Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf

by Sonya Hartnett

  He came nearer to look at the picture and she wriggled sideways to give him room. She smelled, he noticed, like lavender: his mother had some powder that made her smell the same. The picture was a coat of arms and on either side of the central shield were two rampant, stylized, bizarre-looking dogs. “They’re not the right colour,” he said immediately. “The dog at the mountain was tan, not grey.”

  “Maybe that’s because the reproduction is bad. Look at their heads. Look at their ears. Look at their tails, smooth, like a cat’s. Look at the stripes on their backs.”

  Satchel frowned at the image. “I suppose,” he said. “I suppose you’d say they were close. The stripes are right, at least.”

  Chelsea sucked in her breath, and Satchel looked at her. His hands were on his knees and his face was level with hers, and he could see shallow pits in her skin, the war wounds of her ongoing battle with acne. “Don’t you know what those dogs are?” she asked. “Haven’t you ever seen these animals before?”

  He shook his head. “What are they?”

  “Satchel, they’re thylacines. This is the Tasmanian coat of arms. Those animals are Tasmanian tigers.”

  He stared at her, and she stared back at him. She had dug her teeth into her lip and her eyes were surreally huge behind her glasses. It made him laugh. “Tasmanian tigers are extinct,” he said.

  “I know,” she whispered.

  “They’re extinct. So it could not have been a Tasmanian tiger. And we aren’t in Tasmania, either.”

  “I know,” she repeated. “But look at the picture, Satchel. Look at it.”

  He wanted to laugh again, to giggle with the absurdity of her seriousness, but while she’d endured one scoffing nobly, she seemed prepared to be offended by a second, so he did as she asked, and looked. He took the book from her, and looked harder. He tried to imagine the drawn animals alive, fleshed out and leaping through the undergrowth, and the resemblance was there. It was strange, and left him, for a moment, with nothing sensible to say. He flipped the book to see its cover and found it was one of Miles Piper’s school texts. “Is there anything in here about tigers?” he asked.

  “No. It’s just a history book. But I was thinking that, when I take the bus to town tomorrow, I could go to the library and try to find something. If you want me to, I mean.”

  Satchel peered at the picture. The similarity was still there. The printed beasts looked partly cat, partly dog. They were more muscular and thick-set than the lanky creature he had seen, but their backs were slashed with stripes from their shoulders to their tails, stripes that reminded him of the splits in his mother’s palms. He closed the book and put it down quickly, as if it had become suddenly hot to hold. “It wouldn’t be true,” he said.

  “I know. Thylacines have been extinct for years. For years and years and years. And we don’t live in Tasmania.”

  “It was just a dog that looked like those things.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I can go to the library tomorrow, if you want me to.”

  He glanced at her, at her small, upturned, pleading face, the stone-coloured eyes gazing at him as if he wielded some kind of power. He couldn’t remember anyone ever looking at him like that, and it was embarrassing. Her attention was hungry, draining. “I don’t mind,” he told her brusquely. “Go, if you want to.”

  She nodded, her head bobbing cheerfully. She climbed from the feed barrel and had taken a few steps down the driveway when she turned to squint at him and said, “I don’t think we should tell anyone.”

  “No,” he agreed. He stood and watched her walk away and smiled grimly at the thought of what people would say, should the local pariah and the son of the local madman get together to claim they’d found a long-defunct creature living, of all places, at the foot of the local mountain.

  Laura was setting the table and he looked at her as he passed the door of the dining room: she briefly turned her eyes to him and he understood, from this, that William now knew about the nursing home. They had developed over years their repertoire of loaded glances and now a quick precise flash from Laura’s hazel eyes could forewarn Satchel of his father’s mood, could alert him to the calamities or pleasures of the finishing day. William was slumped on the couch in the living room, staring at the carpet, and Satchel took the chair alongside him. “Hi,” he said.

  “Good evening.”

  “How have you been?”

  “Very well, and I thank you for enquiring.”

  Satchel considered his father: William’s face was set wooden and his eyes seemed dry, their surfaces parched. The TV guide was on the coffee table and Satchel spun the paper to face him. “Anything good on tonight?” he asked.

  “I have not yet perused the selection.”

  He scanned the paper. “There’s not.”

  “That would not be untypical.”

  “…Why are you talking like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “You know.”

  William’s gaze scraped his son and fixed itself once more on the carpet. He said, “I detect nothing abnormal in my speech patterns.”

  “Hmm.” Satchel flicked the guide with a finger, sent it skidding over the table’s surface. William sat as if his backbone had been extracted, his head thrust forward, his chest bent to a curve, his upturned hands lying limp beside his knees. He made no move when the guide collapsed at his feet. Satchel watched him carefully. He remembered the day Laura told her husband that she had no option but to return to nursing, the cold fact being that somebody had to earn the money to keep them alive. When he’d heard that news, William had not perched on the couch like an injured vulture. He had ranted and raved and stomped through the rooms. He was appalled that the woman he’d married should have so little faith in her Lord. How could God provide for her, he demanded to be told, when she refused to give Him the chance to do so? He had called upon his God to eye off this disbeliever and William’s God was the old God, the God of plagues and tempests, of fire and wrath, a sulky tyrannical juvenile of a God, and William called Him down like a necromancer summoning a demon: it was frightening to think of Him being in the room. Laura was a different person in those days, not yet as resilient as she would become, and Satchel could remember the sound of sobs coming through the walls of her bedroom.

  Nonetheless, she was determined. After fifteen years of absence from the profession she needed to do much retraining and this she did without complaint. She applied for a position at the hospital in the big town and was given a place on its maternity ward. Despite her retraining she found the work strenuous, the technology dazzling. She told Satchel she could hear babies bawling in her sleep. Her return to work was the droplet that broke floodgates: word of how deep the family’s plight had sunk flowed to Laura’s burly brothers, who came to town and bailed William up in the living room. What, they wanted to know, did he think he was doing? Was he mad? Was he really such a lazy, selfish, pointless man? William posed like a martyr, taking abuse the way Sebastian took the arrows. They believed not in God, and trusted not in His salvation. They believed not in His wondrous works. Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not. Laura steered the brothers into the kitchen for another private conversation, closing the door in Satchel’s face. Satchel remembered standing in the hall with his fists tightly clenched, hearing the muffled voices and feeling a seething disgust. He hated it that everyone wanted a piece of the saga and shouldered in for their say, but all the hushed or shouted opinions had achieved nothing, and nothing was getting better. He felt, at that moment, no anger towards his father: for the first time he acknowledged that William was not infantile, but ill, floundering helplessly below the surface of reality. Others, though, would persist in seeing him as a curiosity, a specimen to be inspected under the harshest light: they would peck him, if they could, to death. Satchel decided, at that moment, that he would never leave his mother and father. The front his family presented would be united, as strong as it could be.

  All this had happened over e
ight years ago, and his mother could be fearsome now and his father could be feeble, but little else had changed. Satchel leaned into the cushions, his hands behind his head. The ceiling was centred by a plaster rose that had cracked clean through the middle. He pondered the likelihood of one half falling and landing on the coffee table like the segment of a huge, wizened orange. He let his gaze drift around the room, past the smudgy windows and over the floral furniture, and come to rest on William. “The chainsaw,” he said. “It’s fixed, isn’t it?”

  “I believe I attended to the repairs several days ago.”

  “And it works?”

  “You will find all internal mechanisms in sound operational order.”

  Satchel chuckled, and William shot a blue glance at him; Satchel suddenly suspected that his father was doing this deliberately now, as an awkward, playful tease. Five minutes ago he had not been teasing, but he had hauled himself out of the murk that could swallow him and hoped to seem, now, as if he’d never been near the edge of that obscurity. And Satchel was grateful, willing to go along with the pretence. He almost told his father about Chelsea Piper and her tiger, for he knew William would find the story intriguing, but he lost the desire as soon as he went to speak. Chelsea had been a source of amusement for a long time – and so had William, and so had Satchel himself.

  Laura came to the door, her hands at work behind her back, loosening her apron. “Dinner’s ready,” she said. William looked at her slyly.

  “I hope you didn’t set a place for me.”

  “Well, I did. Aren’t you eating tonight?”

  “I certainly am. Not here, however. I have a dinner engagement with some friends. Didn’t I tell you about that?”

  “No, you didn’t.” She clutched her apron and said to Satchel, “Dinner.”

  He stood, but William stayed where he was. “Dad—” Satchel started.

  “Don’t worry about him, Satchel, he’s being stupid. Come to the table.”

  “Your purse,” said William. “Is it in the kitchen?”

  Laura didn’t answer; Satchel trailed her to the dining room and as they settled at the table they could hear him in the kitchen, rummaging through his wife’s handbag. He would take whatever money he found there and go to one of the town’s hotels, where he would drink alone until someone else was drunk enough to join him. Despite his aversion to earning, William had never shown a reluctance in regard to spending. Laura gave him a small weekly allowance which he usually wasted, buying trinkets that caught his fancy and useless gifts for his wife and son. When he wanted to go drinking or treat himself to a counter meal or add to his collection of expensive paintbrushes, he would dip into Laura’s wallet as if this was his personal bank. It was a trait Satchel found deplorable but his mother forgave more readily: it afforded her an evening’s rest from him, and gave William something to do.

  After dinner, when Laura was watching television with Moke flopped across her feet, he wandered into William’s bedroom and looked at the painting his father had been doing that day. William worked at a sloped table that he had designed and Satchel had built, over which a magnifying glass on a mobile arm perched like a robotic mantis. Satchel switched on the lamp and peered through the magnifier. The painting was pinned to the table’s surface and had the dimensions William preferred, no bigger than a beer coaster. Joseph had taken Jesus fishing but their poles were lying on the shore, ignored. Instead, young Jesus had one hand dipped in the water and fish were schooled in the hope of being touched. The boy’s other hand was held in Joseph’s large paw. Joseph, with his free hand, was pointing to the sky. In the sky the clouds had parted momentarily, letting through rays of sunlight that streamed onto the heads of the man and the haloed child. William’s work was never subtle, and this was one of his favourite themes: Joseph as guide and teacher, alerting his charge to symbolism that the boy might otherwise fail to see. Satchel’s lip curled, and he stepped away.

  William had done his best to teach his son that God would provide, and that the trick was to give Him the chance to do so. He had encouraged Satchel to drop out of school lest he be tempted to study for a career. This fired Laura to a degree of fury achieved by none of William’s other notions or opinions – when he had declared that he would never die, Satchel remembered, Laura had simply chortled. Now she began to drag her son away when he strayed too close to his father, as if whatever William had was contagious and disfiguring. She was frantic with the idea that Satchel would believe what his father was saying, and it was then that she decided her son should not only finish school, but that he should leave the town when he did so. She said that moving to the city would improve his prospects, but he knew she wanted him gone because with distance, in absence, he would be safe.

  He was sixteen then, and looked at his parents as if both of them were mad: one for the temptation, the other for suspecting he could be tempted.

  He didn’t discuss with anyone the next move he made, not with Laura or with William or even with Leroy. He went to school and cleaned out his locker and walked through the gates for the final time. His father was elated, but his mother seemed to tilt on the brink of hysteria. The next day he took the bus to the big town and got himself apprenticed. William was gravely disappointed, and so was Laura. She had not wanted him to be a tradesman. Like most mothers she’d hoped for her child the honour and security of a future in medicine, in numbers, in the law. But Satchel had never really cared for school, and his grades had always blended with the average. He wanted an income, and when he got one he gave much of it to his mother for bills and food and board. His family would be united, but he would share the work of keeping it that way. His mother, he thought, had never forgiven him. Even now, years later, her strongest desire was to make him go away.

  He sighed and sat down on his father’s bed, hooking his fingers in its crocheted covering. On the pillow lay William’s much-thumbed Bible, its bulk whiskery with slips of paper that marked his favoured passages. Satchel picked it up and leafed through it, not bothering to read the comments William had pencilled on the soft pages. His father had once collected car manuals, but these ancient words were all the instruction he wanted now. Satchel crinkled his nose, because the pages smelled of must.

  He found the quote accidentally, but it jumped out at him like something ablaze. He took a pen and paper and wrote it down and then read it to himself. But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. He went to leave the quote somewhere his father would find it, but suddenly lost interest in the idea. William would simply ignore it, and Satchel saved him the effort of throwing it away.

  The wagon was cranky in the morning and the sound of the car’s gargling brought out Laura, clad in her dressing-gown. Satchel popped the bonnet and together they stared into the blackened mass of the engine. “Spark plugs?” his mother suggested. It was very early, and her breath was foggy with the cold.

  Satchel shooed her aside. “I’ve checked everything. Nothing should be wrong with it.”

  “It’s old. Maybe it’s tired.”

  “If Dad would take a look at it – it wouldn’t hurt him—”

  “You can take my car.”

  “I don’t want your car. I want this car. This car would be fine if Dad would just look at it, just for a few minutes, for God’s sake…”

  She would not talk to him in this frustrated, resentful mood, and when he kicked the bumper she walked back to the house. Satchel threw himself into the front seat and sat for a few seething moments, while Moke stayed wisely quiet and only the chickens clucked on blithely. Satchel closed his eyes and turned the ignition key and the engine caught, as if never having had any intention of doing otherwise.

  They took the old road through town and sheared off towards the mountain, the wagon plunging and lurching over shallows in the trail. When they reached the redgum clearing Moke pounced away into the scrub and Satchel shed his coat and gathered branches, piling
them together near the flat-topped cutting stump. He watched, while he did so, for any sign of the striped animal, and once he spun swiftly when he spied movement in a clutch of fern and strappy trees. But it was only Moke, nose to the ground, running circles around nothing.

  The chainsaw bucked when he pulled the cord and the sound was barbarous and everywhere, an ugly gritty muscular howl that careered off the volcano and rattled the leaves in the canopy. A charcoal party of gang-gangs exploded from the trees, clapping the air solidly as they beat for the heights of the mountain. The racket of the chainsaw would be a shock to the things that lived here, like snapping from sleep to find you had woken in a vat of loose gravel.

  He sliced the branches quickly and threw the pieces aside. He walked about until he found a log not yet badly rotted, and carved it into portable chunks. He piled up his arms and carried the wood to the wagon, the frost shattering under each footstep. Satchel did not have to think about what he was doing, for he had lived this scene over and over: there was a monotony to his existence that would disconnect his mind as though it were something mechanical. He made many journeys across the clearing and took the same route back again, and by the time everything was done he was warm and had shaken off his jumper. He flicked his hands clean and pushed back his hair. The sun was high above the land line, the frost had oozed into the earth and the clearing was quiet and empty. He and Moke were alone. “In the car,” he called to her. “Come on, girl.”

  She was reluctant, swerving in any direction but the one that brought her to the car. He smiled as he watched her: she was always busy, a great investigator and explorer. When she was angry she would raise her hackles and lower her head and look like a wild boar. She skipped through the ferns and over tree trunks, glancing at him sideways, her red tail waving like a torn and ragged fan. Satchel looked around himself, at the boulders cast from the mountain, at the shadows thrown by the escarpments, at the slick dark soil and the rangy strangled saplings at the feet of their towering cousins. This was a place for wild animals, but none of them would show themselves while he and Moke were here. They would find him disturbing, but Moke they would fear.