Loving, Faithful Animal

by Josephine Rowe

  No worries, plenty of room here.

  And you won’t, y’know. You won’t either …?

  What do I want with your fucking Viet love letters? So that both men could laugh. Not real or easy laughter but close enough, and together they shifted the bastard thing from out of Jack’s Ford and around the side of the house. Jack had already known him for a yes, then, arriving with it on the Ford’s backseat. Les himself already sensing that an ask was coming, that this was about something when he saw Jack pull into the drive, or else why wouldn’t he have just walked over as usual?

  You got this thing up and down from the roof on your own?

  Don’t ask. Think I earned myself a hernia.

  Les looked at the jerry green footlocker, remembered it hunkering in the hallway at Dad and Mim’s. Dinged-up and paint-spattered, the strap snapped away, Puckapunyal stencilled in white, hurried work.

  Want this inside or out?

  Damned if I care.

  Les didn’t ask: Why not just get rid of it then? Instead pointed with his chin through the back door and into the spare bedroom, where there was nothing but an empty aquarium, and several decades of National Geographic.

  Would anyone know it to look at?

  Might, Jack said, and so they threw a sheet over it, piling on a few stacks of National Geo for good measure.

  There you go—loveseat!

  How long since you looked in it?

  Dunno. Years.

  You even know what’s in there?

  Yep.

  Everything?

  Just about.

  Like what?

  A wigwam for a goose’s bridle.

  You mean it’s none of my friggen business …

  None of your friggen business.

  Les figured it sure as hell looked to be his business, from where he was standing, but left it at that. The padlock would’ve been simple enough to get around, just a pin tumbler, but it would be easier still to take the lid off its hinges. Which he nearly did, some hours later, hovering about it with a Phillips head, feeling like a bee or a hummingbird, before thinking better of it.

  Now that there’s permission, he’s even less keen. Since Jack’s phone call, he’s been steering clear of the spare room, whether he needs something from it or no. Has felt the trunk throbbing in there, and never more loudly than while Jack’s wife sat at his table, turning the sugar bowl around in her hands, having already asked what she’d come there to ask but not knowing how to best get away.

  Finally in the room with it, he realises he’s still listening for something, realises how absurd that is. He leans his weight on the cutters and the lock jumps apart. Les steels himself for horror. Gruesome trophies, souvenirs. Leathered, unidentifiable flesh threaded onto bootlaces. Teeth and hair. He’d heard tell—well, Jack had told him—of how they’d smuggled back all kinds of bizarre mementos: creatures, both living and taxidermied; all manner of crude weaponry; virility potions of exotic plant matter and ground-up crawlies. And keepsakes of their own dreadful devising.

  But inside the trunk there are no such atrocities, or at least nothing that speaks of them in any language he can understand. Opening the lid he’s met with a mildewous fug; the must of jungle or roofspace, he can’t say which. On top, a chemist’s envelope of photographs: twenty-four prints that show, over and over, the same six-by-four-inch rectangle of milky blackness. A film that hadn’t been threaded properly in the first place, Les guesses. Had stayed curled up snug while the shutter snapped on god-knows-what. Beneath the photographs there’s other paper paraphernalia. A few pamphlets. Manuals. Soldier’s Handbook for Defense against Chemical and Biological Operations and Nuclear Warfare. An Agent Orange info card. A sketch on the back of an onionskin leaflet. This was Jack, he saw, messing around with a rifle, either dismantling it or putting it back together. A few letters from home. One from himself:

  I reckon Dad and Mim have already told you about the NT trip. Practically prehistoric, this place, crawling with dragons. Goannas, I mean. Have you ever seen those pricks up close? Last night we watched one go after a chicken, and it was carnage.

  He remembers that time, but not writing about it. Remembers who he’d been including in that we but had otherwise seen fit to leave unmentioned; that tall Darwin girl, Elena, her sweat like dry wild sage, like dust rising from a narrow track above the sea. Commando under her damp Levis when he finally shucked her out of them. He had known, he’d thought, what he was doing, kneeling on her crumpled jeans, the high ridges of her hipbones cupped under his palms. But she’d laughed up there, above him, amused but not unkind. Said, I’m not a mango, sweetheart, and he’d tried to rein himself in a bit.

  She’d been the one to tell, about his mother. Or perhaps the need to tell had arrived, and she’d simply been there to hear it, the blackened shells of pilfered abalone piled onto a sheet of newspaper between them and a tallboy of rich stout passed back and forth.

  There were only two years stretching between the first memory of his mother and the last. All of it badly vignetted, interspersed with a great lot of highway. Riding in the backseat, being handed back salty packets of things, paper-wrapped things. Quick leg-stretches around country war memorials. A police officer rapping a torch against the driver’s side window, Can’t sleep here, love. And her voice soft outside the car, which had meant that they could, alright, this once. The two of them at the edge of the river that final bright hot night, trying to scoop out stars with their hands.

  He had understood, at the bridge, what his mother meant to do. She’d turned around to look at him there, in the middle seat, had given him that conspiratorial smile she kept for him only. Her eyes brilliant as living coral, and he had not been afraid.

  The rest is not of his own remembering; has since either been told to him, or he’s overheard. How the river was tidal, and low enough at that time to do no great harm. That a man out walking his dog had seen it all happen, and run down the embankment after them. That she was a bit cut up, and Les was a wee bit shaken, of course, poor lamb, but at the end of the day … And it’s a miracle, really …

  And so to his father then, and to Jack, and Mim, who had cause enough to hate the sight of him, but never seemed to, or never showed it, having perhaps learnt of his existence years before and being, as she was, a pragmatic sort. He in turn would think of her, always, as Dad’s Woman. Some residual, senseless loyalty he could never argue himself away from.

  They’d never taken him to the home she’d been put away in, his mother. It wouldn’t be healthy. So said Mim. And later, when he was old enough and able, he hadn’t gone himself, and she had died in there, not too long before he’d written Jack about the goannas, leaving out his mother and things he’d recalled for the girl, for himself, amidst the fire-roasted abalone and the companionable stench of charred shell.

  And it’s true what they say, about the beaches here. Jellyfish season! Saw this little tacker just about drowned in vinegar … Anyway, hope the wildlife’s friendlier where you are.

  He folds his letter back into its envelope, and tucks it back amongst those from Dad and Mim, from Jody and Nan and whoever else. Further down in the trunk there’s camping gear, tools, a rubber groundsheet. Random women’s things. An NVA shirt still packed in brittle cellophane. A crudely whittled chain of three complete links, with a fourth cracked open. Any medals, Les knows, are long since lost to hock shops, to drink; whatever’s in here is all there is to make sense of who his brother was for that humid, useless year.

  The set of jungle greens are folded neat at the bottom, keeping their creases. In the pocket of the trousers he finds an envelope, printed with the address of their Warrandyte house. The moss green weatherboard where Mim still lives, alone now. Recording old movies off the television and talking up at the possums in the roof, as though the creatures are saintly. Foul smells and stains of them seeping down through the plaster of th
e ceiling, causing a putrid cartography.

  They’re not hurting anyone! she’d hissed, when Les had offered to remove them. Humanely, he’d promised. But she wouldn’t have a bar of it.

  That address. Stamp of a Roberts painting, rams being sheared. Return address to one R Fox, number of a post office box in Bundaberg, QLD. Too heavy to be the passport, and in any case postmarked June of ’74, with the seal left intact, untouched. Jack hadn’t been curious then, must’ve known all along what was in there. Or else hadn’t wanted to.

  Les studies the careful print of his brother’s name. Considers steaming open the envelope to discover what its rectangular bulk might be, but instead—bugger it—slides his thumbnail under the gum-sealed lip and rips it ragged. The cassette tape he shakes out is half played through, labelled in the same neat hand. CB (May) 1968. First Light. That’s all. No letter keeping it company.

  The only working deck he has these days is the one in the truck’s dash, and even that is sketchy. He sets the cassette aside.

  Unfurling his brother’s shirt, he feels a greasy dampness settled in the cotton, and the weight of dogtags tucked into the breast pocket. He leaves the tags clinking there, slides his arm down into the sleeve, cautious, as though something might’ve taken up residence. One of Ruby’s infamous redbacks. But his hand appears at the other end, unbitten, the cuff falling inches short of where it should, halfway to the elbow; he stands nearly a full foot taller than Jack, when he’s actually standing straight. Had his mother been a tall woman? He couldn’t remember. There are a couple of photographs he was given, but none that gave any frame of reference, none with anyone he knows. None with his and Jack’s father, of course. But Les believes she must have been. A stately woman.

  There’s no mirror in the house save the one hung up to shave in front of, a disc that could show him little more than his jaw and the safety razor moving over it, carving swathes through soap lather. In any case, he can see as much as he cares to, reflected in the darkened window; the room and himself standing in it, in his brother’s too-small shirt, looking enough of a goose.

  Would he have gone, if his numbers came up? If your balls got yanked. He might have. Or he might have just gone bush, left the silly buggers to fight in a war that had nothing to do with them. But then maybe his hands really would’ve kept him out. Conscientious cowardice, people thought. And there were better, more courageous stories he might’ve invented—shark attacks, gambling debts—but he let them have that one. Can’t pull a trigger without a trigger finger. Because though they thought him strange for it, or worse than strange, the truth would’ve had him straitjacketed, loony-binned.

  It was never a simple matter of dislike. They looked alright. He supposed they’d be fine on someone else, wriggling at the end of a different pair of hands. That was just it, though—they weren’t his. And they disgusted him. That was the simplest way to explain it.

  He disliked his voice, at that age, and still does—how it rises and wheels away from him sometimes, the way a very young man’s might. Shrill. But he’s never felt the compulsion to sabotage his throat, to ruin his vocal cords gargling drain cleaner or what-have-you. He might have smoked his way to a more pleasing gruffness, that would have been easy enough. But truth is that he could never be arsed. It was never what you could call an imperative. He just speaks as little as any given situation might allow. Understands that people who do not consider him a placid and patient man think him a humourless, suspiciously private man, and he’s never taken pains to influence them either way.

  The fingers are another story. The fingers were an imperative. The inversion of a phantom limb, something that should not be there, but you look down and there it is—there they were—and each time the fact of them perturbed him.

  He was only, what, a little shy of twenty at the time. In a way he’s proud of himself, that kid, how sensible he’d been about it, understanding it wasn’t a thing to rush through. Measure twice, cut once. He’d given himself thirty days to chicken out, marking them off on a pharmacy calendar for 1967, a photograph of the Daintree Rainforest that flipped over to the Great Ocean Road at day twenty-three. October, November. That final week of red-pencilled crosses picketing the white boxes beneath the picture of limestone seastacks.

  When the day came he leapt on it, volunteering himself for a morning of clearing and splitting deadfall on Nan and Pop’s seventy acres before fire season swept through.

  You’re a love, Mim said, and packed him a lunch.

  The right and then the left, he’d decided the night before. Was there a workable logic to that? He was right-handed, and figured that the second go would be shakier, that there’d be the shock to contend with. An unsteady right was surely more reliable than an unsteady left. Well, he didn’t know if that was so, but he didn’t want to risk buggering it up. Didn’t want to just wound the hateful things; wanted them gone, both. The first one and then the second. The right and then the left. That easy. He’d his lunchbox filled with ice and a flask filled with Bundaberg, and a couple of lacker bands he’d taken from around a bunch of asparagus. Sparrowgrass, he said to himself, wondering if this should be funny as he waited for the skin below the knuckle to turn bruise-coloured.

  The sound came as unexpectedly bloodless, the hatchet biting neat through bone and sinew and sticking fast in the redgum tree stump. He had thought he’d feel faint, but no. Just plunged his hand into the waiting lunchbox, half ice and half water now. The ex-index finger rolled off the redgum chop-block and lay by its lonesome in the dirt, and Les kicked a clump of leaves over so that he wouldn’t have to look at it there.

  A kind of calm flooded in to fill the space, immediate and bodily. The right thing after all, the right thing. Or maybe it was only shock. Whatever it was, it was useable.

  With his left hand he lit and held one of the cigarettes he’d rolled before the act, and it was the last time he’d ever hold a smoke that way, though it was no longer even natural to do so. He’d stopped using the offending fingers whenever possible, and it had become his habit—when nobody was watching him too closely—to hold a cigarette, or a pencil, or his tableware pinched between thumb and middle finger, ring finger taking up the brace-work. But it seemed important, this idea of last (he’d understood himself then, already, as a man of small rituals), so he smoked in his old way for a couple of puffs, watching the left index finger losing colour and warmth below the lacker-band tourniquet. Then he shifted his smoke to the edge of his mouth and planted the left hand down starfish-like on the tree stump.

  Les shook his right hand from the icewater and, gripping the hatchet handle with the remaining fingers and thumb, was aware of the unfamiliar distribution of tension; felt the new span there, and compensative work being done by his wrist muscles. Beautiful.

  All the time in the world, he steadied himself, though in truth he’d stopped feeling that there was. The sense of urgency was not attached to his own feared squeamishness, but to the possibility—the fair possibility—that someone might happen on him out there, by accident or design, and would intervene.

  No-one did.

  When it was all done he made sure to fling both of them deep into the scrub, not caring where they landed, lest someone send him back to hunt for them, to force him to have them sewn back on. A warm drizzle started falling then, turning fast to drenching rain, and it seemed further testament to the rightness of the decision—for who would expect him to cut timber in a storm?—and he drove himself the twenty klicks to St John of God Hospital in a downpour, feeling he’d just gotten away with a heist. A good wind that day, certainly, he could’ve told that Swan Valley vineyard worker, years later, if he hadn’t by then learnt to keep his stories on the dark side of his teeth.

  *

  Light coming into the sky now, turning it crepuscular. That isn’t a colour but it should be, Les thinks. Crepuscular blue, crepuscular pink. People would know what you meant. Something pis
cine about it. Isn’t just him who thinks so. The sun’s setting and rising, it’s always the colour of—always has something to do with, in any case—fish. Salmon, that one’s easy. Or the undersides of mahi-mahi, the gradients of blue-green-yellow. He feels drowned by it all. By the light spilling into the new year, and by measuring the distance between his own understandings and the understandings of other people.

  He folds Jack’s shirt along its old creases and returns it to the trunk, to its matching trousers. Everything else still laid out on the carpet to show the order it had been exhumed in. Wartime strata. He fits everything back as it was, lingering over a tortoiseshell comb, running his thumb over the teeth to hear the purr. When the failed photographs are back on top, he slams the lid on it all. Only the cassette is held back, radiating with weird heat in the back pocket of his jeans.

  No passport. Jack would only be getting so far, for now.

  Halfway out to the truck, crunching down the drive, there come the rabbiting shots again; a patter of them at some distance, then a few pocks nearer by, as if by way of reply. The whine of dirt bikes like thin wire strung between them. Les pauses there in the drive, listening, the cassette feeling like a wad of too much cash, then he turns instead for his backyard, the bottom fenceline, where sometimes needy things—old foxes, lame crows, a cancerous feral cat—will come stealthily from the grass to take whatever small offerings he might leave there for them.

  Along the ridge, he sees them: two bikes stitching back and forth. A marksman to each rider, sitting pillion, taking pot shots into the long grass. Or no, not pot shots. He sees now and then the tap to the rider’s shoulder or thigh, a signal to slow. They’ve got something out there, though nothing he can see. Then he does, or believes he does; there’s the path of its flight, sashaying of the seeded grass giving its game away.

  What are you devil-shits after?

  He thinks then of the feral cat, the grey face gnarled in tumour. Its wet breathing and the terrible snacking sound of its eating, when he was close enough to hear. He figured he’d shoot it himself: when he thought it time. The thing was determined, you could see it, to live, and he didn’t think it his own place to tell it otherwise. Not yet, at least, but anyway not like this. Though all along part of him has reckoned it would turn up shot one day, his cat. Strung up on someone’s barbwire in the usual manner taken with foxes and the like, both trophy and warning at once.