by Scot Gardner
Kevin shook his head then shrugged. He indicated and turned off the highway to Christmas Bay. ‘He died in a car but it wasn’t an accident,’ he said. ‘It was in the garage.’
I looked at the big bloke. There was no expression on his face. He looked like a driver’s licence photo of himself.
‘Connected a pipe to the exhaust and gassed himself.’
‘Fuck,’ I said. It wasn’t the most brainy thing I could have said, but I said it. It wasn’t the most sensitive thing I could have said either but it just popped out. ‘Fuck.’
‘Exactly,’ Kevin said, then sighed and pushed back into his seat.
I wanted to know why. I wanted to know if Jake was big into injectable shit. I wanted to know if Kevin was the reason his son killed himself. ‘Did he leave a note?’
Kevin shook his head and pulled into the car park at P & KL Wasser P/L. The SS ute was there and Homer’s shitbox VL.
‘I hope you’re telling the truth,’ he said as he opened his door.
I nodded but he wasn’t looking. I got out and grabbed for my pack. It was stuck. Kevin held one of the shoulder straps from his side of the ute. He was hunched under the roof rack, staring at me.
‘If I find out that you touched my daughter,’ he snarled, ‘I’ll rip your head off.’
He flashed his teeth. Nice white teeth.
‘Heh, heh, heh. No problems there, boss. She’s thirteen. What do you take me for? If I even thought about it, I’d rip my own head off.’
‘Good lad.’
Then my lungs would only half fill and I puffed into my hand as I followed Kevin into the office. I felt sweat trickling down my side. Never again. Never.
We didn’t speak again until he’d collected a roll of copper pipe and a cardboard box full of fittings.
‘Grab these, Gary. I’ll be out in a minute.’
His minute turned to five. I listened to music in the van but I was itching to get back to the rough-in in the hills.
The van lurched as he climbed aboard.
‘We’ve got a little job to do in Creston before we finish that rough-in.’
Some time before the pyramids were built, someone in the council got the idea that they’d build a whole lot of government houses on the swamp at the edge of Christmas Bay. Creston. Dicky idea. I hadn’t been there for years. I could see, as we crawled along Opal Street, that nothing much had changed.
Kevin checked the address he’d scribbled on a piece of box cardboard, looked up the driveway then looked at me.
‘This is it.’
The grass had flowered around the shell of an old yellow Mazda van with the front stoved in. The windscreen was a cobweb of fractured glass that looked like it had been cracked from the inside by the driver’s head. There were bits of polystyrene packaging and an upturned pram at the bottom of the stairs. The flywire door sat against the wall. The front door was missing completely. A TV boomed.
‘Hello?’ Kevin yelled, and the dogs in the back yard went off. Big gutsy woofs like a German shepherd or a Rottweiler or something. A blowfly whizzed past my ear on its way out of the house.
A kid appeared in the doorway. Her bed-hair and dirty face did nothing to hide the biggest, brightest pair of brown eyes I’d ever seen.
Kevin squatted. ‘Hello, love. What’s your name?’
Her one clean thumb slipped into her mouth and she looked at the wall.
‘Is Mum or Dad home?’ Kevin asked.
She shook her head. Her thumb made her lips pop. ‘Mum’s gone to get the car.’
‘Is anyone else home?’
She shook her head.
‘When they get back, can you tell them that —’
‘Brakes!’ someone squealed from the street. ‘For fuck’s sake, Reggie, BRAKES!’
A dinged-up Fairmont, the same model and colour as Grandad’s, rolled to a stop just behind the van. Reggie’s face was red, his body pushed back into the seat. Looked like he was using two feet on the stop pedal. The handbrake farted and he slowly let his feet off. A heavy woman jogged to a stop beside the Fairmont.
‘I thought you was going to smack into the back of that van, you fucken idiot,’ she said. ‘You trying to give me a fucken heart attack?’
‘The fucken brakes wouldn’t work. I was pushing as hard as I fucken could,’ Reggie shouted through the window at the woman who had just given him a serve. The woman was bent over huffing, so Kevin and I had a fine view of the ample bum crack poking from the top of her green tracksuit pants.
Kevin stepped from under the verandah. Reggie tapped on the window then pointed through the glass at us.
The woman stood up. ‘What do youse want?’
‘Mrs Hunter?’ Kevin asked.
‘Who wants to know?’ she said.
Kevin pointed at the van. ‘We’re the plumbers. We got a call to check out an oven that wasn’t working properly. Did you call?’
‘Yes! Yes, I did. Thank gawd you’re here. Jesus, that was quick. I only phoned ten minutes ago. Come in, come in. The oven’s in the kitchen. Of course it’s in the fucken kitchen, scuse the French — where else do you keep a fucken oven? Come in.’
The little girl darted into the living room as we followed the woman. More blowflies barrelled along the hall and I ducked. One flew into my chest. The house reeked of sweaty bodies, stale ciggies and nappies and something else.
Raw meat.
The kitchen hummed with a whole squadron of blowflies. In the centre of the table lay the skinless, headless, half-butchered carcass of a kangaroo and a bloodied knife.
‘Sorry about the mess. Been a shit of a day already and it’s not even nine o’clock. Not even eight o’clock. The oven is just there. It won’t get hot.’
The door of the oven was open a crack and part of the butchered kangaroo poked through.
‘Can you smell gas?’ Kevin whispered to me.
I nodded.
‘Nip out the front, find the gas meter and turn it off. Just a ball valve. Turn it until it won’t go any further. Hurry.’
The meter was hidden behind a rusted BMX. Gas: off.
‘Right, I’ll leave you boys to it. Yell out when you want a cuppa,’ Mrs Hunter said.
Kevin had his hands on his hips, looking the kitchen over.
‘Where do we start?’ I whispered.
‘Help us drag the table back a bit.’
The carcass wobbled with fresh death.
‘Broom,’ Kevin said.
I found a broom leaning against a dead pot plant in the hall. Kevin swept a place in front of the oven. There were piles of dirty plastic plates and pizza boxes, a sock and a perfectly circular drop of dried blood on the torn lino. I helped Kevin move the oven away from the wall so he could squeeze behind it. Everywhere I touched was sticky with grease.
Kevin looked up, his brow red and his cheeks locked full of air.
‘Rock scissors paper,’ he said, as he exhaled.
‘What?’
‘Someone has to go under the house. One, two, three.’
I chose rock. Kevin chose rock.
Again. Kevin chose rock, I chose scissors. Rock blunts scissors.
My throat made a pathetic little squeak as I swallowed.
‘Good luck,’ he said, and slapped my shoulder. ‘Mrs Hunter?’
‘Yes, love?’
‘We need to get under the house.’
‘Sure. Fine.’
‘Could you please show us where the manhole is? And your dogs. Are your dogs going to be okay with us?’
She stumped along the hallway and opened the back door. ‘Dogs are fine. They might fucken lick you to death but they’re fine. Under the house is their kennel. They should show you the way in. Heh, heh.’
They were mongrel dogs. Two big mongrel dogs that barked like they’d summoned the sound right from their ball bags. Ridgebacks crossed with Dobermans crossed with wolves crossed with African hunting dogs. I wasn’t going into the yard.
‘Don’t worry about them,’ M
rs Hunter whispered. ‘They’re fucken pussies. They wouldn’t hurt a fly but don’t tell anybody, hey, ’cause they’re great for security. They look vicious.’
Mrs Hunter showed me the way under the house.
‘What am I looking for?’ I asked Kevin.
‘The gas line to the stove. Three-quarter-inch copper. Go under the kitchen and I’ll guide you from outside.’
‘Right.’
I held my breath and crawled on all fours, dodging fleshy bones and piles of dogshit as big as fruitcakes. The house was on concrete posts and there was plenty of room to crawl.
‘Over here,’ Kevin called. I could see his hand poked between the timber slats that boxed in sides of the crawl space. The walls of the kennel. I managed to hold my breath for the whole distance and dodged every landmine on the way. Cobwebs crackled in my dreads. I pressed my face against the timber slats and sucked the air from outside.
‘Right,’ I puffed. ‘Now what?’
‘Look up. You should be able to see a copper pipe going in through the floor somewhere there.’
I spotted the pipe and I spotted the problem. It had been pulled away from its brackets until it hung at dog-head height. The copper was a dull brown except for the thirty-centimetre length that had been bent closest to the ground. It shone in scrapes, was pitted with tooth marks and bent to ninety degrees. ‘Found it. The dogs have been chowing down on the pipe. Ripped it away from the house. It’s all bent and stuff.’
Kevin groaned. ‘What will you need?’
I felt something crawling on my forehead and slapped it away.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to cut out the chewed bit. About sixty centimetres of pipe, a couple of those joiner thingys and the oxy.’
‘Right. Sit tight.’
A shadow moved in the darkness. Two shadows. A low growl.
‘Kevin! Bring a torch.’
The three minutes it took him to collect the gear felt like three hours. One of the dogs sat in the gloom and I could feel it watching me. I could hear it breathing. The other dog lay near the exit to that underworld, crunching bone.
Kevin handed tools through the slats. He had to pull grass away from the wall to find a place big enough to thread the torch in. I fumbled and clicked it on. The dog’s eyes glowed briefly green. Its lips smacked. Nice clean teeth. It took a step closer.
‘Stay. Good dog.’
I took the bits from Kevin. The gas bottles rested against the outside wall but the oxy torch itself fitted through. Kevin opened the taps.
I opened my nostrils and couldn’t decide if the pong was gas or a mix of dogshit, damp earth and rotting flesh.
‘Is this going to blow up in my face?’
‘Should be right. Know what to do?’
‘Sort of.’
Kevin squatted and one of his knees cracked. He peered through the slats and gave me step-by-step instructions. What he said made perfect sense. Every sentence made a picture in my mind. When I lit the oxy to finish the job, the dog in the dark jumped. I made the flame blue but not too hot like Kevin had shown me and pointed it at the dog. It bolted — tail straight — out into the morning. And when I brought the flame to the job, a dozen dangly cobwebs fizzed and shrivelled in the heat. With a smile on my lips, I cleared the cobwebs from my headspace with the oxy. I only stopped when one of the big bits of wood holding the house up popped alight and wouldn’t be blown out. I slapped it, sending a shower of sparks to the cool earth beside my knee.
‘Careful,’ Kevin said. ‘Then again, that’ll probably get the oven hot.’
I finished the weld and turned the oxy off. It made a crack like a gunshot and I bumped my head on the floor above. The shadow of a dog moved. It growled.
I flicked the Eveready on and stabbed the beam at the growl. More green eyes. Coming closer. It had something in its mouth.
‘Nice doggy.’
I stuffed the tools back through the slats. I kept the torch.
‘All done?’ Kevin said. ‘I’ll turn the gas on. Wait there.’
I shone the torch behind me again but the dog was already lit by the daylight coming through the slats. In its mouth it carried the mauled remains of a kangaroo’s head, the fur flattened with saliva and blood.
‘Go on. Piss off.’
The dog stood its ground. Kevin handed me the battery drill, some screws, two pipe saddles and a spray bottle.
‘Spray the joint all over. Soapy water. Watch for bubbles.’
No bubbles.
‘Use the saddles to anchor it to the joists. Make sure the dogs can’t get at it again.’
The dog grumbled as I changed position. I could hear it breathing again. I slipped off a screw and drilled my finger with the screwdriver point. I swore but eventually managed to secure the pipe.
I passed the spray bottle back to Kevin but kept the drill.
‘Good doggy.’
Hurrying, the hair prickling on my neck as the dog behind me let off a couple of muffled barks, I managed to dive my bare hand into a nest of dogshit. I gagged as it squidged between my fingers like an overripe banana. Held my breath.
I wiped my hand on one of the posts and kept holding my breath until I felt faint. When I got out I dropped the torch and the drill, unplugged a rotten hose with my clean hand and washed until the skin was raw and the dogshit had gone.
Kevin arrived. ‘The oven works fine. Well done. Let’s get out of here.’
I breathed in puffs through my mouth and followed him out to the van. I chucked the drill and the torch in the back and I slammed the rear door.
Kevin scowled.
We sat in silence most of the way to the rough-in job. Kevin looked across at me occasionally, half a smile on his face.
‘You right, Gary?’ he eventually said. ‘You did well back there. Good job.’
I shivered. ‘That was fucken disgusting. I can’t believe people actually live like that. How totally fucken feral.’ I looked out my window. ‘I stuck my hand in dogshit. I can’t believe someone had a dead kangaroo on their kitchen table. That’s fucken disgusting. They were totally off. Imagine that poor little kid. Imagine what she’s going to grow up like. People like that shouldn’t be allowed to breed. That’s fucken feral.’
Kevin’s smile flattened until it was his average scowl.
‘If we lived in a decent society, people like that would have been smothered at birth.’
I crossed my arms. They were my words all right but as soon as they were out I couldn’t believe that I’d said them. Couldn’t believe that they’d tumbled out of my mouth.
Kevin glanced at me with a look of total disbelief on his face. He looked at me again and again. He shook his head.
‘What?’ I said.
‘You sound like Homer,’ he said.
As far as possible we gave each other the silent treatment for the rest of the morning. Kevin grumbled a few orders, I asked a few questions, but every word was a huge effort.
We sat in the van at lunch. I was chowing into my Vegemite and cheese sandwiches and Kevin kept looking across at me.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Could you please chew with your mouth closed?’
I moaned and turned the radio on to Triple J. You’re not my fucken mother, I thought. After I finished my sandwiches, I pulled my hat over my eyes, crossed my arms, rested my chin on my chest and tried to go to sleep.
I felt the van rock as Kevin left. I sat there for a half-minute, my eyelids fluttering under the brim of my hat, before I was overcome by the desire to go back to work. Get that: desire to go back. The job was fun and I kept forgetting to be pissed off. I felt the sun on the back of my shirt and caught myself whistling. I didn’t want to be a Homer.
We finished the rough-in just before 2 pm. I packed the tools and asked Kevin where we were going. He said we were going back to the depot. That he had to leave early. Doctor’s appointment.
We had a pee stop at the park where we’d eaten lunch the day before. The p
ark with the seesaw table seats. I decided I could go a squirt.
Kevin used the cubicle. I peed at the piss trough. It was an old concrete urinal; clean, dry and unused. I drew random shapes with my pee. A triangle. A squiggle. Then an H. ASH. I’d written her name in piss. I blushed and scribbled it out with my last burst.
Kevin stood in the cubicle making little grunts of effort. I’d finished, shaken three times and tucked myself away and Kevin hadn’t even started to pee. I wet my hands at the sink and as I was stepping through the door back to the van, I heard a trickle. A solitary splash of piss into the toilet.
That was it?
There was a little grunt and another splash. Grunt splash. Grunt splash.
I swung into the van and put my seatbelt on. I hoped Kevin was going to the doctors to see about his stage fright. Or get his piss valve checked.
He came out five minutes later, a few dark drip marks on his overalls. Poor bastard looked like he’d had a tooth removed with his face all screwed up and his eyes narrowed to slits.
We pulled into the depot car park at 2.36 pm. Kevin looked over his shoulder to the rear of the van.
‘Can you smell gas?’
I sniffed and my lungs filled with putrid air. I could smell gas all right but it hadn’t leaked from any bottle. It wasn’t oxy or acetylene or butane or LPG. It was butt gas. It reeked of the septic tank that had done me over the day before.
Kevin’s face cramped as he struggled to hold down a smile.
‘You bastard,’ I groaned, and pinched my nose. ‘That’s disgusting. You need to see a doctor.’
I dived through the door and frantically waved clean air at my face.
Kevin chuckled, and vacated the van himself. ‘Yes. I’m going, I’m going. Only he’s not going to be looking at my bum, thankfully. He’ll be looking at my ankle.’
‘Careful you don’t fart in his surgery or they’ll put you in jail. That would be manslaughter. Worse. If you squeezed it out, that would be murder.’
I went to the back of the van. Kevin opened the rear door and fart gas rolled out onto the ground and straight up my nostrils again. I spun, fanning my face.
Kevin laughed properly that time. Bent over and shook with real happiness. It was a warm, breathy laugh that was deep and kind of musical. It suited the big man and was easy to listen to. He shook his head but still managed a smile when I started collecting the tools with one hand, the other clamped over my nose and mouth.
