The Mary Smokes Boys

by Patrick Holland

  Tanner and the man who had visited him came back to the yards. The man got in his car and drove away.

  Tanner leant in Eccleston’s window.

  “After tomorrow you’ve worked your last bloody day for me, you ungrateful black bastard.”

  “Is that right?”

  Tanner had spoken words akin to these at least a dozen times before.

  “Don’t you ever talk to me like that in front of another man, you hear?”

  “Like what?”

  “Threaten me like you did about Pos.”

  “Settle down,” Grey said.

  “Do you hear me?”

  “Settle the hell down,” Grey said again. “Who was that bloke, anyway?”

  “He takes bets.”

  “What on?”

  “Whatever you like. He’ll give you odds. I met him at a card game in–Well, at a card game.”

  “In a hotel at Dinmore,” said Eccleston.

  Dinmore was a nowhere suburb west of the city. It was little more than a stinking abattoir and industrial sheds. Eccleston had only guessed; it was one of only two semi-permanent card games he knew. But he saw by the look on Tanner’s face that he had guessed right.

  “I wouldn’t tell you unless you wanted to play,” said Tanner.

  Eccleston laughed.

  “Do you get a finder’s fee for the poor suckers you bring to the table?”

  “The man’s my friend.”

  “Your friend,” Eccleston grinned. “So you’re mates with a proper moonlight state man now. You must be happy.”

  Tanner did not reply.

  Eccleston had been once to the clean and characterless bar at Dinmore and seen men dressed in cheap casual wear climb the stairs to a room where they played blackjack, else roulette on a fold-out backgammon board. The set up was childish, but the amounts of money staked were not. The game had driven one man to suicide. So it was said. The men who gambled at the bar were out-of-towners. No one lived at Dinmore. Some came from the Brisbane Valley and further west–truck drivers, gas workers and meatworks buyers–and some were from the city. Some had been local landholders and some were pious Pentecostals who oscillated between vice and piety and, depending on the week, might be present at the table, else preaching about the evils of such practice in one or other of the shopping-mart churches on the outskirts. Certain bored landholders west of Brisbane had become wealthy by associations made at the table in Dinmore. Men whose country had always been too stony or sour or timbered to run cattle began buying out neighbours.

  From the bar at the Dinmore Hotel you heard the occasional table thumped upstairs and a glass smash on the floorboards, perhaps a raised voice. But finally there was quiet. And the bartender would avoid the eyes of certain men who came down the stairs.

  And apparently Tanner had linked himself with at least one of these men.

  “What do you have to do with him?’ Grey asked.

  Tanner took a swig of whisky from the flask he kept always in his jeans.

  “He wants me to introduce him to horse breedin. Buy a few good mares and a stallion to start him off. He gives me an investment tip now and then in return. He doesn’t run the card game, that kind of thing’s too risky and amateur for this bloke. He only sits in on it–in order to make friends. Officially he’s in property and development, so he can account for his money if he has to. The cops can’t get anything on him, and he’s got plenty on them. That’s why I was upset when you threatened me in front of him. You’ve got no idea how careful you gotta be around blokes like that. They’re touchy as hell, superstitious and psychological. I don’t want to lose his confidence. If I play me cards right, in a year or two, I’ll be living in a high-rise on the Gold Coast. You see.”

  The boys laughed.

  Tanner wanted to be impressive.

  “That bloke you saw today has a mate who makes weapons in a shed outside Villeneuve. He brings parts from different countries and assembles em out here to avoid being seen. I’m buyin a copy of a sniper rifle from the Balkans war.”

  “ Why the hell would an old bastard like you need a gun like that?’ said Eccleston.

  Tanner only raised his eyebrows, as though the appeal of owning the weapon was obvious.

  Eccleston sighed. He was becoming annoyed. Tanner was talking about things he had not seen, only heard about; and neither of the boys could imagine anything more banal than the underworld Tanner described with envy.

  Eccleston tapped Grey on the leg and Grey ignited the engine and shifted the column-shift.

  “We’re goin if you’ve got nothin else to talk about, Tanner. All of a sudden I don’t want to hear it.”

  Tanner sneered and twisted his mouth.

  “Who just put two hundred bucks in your hand, you ungrateful bastard?’

  Eccleston opened and closed his empty hand.

  “You’ll get it tomorrow.” Tanner stood up. “I’ve had it with your blackfella moods. Like I say, after tomorrow you’ll never work for me again.”

  “Good,” said Eccleston.

  Tanner walked away and Eccleston sighed. Then he laughed.

  “Just imagine the old bastard in a Gold Coast penthouse, watchin bikini girls through binoculars!’

  “Or through the scope on his sniper rifle,” Grey smiled. “He’ll fit in fine.”

  They both laughed, and Grey took the truck onto the road.

  “I’m thirsty,” said Eccleston.

  “Me too.”

  They drove to the Railway Hotel. They walked past the old men who sat morning until night on the veranda watching the sky. Grey put twenty dollars on the bar and the boys drank pots of bitter and watched rain fall in sheets on the hills.

  WHEN HE CAME home Irene was plucking apple-mint leaves from the plants she grew amidst milk thistle. She tried to be angry with him.

  “You smell like a horse,” she said.

  “I thought you liked the smell.”

  “You stink,” she smiled.

  In the kitchen she crushed the mint leaves into tea that was stewing in a pot on the stove. The smell drifted through the room. She put a cup in Grey’s hands.

  For dinner they ate reheated corned brisket and boiled vegetables. Irene cut wedges of butter and slapped them on her potatoes and cauliflower. Grey told her when she grew up she’d be enormous.

  She smiled and stuck a fork into a potato.

  “Gotta grease em else they won’t go down.”

  For afters she had a spoon of days’ old bread-and-butter pudding. She made Grey promise to take her to the northern hills in the morning, to a little stream where fish gathered at the piles of an old rail bridge. She fell asleep on the floorboards in the breeze that rushed through the open front door.

  Grey sat up and read from a leather-bound notebook he had found in a chest that belonged to his mother. He ran his thumb slowly across the handwritten words, across the indents made by the nib of his mother’s pen. He listened to the wind in the leaves of the stringybark, then to a Mass by Pärt on the radio.

  A horse turned around in the dark outside and he remembered Tanner and the slick-haired criminal at the yards. He wondered how much of what Tanner had said was true.

  VI

  IRENE WOKE HIM EARLY THE NEXT MORNING. SHE SAT on the end of his bed and held his ear until he groaned.

  He went down to the truck to rig the handlines. She came buttoning her shirt and carrying a thermos of last night’s tea and a lunchbox of corned meat and mustard sandwiches along with a half-dozen cold potatoes she had boiled the night before and wrapped in foil. It was near seven and already warm and it would be hot by the time they got to the creek.

  They drove onto Wivenhoe-Somerset Road and left the car in front of Eli’s Shoppe at the junction of the two big lakes and walked into the woods. They walked across a splintering of nameless creeks and gullies. Grey made sure they kept their line by lining up distinctive trees in the direction they wanted. When he drew close to one tree he lined up the second with a farth
er third. Irene laughed and said she did not need to mark the trees to find her way, but she followed her brother.

  They came out of the woodland into open country where the water gouged a meadow of wildflowers. They set up near a long-unused girder: a warped structure of railway sleepers that had usurped their bolts and given over wholly to the commands of the weather.

  The creek was not six yards across at its widest so they more dropped their lines in than cast. Black she-oaks and grey gums hugged the bank and sunlight filtered through the trees and lit the water that flowed clear and fast over the ribbed bed. Rocks and overhanging tree roots made shadowy pools where a fish might rest. Grey and Irene sat on the bank and drank tea from their thermos and took cold water up from the stream in their hands.

  Irene skittered her hook over the water. Grey did not watch his line. He watched the tops of the she-oaks being smudged by the thumb of the wind, the clear water polishing stones.

  At eight o’clock they sat barefoot in the shade of a gigantic grey gum. They ate their sandwiches and listened to the water. Irene would be an hour late for school, but her teacher was accustomed to that.

  “Why does food always taste better outside?’ she asked.

  “You earn it walking, I spose.”

  She looked in the canvas bag at the one big eel-tailed catfish they had caught.

  “You can eat catfish,” Irene declared.

  She had eaten it often enough in years gone by, when Grey did not have the two hundred dollars a week he made at the service station now.

  “This boy is old, though. There’d be more silt in him than on the bottom of this creek. We’ll put him in Ook’s bathtub to drain him out. He’ll be right to eat in time.”

  Irene nodded.

  “How come you don’t take Vanessa fishing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She’s too dainty,” said Irene. “And she’s probably afraid of fish slime.”

  “Probably.”

  She took the catfish up out of the bag and kissed its lips and whiskers and then grimaced. “You poor old man.”

  Grey smiled.

  “Will you come get me after school,” she said, “so we can muck around tonight?”

  “I’m working at the service station.”

  “I don’t mind the service station.”

  “If you like.”

  “It’ll mean I won’t have to wait all night at the restaurant with old Minh rousing on me.”

  “Then I’ll pick you up.”

  She was pleased.

  “I’m different to Vanessa, Grey.”

  He smiled at the childish competition for his attention. But then a look came to her face that was not childish, one of deep, abstracted thought.

  He did not ever truly know what she was thinking.

  “What do you mean?’ he asked.

  She did not answer him. She curled her toes in the fine gravel at the edge of the water.

  He wondered at the strange moods that seemed to visit her from without. He remembered the night their grandmother died: Irene had had delirious dreams that she could not be woken from. She had sat up suddenly. According to their father it was the minute that Margaret Finnain died.

  “Grey.”

  “Yes?”

  She turned away from him and threw the crust of her sandwich in the creek. She watched the lambent light on the water, stared intently into that other world into which Grey could not see but by the impression it made upon her.

  “You’ll keep me now–you won’t leave me?”

  Grey furrowed his brow. Twice lately she had spoken words akin to this. He wondered why. Perhaps she thought of their father, who had left them for so long when she was younger.

  “I’ve taken care of you this long. I’m not about to stop.”

  She sighed.

  “You treat me different to Vanessa. Is it because you don’t think I’m pretty? Is it because I’m your sister?”

  “You are pretty.”

  “You don’t believe it. I know when you’re lying, Grey.” She stood up and brushed the earth and leaves from her skirt and shins. “Come on, let’s go.”

  It was too hot to fish anymore. They made their way back through the wood.

  They stopped to rest on a buttressing quandong root. Irene had carried with her the last exchanges of the conversation on the creek.

  “It doesn’t matter anyhow. I own you. All things belong to the people who love them most.”

  SHE DID NOT go to school. She waited at the gate until her brother’s truck was out of sight. She walked across the disused railway tracks, stopping to scratch the nose of a long-haired highland pony that lent over rusted barbed wire. She walked past the sweet-smelling sawmill to climb her favourite fig tree. She stayed cradled in a massive bough, daydreaming, half-sleeping through the afternoon until Eccleston’s truck pulled up beside her.

  “How long’s school been taught in trees?”

  She shrugged and smiled.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Into the hills to check traps. You want to come?”

  He had meant this as a joke. Girls were uncomfortable around him at the best of times, without the sanguinary facts of the way he made his living. He had an intimidating frame, and he was half-caste. He knew parents told their children even worse stories about half-castes than full-bloods.

  But Irene smiled and climbed down.

  He put out his cigarette and cleared the seat for her.

  VII

  GREY DROVE TO BIZZELL’S SERVICE STATION AT THE southern edge of town. The owner, Frank Bizzell, was a hermetic and nervous man of sixty odd years who was frightened of missing anyone’s money as they rolled through Mary Smokes. On a whim he would ask Grey to keep the service station open until midnight rather than close at a sensible hour. Then Grey was meant to sleep in a fold-out iron bed in the back room, to guard the money. Bizzell did not trust him to take the cashbox home.

  There were three old latch-handle pumps out front braced by transplanted palms. The palms and a shabby wooden toilet and one yellow-flowering wattle tree were festooned with Christmas lights regardless of the season. Bizzell lived in Ipswich now and after a certain hopeless hour there was no one to stop Grey doing as he pleased. When it was quiet he would sit and read newspapers from the rack.

  He read again of the man who had been killed on Highway 54. The newspaper said the “violent event” was still unresolved and likely ever would be. He thought how someone could drive a man off the road here in the middle of the night and be at the far north coast or the desert the next day. He put the paper down and looked toward the invisible highway. He wondered why the man in the newspaper story was killed. Drugs. A gambling debt. Perhaps he was a police informer. And perhaps he was killed for nothing–idiocy and boredom. You could not know. You could not assume anything had a meaning anymore. And those perhaps-murderers had fled into oblivion and impunity on the highway that even now might be concealing them at unmemorable stops, amidst people in transit who did not recognize that anyone belonged to any place, and so could not tell fugitives apart.

  He was near asleep in his chair when Angela came in to the counter. He checked the clock on the wall that showed three empty revolutions must be made before midnight. Angela’s hair was out of the careful place she always set it. Her eyes were bloodshot and weepy with tiredness.

  “I thought you were at the restaurant,” Grey said.

  “No. It’s just old Minh and his wife tonight. I’ve been to Toogoolawah, to the bridge club.”

  No money ever changed hands and no serious cards were played at the house party called the bridge club. Instead it gave occasion for a number of the district’s bored wives to get distractedly drunk.

  Angela put an orange juice on the counter.

  “Also a packet of menthols.”

  Then Grey remembered Irene. He had forgotten to collect her from school. No doubt she had waited.

  He took the cigarettes from the stand behind h
im. Angela handed him a ten-dollar note and leant on her elbows on the counter.

  “Are you all right?’ He put her change down in front of her.

  She stayed leaning on the counter, now with her head on her forearms. She was drunker than even her eyes had told.

  “How did you get home?”

  “The bus. I took the bus.”

  There was a late-night bus that passed through Toogoolawah, but Grey was sure it made its last trip an hour ago. The road from there to here was completely unlit. She must have walked, else fallen asleep at the Mary Smokes bus shelter and only now woken up.

  “Sit down for a bit.”

  He took a chair from the back room and set it down beside her.

  “How are your bridge friends?”

  “Tolerable. Barely.”

  He could imagine. He had met a few of them.

  Angela picked up a women’s magazine and began leafing through it. She stopped at a picture of a European prince having his boots shined on a cluttered street, perhaps in the Americas, while his heavily made-up princess looked on smiling.

  Angela sighed. “I’d polish boots forever if just for one day someone would polish mine. Just once to feel important.”

  Grey could think of no response to such a strange remark.

  She collected her cigarettes and juice from the counter and stood up.

  “I’m all messed up tonight, Grey. Don’t take any notice of me.”

  “Why don’t you rest here a while?”

  “Can I smoke?”

  “Sure.”

  She sat down again and lit a cigarette.

  “Thank you. You’re very kind. I’ve told you that before. You have a kind face, you know?”

  He forced a smile. Angela dragged heavily on her cigarette.

  “Can I say something serious to you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m not well suited to family life, Grey. That’s why I chose badly the first time around–a husband, I mean. I didn’t choose a proper man but a criminal. You know, he couldn’t sleep in the moonlight,” she laughed. “He was crazy. He’d sit alone at the saleyards where he worked, all night long in a two-metre square dogbox and watch the empty road and drink. I couldn’t have chosen worse. It sort of ruined me for everything that came after. I hope you understand.” She sighed. “Do you have an ashtray? And I was pretty enough when I was younger. Plenty of men would’ve had me.” She stared out the window. “I’m not much of a mother to Irene. I don’t need to tell you that. Anyway, she has no time for me. That’s natural.”