The Mary Smokes Boys

by Patrick Holland

  Grey put his arm around Irene’s shoulders and pressed through the loose gathering. Eccleston winked at Irene from the scaffold and she gave him a half-hearted, nervous smile.

  Inside the tent the crowd of high-school kids and district farm boys pushed hard up beside a thick rope that made a circle on the dirt. The rope would be the ring and the crowd the ropes. Irene held Grey’s hand tight as he pushed them into a good enough position to see Eccleston fight but not so close as to be dangerous. Often enough at these shows people in the front row were punched squarely in the face or trodden or fallen on.

  “Can you see?”

  “Yes,” she answered, but the light had gone out of her face.

  Once in the ring, the same toothless black troupe fighter who on the scaffold had been on a six-fight losing streak Mahony announced as having won his last twelve by knockout. The silver-haired conman smiled and blew the whistle for the bout. The crowd howled as the toothless black fighter danced around the pot-bellied old man and did not throw a punch. The old man stood square and made circles with his gloves. The troupe fighter threw a haymaker that was intended to miss, and the crowd whistled and howled. He ducked the first serious punch of the bout and came inside with a quick combination, slamming the old man’s face and then stomach. The old man grimaced and bent over to let blood run from his nose and rubbed his belly with his gloves. Mahony sneered. He did not like the fights to finish too soon. He spoke in his fighter’s ear. The old man shaped up again. Despite his lowered guard, the old man took a blow to the kidneys that was not meant to hurt him, yet he fell to his knees. The crowd jeered but the old man did not get up. He looked very sick this time. Grey looked down at his sister who was no longer watching the ring.

  “I don’t like these people.”

  She spoke just loud enough beneath the crowd for him to hear.

  “All right,” he said, and he knew he had been a fool to bring her. “We’ll just stay to watch Ook.”

  There was an emaciated official whose job it was to glove the local fighters, but Eccleston’s gloves were tied in a corner of the tent by Matt Thiebaud. Thiebaud pulled the gloves tight and got Eccleston to squeeze and open his hand while Raughrie Norman stood by to no purpose. Grey caught his sister peeking back through the bodies of the crowd at the broad-shouldered boy she knew well but who seemed strange to her now, slamming his gloved fists together and looking fiercely ring-ward.

  The Italian-looking boy that Mahony called Kid Valentine limbered up in the human ring, eyes gleaming with hollow confidence. But Eccleston would not be rushed. When his gloves were tied the fight began.

  Eccleston pushed hard and close into Kid Valentine’s body so the boy could not get a decent punch off and was forced to wheel back to regain his reach. With the boy unsteady on his back foot, Eccleston threw a short left hook into his mouth then hit him with his favoured right and blood flew into the air and onto the dirt and the troupe fighter fell into the crowd on his back. Grey felt a pull on his shirt and Irene looked up at him with confused and teary eyes.

  “All right,” he said.

  THEY WENT TO the town’s café and shared a toasted cheese sandwich and an iced coffee. In awhile Grey saw Eccleston come onto the street with the boys slapping him on the back and smiling. Twenty dollars a minute and three three-minute rounds. He had earned a decent purse for the night. Grey knew the boys would go to one or other of the bigger district towns now to squander the better part of the money between them. Eccleston looked around on the street for him. Grey did not call out. Eccleston had seen Irene was with him and would understand.

  HE PARKED THE truck by the back fence and they walked to Lake Wivenhoe.

  He did not expect to find the boys at the lake. He thought they would already be gone. By the time he was aware of them it was too late to turn back.

  “Where were you this afternoon?’ Thiebaud called.

  “I was there. I left early. Where’s Ook?”

  “He’s comin later. He had somethin or other to do with Pos. The whisky run, probably.”

  “Easy win?”

  “Not so easy in the end. He had some fight in him, that bastard.”

  Grey sat down on a hessian sack and Irene sat beside him. Wisps of red cloud drifted under a frayed grey blanket like loosed flares. Drowned eucalypts stood in the shallows of the lake and the rippling water slapped against them. Then the red clouds turned white and were shredded by the wind and the boys sat in a deep blue dusk.

  “She go with you everywhere?’ said Hart Bates, leaning back with a bottle of beer.

  Grey glanced at his sister. She tried not to look embarrassed. He glared at Bates and the boy turned away and hurled a stone into the lake. Bates said something under his breath to Raughrie Norman. It was not a great insult–only that there was no point carting around girls who were not good for the one thing girls were good for. Still, Raughrie Norman shook his head and refused to answer.

  Thiebaud threw an empty beer bottle that struck Bates on the shoulder. He talked through his cigarette.

  “Hart, if you weren’t so clever as you are, you’d be an idiot.”

  “Lucky for me.”

  “Real lucky.”

  Grey smiled reassurance at his sister. He asked the boys where they were going.

  “Toogoolawah, Crows Nest, Villeneuve,” Thiebaud said. “We’ll see when Ook gets here. You comin?”

  “I think I’ll stay home.”

  He knew Irene would not go back to the restaurant now, even if Amy was working.

  Grey stood and said that they had things to do. Thiebaud reached up to loosely shake Grey’s hand and said he would see him tomorrow.

  They walked back toward the house.

  A bulky figure with a bushel cornsack rolled up on his shoulder appeared out of the blue dark. Another body came behind, scrawny and black like one of the scrub trees in the flat country to the west.

  Eccleston said he had been at Grey’s house. Grey said the boys were still waiting. Eccleston talked through his smoke and asked if Grey was coming out with them tonight and Grey shook his head. Eccleston mussed Irene’s hair.

  “You’re going to Toogoolawah.”

  “Reckon so. Came into some money. You saw the fight?”

  “I saw part of it. You feel all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about the other boy?”

  “He’s all right.”

  The old black man trailing Eccleston was Possum Gallanani. After Eccleston returned from Borallon, Possum continued the education begun by the boy’s father. He taught Eccleston how to break horses and how to track brumbies by the marks they made with their teeth in trees, and he and the boy worked for three months taking colts and fillies out of the Carnarvon Gorge and turning them into saddle horses–stealing cattle that had escaped into the national park meanwhile. But “No jobs now for old blackfella,” Possum would say. And it was true. He did not have the know-how to apply for a social security check. He did not have a bank account. He could neither read nor write. He lived off money from a scant few jobs for August Tanner and from his illegal whisky run.

  “What’s up with Pos?”

  Eccleston smiled.

  The old man whimpered and clutched his behind.

  “He got shot with salt pellets,” Eccleston said, “cuttin home across Tanner’s northwest country from my place.”

  “Just now?”

  “Just now.”

  “What were you up to, Pos?”

  Possum grunted with disgust. Eccleston spoke for him.

  “He was usin my keg to make his whisky, then was sneakin it back home in the dark.”

  Many old men of the country made their own drink, but a black man carrying homemade liquor along the highway at night was a needless temptation to offer already bored police. So the clandestine route.

  “Why the hell would Tanner have reason to shoot?’ Grey said.

  “He reckons someone’s been strippin the heads off his milo for birdseed. Th
e old bastard’s been sittin out there in the afternoons watchin for his thief.”

  “Pos?”

  “Yep. But he doesn’t use it for birdseed. He mashes it up and eats it himself.”

  Possum gave another groan of pain.

  “He’ll be all right,” Eccleston said. “I’ve been hit with those things before.”

  He said they had already taken out the pellets with tweezers. The word “tweezers’ drew a wail from the old Aborigine.

  “I was on the fuggin creek,” he said. “Tanner yells at me the creek’s the Queen’s land. I said to im, I never seen er walkin it!”

  The boys laughed.

  “The Queen’s too busy cartin whisky up and down creeks in England,” said Eccleston. “And anyway, you don’t know how to walk this country, old man, that’s why you ended up shot.”

  “I can walk anywhere within a thousand miles a ere. When I’m sober. Before me eyes went bad, I could.”

  It was true that a film of sun-induced cataracts lay over the old man’s red eyes.

  Eccleston smiled.

  “You went to the house?’ said Grey.

  “That’s right.”

  “How was Bill?”

  He shrugged and Grey nodded. It was a hopeless hope–that he might have been able to leave Irene at home after all.

  They left Eccleston and Possum on their way to the lake. The lights of cars leaving town banded the western dark.

  IRENE CLIMBED ONTO the round bonnet of her brother’s truck and Grey told her to wait for him there. The sky was blown clean of cloud now and the firmament hung over them in full gleaming array. Irene lay back on the windscreen.

  She could name much of the night sky–Sirius and Canopus and Rigel and Betelgeuse, which she called “belting geese’, and the lesser stars too, all at a glance. She took the names from a survey of astronomy that her mother had used at school. She knew to the night and to the hour what would rise. She quizzed Grey on which luminaries were which–which were stars and which were planets–but his eyes were not strong enough to see the absence of flicker in the planets and it was a game she always won.

  Inside the house their father was asleep. Grey wrote a note and put it under the bedside lamp. He changed his shirt and wet his face and hair and came back outside.

  Irene told him there was going to be a meteor shower tonight, the Alpha Centaurids. Sister Charbel had said so at school. But so far she had seen nothing.

  “Let’s go for a drive,” Grey said.

  Irene jumped off the bonnet and landed awkwardly on her feet.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Around.”

  “To the pictures?”

  “There’s most likely nothing on.”

  “Where then? Vanessa’s?”

  “Why not?”

  “Can’t we do something else?”

  “ What’s wrong with Vanessa?”

  “Nothing, I spose.”

  But for the second time in the night the light had gone out of her eyes.

  IV

  IRENE HARDLY SPOKE ON THE DRIVE. SHE WITHDREW out the window into the night sky. It was remarkable, Grey thought, that such an excitable girl could become so pensive. It was a trait of hers that at times seemed whimsical, but it was not insincere. She was a fourteen-year-old girl capable of genuine melancholy, that was not easily relieved once it came.

  He put his hand on her shoulder and she turned from the window and smiled sadly and her eyes were like dark ponds in her odd little face. She relaxed back into the wistful expression that was hers in repose. The tops of her ears protruded through her unwashed hair. Her splotchy complexion and watery eyes ever made her appear as though she had just finished crying. She is not pretty, Grey thought. Her face was too strange to meet any standard of prettiness–yet her face was affecting. A small ache came into his heart whenever she was sad.

  ON HIGHWAY 54 they rolled through darkness broken by glints of wet sorghum and the veranda lights of farm houses on stilts. Plump women in flapping cotton dresses stood watching the night from the stairs of the houses. Horses leant over wire fences and picked at the feed on the roadside.

  But there were tracts that threatened the country’s peace. The foundations of a shopping centre were being laid fifteen kilometres west of the Brisbane Valley turn-off. Bulldozers and rollers that would broaden the highway sat in ditches off the asphalt. More machines sat atop the dirt walls of enormous dams. Patches of biscuit-cutter houses appeared. The houses were set on new and overlit roads that ran circuitous routes, else to dead ends, like mazes in the backs of cheap magazines. And all the houses seemed empty. Towns were bypassed with only reflective road signs to indicate them: names and arrows pointing somewhere out into the banks of depthless black begotten by the highway radiance. But the names came to signify nothing. The places they called upon were no longer discrete.

  WHEN THEY CAME into Haigslea the land opened up. The sprawl did not reach so far. The lights of houses trickled and pooled across the valley like water. Orange lamps picked out railway crossings and desultory children on bicycles lingering about the line.

  Grey and Irene stopped at the high roadside pie stand called the Pieteria and bought a packet of cigarettes and two small bottles of ginger beer. Beside the Pieteria was a roadhouse hotel called the Sundowner. Across the asphalt was a big Moreton Bay fig and a paint-stripped house and a blue school bus that had not been driven in twenty years. Then the land fell hard down into the valley and in the distance was the blue ridge of the D’Aguilar Range.

  Grey placed a bottle of ginger beer in Irene’s hand. She stared at it.

  “You go on if you want.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You go on to Vanessa’s. I’ll wait here. Ask the lady what time she closes.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  Grey uncapped his sister’s bottle with his pocket-knife and the over-carbonated drink spilled onto his hands. She was looking at her shoes. Grey sighed.

  “If you didn’t want to come you should have said so earlier.”

  “I did,” she whispered.

  He sighed.

  “Don’t you have some friends I could leave you with?”

  Directly he spoke he was sorry.

  “You’re my only friend,” she lied.

  “Come on, we won’t stay long. We’ll get something to eat with Vanessa and head back.”

  She dragged her feet toward the truck.

  THEY DROVE OVER the railway tracks into a wide street and stopped in front of a house built of stone.

  A plumed middle-aged woman opened the door to him.

  “Hello, Mrs Humphries. Is Vanessa in?”

  “Grey. It’s … it’s nice to see you again. And this, of course, is your sister.”

  “Yes. This is Irene.”

  “Well,” said Mrs Humphries, and her eyes darted between Grey and his sister, unsure what to say next. “ Well, you’ve grown up since last I saw you, miss.”

  Irene nodded indifferently.

  Vanessa’s mother always received Grey with fraudulent welcome. He forgave her for it. There were plenty of reasons why a twenty-four-year-old weekday-night service station attendant was not an ideal choice to have calling on your daughter, and Grey was sympathetic. Probably she had heard too that his friends were reckless, and that half-truth made the fact of him even more difficult on the woman’s middle-class conscience.

  “Vanessa!’ she called in a voice that contained strains of warning and reprimand at once. She did not wait long enough for a reply before she went to get her daughter, to afford her one last moment alone with the girl and make certain the strictures of her leaving the house. She left Grey and Irene standing on the doorstep.

  A pretty, sandy-blonde girl appeared at the end of the corridor.

  “Well,” she said, “look who’s here!”

  “Thought I’d come by and see if you were doing anything.”

  “Hardly. Hey, Irene.”

  Irene w
himpered a reply. Vanessa pulled on a pair of sandshoes.

  “Isn’t your brother handsome,” she said when she came out the door and took his hand.

  Irene looked up.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Vanessa’s mother tried to intervene, to impress one last order upon her daughter, but they were already down the stairs.

  “THAT’S IF I really go,” said Vanessa. “ But I suppose I will go. You can’t stay at home forever, can you?”

  “No,” Grey said.

  They were talking about an offer of work at a legal office in Brisbane at the end of the year. All young people left for the city eventually.

  They had only gone as far as that same pie stand at the turn-off to town. The pie stand and the Sundowner Hotel beside it were the only places open at this time of night. Vanessa could not stay out late, so there was no point in driving to find something better. The highway was long and this far west entertainment was not one of its concerns. After the Sundowner you would drive an hour before you found a cup of instant coffee at anywhere other than a service station.

  The smell of wet crops carried along the road with a wind from the southwest.

  “I’ll be finished at the end of the year,” Vanessa said. “I guess I’d like some time off after that, but then, I’d be a fool not to consider it.”

  Grey only half-listened. He was trying to remember how long he had chased this girl. Like most young people of the district they were acquainted early. They had kissed once as teenagers. But it was five years before she noticed him again: that night he found her right here, sitting crying under a highway lamp after a run-in with a drunken boy at the Sundowner. He had asked if she wanted to be driven home. Back then she lived closer to him: at Fernvale, the next town south along the Valley Highway. She was called the prettiest girl in the district. Her sensual figure, sun-bleached hair and olive skin suggested vibrant health. And her habit–whether deliberate, he did not know–of unexpectedly touching boys’ arms when they were near her enhanced her charms. Grey put the habit down to a need to be constantly loved and considered. That feeling was so foreign to him that he did not regard it as a flaw. It made him smile. She was not self-possessed, though some mistook her gestures for self-possession. Her deepest desire was to be possessed by another. He discovered she was incapable of achieving a boast. Try as she might, even a comment on her own desirability sounded like the unartful, uncertain plea of a child to have an adult notice something special about them.