Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf

by Sonya Hartnett

  “He hasn’t changed. I don’t think he’ll ever change. Not now.”

  Leroy’s mouth sagged, as though the verdict was unexpected. He took a sip from his mug and his gaze roamed the kitchen. Laura tried to keep the house nice but Satchel was suddenly conscious that the walls needed painting, that the linoleum was lumpy, that the cupboards were streaked with spills. Leroy would not care about this, but it shamed Satchel anyway.

  “And nothing interesting has been happening here?”

  “…No.”

  “No, it never does. Stupid question, really.” Leroy laughed roughly. “This place is the end of the world, you know. It’s a dark, nasty, dingy little pit where nothing’s allowed to happen.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “No? What’s been happening then? Tell me one thing.”

  Satchel looked at the table’s surface, his fingers flexing around his mug. Leroy smiled darkly. “You see. You’re going to die here, Satchel. You’ll just disappear into thin air.”

  Satchel shifted and Moke swivelled her watchful eyes to him. Leroy gulped his tea until it was gone and set the mug down. “Come to the city with me,” he said. “I’ve got a house, and it’s got a spare room you can have. I’ll help you find work. I was talking to your mother about it and she reckons it’s a good idea.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Bullshit. What’s keeping you here? You think your mum wants you to stay? She doesn’t. She wants you to go. She thinks you’d be better off in the city.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, then?”

  Satchel sighed. Leroy was staring at him mercilessly, his blond hair draped like bars over his face. “I will go, one day—”

  “Why not today?”

  “I just can’t, that’s why.”

  Leroy grunted, slumping in his chair: Satchel knew he was disgusted, that he found his friend disgusting. He said, “I’m sorry.”

  “You are not.”

  “Maybe, in a few months—”

  “In a few months I might have forgotten about you.”

  Satchel glanced at him, saw Leroy was not joking. He felt heavy and, for the first time in his life, he felt old. He stayed mulishly silent, aware that Leroy was waiting for him to say something, was looking at him steadily, refusing, with equal wilfulness, to take the words back. Finally Leroy stood, slipping his coat from his chair.

  “Look, Satch,” he said, “I’ve got to hook it. I promised I’d bring the car home before it gets late. My housemate’s got a new girlfriend and he wants to take her out… What are you doing tonight?”

  “I don’t know. I might go down to the clubrooms, see who’s there. Maybe I’ll just stay home.”

  Leroy smiled grudgingly. “That’s what I’ll be doing, staying home. I don’t know anyone besides my housemate, and I don’t like going out by myself.”

  “What about the people you work with?”

  “They’re all married, got brats. They’re no use.”

  “You’ll make friends—”

  “I’ve got friends. I’ve got a friend I used to hang around with all the time. We used to go everywhere, do heaps of stuff. But that friend doesn’t care about me any more. He doesn’t know what’s good for him.”

  Satchel followed him through the house and out to the car, where Leroy searched his pockets for the keys. Satchel looked at the office: the chain was linked through its door handles and William was nowhere, gone as cleanly as if he’d never been there and Satchel had simply imagined what he saw. Leroy slid behind the steering-wheel and started the engine. He said, “Think about it, Satchel. I’ll ring you in a couple of weeks.”

  Satchel nodded. He walked onto the road to watch his friend drive away and when he could see nothing that he hadn’t seen every day of his life he turned and went into the house.

  His mother was sitting on the veranda and her eyes had drooped shut: she opened them when he let the screen door slam behind him and smiled a little warily, as if she did not really recognize him. “Why did you say that to Leroy?” he asked curtly. “Why did you say that you want me to leave?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Laura yawned into a hand. “I said that I thought it would be good for you, if you went.”

  “I’m not a kid,” he said. “I can do what I want.”

  “All I said was—”

  Satchel jerked away from her. He was furious, and he didn’t quite know why. “If I want to stay in town,” he snarled, “I should be allowed to stay. I’ll move out of this house, if you like, but I’m allowed to live where I want. Is that what you’d like – would you like me to move out? Because I will, if you want.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Laura gazed at the cup that was balanced on her knee, her fingers slack around the handle. She had dozed off before finishing her tea and a film of cloudiness was floating on the liquid’s surface. “I don’t understand you, Satchel. Most people are desperate to get away.”

  “Most people don’t live the way we do, do they?”

  She considered him, her face passive. “I’ve never asked you to feel responsible. I’ve never wanted you to worry.”

  “You are not me!” he yelped. “What difference does it make to me, you deciding that I shouldn’t worry? You don’t live my life!”

  “And you are not a child, as you say. Please stop behaving otherwise.”

  It made him snap his mouth shut, made his cheeks flush hotly. Laura put the cup down and looked across the yard. A chicken was sunbathing among the vegetables, its neck crooked as if broken over extended speckled wings. “You’re quite right,” she said, “I don’t live your life. But I want you to have a life. I want you to see things and do things. I don’t want you tied to this place. Tied by your father’s illness. Feeling you must stay to help me. You will wake up so angry, one day.”

  “I won’t!” he spluttered. “Why do you think you know everything about me?”

  “I don’t. But it’s the way I wake up feeling, some days.”

  Satchel stepped backwards, as if she had slapped him. When he was little she had struck him as punishment for his crimes and mutinies: he felt young again now, and afraid of what she could do. His fury disintegrated in an instant and he asked, “Is it because of Dad and me?”

  His mother shook her head. She’d dyed her hair before starting her new job and the sunlight skimmed it dully, neither reflected nor absorbed. Her hands, upturned on her thighs, were cracked as badly as ever: a week at the geriatric home had done nothing to help them heal. “Of course not,” she replied. “But sometimes I think I have lived a very small life, and that makes me angry. It makes me angry to think of you doing the same.”

  He sat on the veranda steps, silenced by a dousing sadness for her, and for himself. It was almost unbearable, to think of his mother classifying her existence as wasted, and to realize she was not wrong. Life had been stingy to her. He loved her, depended on her, he admired her and learned from her, but this had not been enough to give her value in her own eyes. He had always wanted her to be happy, but he had not understood how important it was that she should appear to be so: she had dropped a mask he desperately needed her to wear and he wondered if he could ever look at her again without feeling a ripping, tearing sense of sorrow.

  And, because of this, there bloomed in him a sense of betrayal: she had let her disguise drop with objectionable willingness, indifferent to the fact that this was a desertion and he would have to go masked, now, alone. To revenge himself he said, “I asked you to take me away years ago, but you didn’t.”

  “Don’t be tedious, Satchel. I couldn’t leave. You know that.”

  “Then you should know that I can’t, either. You should stop wishing I would.”

  “I will never stop wishing that,” she answered.

  Satchel glowered. The dozing chicken had woken and was staring suspiciously at them. After some moments it got to its feet and made its way casually through the garden, picking at vegetables as it went. Laura clucked her to
ngue at it and the bird ignored her. Satchel could hear Moke snuffling at the gap below the screen door, heard her small vexated whines: Laura called her and, emboldened, the dog shoved the door and came out running, claws skittering, ears flat and jaw slung. She dived down the steps and drove the flustered chicken before her, her belly to the earth, her teeth nipping the air. Satchel smiled reluctantly. He remembered the day his mother had arrived home and called him out to the car, where he found the small brown bundle that would become his dog. His father, at first, had frowned on the idea of keeping her, but his mother had stood firm. She wanted Satchel to have the pup and she would not give William a proper reason why. “It will give him something to think about,” was all she chose to say. She may have judged their future darkly and the dog may have been a consolation for him, but it had been a relief to know that their lives were under her control now, that the erratic, chaotic mind of his father would no longer hold any sway.

  Satchel sighed. “Do you know what I used to wish?”

  Laura lifted her head. “What?”

  “…I used to wish Dad would die.”

  His mother said reprovingly, “Satchel.”

  “I didn’t want him to die, I just wished that he would. Quietly, at night, no pain. It would have made things easier.”

  “But still, you shouldn’t think it.”

  “I don’t any more.”

  “What stopped you?”

  He leaned back on his palms, his face turned to the sun. “I’m not sure. Everything has a right to live, I suppose. Just because something doesn’t suit you, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t got a right to exist.”

  She said nothing, and he looked over a shoulder at her. “And anyway,” he added, “Dad might get better. You’ve been saying that for years. Something might happen. God might provide.”

  Laura gasped, and burst into laughter. Satchel smiled, always pleased to make her laugh.

  William forgave the misguided opinions of his priest and the O’Ryes went to church again, occupying their usual pew, four rows from the altar. Satchel would not take off his coat, despite his father’s pointed glare: he tucked the folds of material around him and twined his fingers against the cold. He did not unlock them to hold a hymn book or to offer his neighbour a handshake of peace. Outside, it was raining, the wind battering the drops against the stained windows angrily as if some natural force despised what the congregation was doing, shut away and murmuring. It was not a steady, useful, drenching rain: it was a storm that would end as suddenly as it started, leaving in its wake broken branches and puddles on the street. On the journey into the big town his mother had remarked upon the blossoming of the spider orchids that she’d seen on her morning walk; the unfurling of their blood-red petals was a sign that winter was finally giving ground to spring but the cold and dank was always loath to leave, digging in its heels and lurking until summer came, with its scorching force and temper.

  Satchel stood, sat down, knelt and stood again, a ritual he followed without giving any thought. He thought, instead, of Leroy, who would be in bed and sleeping soundly. He would not repent the agitation he had left in the O’Ryes’ kitchen. Leroy’s mother was sitting some distance behind Satchel’s family and now and then Satchel heard her attempts to stifle an asthmatic wheeze. Leroy’s father never went to church, and neither did his siblings, and nor had Leroy himself. Mrs Piper didn’t like that, but she didn’t waste her breath to complain. She had been sick for many years, the onset of her illness being abrupt and without apparent cause; but malady seemed to stalk the countryside and she was not alone with her stubborn complaint. Others had bad hearts, cloudy eyes, constant influenza.

  Gosling wasn’t here either: he claimed that the Lord heard his prayers six days of the week and that Sunday was a day of rest for both of them. But the big foreman was planted on the fringe of Satchel’s contemplations, puffing with impatience as the days went by and Satchel withheld an answer to his offer. When Satchel thought of Gosling, it was with dread: he worried that the foreman would be on the phone soon, or come pounding on the door. He would take no nonsense from William, careless of the trouble he’d cause.

  Satchel slid his eyes sideways to take in his mother and father. William had repaired the generator, reinforcing his knowledge that the world could not turn without him, and was sitting straight as a flagpole, voicing the responses with gusto. The elderly woman to the left of him was also sitting rigid, as subdued as William was loud.

  Laura, placed as always between her husband and her son, was the only one of the three who used her time in church constructively. Satchel daydreamed and William sought offence, but Laura prayed. He knew who she prayed to: a kindly, lenient, understanding Lord, a youthful Lord, with adaptable ways. He supposed he knew what she prayed about, too, for Laura’s life, as she said, was a small thing, and one that lay exposed.

  The priest must have been feeling the chill: he had rushed through his sermon and spitfired out the hosts. He sat in his chair to calm himself, his robes hitched to display a shiny new pair of shoes. Satchel looked to see what his father was making of this but William’s blue eyes were squeezed fervently shut. Satchel turned, instead, to the crucifix suspended above the altar. As a child, the blood and anguish depicted there had thrilled him to the bone.

  He thought of the striped animal, and hoped it knew of somewhere that was shielded from the storm. He pondered whether rain was good for it, or bad – if creatures would come out to browse the freshened landscape and make for easy hunting, or if they would shy from the water and the bogginess of the ground and make the animal’s life difficult.

  Laura shifted, distracting him. She’d finished with her prayers for the day. The priest stood to close the mass and in those final moments Satchel shut his eyes and bowed his head. He sent up only a single request, on the wings of his mother’s many: God, he prayed, make it true.

  He could not bear to be unoccupied, and because the afternoon was clear he dragged the table from the kitchen, disregarding Laura’s protests that he was leaving her without a decent working surface. William helped him carry it to the garage and Satchel opened the big wooden doors, Moke dashing through them to investigate. Dust swirled as the sunlight sloped in, whitening a square of the discoloured floor. They shuffled the table to the centre of the brightness and William rested his elbows on its top, exhausted. He had once been a fit man, and strong, but his years of inactivity had softened him and Satchel found the sound of his breathing embarrassing. He looked at his father critically and realized for the first time that, were they to fight each other, William would not win. He wondered for how long this had been the case.

  “Anything else?” asked William, and Satchel shook his head. Moke had found something in a corner but William did not go to see what it was. He turned on his heels and trudged out, bent as a mourner. When Satchel could no longer hear his footsteps, he went to Moke and crouched beside her. She had found the shed skin of a snake, fragile as heirloom lace.

  Somewhere in the garage would be things he could use and he spent an hour finding them, wiping aside cobwebs and dusting with his sleeves. He gathered a sanding block and sandpaper, leftovers from when the house had been painted, and a bottle of timber stain with a cap stuck fast, that had to be soaked before it would twist. He found a brush, its bristles stiff as spines, and ground it between his fingers until it was flexible again. From the back of the station wagon he took his box of tools and rummaged through the metal for his hammer, a chisel and a screwdriver. He’d bought his tools as individuals, one by one when he’d saved enough to buy the best he was ever going to afford. He went to the big town to get tins of lacquer and paint-remover and then, collection completed, he rolled up his cuffs and began.

  It took the rest of the day to strip the table of the red paint William had slathered over it, a thick oily paint that had seemed, at some time, too good to go to waste. It had scarcely chipped in its years of service but it buckled under the paint-remover, wrinkling and writhing. Sa
tchel scraped it off and smeared it onto newspaper and scrubbed the remaining traces with sandpaper. The table stood as if naked then, as vulnerable and pale as skin exposed to sunshine for the first time in months. He had already switched on the garage light but it was becoming too dark to see clearly so he whistled his dog and shut the doors for the night. Laura was still grumbling so he brought the card table in from the laundry and unfolded it in the kitchen for her.

  The next day, after waving his mother off to work, he opened the doors again and took up the screwdriver. The screws that joined the legs to the surface were long and their threads were wearing: he cleaned those that could be salvaged and replaced those which could not, and he slotted each into its tunnel and tightened them until the timber creaked. The table’s top would dip irritatingly if weight was placed on a particular corner and this fault he fixed with a chock of wood that he glued and then screwed into place. The new stability was satisfying and he wished he had attended to the problem years ago.

  Then, he sanded everything icy smooth. Particles fell in clouds, catching in Moke’s feathery hair and wafting into ripples over the concrete floor. Satchel stopped thinking, his eyes on the hand that held the sanding block and sent it back and forth along the grain, his mind lulled by the repetitiveness of the work. When Moke barked, he jumped as if stung.

  “Hi,” peeped Chelsea.

  It was almost a week since he’d last seen her: her unannounced and unpredictable appearances in his life were disruptive and bizarre. She was like a goblin who stepped from behind a leaf or a ghost which materialized from thin air, whispered madness in his ear and vanished once again. He said, “You gave me a fright.”

  It seemed a childish thing to say and he would have liked to take it back. She looked sheepish and shuffled sideways. He expected to hear her usual offer to leave and come back another day, but she said nothing, so he took up the block and slid it down the rail of the table. “I found out what you knew and I didn’t,” he said.

  “Were you glad to see him?”