Grey knocked on a door and asked for Mr. H. That man was not in. Grey would wait. He waited an hour to deliver the envelope personally to a bald, well-dressed man with an untidy peroxide blonde on his arm.
“This is from Bill North,” Grey said.
“Drink?’ asked the man, turning his back to Grey and taking a bottle of cognac from his shelf. Grey had the feeling the man was modelling himself after a gangster from a movie.
“No thanks. Why don’t you count the money?”
The man smiled warmly.
“Really, I trust you, boy.”
“I’ve gone to the trouble of delivering it. You count it.”
The bald man exchanged glances and smiles with the prostitute and another man in a pin-striped suit who Grey guessed was the accountant.
“If you knew me better, you wouldn’t speak that way.”
“I don’t want to get to know you. I want you to count the money in the envelope.”
The man snapped his fingers and the accountant brought out a red ledger then sat back down at the table.
While the man counted the money, Grey took in his manicured nails and trimmed eyebrows, then the vaguely masculine features of the blonde prostitute. Their eyes met. She looked at him dully and played with the gold bracelets on her wrist. Again, it was as though they were all acting parts in a movie. Grey felt like laughing. He felt absurd, sitting here above the pensioners who probably delivered the bald man as much money as his crimes. The scene was so juvenile and droll, but the danger was the child, the rich child who sat before him who did not see that this was a joke. Grey guessed he posed in the mirror before leaving the house, cried at the lyrics of popular love songs, but might shoot you if you laughed at his shoes.
“Correct?”
“Correct,” said the man.
Grey stood up and left the room. He walked down the stairs into the bar and took a shot of Scotch then walked back into the ugly suburban night.
Another week passed. Then a month. The police investigation into the stolen horses barely existed. Some questions that were easily answered were asked of everyone within ten miles of the town. And no more was spoken by newspapers or men of the theft of horses from the property of a small-time Mary Smokes horse dealer.
XIII
THE MARY SMOKES WORKERS’ CLUB WAS A DIM-LIT THREE-PLY box attached to the backside of shops on Banjalang Street, where the same beers that sold for three dollars at the hotel sold for two.
Grey walked in and saw August Tanner sitting alone at a corner table. Tanner never drank here; only poor boys, the town’s few Aborigines, and loose girls. It was the first time Grey had seen Tanner since the night of the horses. Their eyes met and Grey nodded. He felt an urge to go and talk, but he told himself he must be careful not to be over-friendly, he must act as he always would. Eccleston came in shortly after. He sat at Grey’s table with his back to Tanner. They drank beer and smoked. They spoke of nothing out of the ordinary–hunting, horses, and jokes at Raughrie Norman’s expense–though their thoughts were always with the man sitting at the other side of the room. When Grey next went to the bar Tanner stood up too and sat down with Eccleston. Grey heard the conversation over his shoulder.
“I had some work lined up for you the other day, Ook.”
“ What work was that?”
“Handlin some horses for me. Only they got stolen. You heard about that.”
“Of course. Shame.”
“Yep. For you too.”
“Why’s that?”
“I reckon you could’ve used the money.”
Grey turned to see Eccleston shrug dismissively.
“I’m used to not havin money. I can do without it.”
Grey came back to the table with three shot glasses and half a bottle of Scotch whisky. Tanner nodded to him and took a glass and turned again to Eccleston.
“The four were just horses. But there was a black colt with em. That horse was worth more than you, Ook. Its blood was purer.” Tanner sighed. “Well, now he’s gone. How bloody complacent a man becomes. I should’ve had him in the stable. I thought the best place to hide a tree was in the woods. I was proud of that wisdom. And now all I can think of is some ignorant ringer usin him for a stockhorse, some cocky leadin his daughter round a houseyard on him. Well that just makes me–” he clenched his fist but stopped short of banging the table. He set his palm down gently. “I tell you, Ook. If I had’ve caught the son of a whore that did it, he’d’ve known he was alive–for about two minutes before he realized he wasn’t anymore.”
Tanner took a deep breath and calmed himself.
“So you owned em outright?’ Eccleston knew the answer.
“They were mine. But not the black colt. It was necessary that horse should come through me, appear on my books. The vendor and buyer are both very difficult men to deal with. I tell you, Ook, the whole week after the theft I woke in cold sweats at the thought of explainin to em.”
Perhaps Tanner had been testing him, but Eccleston’s face had given nothing, and now it seemed like the old man only wanted to vent his worries.
“You’ve got insurance,” Eccleston declared.
“For the horses. Not the colt. The colt was a dead racehorse.”
Eccleston raised his eyebrows.
“Disqualified,” said Tanner. “Banned. Never to run again.”
“How’d he die?”
“Irregular heart beat. It was all the chemicals they fed him.”
“That’d do it.”
“I tell you, Ook, the time and effort I put into changin that brand, a work of art it was, and all for nothin. When he was alive and racin he only had a little star on his forehead, and when he was stolen he had a full white blaze. That I did with dye and a razor blade. They couldn’t a got a better man than me. And look how it turned out.”
Eccleston recalled the horse now. The story had made the shire news-sheet; no doubt the papers in the city too.
“Perhaps you don’t sympathize with me, Ook.”
“I’ve got no love for horseracing–honest or otherwise.”
Tanner sneezed. He pointed out the back door.
“West wind. I always get hay fever in a west wind. That wind was blowin the night the horses were stolen. I was bedridden. Couldn’t hear anything. If not for that …’ Tanner spat on the floor. “Keep your ear to the ground, Ook. You get around. You might hear somethin.”
“I doubt it. Seems to me like they were out-of-towners.”
“You never know. There are people round here in want of money. And the colt’s not a horse anyone’d be likely to buy off the back of a truck–not for a hundredth part of his value. I got a suspicion they were amateurs.”
“Maybe.” Eccleston sipped his whisky. “How difficult are these blokes you’re dealin with? You’re a bastard of a man, always have been, but I’d just as well have you alive as dead.”
“I don’t know much about the vendor. The buyer–What I do know I suddenly hope isn’t true. You’ve seen him. He was at my house the last time you broke horses for me.”
Eccleston remembered the man with slick, thinning hair and dark sunglasses. Tanner knitted his brow and squinted and rubbed his grey chin stubble with visible pain.
“I’d buy the horse back if I could, Ook. I’d buy him back for twenty grand cash. I only tell you this so you can put the word out. Like I say, you know people.”
Eccleston fixed Tanner’s eyes.
“I don’t know where your horse is, old man.”
Tanner stood up from his chair.
“Well, I’ll leave you boys alone.”
Then he was gone onto the street.
“What do you think?’ Grey whispered.
“I reckon it’s crossed his mind,” said Eccleston. “But he doesn’t know. And we don’t have to worry about the police. He would of rung em in a panic when he first saw the horses gone, but he’ll be more scared of em finding the colt now than anything else. It’d raise questions the old man sure as hell doesn’t want to an
swer. I bet he’s been scolded by his associate for ringin em in the first place.”
“ What chance you think he knows?”
“He’d say if he knew for sure. This far on. I reckon he doesn’t.”
“It’s goin on two months.”
Eccleston nodded.
“Possum told me he’s never got away cleaner. He drove all the way to Dalby. Sold the horses all to one man. He never had to leave a name, not even a fake one.”
Grey breathed a sigh of relief.
He took up the amber bottle in front of him and filled both their glasses. Eccleston took the shot in a gulp.
“What’s Irene up to tonight?”
“She’s at home,” said Grey.
“You know, Irene’s–”
“Don’t speak of her here, Ook.”
Eccleston stared at him.
“Why can’t I say her name?”
“Just not here.”
“All right.”
Grey went home and Eccleston stayed another hour by himself, taking straight whisky very slowly and deliberately at the bar until the bottle Grey bought was empty. Then he danced with a plump local girl and part-time prostitute. Then there was an argument with the bartender and he put his fist through a wall. Then he walked home alone.
WITHIN A FORTNIGHT Grey heard that the card game at Dinmore had packed up, for what reason he would never know. Perhaps it had returned to the city. Oats and wheat were sown and shot where sorghum had been. At dusk and dawn a burning freshness filled the nostrils. The skies were higher. There was a quickening of the breath and blood. And a day came when Grey looked at the calendar in the living room and realized Vanessa was back at school. Even in holiday time they lived far enough apart never to meet by chance, and he had vaguely excused himself from both her invitations before she left.
His days passed much as they ever had, running with the boys of Mary Smokes in the forgotten town whose smallness constricted their aspirations. Then one day late in May a wind came and blew the long summer away for good. The wind came from out of the inland and blew mares’ tails across the sky and swept and yellowed the grass and banished the rains so the rivers and creeks became still and then dry, and then the lake receded and left flats of cracking clay. A mist rose up from the dry bed of Mary Smokes Creek like the ghost of water and drifted through the eucalypts of the gallery. The old men said the creek had dried earlier than ever this year. And as suddenly as these changes in the weather, a day came when Irene did not wait for him at the school gate. That day was followed by another. Then she did not follow him around on Saturday nights or even annoy him at the service station.
Three
I
GREY WALKED NORTH ALONG BANJALANG STREET. HE stepped off the asphalt for the speeding tourists who had come to use this road as a back way to the north coast from the west. He walked across the overgrown railway line, past unpainted houses with their front yards full of old stoves and car parts rusted by the rain. A shaggy pony with sweet itch and deep scratch marks in its hide leant across sagging wire to take what little green pick remained on the roadside. It was invisible at this hour, but at night, looking west, you could stand here and see the white haze of the new shopping centre’s sodium lights. Parents took their children out of school to work there in the late trading hours, so this afternoon the town was empty.
Grey looked up and down the disused railway tracks, at the decrepit railcars where his sister and her friends sometimes played. She was not there. It seemed she had forgotten the arrangement they had made in the morning.
He sat in the gutter in front of the school and watched unknown cars go by.
He drove home. The boys were all standing on the road.
HOURS LATER, HAVING used up the town’s bars, Matt Thiebaud, Raughrie Norman, Gordon Eccleston and Grey North walked down the midnight street with nowhere left to go but a half-mile beyond town to where they had hidden Grey’s truck to avoid having to drive past the police.
Grey’s birthday was gone and he had still not left town. He kicked loose stones south along the road. They came to the road sign that read “Mary Smokes. Inhabitants: 976.” The sign did not bother with any note of welcome. No one was stopping here but those who called the place home. Thiebaud banged the sign with his fist.
“Let’s steal it,” said Raughrie Norman, wisps of untended hair blowing about his eyes in the dry cold wind.
“And do what with it?’ said Thiebaud.
So they kept walking.
Grey had asked Bizzell for the week off leading up to Christmas in July. He looked inside the service station to see who was taking his place tonight. A red-haired boy of about fifteen who he did not recognize stood flipping through magazines on the rack.
In the pitching land just south of town woolly unridden horses stood sleeping in defiance of the weather. A half-dozen black-bally cattle picked grass around degenerate car bodies.
The iron skeleton of the drive-in movie theatre still stood above town. The drive-in had been shut down in June. Even the demolition job had been aborted, half-done. The canvas screen was torn by winter winds. The poles that held the speakers for cars still stood in lonely rows on the empty bitumen lot.
Grey’s truck sat inside the drive-in’s broken gates. It was safer leaving it here than at the service station. The police were awake to that. But the road tonight was free of police, and it would not have mattered.
From the top of Solitary Hill the boys saw fires in a sweep along the western horizon. Someone was burning raked timber. From this distance and at night they could not be sure who. For a time they all stood still, transfixed by the plain lit red.
Grey fell into the truck.
“Let’s see if I can get my head straight enough to drive this thing.”
He pumped the accelerator to get the fuel moving and the hundred-and-fifteen horsepower motor heaved into action, blowing heavy smoke into the cold.
They took a dark and winding back road on which they were unlikely to meet anyone.
They did not walk to Mary Smokes Creek tonight. Tonight the creek was a muddy trickle choked with weeds, and the water stank with algal blooms.
At home the yellow veranda light was on as he had left it, but all the windows were dark.
Eccleston walked to his own house. Matt Thiebaud lived at Helidon now to be closer to the new abattoir where he worked, so he would stay the night at Grey’s along with Raughrie Norman.
Grey turned on the kitchen light and lit the potbelly stove and the boys sat down at the table. Bill North had taken a cash job fencing for the winter and Angela was spending the week with her sister, so Grey and Irene were alone.
Thiebaud put a cigarette in the stove pinchers and lit it in the flames.
“Where’s Irene?”
“At Amy Minh’s.”
Grey looked at the clock on the wall that showed five minutes to one.
He took a mattress and blanket from the spare room and laid them down for Thiebaud and Norman in front of the stove. He threw a block of railway sleeper into the stove and stirred the coals.
“That’ll burn through the night.”
Raughrie Norman fell asleep as soon as he lay down.
“Irene comin home tonight?’ asked Thiebaud.
“I doubt it.”
“I’m glad. She might have seen this set up and reckoned me and Flagon were a couple of drunk queers broken into the place.”
Grey smiled. The drink had worn off him and he did not feel like joking. He did not know where his sister was.
SHE CAME TREADING along the gravel way to the house. She opened the gate that sang on its hinges and stepped across the front yard wrapped in blue dark. She stood on the veranda while the west wind picked up and blew hard against the wallboards carrying smoke. She pulled back the hood of her duffel coat.
In his room Grey listened to his sister come in and kick off her boots. He heard the door of her room shut carefully, and through the wall he heard her pray the Hail Mary.
After that there was quiet.
He had been sitting up in the house with Matt Thiebaud, but Thiebaud had gone to sleep an hour ago and now it was very late. He lay in bed and listened to the wind romp on the flats outside the house. He turned on the radio to a city station and listened to a performance of Bach’s preludes and fugues that fell out and became static.
II
GREY SLEPT UNTIL ELEVEN. WHEN HE WOKE, THIEBAUD and Raughrie Norman were gone. He washed dishes and tidied the kitchen to wake her and she came out from her room rubbing her eyes.
He did not know why he did not ask her where she had been. It was his right as her custodian. But he felt more anger than was his right, and there were no words that would fit his anger. So he was silent.
He sat on the front veranda and drank black tea and watched the shadows of clouds glide across oats in the north.
Soon Amy Minh came by to take Irene to Mass. She did not return until late that afternoon.
IRENE AND GREY drove into town to get fish and chips and Matt Thiebaud sat down at their table. He had left his own car at the garage and was looking for a ride to Helidon. Grey had nothing better to do.
The three of them left the café with Thiebaud carrying his dinner in newspaper. They drove to a service station and Grey put twenty dollars in the tank and went to the counter to pay. Irene got out of the truck to sit on the bonnet. A couple of boys were filling up beside. One of them watched her. They were out-of-towners. The one who watched Irene was a pretty, greasy-blond-haired boy who Grey thought he recognized, but could not say from where. Grey imagined the boy was eyeing he and his sister in turn. Grey held his gaze and then the boy turned away to where the highway ran into the dark. Irene shivered in a T-shirt and hugged her arms into her chest. Grey watched the boy who smiled at Irene before he got in his truck and drove south out of town.
On the way to the big highway Grey delivered Irene home.
He and Thiebaud drove into the Darling Downs at dusk. The sky opened up. Starry and cold. The lights of cars and roadtrains flickered down the road. Runs of winter oats broke the miles of dry grass.
The Mary Smokes Boys Page 12
