Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  Spruiker ran three afternoons a week — around the Oval if it was free, or into the hill suburbs. June pretended to know nothing about it. Keith paced him on the bike if it was road work. ‘There’s no hills on those athletic tracks,’ he said.

  ‘Hills are good for your wind,’ said Spruiker. And he enjoyed seeing his son-in-law suffer a bit.

  The television series was long over, but Keith was getting all the meet times sent out to him. He even built up files on the most consistent fifteen hundred metre winners and the nature of the different venues. ‘Yours is a glamour event,’ he told the old guy. ‘Top prizes for it.’

  Within three months Spruiker was recording times that would have put him in the money if he were running in the States. Keith had spent a lot of time talking to him also about tactics and motivation. ‘Visualise yourself passing Dan Swarfest of Shadow Man Falls, Montana; visualise yourself breasting the tape,’ he told his father-in-law. Spruiker never bothered to answer. He did agree, however, that he should have the best steak twice a week, and his legs massaged regularly by Mrs Drummhagen who lived next door and used to be a district nurse.

  Keith and Spruiker had a meeting after a tea of curried sausages one night. Spruiker said that it was time to go to the States and take some money from the Americans. June pretended to be surprised by the project, but she and Keith had already decided that it was worth-while backing the old guy to have a go. What else did he have? June said. It would take all of Spruiker’s small savings and the bulk of June and Keith’s. ‘I’ll win enough to set us up nicely, to more than pay my way in the family, but I don’t want anyone getting wind of it. You understand. If anyone asks, it’s just a holiday.’ Spruiker never overcame a certain self-consciousness, almost shame, about the whole thing. A lot of silly old people flogging themselves in games, taking their laughable performances seriously.

  Keith and Spruiker flew to Los Angeles on a Big Top from Christchurch. Spruiker first ran at a qualifying race at the Wachumpba spring festival in Fresno. His first prize barely covered expenses, but enabled him to enter the Pan Veteran indoor event at Sac City, Iowa. He came fourth in the final because he was elbowed in the face at the final turn, but it was a lesson learned. He was never less than third in the thirteen regional meets he competed in after that. He won at Savannah, Lubback, Seattle, St Cloud, Saratoga Springs and Troy in Alabama and was a close second to Dan Swarfest in the national final of the United States Pan Veterans’ Athletics fifteen hundred metres at Glameen Park, Chicago. He received forty thousand dollars and a citation, and his name was entered on a copper plaque above the members’ cocktail bar at Glameen Park, between that of Dan Swarfest and Wesley Boist Smith, who was third.

  Keith was amazed and grateful and interested in all around him. He wanted Spruiker to take it easier, to see something of the country and the people while they had the opportunity, but his father-in-law saw it all as a vast sham that might collapse at any minute. Spruiker insisted they stay in modest motels, and the only friend he made was a seventy-six-year-old ex-miner from West Virginia who was doing all right in the hammer throw. They used to watch blue movies and drink Hills pinball beer together after the meets.

  One week after Glameen Park, in unit nineteen of the Saddle Sore Motels on the east side of Beaumont, Texas, Reece Spruiker told Keith that it was time to get out, time for a reckoning.

  ‘One of my legs is going,’ said Spruiker, ‘and I’m fed up with the people. I reckon I’ve done my dash.’ From the motel window they could see a group of young hoods trashing cars in the park of the El Pecho Diner and Bar. The neons were starting to brighten in the dusk. ‘What have we got clear?’ he asked Keith. ‘What can we get back home with?’

  Keith got out the laptop that he had purchased from their winnings for managerial purposes. ‘In the vicinity of one two five New Zealand,’ he said.

  ‘What vicinity? How much clear when we’re back home?’

  ‘I’d say a hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars,’ said Keith.

  ‘Half for June and half for me,’ said Spruiker. Keith assumed charitably that June and himself were seen as indivisible. ‘And I don’t want any bugger to know more than he needs to.’

  In Caversham Spruiker slipped back into his pre-athletic role as if all the rest had never happened. He was happier, though, because he was certain that he wasn’t beholden to any bugger, that he wasn’t a drag on his daughter. Nothing that the rest of the family could bitch about. He let Keith keep his last pair of expensive running shoes in case his son-in-law developed talent in old age himself. Spruiker reduced his exercise to walking again, watched a lot of television, drank rather more beer — all the same sort of things as before. But he decided that he needed to keep on with the massages from Mrs Drummhagen, and just occasionally came out with a turn of phrase which betrayed his American career and friendship with the West Virginian.

  Like when he told the plumber that the new bath was as smooth as a prom queen’s thigh.

  If anyone ever bothered to ask him what was the best thing he’d managed in his life, he always recalled the time he and Buck had won the Canterbury Huntaway Championship at the Windwhistle dog trials. That dog could walk on water, he said.

  The Devil at Bruckners’ Pond

  No matter how things prosper, a woman can always imagine better times. For Haydon Collins, though, it was heaven gained to be with Alice under the buffalo horns of a new moon. A cool drift of air from Bruckners’ Pond, and Alice’s gasp from between himself and the coarse weave of the car rug.

  Only at such times, rare times, did he feel all of himself alive and free from the lethargies that otherwise laid hold on some part of body, or spirit. The moon’s wry smile glittered weakly on the small, dark ruffles of Bruckners’ Pond; the willow ends trailed back, whispering of autumn.

  Alice’s husband never listened to her, and she was entitled to a sympathetic listener. Haydon was an eager confidant, even to the verbatim account of a meter maid, for Alice had no skill of paraphrase, no awareness, in fact, of any such mode of discourse, so all the episodes she cropped from each fortnight of her life were delivered blow by blow. He’d suggested they meet once a week, but she considered it too physical, too taxing, and she was the coach of an under-fifteen softball team that had prospects in its grade and needed to practise twice a week.

  ‘I ticketed the harbourmaster’s Landcruiser,’ said Alice, ‘and his secretary rang me up and said I couldn’t do it, not to the harbourmaster in his own precincts. I said to her I could do it in any precincts in the city that has meters: that I could do it to the mayor himself, and I’d ticketed the Civil Defence officer three times in one week, and because no emergency had been declared he had to pay up like anybody else. That’s different, she tried to tell me. The Civil Defence officer’s different to the harbourmaster in his own precincts. No difference at all, not at all, I says. All’s equal under the local regulations and I know it off by heart. She didn’t have an answer to that.’

  If Haydon raised himself on his elbows he could see the moon fragments dancing on the surface of Bruckners’ Pond, and the whips of willow shaking slightly in the night breeze. Miniature waves slapped the mass of root filaments that made the small bank of the pond. There was a morepork calling from the gully upstream, and Haydon was almost overcome by his good fortune to be lying on Alice in such a night, instead of watching television alone, or playing snooker in Paul Barrett’s garage.

  ‘You’ve got guts, Alice. I don’t reckon the other meter maids would have the nerve to apply the law so evenly.’

  ‘There’s blokes too do the meters,’ she said. ‘How many of them do you think would ticket the harbourmaster in his own precincts?’

  ‘None of them,’ said Haydon. ‘You’re a bloody marvel. I reckon I should write anonymously to the council and say it too. Someone should do it.’

  ‘I actually should go and see the harbourmaster’s secretary again now that I think about it.’

  Haydon gave her thi
gh a light slap, which sounded barely louder than the ripples on the bank, and blew hair back from her face. ‘What would you say to her? Tell me exactly what you’d say to her.’ In such circumstances he could listen for ever.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ve come for a bit of a word with you, I’d say, something of a chat about your harbourmaster in his own precincts. I’m not a person who looks to be awkward, you understand —.’

  Haydon wished she would divorce her husband so that he could move in with her and make love after the evening meals, while she talked about her day wearing the civic badge, and upholding municipal traffic regulations. Alice was a very warm person: he could feel the fresh heat of her body as she became animated in her hypothetical conversation with the harbourmaster’s secretary. ‘I’d tell her straight out. Rules is rules I’d tell her, straight out — just stop a minute, there’s something hard under the rug: a stone or some damn thing. That’s it — no, I’d tell her, in my way of things everybody’s equal, whether you’re the harbourmaster, or just ordinary Joe Bloggs —’

  A noise was coming from the lupins and broom further back from the pond. Haydon could hear it, even though absorbed with pleasure, through the sound of breeze in the weeping willows, and Alice’s monologue. It demanded attention not because of volume, but because of eccentricity — it was a noise quite unknown to him. A sound that had something of whirling in it, something of disturbance to natural order, yet also a constituent of powerful personality.

  Haydon raised himself from Alice enough to glance behind, and saw the Devil stroll down beside them, nod in a passing sort of way, and then stand on the lip of Bruckners’ Pond. He had the goodness to face away for a time, and the moonlight caught his small horns, and the thatch of vigorous, but grey, hair at their base. Haydon and Alice scrambled to uncouple, and then arrange themselves separately on the rug. Alice was very rarely at a loss: she had fronted up to harbourmasters, mayors, media celebrities and Mongrel Mob members in the course of duty. She drew in a full breath to start in on the intruder, but then he turned, could be seen so clearly for who he was, that she let it all out in one long sigh.

  ‘Overall it’s a wretchedly poor creation,’ said the Devil, ‘but I must say that a summer’s night at Bruckners’ Pond, a warm half wind, a little routine copulation: there are worse places.’ He had a voice of blandishment, rich with cynical toleration and forgiveness.

  ‘I beg your pardon!’ said Alice, affronted.

  ‘Not at all,’ said the Devil. ‘Think nothing of it.’

  The Devil didn’t appear to have any trousers, but he wore a long frock coat of fustian green, mid-calf boots, and there wasn’t much gap between. He had side whiskers and a dusky red complexion as if embers glowed within. Despite the night he was quite clearly seen; again the light that made that possible was subtly from within rather than the effect of the moon. He was like one of those unregenerate eighteenth-century squires; bluff, hearty and entirely self-serving in the most natural of ways. The Devil’s tail was dark, and heavy on the ground when he moved, and with flukes at its substantial end. Haydon had the odd thought that it would make a great quantity of strong soup.

  ‘I knew the first Bruckner here,’ said the Devil, after he had breathed the lake air deeply. ‘Old Anton, who bought the place in the 1860s with his wife’s money, and had a vision of it as a resort in the European way, all chalets and profit. But of course the family lost it one generation before it became really valuable.’ The Devil’s humour seemed of an ironic turn, and his smile of reminiscence was dusky and emberish. ‘The family were religious, but had a redeeming streak of profligacy,’ he said.

  ‘The Reverend David Bruckner’s the vicar here, you know,’ said Alice, more assured now that she had got her legs together. She wondered whether to introduce Haydon and herself to the Devil, but it was that sort of awkward situation in which you get too far into conversation with a stranger for introductions to be comfortable.

  ‘Quite,’ said the Devil, ‘and I believe the vestry are at this moment taking a particular interest in the church accounts.’

  Haydon feared that he was to be excluded from the conversation with the Devil, and that afterwards his silence would be taken by Alice as a weakness. Remember the time we met the Devil, she might say, and I talked to him, but you had nothing at all to say for yourself did you, nothing at all.

  ‘Bruckners’ Pond belongs to the ratepayers now,’ he said.

  ‘So it does,’ replied the Devil equably, but his smile continued to be for Alice.

  ‘We don’t come here often,’ she said.

  ‘More’s the pity,’ said the Devil. ‘It’s not what you do, but who knows about it, isn’t it?’

  The three of them considered that, and watched the moon and the willows of Bruckners’ Pond for a time, then the Devil wished them well and said that he had to be going. He gave the faintest of bows, but with the assurance of the landed gentry, and his coat was a rich, verdigris green for a moment in the moonlight and his face dusky and glowing, and he walked past them and into the bushes.

  As Haydon saw the Devil walking on two legs and with a tail, he realised how fitting and natural it was, and that ordinary people on two legs seemed ungainly and incomplete, while the Devil walked with the grace of a tiger, and his tail made a firm and steadying contact with the ground behind him.

  The Devil’s departure prompted that of Haydon and Alice. You couldn’t just carry on regardless after talking to the Devil. The two of them gathered up the rug and pillows and climbed into the off-roader. ‘I’m damned if I know,’ said Haydon. ‘What can you say that makes sense of that?’

  ‘I wish I’d thought of more to say,’ said Alice. It was a feeling foreign to her. ‘Anyway, I won’t be seeing you again — not like this anyway,’ she said clearly. ‘The Devil’s quite right you know.’

  Haydon was so angry that he couldn’t get the key into the ignition, but he kept his voice down because he wasn’t sure how far the Devil had gone. ‘What do you mean, the Devil’s right?’ he said bitterly, but he knew in his heart the absolute authority of the Devil. The Devil had done for him, no doubt about that, had scotched the greatest of his pleasures. ‘What if it had been God, eh?’ said Haydon. ‘What then?’

  ‘Just the same,’ said Alice serenely.

  The Language Picnic

  Prof Carver Glower was there, Assoc Prof Teems, Dr Podanovich, Dr Johns, Dr Fell and Eileen the department secretary. Only Dr Allis-Montgomery refused to come, because of a vendetta going back seventeen years.

  The English department had just that week completed the fourth and final volume of Antipodean English: Growth of a Variant, and Eileen had suggested a picnic. Prof Glower had appropriated the idea, as was his wont and prerogative, and put it to the faculty. ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘Cracker,’ said Assoc Prof Teems.

  ‘Bonzer,’ said Dr Podanovich.

  ‘Yeah, why the fuck not,’ said Dr Fell. ‘Out in the boohai, eh. As long as us sheilas aren’t expected to bring all the grub.’ She preferred not to socialise with her academic colleagues, but knew what was politic in establishing a career. Also she found something generically plaintive in picnics: they reminded her of the desperate efforts her mother had made to placate family disharmony by such occasions. ‘We should have Eileen along.’

  ‘Bingo, already come up with that,’ replied Prof Glower. From the carpark amid pine trees the track led down to the beach of black sand. Because the sand was easily kicked out, the track was almost a ditch, and Assoc Prof Teems stumbled. She couldn’t recover her balance because of the open basket she carried, and after wild oscillation she tumbled into the heart of a small gorse bush. Her apricot muffins were shaken into the marram grass, and the blue gingham cover she’d had over them caught in the gorse and became a taut pennant in the ripe sea breeze and beneath an effulgent sun. ‘Bugger,’ she said.

  Solicitous as ever, and rendered clumsy by his concern, Dr Podanovich scrambled down to assist her. ‘
You did a real header,’ he said. ‘Arse over tip.’ He began to pluck the gorse prickles from her pale arm and cheek, his fingers long and nimble from subtle play on the computer keyboard.

  ‘Crapped out badly there,’ said Dr Johns, who couldn’t disguise that elementary human relief which is a response to the misfortunes of another. He was a small, neat, waxy man, rather like a Belgian detective. ‘Come a real greaser all right,’ he said, and gave his quick-fire, harsh laugh. Dr Johns was not essentially a malicious man, but he was suffering from an uneasy conscience, and attempting to assuage it by some acerbity towards his colleagues. Within the department he was normally a somewhat devious, and not fully disclosed, ally of Dr Allis-Montgomery, but he’d not had the courage to join him in boycotting the picnic. It was too unequivocal an alignment for him to commit to, but he half despised himself because of his decision.

  Prof Glower picked up several of the muffins in a lordly, off hand manner, and shook them free of sand. ‘No probs, she’ll be jake,’ he said. ‘Nifty kai, I reckon.’ In his heart, though, he was a disappointed man. He led the way down to the beach, and with his fingers combed the remaining long strands of grey hair across the pale luminosity of his head. Already he could feel sand grating there from his hand. Most of his staff were amiable enough, but he had academic respect for none of them, except perhaps Dr Fell, and all the time he felt his leadership under insidious siege by Dr Allis-Montgomery. Prof Glower told himself he should be satisfied with a chair in a New Zealand university, but he yearned for a vice-chancellorship, even more for a professorship at a name overseas institution. Antipodean English was his final play for scholastic distinction, and the first three volumes had received only qualified critical reception. ‘Let’s find a pearler possie out of the wind,’ he said in his falsely jocular tone, and looked over the empty, black beach.