The Mary Smokes Boys

by Patrick Holland

  But they lived in different towns. She was flighty. She stayed in the city through the university year and she had difficult parents. All the boys of the district but Grey had long ago given up on her. Though he was her favourite among the boys west of the mountains, they were not quite involved in a romance. He wondered what she got up to in the city. She assured him he was her favourite here and everywhere else.

  A sedan screamed past on the highway and broke his meditation. Vanessa’s eyes brightened.

  “Did you hear about the man who was killed here last week?”

  “Only that much.”

  Grey had read it in the paper. The man was killed when his car was shouldered off the road by another vehicle and smashed in a ditch. People who had heard the crash suggested shots had been fired, but that was not proven; it may have been tyres blowing. There was no mention in the newspaper report of who the man was or where he was going or coming from; no mention of what motive his attackers might have acted on–if they were attackers. Likely the motives were unknown. It was as though these things were inessential to the event that belonged to the highway alone: a place where destinations and purposes were irrelevant, where random accidents were the way of things. A place as violent as it was dull and forgettable. Only the departure speed of the vehicle, the location it left the road, and the possibility of two shots being fired were recorded.

  “They’re gone now,” said Vanessa of the possible attackers. She indicated the highway west with a flick of her hand, as though any search for them beyond this point must be futile. “You can’t help but wonder who’s driving around.”

  Grey had not noticed Irene go off by herself and sit down on the side stairs of the Sundowner. She held her chin in her hands and stared across the highway. She was staring at horses that stood sleeping beside the bus. The mountains behind the horses were lost to the dark.

  “Poor kid,” said Vanessa.

  Only then did Grey realise she was not with them. He felt a regrettable relief at not having her in his shadow for the moment. “She acts a little strange though, you must admit. She’s so quiet.”

  “She has no mother–or father,” Grey justified.

  “I heard what one of her schoolmates said to her the other day. What was it … ?’ Vanessa had heard because Grey had told her and he did not feel like hearing it again. “If he had a dog that poor he’d give it away,” she answered herself. “Boys are so awful.”

  In fact what had been said was much worse than that.

  “Do you think it upset her very much? She seems the kind of girl who could get used to it.”

  Grey looked up from his steak pie. Whatever Irene was, she was not a “kind’. He wanted to say her whims were all her own. And the idea of her being teased at school upset him greatly. He had gone to the boy’s father’s house and demanded the man make his son apologize.

  “What’s wrong?’ Vanessa asked him.

  The look on her face showed she had meant nothing at all by what she said. There was never any malice in her words, however ill-chosen.

  Grey smiled.

  Vanessa loved to talk and Grey was sure it was simply the sound of her own voice that gratified her. He liked the sound of it too and was content to listen. It was a voice that, despite a few trivial, personal insecurities, was certain of the shape of the world. In Vanessa’s conversation, misfortune only possessed the power to affect other people, people beyond her circle. A voice made by the big stone house and mahogany furniture and landscaped gardens as surely as the plains once shaped the language of aborigines. She was habitually happy and had a precious gift for making those around her happy too. She seemed aglow with the life that was promised her, and Grey’s heart lightened. Her upbringing and all the circumstances of her life were so different to his own. He held her hand across the table.

  “What will I do when you move away for good?’ he said.

  “Marry one of the Blandford girls in Mary Smokes,” she teased. “I hear Anne and Eve are already gone, so you should start on Libby. You won’t miss me.”

  “And if I do?”

  “How could I tie myself to someone like you? You’ve been in jail!”

  “The Toogoolawah lockup isn’t jail,” Grey smiled. “And it wasn’t my fault that put me there. What would you do if someone you didn’t know walked straight up to the bar you were sitting at and hit you?”

  “Fall down and cry.”

  “Well that’s what I did, and I still ended up in trouble.”

  “What happened really?’ Vanessa grinned.

  “A bloke questioned the femininity of a girl I was with, but she was too drunk to fight anymore that night so I had to step in.”

  “You fool. You’re never serious with me. But really, that’s a terrible story–if it’s even partly true. And after that I suppose you learnt your lesson about Toogoolawah girls and came running after me.”

  Grey smiled and then looked past Vanessa and met his sister’s sad eyes. She turned away and resumed staring at the horses. He sighed.

  “I should go.”

  “But you never come see me. And in a couple of weeks I’ll be gone again!”

  “I’ll make it up to you,” he winked.

  “But we just got here! And I don’t mean that, you vulgar hick. Any wonder it scares my mother when I tell her the things you say.” And she giggled.

  Grey looked inside the remodelled van. The pie lady was leaning over the counter staring at them, no doubt wanting to close. He and Vanessa had finished eating, and Irene’s half-eaten blueberry pie was cold.

  “Don’t you have to be home?”

  “Not so early. Stay a little while longer. Give Irene a couple of dollars to buy a milkshake and we’ll go for a drive. Or, at least, the bottle shop at the Sundowner is still open. Let’s get a seven-fifty of whisky. We can all drink it sitting in the field.”

  “A capful of whisky will put Irene to sleep.”

  “Well, that’s not so bad. The grass is soft behind here–for lying and looking at the stars,” she teased. “See! I can be bad too.”

  Did she really think of him in that light? If so, how little she understood him. He could have been a child of respectability just as well as her. He looked again at Irene, sitting on the hotel stairs and staring at the sky, and thought how he was not half as wild as his sister.

  Vanessa had been promised entertainment for the night and then disappointed. It was only a quarter to ten. But Grey was tired of the teasing that would lead nowhere tonight.

  “I’m sorry. I should take Irene home. It doesn’t look like she’s having much fun.”

  “Well, she’s not the only one.”

  Grey looked into Vanessa’s sham indignant eyes and entreated sympathy.

  She sighed then stood up from the table.

  “Come on then.”

  HE DROPPED VANESSA off in front of her house and drove back onto the highway. The highway was even emptier and lonelier than before. The distant lights of farmer’s houses had gone out. The bulky women in flapping dresses had retreated inside. The wind blustered through the wound-down windows of the truck and was almost cold and on the straight road Irene began to cry.

  “ What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You can tell me, Irene. You can tell me anything.”

  “It’s nothing, Grey. Really, it’s nothing.”

  He furrowed his brow and tried to make light of it, whatever it was, by affecting a sombre face. She wiped her eyes with her dress, revealing all of her thin legs, and he was moved by her innocence. He put his hand on the back of her head to comfort her.

  “Don’t, Grey. Please just drive. Girls can’t help crying sometimes. Don’t you know that?”

  “All right,” he whispered. He rested his elbow on the windowsill. “All right.”

  She lay on his shoulder and fell asleep, bouncing awake at each flaw in the road. He left her sleeping in the truck when he stopped at lonely Rusty’s Roadhouse to refuel.


  She lay down with her legs curled up on the vinyl seat and slept there until home.

  When they reached Solitary Hill the night’s final movie was playing. In the last hour of the show the ticket seller abandoned his booth and you could drive in and watch for free.

  The only parks taken on the lot were just back of centre. Grey pulled the truck up at the eastern edge where they were all alone. Irene woke when the engine stopped. She looked up at the movie screen and smiled and returned to sleep. Grey did not hang the speaker in the window, nor try to follow the movie. He watched the play of light on the screen and felt the west wind flush on his cheek.

  When he woke the dozen cars that had sat before the screen were filing out through the gates. Irene was asleep in his lap. He ran his fingers through her hair.

  “You poor child,” he whispered. “I’ll always be with you. I promise.”

  They were the last car on the lot. Soon the attendant would be bolting shut the gates. Grey felt like sitting a while longer. He sighed and held her arm until she sat up and looked all around, trying to remember where she was.

  On the short run home she leant on her arm on the window. He thought she was asleep again when she cried out to him.

  “Grey, stop the car! I saw a meteor.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “Like a shooting star, only green and much brighter. Grey, stop!”

  They pulled onto the side of the road and he saw a bright green flash that came blazing in seconds across a thousand miles. They climbed into the tray and lay down on hessian sacks and watched the night sky kindled with ancient rocks.

  When the meteors failed she spoke, genuinely happy for the first time in the night:

  “The next time we see a shower like that we’ll be a thousand years old.”

  V

  THE MORNING WAS CRISP AND CLEAN AND THE COUNTRY was tinged the colour of lemons. Six blue-roan two-year-olds stood in the water yard and Tanner and Grey isolated one and ran it into the roundyard where Eccleston had wrapped his cotton rope around the top rail.

  The filly held her head high and her ears back. She skirted the rails and blew mucous from flared nostrils. Tanner turned to Eccleston.

  “Even that black uncle a yours would’ve had a job to break this lot. Had he shown up, that is.”

  Eccleston only shrugged. He did not know where Possum was.

  The horse had been pacing the opposite end of the yard to where Tanner and Grey sat on the top rail, but when Eccleston moved into the centre it stood still and square to him.

  He stared into the horse’s eyes and flicked at its heels with a length of rope, hunting it around the edge of the yard. He kept the horse circling until it dropped its head. He tossed a loop around its neck and stood at the horse’s shoulder and pulled gently on the rope until the horse turned and faced him, and he immediately released the pressure. Then he changed his angle to the horse, changed it a dozen times, always bringing the filly’s head toward him and releasing the rope when she turned, and always drawing a little closer. And all the while he spoke to the horse, impressing upon it the calm tone of his voice. He drew close enough to take off the loop, then threw the rope at the horse’s heels again. Then he walked in front of the horse and turned his left shoulder and dropped his eyes and the horse came toward him. He walked away and the horse followed.

  He scratched the filly’s forehead. She sniffed at his face.

  He scratched the horse’s shoulder and then leant on its neck. He scratched its flanks with a length of yellow poly Grey handed him. He got Grey to bring him a halter. He slung his rope over the horse’s neck and slid the halter over its nose, but when the crownpiece touched its ears the horse broke away.

  The horse stood at the opposite end of the yard.

  Eccleston tried the halter twice more, and twice the horse broke from him.

  “I’m not payin you by the hour,” said Tanner. “I want these done tomorrow.”

  Eccleston eyed the man on the top rail.

  “Six green horses in two days?”

  “I did six a day when I was your age.”

  “I bet they were good too!”

  Tanner shrugged and spat off the rails.

  “Tie her up and put a saddle on her.”

  “How none a your clients never shot you is a mystery to me, old man?”

  In the days when Tanner broke horses it was common enough to drive past this yard and see a horse tied with a foot of slack to a post, the man throwing a tin under the horse’s feet–else pulling it down and beating it with a burlap sack–for mysterious purposes he called, “gettin it used to bein bossed’.

  Tanner climbed off the rail and put his hands on Eccleston’s saddle.

  “Not yet,” said Eccleston. “You know I ride em bareback first.”

  Eccleston took his ragged old saddle and tack and set it down in the yard with the other horses to let them nip and paw at it.

  Eccleston spoke to Grey.

  “Guess I’m doin it the old blackfella way.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Rope em and tie em to snubbin posts. Pull em into the race, then ride em out till they get sick a throwin me off.”

  “It’s faster,” said Tanner.

  “It’s not.”

  “Whose horses are they?’ Tanner snorted.

  Eccleston spat.

  “I’m gettin her to lead before I do anything,” he said.

  “Suit yourself. Just as long as they’re done tomorrow night.”

  Eccleston slung his rope over a rail and pressed rosin into the palm of a glove and pulled the rosin into the rope. He picked up a loop and took up the slack in his left hand. He threw the loop that fell over the filly’s ears and onto her shoulders. The rope pulled tight around her neck. He dug his heels in the dirt and held the filly until she was still. He drew along the rope but the horse reared and ran at him, shying away at the last, pulling him over and the rope out of his hand. The horse pranced about the end of the yard, as skittish as it had been in the beginning, head high and wary, now dragging the rope.

  Eccleston collected his angler’s hat and brushed and reshaped it. Grey ran him a cup of water from their esky that sat atop a post.

  “That thing was sired by a goat!’ said Eccleston.

  “The blood’s all right,” said Tanner. “We had some of these horses here last year. She’s full a grain, that’s all. Her guts are burnin.”

  Eccleston looked at Grey then back at Tanner who looked up at the sky.

  “The bloke I bought em off just inherited the string. He’s a boy. He thinks it makes em more saleable if their coats are shinin.”

  “When did they get off the truck?”

  “Last night.”

  Eccleston began untying his glove.

  “Leave em in the yard for a day with water, no feed. I’ll come back tomorrow afternoon and saddle em out. The day after that I’ll break em.”

  “No can do. I’ve already got a buyer. I promised em delivered broken this week.”

  “How far away does your bloke live?”

  “On the border. Near Goondiwindi.”

  “Well, I’ll start em tomorrow. A truck can get to the border in a day.”

  “Ideally,” Tanner said.

  “Ideally what?”

  “Ideally, you could start em tomorrow. Only, I’ve got business in the city day after tomorrow.”

  “No matter,” said Eccleston. “I’ve got nothin else on.”

  “Clients don’t like the idea a boys bein on the place when I’m not around. The horses here are my responsibility, you understand.”

  “No. But they’re your horses–in a manner of speakin.”

  “I’ll do half,” said Grey, jumping down off the rail. “So you don’t have to get thrown off all six. Three solid meals of dirt are enough for any man in one day.” He looked up at Tanner. “Full-pay again. Me and him’ll split it. All right?”

  “Can you break a horse?”

  “You want
em done in two days?”

  Tanner spat.

  “All right then.”

  Eccleston turned to Tanner.

  “You still got that old white mare here?”

  “She’s in the willow paddock.”

  “Go and catch her for me, Grey. There’s a bridle and rein in the back of the truck. Ride her back. We’ll quieten em down easier with her in the yard.”

  When Grey left to get the mare, a late model sedan neither he nor Eccleston recognized pulled up the drive. The man who got out wore a suede jacket and sunglasses. His thinning brown hair was oiled firmly back on his skull.

  Tanner climbed off the rail.

  “If your useless black uncle shows up while I’m inside, tell him he’s not gettin a red cent.”

  Eccleston stopped working the filly and spat and took a rolled cigarette from his shirt pocket and sucked on the end.

  “You fire another shot at him, old man, and you’ll regret it.”

  Tanner was suddenly nervous. He turned to the man beside him and mumbled something and the two of them laughed.

  “Don’t set fire to the place while I’m inside, Ook. The bloke I’m sellin the horses to cares about presentation. He won’t want em ripped apart goin over fences.”

  Tanner drove the man the quarter-mile from the yards to his house.

  “Who’s that?’ said Grey when he returned with the mare.

  Eccleston shrugged.

  “Looks like a racetrack urger or ex-cop.”

  THEY WERE TOO tired to speak when they got into Grey’s truck late that afternoon. They splashed iodine on their shoulders and forearms that were wounded from being thrown into the yard rails. Lightning flashed on every horizon and a cloud as black as charred wood pulled wispy orange tendrils beneath it.