Wedding Bush Road

by David Francis

  “He’s not Walker’s son for nothing,” I say. “Just get him off the place. Take him with you.”

  Bobby looks confused, squints at Sharen for details.

  My father snuffs at Bobby who doesn’t know who’s fathered whom. “She’s a wheelbarrow full of surprises, our Sharen,” my father says, tries for a diffusing laugh, but his words incite a new glare from Sharen. She retreats to the truck and climbs up into the passenger side. “Fuck yous’all,” she says, slamming the door. Bobby looks on, a sudden spectator.

  “She’ll keep you on your toes, Bobby,” my father says, his smile weak, lopsided, a display of silver-capped molars. As he turns to me I wonder if it’s more than the usual water welling in his runny eyes.

  “Someone saw Walker down at the caravan park,” says Bobby.

  That strikes each of us silent. Except for Sharen who stares out the truck window, down into the dust.

  ANGLING THE QUEEN Anne chair under the doorknob and wedging the windows shut, I collapse on the bed. The evening heat leaks in as I listen, think of that boy climbing all over things, blowing dirt in our faces while we sleep. This house where nothing locks, silent now but for the crickets and the snort of a horse from out near the pond, the echo of dogs from the greyhound kennel on Finks Road. The gruesome thought of Walker.

  Out the window, the dull black shadows of the cypress trunks and distant lights from the refinery at Lysachts. And the photo of Isabel, left on my pillow with the glass cracked, brings on the need to hear her, but it’s the middle of the night back there. We could have had Christmas with her mother. That little walkup off Westchester Avenue in the Bronx. How her grandmother Rosario understands English but refuses to speak it. I remember her kneeling in the candlelight, petals on the white lace cloth, and the cross with Jesus festooned with beads and a bowl of grapes and bright plastic flowers. The odd thing was the urn of feathers. Isabel said it was nothing; her grandmother had once been a priestess of Palo Mayombe, some old voodoo thing. She had small mirrors and a cauldron of water. When I was a kid she cast out demons, Isabel said, consulted the dead through patterns in tea leaves and slices of fruit. Only later did Isabel let on her grandmother was probably casting me out, didn’t want any more white men infiltrating. I looked too much like Isabel’s father.

  Don’t panic, Isabel assured me. I don’t believe in the color of gods. But she still has her superstitions—throwing a bucket of water into the wind for the New Year, her own altar with pictures of Amma the hugging guru, and her grandmother’s stories passed down: the Chupacabra that sucked the blood of calves and goats and children, leaving nothing but their carcasses with puncture wounds.

  She told me how her grandfather was once a well-ranked general and they gave him the moniker “The Chupacabra of Caracas.” He had a son, Isabel’s uncle, who dressed up as a girl and wore bright makeup, and one day got brave enough to parade himself in front of his father. The general beat him so badly the son ran away and her grandmother never saw him again—a teenage travesty on the streets or “disappeared” by her grandfather to clear the family name.

  Me staying out of sight, the snort from the paddock and I sense it out there in the dark. Not just the three black horses down by the pump shed, but someone out there, me crouched low as a lizard, and I know the shape of him, feed in his hand and a halter. Walker come rustling, one hand outstretched like a tongue in the night and horses will go missing. Walker come for Reggie too and my breath gone cold. The big one sniffs at a carrot and Walker try to catch him with the rope, one then another, to load them on the secret truck and drive them down for sale. Bairnsdale or the knackery at Poowong. I know those ropes. Horses there in the night and gone in the morning. I know the sound of Walker’s whisper.

  “I know you’re out there,” he says to me, voice low and pretending he’s nice. Wants to drag me back to Yarram but I gotta hide myself from that life, threats to send me off to Rhon Rhon, a prison down there that he went to, but it doesn’t exist anymore.

  “Come help me, Reggie.” His whisper through the dark but he won’t catch that gelding, not without me. “We just gotta get them to the place off the highway near the egg farm. Truck’s coming. I need you, son.” About to put the halter round the big mare’s neck but she backs away. “Look at these buggers,” says Walker. “Dodge the three of them together and we’ll have a truck of our own.” The way he always talks about us “doing business.” You and me, Reggie. Walker and son. And the mare eats out of his hand again.

  I reach for a stone and throw it low and then the dog comes out of nowhere so the mare she spins on him and gallops off, all of them turn from his carrots and rope and go.

  “You little bastards,” he calls to me and to the dog. “I’ll catch you too, don’t fuckin’ worry.”

  But I lie here in grass and dirt with my own breath coz I’m not his prisoner boy no more, don’t do his rustling, not here not nowhere. Riding horses bareback through the night to wait on roadsides or in the room in Yarram when I pretend to sleep and he tells me I’m his precious little bastard and how we make a business work together but it’s just because he’s drunk and knows the animals trust me.

  His torchlight sweeps near me so I get up and run with the dog and the horses, but me, I’m low and silent. He won’t catch me this time.

  A PANADEINE MUTES the ache in my hand but the gallop of horses and the distant greyhounds howling in their cages make me restless, sparking an old desire to steal up to the city. Get drunk on rum and Coke and circle the curbs around Grey Street and Barkly waiting to spot a St. Kilda girl who might suit me. Thoughts like that make me want to take the Prius to Tullamarine, catch the Qantas flight in the morning—be in LA the same morning and rent a car there and drive up the coast. Esalen by midafternoon.

  Almost asleep when I hear pushing at the chair that holds the door, a knocking. My mother whispers my name.

  I wrench the chair free from the latch and see her standing there disoriented, folded into her nightgown. “Pip’s disappeared,” she says.

  I get up and look down the dark hallway. “He’s probably on the veranda,” I say. “In his bed.”

  My mother wipes her eyes, gummed-up and watery. “When I woke I got lost in my room,” she says. “I was crawling about on the floor.”

  I turn on the hall light, fearing the boy might be slouched in the fanback chair, or in the pew, waiting. “I’ll find him,” I say. “You go back to bed.”

  As I walk down to the living room, I take my grandmother’s knotted mulberry cane from among the shooting sticks and umbrellas that sprout from the hallstand. Then I see the cane that Reggie made for her, last spotted at the sluice gates, returned, but I am less surprised by such mysteries now. The boy must have followed us down the town.

  Through the curtains into the shadows of the dark enclosed veranda, I make out Pip’s small canvas bed, an empty burrow of blankets. The doors are shut. The dog is gone.

  Barefoot with the cane, I slip into the night, call Pip’s name in the powder-lit garden. The cypress trees creak like ships. The sounds so distinct and the quietness is scary, the sense of that boy. I hear the word pernicious in my head. In LA risks are everywhere but somehow I feel safer there. Here there are no witnesses, just the mute regard of the trees, and the dull acceptance of the animals. This place I so often conjure when I close my eyes and dream.

  I head past the compost pit and stand on the stile. The air is black as iron as if the night is dead, the shadows of the ibis roosting in the trees like folded tents. An old Welsh pony raises its dished face from grazing, a pony I remember. Vonita. I climb down and put my arm around her thick bay neck and scan the shadowy distance. No sign of the dog, just the moon that hems a great raft of clouds with an edge of light, the bare bones of distant hills. The pony’s smell is familiar, musty and salty, and the night is warm and high, suddenly lit up by the barefaced moon.

  My soles brush through the dry paspalum. I should be in boots; my feet were once tough before these years in
loafers and wingtips, lawyer shoes. I’d be out in the night as a boy, fear and freedom running through me indistinguishably, the chance of snakes in the grass. For all I know, I’m being tracked by the boy across the cool gray sand to the rabbit warren. I head on down near the Lagoon Paddock gate, the breath tight in my chest, eyes on my footfalls, and the cane in front of me.

  I swing up onto the corner gate with barely a sound from the chain link, and land easily on the other side. I could probably still swing up onto a horse, but my body is achy from the ladder, and the hand I’ve forgotten to favor begins to throb. The incinerated car lies ahead, a low monument. Moving through the night toward the three black horses. That dog when it goes hunting and forgets its name. My underarms sweaty as I cross through the ti tree and over near Sharen’s fence, as though it’s where I was headed all along.

  I don’t knock, just push the front door open and stand in the entry hall, stare into the living room. No Reggie, just Sharen on a blanket and cushions on the empty boards, a pale sheet pulled up around her. The painted wall above her. She rises up abruptly, a quick sound in her throat as she hugs her arms to her knees in the shadows.

  “What you want?”

  I feel the carved grip of the cane in my hand. A bruise on her cheek seems to shine in the moonlight. “Pip’s disappeared.”

  She looks cautious; her green river eyes and a hand on her heart as if for protection. “Do you want help?” She looks almost innocent in the dark, the sheet off one bare shoulder, but I’m not sure what I want. Her surf-bleached hair about her face, a small tattoo on her upper arm, she clasps herself to cover her bruises. “Ruthie must be worried,” she says and I study her. Pretty once, and in a weathered leathery way still. I can see Reggie in the shape of her mouth and eyes. There’s no doubting he’s hers.

  She stands, struggling to stay covered, tucking the sheet under her armpits; she reaches down for a pair of red denim shorts and pulls them on, facing the window. “Give me a sec,” she says, but as she grabs her gingham shirt, the sheet falls and I see the narrow curve of her back, a glimpse of a breast, her attempt at modesty. Makes me want to move closer. She’d smell musty as old hay, musky, so different from Isabel, lucerne to freesias and rose.

  “What happened to Bobby?” I ask.

  “He was afraid his wife would find out,” she says, buttoning her blouse. She looks down at my bare feet, the thistle burrs on my pant legs. “You gone native?”

  Searching her eyes for something, a part of me that wants her just to stay undressed, to kneel and be near her, and I wonder how different I am from my father, from men like Bobby Genoni. I feel different from myself, back here, out here, as though I’m near the end of something.

  Clasping the walking stick, I stay in the doorway, the soles of my feet on the boards; my plastered hand begins its ache. “What am I doing here?” I ask.

  Picking up a worn-out Blundstone boot, Sharen stops and turns, pushes her hair from her eyes. “No accidents.”

  I look about the emptied room, the words on the stippled wall. The pile of clothes and blanket, so far from how it had been. No inlaid table or grandmother’s chairs; she’s left herself with no bed. I think of Isabel’s Frette sheets from the outlets at Morongo, a quilted satin comforter. “I need to get back,” I say, look out into the faintness.

  “Wait,” says Sharen and I can hear her slipping on her other boot.

  I step into the color-blind eye of the night. The constellations spangle light across the gray grass, past the windmill and all the way back to the big house. “Pip,” I call as if I’m calling myself. I try to remember my real life, what I do. Securities laws, the “blue sky” surveys, treatment of debt under the laws of every state and Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands. A row of Zegna suits, a high-rise office with a view, a 401(k) and benefits; all of it incongruous under the breadth of this sky. The sound of Sharen shutting the garden gate, following. She shouts the dog’s name so loudly the three black horses raise their heads. The simultaneous pricking of ears and they’re trotting to us, spanking through the grass. Sharen’s white pony now follows them, a new disciple, as they break into a canter.

  “They scare me, those big ones,” says Sharen.

  I reach behind me to assure her, feel the bareness of her arm. “Stay close,” I say as the three of them come to a halt just feet away, puffing, heads rising up in alert. The baldy-faced mare steps forward, extends her neck to sniff me, the air too warm to mist her breath. “Hello, girl,” I say, gently reach out my good hand and rub her velvet nose. She nuzzles my neck and I let her, her nostrils on my throat, whorls on her forehead. Then Sharen’s pony pushes in and there’s squealing and they scatter then stop in their tracks. The bigger gelding stands aloof in the dark, suspicious, its mane growing thick and almost straight up. “That’s the one that spooks me,” she says and as she says the words, the horse snorts, wheels on its haunches, and all of them take off, thundering across the moon-dappled meadow. Together we watch the shadows galloping, and from nowhere the dog appears, haring after the horses through the grass with the moon on its back. The dog that never chases stock.

  “Little bugger,” says Sharen, calls the dog off as if it’s hers, but the dog races on like a greyhound let out of a cage. The night is the only one listening.

  I LEAD THE dog home through the dark with my belt looped through his collar. My mother delights in dogs that are deaf to instruction and then come back all proud and smiley.

  At the windmill, the dog’s still panting. He only stopped chasing when those horses turned in their tracks to strike at him, then he took refuge under a boxthorn and came straight to me. As I let him drink at the horse trough, I hear the same strange hoot of the owl. High on the edge of the tank is a shadow. “You up there?” I ask.

  A laugh is laced with something akin to mocking. Ten feet up, a knee to his chest with his skinny arms wrapped around it. A silhouette of twisted hair.

  “Why do you like to be up so high?”

  “Safer,” he says. No shirt even at night and the moonlight on his open face, one dusty foot dangles down the lichen-covered bricks of the tank. “Gotta keep an eye out.” His glistening eyes stare out toward the distant window lit on the hill, my mother waiting. “You know she shouldn’t be up there alone.” He lets both legs hang and spits into the tank, hums the way my mother does as if it’s how he soothes himself, and the fins of the windmill creak. “Walker’s around,” he says.

  “What’s he likely to do?”

  “Wants to take me back.”

  The dog begins whining as I lead him home through the warm slices of night, the groan of a truck without lights rumbling along Genoni’s Road.

  WEDNESDAY

  “C’morn, C’morn.”

  I wake to the call from down in the Boy’s Paddock flats and it has me rising up from the bed to draw the senator’s curtains that never quite close. This life proceeds without me. A bright stroke of daylight and a view of my father summoning the herd of old ponies that live near the house, his call echoing up as I walk outside in my boxers to pee. Last night feels somehow distant, the pain dissolving from my hand as I stand on the edge of the veranda like I did as a kid, making patterns in the lawn.

  My father hobbles through the distant capeweed in his gumboots, still hollering at the geriatric ponies that ignore him. Then one raises its head and begins to trot stiffly, followed by another, and the elderly geldings thread past, their movements pottering, not pummeling the earth as they used to or as those black horses did last night. They’re far away on the Lagoon Paddock rise, lined up as kings, as the brood of rickety ponies disappears over the hill to the yards by the sheds, my father left far in their wake. It makes me think of running brumbies up past Briagalong, my father stopping at a waterhole with his horse’s neck stretched down to drink. Taking fright at a branch that cracked, it leapt out into the middle of the water. We laughed at my father then realized the horse couldn’t swim, panicked and sinking, its eyes rolled high in its head.
In the turmoil of dragging the panic-struck horse to land, we forgot my father couldn’t swim either, floundering on his own in his oilskin coat. We had to help haul him out too, saved by the wax in his Driza-Bone overcoat. He’d broken his hip for the first time.

  The phone rings and it has me rushing inside, through the mean glare of the morning. I hear my mother’s “hairlo . . . hairlo” as I open the rattling sitting room door, “Whoever it is can’t hear,” my mother says, handing over the receiver as if it’s a grenade.

  “This is Daniel,” I say.

  A faint echo. “Oh my God, was that your mother?”

  “Thank God it’s you.”

  My mother glares, waiting to see who it is, refusing to leave. I’m nodding but not speaking, strung between them.

  “We stayed at Pismo,” she says. “Now I’m up near Big Sur and it’s raining like crazy. There’s no reception at Esalen so I drove up the highway to call. I’m near where we saw those dresses hanging on the tree.”

  “Are they still there?” I ask. Maybe now’s the time to pin a prayer for me, my mother tidying the desk as if searching for something by the phone. “Breakfast’s ready,” she whispers urgently and I nod.

  “Are you okay?” she asks, a crackle on the line. “Hello.” I must have missed her answer.

  “Yes,” I say. “For some reason my mother’s loitering.” I don’t mention my fall, the ladder, my hand, the gleam in that black horse’s eye, the boy on the rim of the tank.

  “Tell her to leave us alone,” says Isabel laughing.

  My mother’s examining the calendar on the wall, crossing out yesterday with a Sharpie. “Mum, please,” I say.

  “Oh my God, you sound so Australian,” says Isabel. My mother looks daggers at me then smiles.

  “I feel it,” I say as my mother returns to the kitchen. “I just wish you were here.” But I’m not sure if it’s the phone that sounds hollow or me. “You seem so far away.”