassuming package. The police said to open the package carefully so it could be rewrapped with no evidence of tampering. I finally had the book in my hands with the paper wrapping almost in original condition on the desk. Charlie said I had been watching too many movies, but he was right next to me waiting for the big moment. I lifted the cover. The first twenty or so pages lifted easily, and there, nestling in the centre of the book, was a row of plastic packages filled with white powder. I don’t know who was more amazed, Charlie or me!

  The police arrived by plane and took over the proceedings. We gave the whole story and the girls’ names from the wage records, and the police told me they wanted to catch the girls in the process of receiving the goods. So the package was carefully rewrapped and taken back to our Darwin mailbox to be the centre of the trap. It was put in our mailbox and Kelly was to hand it out the next Monday along with, they hoped, that Monday’s delivery in another book. The police were all staked out around the mailbox section of the Post Office. Both girls turned up, our ex-meatwork heroin addict looking a much better colour now she was on a regular supply. The police arrested them, with drugs in their hands, as they were stepping into a car.

  The girls were new to this drug thing and very frightened, so they gave the police all the information they could, including a valuable list of contacts in each state. It turned out to be a big concern, with outlets like the two girls receiving drug-laden books all over Australia. The police thanked me for my invaluable help in cracking one of the most lucrative drug rackets operating in Australia in the 1970s. Charlie said I just fell into it … and he was right.

  The Darwin officer’s departing words were about the very grumpy officer standing off to the side near the plane, hands jammed in his pockets, head down, kicking up the dirt. It seems he had been on the case for years, trying to get a breakthrough. When Darwin called through to Melbourne he was on the first plane up. His remarks were along the lines of, ‘Bloody years of work to crack this bloody case and some bloody female out in the middle of nowhere does it for me!’

  The next domestic was not nearly as colourful or unconventional, didn’t sing, wasn’t bopping around on a marijuana high, but nonetheless was quite good at housework.

  5

  * * *

  AMERICA, PRINIE AND THE CRABS

  In his usual manner Charlie announced, out of the blue, we were going to America to visit his family. I was packed in a flash!

  We had been in America for four months and were living with Mrs Henderson at Lloyds Landing in Maryland. It certainly was a wonderful old house, and we were enjoying living in the high degree of normality after eighteen months in a caravan parked in a tin shed out in one million acres of dusty wilderness in outback Australia.

  Well, I know I was enjoying myself immensely. Waking up in a comfortable bed, in soft sheets that smelt fresh, was an exquisite sensation, compared to my last year and a half on the undersized sofa-bed in the caravan, with a dip in the middle. Charlie managed to sleep in the dip in the middle of this miserable excuse of a bed, all night, while I clung to the high edge up against the wall. Many a night I disappeared down the gap between bed and wall into the mysterious workings that, with the heave of a lever, miraculously turned the bed back into a sofa, and allowed you to sit or get out the door. Other nights if he turned over with a thump, the spring lever would activate itself and I would be straddling the back of the now-in-place sofa, or if he thumped hard enough I would catapult over the top of him and end up on the floor.

  The padding on top of the springs was nonexistent (twenty years of occupancy before us). So I walked around with a strange circular pattern on my back and buttocks. There was no way you could keep a mattress protector on the stupid thing, or a bottom sheet. Everything disappeared into the dip, with Charlie, who snored peacefully no matter what the night might bring. Often I awoke clinging to the raised edge, pillow and sheet down in the dip with Charlie, just the grimy green sofa cover making patterns on my cheek, or the springs making more patterns on my back.

  Yes, I was definitely enjoying our new sleeping arrangement. I could lie there in comfort and bliss and look out the dormer windows at the snowflakes and the snow-covered fields and trees. I couldn’t get the girls out of the bathroom: after bathing in cold water, in a cut-off forty-four-gallon drum at Bullo, to have a normal bath again was wonderful; they would steam up the room and play in the hot water for hours.

  Of course, this didn’t please their grandmother, who saw it as a wilful waste of water. Never in a million years could she understand what hardships these two little girls had endured living on Bullo those first years, and I felt a few weeks of hot baths was a small gift to them. But their grandmother was seventy-five years old and very set in her ways, so bathtime had to be reduced to what was deemed acceptable.

  But it wasn’t only the length of the bathtime that was the problem. Trying to keep five-and three-year-olds quiet was near impossible. Telling them they must walk, not run, sit, not pounce, speak, not yell, and just about everything else. In short, having two little girls behave like their grandma, in order to keep the peace, was a bit more than I cared to agree to. The problem was solved when we moved into one of the little farmhouses on the property. Alone at last! The children ran and screamed and jumped and played non-stop inside and outside for at least a week, until all their pent-up energy was expended. Then they worked through endless long baths, and finally settled down to normal.

  The girls started school. I bought furnishings. The house was partly furnished but had no children’s things, and we needed a few extras to make it a comfy home. We settled in for the winter, it was almost perfect, but something was missing. I didn’t have a dog. It was the first time in my life I had been so long without a dog. My birthday was just around the corner, so I told Charlie I wanted a dog.
A few weeks later he said we were going to visit some old friends. When we arrived at their house he took me into the garden and there was a Chesapeake Bay Retriever with a litter of puppies running everywhere.

  I had never seen that breed of dog before and knew nothing about them. But looking at the mother, the breed filled my requirement; big, solid, intelligent and playful. Charlie told me they were bird dogs, they retrieved ducks from the water. He had already picked out his bird dog and was handing it to me saying it was my dog. It wriggled and squirmed in my arms, straining to get free.

  All the other puppies were racing around and playing, except one. He was sitting in the middle of all the activity, watching. All the pups were light brown, with a wiry, curly, wavy coat; this pup looked as if he had been put through a blond rinse, his coat was not as wiry or wavy and he was twice the size of all the other pups. He tried vainly to join in the play but his feet were so big he kept falling over them. He had a big broad head and beautiful eyes. The moment he looked at me it was love at first sight.

  ‘I want that one.’

  ‘What!’ said Charlie.

  He took me over to the corner of the garden to talk me out of my decision. The dog was so clumsy it couldn’t walk, would never be able to hunt! It wasn’t even the right colour! So it was decided we would take his choice.

  ‘It’s that one or forget it’ was my stubborn reply.

  Even the owners had to admit that my choice, although from pedigree parents, was a strange-looking pup. True it was healthy, but they had to admit it didn’t even look like a Chesapeake. They were sure he would grow out of his clumsiness. But sometimes even established pedigree dogs had throwbacks, they conceded. They weren’t sure what this one had thrown back to exactly, but they were sure they had a throwback on their hands. The standoff continued. Charlie wasn’t going back to tidewater country on the Chesapeake, the heart of the duck-hunting world, with a Chesapeake Retriever that didn’t look like one, or more precisely, that didn’t look like a pedigree. Even the farmers there had pedigree dogs.

  I wouldn’t budge; it was the funny big puppy for me. I explained I wasn’t going to show the dog and I wasn’t going to hunt; if Charlie wanted to hunt, the dog was pedigree and what he looked like wouldn’t affect his retrieving skills, so what was the problem? I wanted a big dog to protect the children when they were playing out in our woods, I wanted a family dog. When I accused Charlie of conforming to what everyone else thought a Chesapeake should look like, that did the trick. Charlie couldn’t bear to be referred to as average; he immediately warmed to the idea that he would have the only different Chesapeake on ‘the Shore’, the name used for the area where we lived.

  And so I walked happily out the door just barely able to carry the nine-week-old puppy. The girls had his box for travelling ready and we all three sat in the back of the car and cooed to the puppy the whole way home, much to Charlie’s disgust.

  And that’s how Prince London of Lloyds, his pedigree name, we called him Prinie, Charles called him Prince, came into our lives. And what a brilliant dog! He lived up to the size of his paws and grew into a huge dog, all of one hundred and forty pounds (or sixty-three kilograms), all muscle. From an early age he ran for miles, the girls couldn’t wait until he was big enough to pull their little red wagon, so they could explore deep into the woods and pine forest that were part of the farm.

  Lloyds Landing, the property, consisted of four farms totalling around one thousand two hundred acres (or just under five hundred hectares). The main house, called Lloyds Landing, was built in 1720 on the banks of the Choptank River. In the 1700s, English sailing ships sailed up the Choptank River and loaded grain to take back to England. The ships brought out finished goods like silks, satins, furniture, machinery, light cargoes; for ballast on the way over the holds were loaded with house bricks; these were taken out and the hold filled with grain for the return. As a result, all the lovely old homes along the Choptank River are built out of English brick. Lloyds Landing is a wonderful English-style cottage with low doors and dormer windows and a shingle roof. Mr and Mrs Henderson restored the original house, I think some-time in the 1950s, when they retired to ‘the Shore’ to live. The present living room was once the big functional all-purpose kitchen/living room. The big fireplace was used for cooking and the smoking of hams was also done there. When we were there in the 1960s, on a cold winter’s night with the open fire roaring, the beautiful old original wall panelling released the secrets of the past and you actually smelt, just faintly, a hint of smoked hams in the air.

  During the restoration the original building was doubled in size; the old stairway with doors top and bottom was taken out and a whole section of entrance foyer and staircase added in between the old part and a completely new part; the original low front door was now the door into the dining room. A new kitchen, outside porch, double garage and the quaint outdoor smokehouse were added. The barn in the distance, nestling amongst the cornfields with pine woods bordering the property beyond the cornfields, and long sloping green lawns edged with box bushes rolling down to the wide Choptank River, made Lloyds Landing a very beautiful historic country residence.

  The other three farmhouses were just farmhouses, made of weatherboard, or clapboard as it is called in America. Their names were Rigby’s Marsh, Warehouse and Whitewash. We were living in Rigby’s Marsh.

  As the name suggests, the farm was on a marshy part of the river, so there was no sloping lawn down to the water’s edge, just very thick reed growth along the waterfront, lots of mosquitoes, and no view at all. It was a quaint little house, all closed in and tucked away in amongst the pine forest and cornfields. After the corn was harvested, there was a view across the ploughed fields: you could see Lloyds Landing about three miles away, and the other farmhouses off in the distance. Such a contrast to the wild, empty wilderness of the Australian Outback.

  Prinie grew daily and it wasn’t long before I could say yes to the question the girls had asked almost daily: ‘Is he big enough to pull the red wagon yet?’

  Soon they had him in a harness of ropes and straps, with their Dad’s help, and they were off exploring. Charlie installed a long stick rigged to the wagon with a piece of red fabric flying at the top, so when I wanted to know where they were I could look out the upstairs window and see the little red flag going up and down the rows of tall corn. Some days Prinie would go on strike and just sit down on the job, and they would finally go off and explore without him. But if I needed them, I would send him off and he would track them down. The children would only come back if he let them hitch him to the wagon. They had some great rides home, clinging to the wagon and squealing with delight, as Prinie trotted home at a fast clip.

  Charlie was almost always in Washington, so the girls and I were alone most of the week, another reason why I wanted a big dog. The house was a mile off the road, through a pine forest, so we were quite isolated, and during winter the phone would be out of order quite a bit of the time when snow or pine branches caused trouble with the line.

  Charlie called again one night to say he was staying in Washington. It was Friday and he usually came home early for the weekend, but he called to say he had to finish some business, missing the last train, but he would catch the first train in the morning and see us for lunch. I had just put down the phone, knowing full well what ‘business’ Charlie was up to, when a knock at the door interrupted my sober thoughts.

  The girls and Prinie were in the living room watching a loud cowboy movie, but I thought it strange Prinie hadn’t barked at the lights when the car came down the drive. I opened the door but left the glass snow-door (keeping the warmth in the house) locked.

  A man was standing there; he shouted through the door he was from the phone company and was there to fix the phone, he’d had a report it was out of order. It was nine o’clock at night. I told him the phone was working, I had just finished a call. He said well he may as well check it seeing he had come all the way.

  Something
was nagging at the back of my brain but I couldn’t put a finger on it. I looked out at the vehicle, it was a van like the repair vans used by the telephone company, but finally I knew what was worrying me: it did not have a company name on the side of the van.

  The situation just did not feel right, so I called Prinie; he came bounding up to me, tail wagging. When he saw the man standing outside the glass door all his hair stood on end; he stood on his hind feet with his great paws on the steel reinforcement bar across the glass door. Standing as tall as the man, staring eyeball to eyeball, he slowly raised his top lip to reveal massive fangs. The man backed away at such a pace he fell backwards off the edge of the porch, missing the step completely. He shouted he would not come into the house if that dog was there and said I had to lock him up. I just shook my head in a very definite ‘no’. He hurried back to the van and drove away. I called the phone company to check on him; they had not sent anyone at that time of night. I called the state troopers on the highway seven miles away and they acted at once. It seemed there had been several cases around the country where a man posing as a repairman had gained entrance to the house and there had been robberies, and in some cases more serious offences. I was informed I was a lucky woman. I told them I had a very good dog. The troopers came the next day and when they were met by Prinie they agreed that indeed I had a very exceptional dog. When Prinie locked those yellow eyes on you there were very few people who didn’t react with extreme caution. The man was caught a few months later.