by Tanya Moir
I’m lonely, Winstone wanted to text, but it came out, can’t sleep, and Zane must have been awake too because the reply came right back and fifteen minutes later Winstone was up Boundary Road climbing into Zane’s car at the usual spot where the shingle met the seal.
They went to Zane’s room and watched Rio Bravo. Zane’s duvet was white and made of feathers and when he wrapped it around their shoulders it was like being wrapped in a big warm fog where nothing bad could find you. Zane left his arm on Winstone’s shoulders and the weight of it curled him into Zane’s chest. Winstone froze up for a second or two but Zane’s body was soft and relaxed and it wasn’t like a headlock at all. Then Zane ruffled his hair like dads did to their kids on TV, dads with clean shirts and wise eyes and no rollies hanging out of their mouths, and Winstone understood why they did that, because it was gentle and nice like patting a dog and not hard and mean just to mess you up like it was when Bodun did it.
He leaned back against Zane and watched John Wayne ride into view and when he woke up he had no idea where he was and the lights and the TV were off and someone had hold of him and he started to panic but then he remembered. Zane was holding him the way Winstone sometimes held onto Marlene when she slid into his bed and now he knew why she liked it so much and he felt a bit bad that he didn’t do it more often. Zane had his back and his side and the duvet had his front and no one could get him and in fact it was even better than that because he was at Zane’s place and nobody knew he was there or even where Zane’s place was.
He could tell by the way Zane was breathing that he was asleep and Winstone felt him move and his arm slipped forward a bit more. Zane’s arm was warm and heavy, heavy and loose like a sack of sand, and Winstone felt himself sinking, a good kind of sinking, into the bed, the dry sheet, the pillowcases sharp with clean, into the cowboys’ open blue.
There was a noise like the sea and it was Zane’s phone and Zane rolled over and turned it off and then he rolled back and rubbed Winstone’s shoulder and brushed his hair back and spoke quietly into his ear. Hey. Hey mate it’s time to wake up. We’d better get you home.
Winstone pretended to be asleep for a few seconds more because it was nice to be woken that way, soft and slow, and he didn’t want to go home. But he knew Zane was right and they’d better get going because if he got caught sneaking back in, well, he didn’t want to think about that, but it was too late by then and he didn’t feel so warm and sleepy any more.
Okay, he said, and sat up. Zane turned the light on. Winstone didn’t remember getting undressed but he was, and Zane passed him his clothes which were folded up on the chair and he pulled them on and by the time he’d finished Zane had taken off his pyjama bottoms and was back in his jeans and sweatshirt too.
They didn’t speak as they walked down the hall but Zane rested his hand on Winstone’s shoulder and it said everything important. In the garage, Zane switched the automatic light off and before he opened the door Winstone crouched down in the footwell of the car again even though he’d have been surprised if Bic knew anyone in Zane’s street and it was four in the morning anyway but they’d both agreed it was best to be safe. You never knew who was watching.
A couple of nosy dogs were watching, apparently, because they started barking as soon as the garage door went up, but no lights came on in the houses around and when the dogs had stopped the street was silent and empty except for the pools of orange light edged with fog and it hardly looked like any place that Winstone had seen before.
Will you be warm enough? Zane said as they turned into Boundary Road and Winstone said yes and Zane switched the headlights off and they drove the rest of the way in the dark.
The bedroom window was still up. Winstone slid through it and into his bed, and cold and damp as that was it was quite a relief to be there and now that he’d made it he felt pretty pumped. Mission accomplished, no casualties.
Where the fuck have you been? Bodun hissed.
Winstone froze. An ambush. He was surprised the fear hadn’t popped him two metres out of his bed, but he kept his head and stuck to his plan. Where were you? he said.
Out. You little fucker.
Winstone said nothing, but they both knew it was a pact. His heart was ticking like an IED, the racket all up in his ears, and he thought there was no way he could sleep but the next thing he knew his covers were gone and Bodun was up and getting dressed and Bic was yelling get your hand off your dick you filthy little bugger.
From then on Winstone stayed over at Zane’s two or three nights a week, sometimes more, and he got to know the ground between the bedroom window and the end of the shingle so well he could have covered it in his sleep and sometimes it felt like he had. They watched Zane’s entire collection of John Wayne films and then they moved on to the boxed set of Bonanza. They did other stuff too, but Winstone didn’t think too much about that. Zane showed him some other things you did for people you liked, and some things you did for people you more than liked, and it was lucky Winstone liked Zane as much as he did because some of the things were pretty revolting to be honest. Worse than cleaning Marlene. And even though he wanted to do nice things for Zane he didn’t like looking at him while he did them, the way his face went, and there were times Winstone felt a bit sick and he almost didn’t like Zane, but then again there’d been times when he hadn’t liked Marlene that much either. Anyway, that stuff didn’t take long and it made a lot of sense just to get it over and done with. Afterwards Zane went back to being himself and he was happy and pleased and before he turned the lights off they watched Lorne Greene being stern but kind and putting up with all his sons, even Little Joe, and never losing his temper.
One morning there was a new kid on the bus, a kid Marlene’s age, and he was sitting in Winstone’s seat so Winstone took a deep breath and kept his eyes down and slid into the row behind him. WINSTONE HASKETT SUX DICK he read on the back of the seat. They’d carved it right into the plastic, deep, so it would never come off and kids a hundred years from now would read it. And Winstone was amazed all over again, but he didn’t tell Zane this time because he had all the way to school to look at those spiky letters, the depth of them, and the longer he did, the less likely it seemed to him that everybody did it.
WEST
Winstone watched the Friday night headlights cut the falling dark, the erratic parade of them sweeping up the road, veering off, rising and falling over the grass to the huts, arcing around the far side of the dam, appearing and disappearing. They settled in pools shot through with raised moths and dust, criss-crossed by shadows, boxes and chilly bins, kids and dogs and stereos blaring. The first generators started to hum and then the hut windows were lighting up, squares and rectangles spilling over the grass. In the Sliding Door Hut the TV came on. A Highlanders game, by the looks of things, the bright flat green, the scud of blue and gold.
He could hear things being flung open and slammed shut and dropped, the clink of logs, and the wind off the dam brought up the first whiff of woodsmoke. Two dogs ran laps of the Green Camo Hut barking and barking at their own echo.
Winstone liked to keep an eye on the huts on Fridays. It helped to know who was about, how many kids and dogs there were to watch out for. Most of the hut-owners had a routine, stuck to their favourite spots, pissed behind the same rocks, so he knew where they’d be in a given wind. But there was no telling with kids and dogs. They could turn up anywhere.
Each week, more people arrived in the dark and fewer in the daylight. A month ago, even the last to get there had had time for a fish or at least a crawly hunt after they’d unloaded. There’d been barbecues and tables outside and even as the sun pulled out and sucked the heat from the grass they’d filled up the empty dusk with sausage smoke and voices. In his hideout high in the rocks behind the cattle fence Winstone’s mouth had filled with spit and his guts had wrung and he’d thought about Todd and cheese sizzlers. But now all the hut-owners were in a hurry to get inside and light their fires there and he couldn’t se
e what they ate and only the dogs went down to the water.
Another set of headlights made their way up the road, saloon-car low and hesitant, more creeping than sweeping, pausing at every hint of a track, lingering beside the Scout Hut. Lost. But just as Winstone thought it, the car crunched back onto the road and a few metres later swung off it again along the track to the Red Hut. A station wagon, not a saloon. He caught the blue glow of a seatback TV, the silhouette of luggage.
There were people in the Red Hut already, the old man and his wife, and they came out and stood in front of it, shading their eyes, watching the headlights coming. The station wagon pulled up and two people got out and the sound came up on the wind, the clunk of car doors, voices with the words blown out, happy and excited. The back of the car stayed closed and the TV stayed on, flickering fast and bright, great swirling explosions of pink, and Winstone wished he was close enough to see what was so much better than two old people and hot food and a fire in a hut on a lake in the back of beyond in darkness.
There was more talking and laughing and gathering of bags and somebody opened the back of the car and spoke and it was a woman and there was music and wheedling and whining in a girl’s voice and then other voices and the tiniest hint of a fight and the door closed again and the flicker went on and the others walked away all loaded up with their stuff and went inside.
Winstone watched the colours leap and shift on the dark and he tried to imagine what they made up and he thought of a whirl of princess skirts on a ballroom floor. In a few seconds they stopped and there was just steady blue and then black and the car door opened and the inside light came on. The girl did something to the back of the seat and slid out and shut the door and she crossed the patches of window light in her gumboots and skirt and went into the Red Hut. She did it fast, but not so fast Winstone couldn’t see she had something in her hand and he felt pretty sure that it was an iPad.
He waited until the guy in the Green Camo Hut shut his dogs in the back of the ute for the night. Then he went down.
The Red Hut was maybe Winstone’s favourite hut. It had a sooty stone fireplace for sitting beside as well as a range for cooking on and brown chipboard walls with pictures of fish hanging on them in frames and the curtains were red and blue and if he narrowed his eyes just right it looked like The Ponderosa. He liked the old man, too, who had a round head and big eyes and was bushy and silvery like Lorne Greene. When the old man went fishing, he even wore a tan vest, and Winstone had learned a lot from following him and seeing where the big fish hid up in the wind and what they liked to eat and how to get them.
Tonight the old man and his wife were drinking. Whisky, he thought. Something brown, anyway. They had it in flash glasses and they were sipping it slow, not knocking it back like Grunt sculling Jim Beam from a plastic cup, but nevertheless it was disappointing. Lorne Greene didn’t do that. Winstone had presumed the bottle he’d seen in their cupboard was there in case of emergency, for sedating patients and cleaning out wounds. It had tasted like it. But the visiting man and woman were drinking it too, and he started to get a bit worried about the girl because the glasses were big and there wasn’t much left in the bottom of them.
It was dangerous, of course it was, to be this close to the huts, looking in. Wedged like a skink into a crevice halfway up the Red Hut’s sheltering rock, fingers splayed, the cold black lap of the dam just behind and the electric spill of the hut before him. More dangerous still to slip down when the old man’s back was turned, skirt the light and settle in the thick dark underneath the water tank stand. To climb its cross-brace and peer in through the bedroom window. He wouldn’t have done it except for the glow. And he didn’t really have any plan except to see what she was watching.
Angry Birds.
Alicia, the woman called, come in here.
The colours stopped. And she just left it. Left it sitting right there on top of the sleeping bag under the window which Winstone happened to know had no stay and could be opened with pretty much any blade of a Leatherman tool if you had one in your pocket.
He’d never been so close to an iPad.
Shut the door please, the woman said, and the girl – Alicia – did.
Winstone asked himself what John Wayne would do, but he didn’t like the answer to that, and Doc was undecided because it didn’t seem right to steal from a girl but on the other hand the girl had a lot of stuff like a hut and Lorne Greene so she didn’t need an iPad, and Winstone didn’t have time to ask anyone else because she might be back for it any second.
Knife or screwdriver? Knife. Longer blade, better leverage. Slip it into the gap. Angle in, then ease it back. Thin crackle of spiderwebs. Coming to him slowly, wood dry and spider-sticky on his fingertips, don’t drop it like last time whatever you do.
The bedroom door flung open. Hitting the bulge in the floor with a whump and sticking there, shuddering like an arrow.
Mum!
Winstone somehow back in the dark under the tank stand and the iPad still on the bed. The urge to run very strong. He was pretty sure he could make it, too, through the light up the slope across the road vault the cattle fence he could do that couldn’t he he could he was fast down into the gully but don’t run straight don’t lead them back make a target let them see where you go you’ll have to zigzag like a rabbit.
There’s something out there, the girl said.
The knife still in his hand.
The woman’s voice, What is it Ally?
I saw something.
Where?
Outside the window. There.
What was it?
I don’t know, the girl said. It went so fast. I think it was a kitten.
It was a while before Winstone came out from under the water tank, but when he did it was at a gallop, fast and straight, quick as Charlie Sheen or the Sundance Kid or any outlaw with the law on his tail, and he didn’t stop until he was back in the cave staring hard at the dark behind his eyelids.
His lungs burned and his breath was coming too hard for his chest and he tried to talk it down, Whoa there, easy now. Find a rhythm. Clip clop. Nothing happened. Nobody saw. Clip clop. It was all okay.
COOPER AND THE KID rode into town. They rode a main street that might have been cut by the wind and in that bluster of dust and skirts and wagons and weeds they alone moved slow, the brims of their hats tilted over their eyes, their bandanas up over their noses. The town was as wide as the road and the porch and the store to its left and its right and all around it, close, the mountains banked like settled smoke, last year’s snow grit-grey still on the shale below a brittle new white dust. How a town came to be there and why wasn’t easy to see, but if it had been a mistake it didn’t matter much, since the elements seemed likely to erase it before long.
They could hear the wind fretting away at the boards, rattling signboards and slamming shop doors, and through the small slit between hat and bandana the Kid watched it hurry the folks of the town about their business. To his right, a man in a doeskin coat was loading a wagon with grain. Across the street a door banged loud as a gun and the Kid’s hand went to his hip as he turned, but there on the porch above him was only a girl in a blue dress. The wind was whipping up the ends of her shawl and her hair and stinging her face but he could see her eyes, which were blue as her dress, and they followed him as he rode by. The Kid was so busy looking he forgot to tip his hat and it wasn’t until he had passed that he recollected his mistake and looked back to make it good and as he did so a man stepped in front of the girl and he was all in black like a cloud across the sun.
Cooper reined in beside the hotel and they sat their horses there until a raggedy boy ran out and took them. Inside the hotel a tall clock was striking whatever hour of the afternoon it was and to one side of the clock was a desk and a round-bellied clerk in vest and spectacles and he looked at the Kid and Cooper and they looked at him and they all waited for the clock to finish so they could make themselves heard and while they did the Kid and Cooper unt
ied their bandanas and shook the dust from their hats and wiped their faces.
A room, Cooper said.
Names, said the clerk, and Cooper gave two and the Kid looked up at the blue flowered paper rising over the stairs and didn’t contradict him.
They followed the clerk up to a room with more flowers on the walls and the beds and white lace across the window. The bed was soft and deep and the Kid lay back with his arms behind his head and the clerk eyed the Kid’s dusty heels on his flowers and said there’s a place just across the street if you boys want a bath and Cooper said well he didn’t mind if he did it had been a while.
I’ll do some askin around over there, Coop said, when the door was shut. Find out if anybody seen em.
The Kid stared at a blue flower on the wall and it made him think of the girl and he got up and went to the window.
Go easy, Coop said, if you go out. We don’t wanna spook nobody.
The Kid leaned on the window frame and looked over the lace and listened to Cooper leave. He watched the dusk sink off the mountains into the street until the wind guttered under its weight and the glass became still and then he put on his coat and his hat and he went downstairs.
He let his coat hang over his gun so a passer-by would hardly know it was there and his hands were in his pockets. He walked in the soft mounting dark and above his hunched shoulders store windows glowed yellow and gold and he saw a woman throw back her head and laugh and a man knot up a big paper parcel with string and another try on a hat while a boy in the window ran his hand over the tooling of a saddle.
