The Rest is Weight

by Jennifer Mills

  ‘No,’ the kid says, shutting down. He turns his body away, moving at the pivot point where his hip joins the vehicle, until his groin is pressed into the fender. Ant wants to reach out and touch him, a pat on the shoulder is all. Wants to say he saw him leave. But he doesn’t want to get caught up in a situation.

  ‘Hey,’ Ant says. The boy’s face flicks around, his lips pressed closed. A ripple in Ant’s fingers again. ‘You can have a shower here if you want. Whenever you want.’

  ‘Okay,’ the kid says, and turns back to face the Ford.

  Ant heads for the office, rubbing his hands on his jeans. He’s sure he hears the kid say one short, unflattering word under his breath. Maybe he’s misjudged it.

  At the end of the day Ant dismisses the kid and watches him walk down the dusty verge in his Blunnies and jeans, his long stride casting a longer shadow. Making sure he leaves.

  Ant goes into the yard when he’s out of sight, and weaves through the cars. Past the few he’s fixing are a couple of his own projects: an old Dodge truck he’s had for yonks, which barely runs, and an hz ute body, stripped and waiting for parts. There’s no sign of any tampering. He checks inside the Holden, feeling like a trespasser, even though it’s his car, his yard. In the late sun the worn metal looks like it still has a shine, like it’s finished.

  There’s another shed behind the vehicles, a line of car doors leaning against it, and though he keeps it locked it’s worth checking. He steps over a tail shaft, kicks something soft. It’s a pair of sneakers lined up neatly, toes tucked under the front wheel of the Dodge. He bends down. Under the truck tray there’s an unrolled swag, an empty packet of smokes. A small backpack. A half-rolled footy sock. A pen torch taken from the office drawer.

  He’s not angry. No shiver of rage in his hands, which is good. He kneels there looking at the boy’s things, smelling the musty teenage smell of his nest. He wonders how many days it’s been and what’s happened to his family. What the kid might think about under there. What he does to himself, if he fights to get to sleep beneath the rusted axle. The light drops calmly out of the sky around him and he lingers on.

  A magpie talks from the roof of his shed as Ant stands. The feathers ruffled by a chill breeze. It looks like it’s losing its balance, rights itself, then flies off. Adolescent, you can see the grey on its neck. What can you do?

  He shoves his hand in his pocket for the keys and opens the back shed. Just inside the door he clears a space for the swag. It’ll be warmer at least. He turns on a light, props the door open with a jack, then locks up the rest of the shop and goes home.

  Ant comes in on Sunday to finish the minibus from the spastic school. He wants to have it done for Monday like he said and this is the only way. He goes straight out the back to check the yard, but there’s no sound when he calls the kid’s name. He bends to look under the Dodge and finds the space has been cleared. In the shed the swag’s been spread out just inside the door, a rubbish bag with it, but no shoes and no kid. On the bench there’s a phone charger plugged into a wall socket, but there’s no phone on the other end. Ant scratches at a mozzie on his arm and thinks. Tomorrow he’ll bring in a heater, should have thought of it before.

  He goes back out to the van and works all day. All day there’s no sign of the kid. He finishes up, wipes the windscreen, even tidies up the office for a while on the off-chance the boy will come strolling in. But maybe he’s seen the car out the front.

  Early again Monday, bright and cool, he takes out the bus to test the brakes. Around the block, past the scrap yards, the town camp, the storage place. The sensitivity is better. Another side road. This part of town makes it seem like a dump, uninhabited. At the back of the rail yards he finds the kid walking fast with his hands in his pockets, holding a cigarette between his lips. Ant pulls over just in front of him; he won’t recognise the plain white minibus.

  ‘You want a lift somewhere?’ he says, fighting a smile.

  The kid stares at him. His eyes hidden. Might be laughing at him, but you can’t tell.

  ‘Come on,’ Ant says. ‘Hop in.’

  They go the two blocks back to the workshop and then they stop. Ant sits in the van with the engine on, his hand holding the handbrake. ‘Look,’ he says. They both stare through the windscreen.

  ‘I’ll shift tonight, all right,’ says the kid, hardly more than mumbling.

  ‘Nah, nah, don’t,’ Ant says. The fingers on his handbrake hand lift as if they’re going to touch the boy’s thigh but get no further than a stretch. He clicks the button with his thumb. ‘Look, whatever it is . . .’

  The boy makes a subtle groan that might be pain or disgust. He drags on his cigarette. His long legs lift in the jeans.

  ‘I don’t mind.’ Ant clears his throat, grips the handbrake hard. ‘I put a heater in there for ya.’

  The boy exhales out the window.

  ‘You should’ve asked, is all.’ Ant’s eyes sting at the corners and his hand on the brake is faintly shaking. Shouldn’t let him smoke in the bus. What is he thinking, for God’s sake, the kids are disabled. He opens his mouth, but the boy throws the butt out the window. Ant looks the length of him. The boy sits chastised, his torso bent at an angle. One leg jumps.

  Ant turns off the engine. The boy looks across at him. Frightened of him. Electrical impulses in his hand, must be from the keys.

  ‘Here, it’s cold. Cuppa tea,’ Ant says, and his voice isn’t shaking.

  Inside he goes to the sink, glad for something to do with his hands. He washes them first, but the grease still stains prints on the mugs he finds.

  The boy waits in the driveway, keeps close to the bus. He glances at Ant’s heavy fingerprints as he takes the mug.

  He sucks at his tea.

  ‘You need anything?’ Ant says.

  The boy shakes his head.

  Ant grips his cup. He is doing the boy a kindness. Just a kindness. And the bloke from the spastic school is pulling up in a taxi. By the time Ant gets back to his tea it’s gone cold.

  Tuesday. The boy has washed his clothes. They hang on a rope in the yard, a soft scarecrow strung between the shed wall and the Dodge. The magpie’s back and it warbles awkwardly overhead, its voice breaking as it practises its morning song. There’s a twin song ringing with it: the kid’s ringtone, coming from the shed. It doesn’t stop. He stares at the washing. He could have asked. Thinks of the kid pushing at his things in the sink.

  ‘Yeah?’

  When he hears the boy answer the phone, Ant goes into the office and shifts his pens. Looks at the priorities for the day – got to get through everything. Pick up some parts from Donna’s. The pie place bringing in their van at ten. He drops a bit of paper, scrabbles for it. His head’s a mess, he didn’t sleep well.

  He goes out the back to check on the kid. The boy sits up, shirtless. Ant sees ribs and milk-white skin, almost glowing. No hair. Nipples brown as brick. His voice catches on a greeting the kid doesn’t bother returning. He coughs into his fist.

  ‘Listen. I can’t have customers – You’ll have to clear this up.’ He points his face into the yard and feels a flush in it. He’s mad about the washing, is all.

  ‘You don’t have to use the sink,’ he mutters. ‘I would have done it for ya.’ But the boy’s out of earshot, up in his shorts, pulling his clothes down from the rope, shoving the long legs into jeans, something in his face defiant, the hardening of a grown man.

  ‘You need me to go?’ The kid’s eyes close as he buttons his shirt; Ant doesn’t watch the pale skin disappear.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can go,’ the kid says, and shrugs. Barefoot, he’s not so tall. Still skinny. The foot tapping again. His toes must be blue with cold, Ant thinks.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ Ant says.

  The boy frowns, smiles, sticks his hands in his pockets. ‘Work,
yeah?’ he says. He heads into the shed to get his boots.

  All day the boy wears his earphones and hardly speaks to Ant. All day they’re run off their feet; Ant is glad he doesn’t have time to order the kid around.

  Soon after five Ant feels the chill in the air and starts locking up the office. The boy stands stiffly near the door to the yard, like he’s waiting for instructions.

  ‘You can finish up,’ Ant says.

  ‘Yeah,’ the boy replies. He glances over his shoulder to the shed and his hands flex inside the pockets of his jeans. For a minute Ant thinks he’s going to thank him. He’s not sure he wants that.

  ‘Goodnight, boss,’ the kid says instead. He’s never called Ant that before.

  Ant locks up the front and makes to leave. He does the whole routine fast without thinking and is sitting in his ute, holding the keys in the ignition, before he reconsiders. Nah. Thursday is wages. After that the boy’s free, more or less. Pay out his leave and he’ll be gone.

  Ant turns the key, lets his foot off the brake, almost makes it away, but then the charged feeling comes again, eating into his hand. He turns the car off, eases himself off the seat and steps around the back, past the Dodge and the hz. He stops at the line of car doors, leans into the shed and breathes for a minute.

  The light’s not on but it’s not dark yet and he can see the boy lying there, the swag open to his chest. His eyes are closed, but he’s not asleep. Ant can tell from the breathing.

  What happens now?

  The boy’s eyes open, he’s looking at the roof. There’s something moving on his lips, not speech and not expression, like a cipher. Ant stares over him, waits for it to mean something. The magpie sings at the hollowing chill. As the light goes, the milk of his skin starts to shine. It doesn’t mean anything.

  Ant lets go of the door and moves inside, in search of heat. All the glass in the workshop breaks, the windscreens, everything. Metal all over, bursting.

  Or the boy’s eyes stay closed. Ant goes home.

  The rest is weight

  Alex is a spider’s thread, the stick-point at the end of a long white line. There is a high rough whine and that’s it. You disappear into one small mistake.

  Two weeks later, he is knocking at a door. The knock makes a strange echo inside the house. Alex supposes this is because of the hole in it. There’s no answer at first, just a scuffling sound that might be a person or a mouse. He looks up. White altocumulus flocks in a band overhead. There’s a vague itch in the back of his throat. The scuffling clarifies, becomes steps.

  A man stands in the doorway in his dressing gown and pants, flanked on one side by a scrap of white mutt, a tiny cloud that flickers with electricity. At a quiet command the dog sits still. Mr Ravka is not a tall man but his body is tall-shaped, bent from ducking. He has a clipped white beard that makes his face look doctor-ish. Alex sees they are about the same age, retirement age. Mr Ravka looks at the stripes on Alex’s breast pocket. Alex looks at the piles of newspaper on the floor, peers into the dark behind Mr Ravka’s head.

  ‘Hello, Mr Ravka,’ he says.

  ‘You took your time,’ Mr Ravka says.

  ‘I didn’t know I was expected.’

  The man grunts, picks at something behind his ear.

  ‘Alex Kuchin.’ Alex holds out a hand.

  Mr Ravka doesn’t take it. ‘You’re from the government,’ he says.

  ‘Not exactly. May I come in?’

  His head is tugged a millimetre back towards the interior, but he doesn’t turn.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  The dog shifts on its hips. Alex feels his sinuses prickle.

  ‘Mr Ravka –’

  ‘They told me they had everything they needed,’ he says.

  ‘I’m not here about the compensation,’ Alex says. Mr Ravka’s eyes focus out of their weariness. They are small eyes, rimmed red. His expression is hard to read.

  ‘I am still waiting for the cheque,’ he says.

  ‘It is not my area,’ Alex says.

  Mr Ravka’s hand clamps on the doorhandle. ‘What then?’ he says. His voice is clipped. ‘What is your area?’

  Alex clears his throat. A hand dives into his pocket for a handkerchief. ‘I have come to apologise,’ he says.

  Mr Ravka smiles. ‘Oh, apologise. You want to apologise. You think you can apologise? Look at this.’ He waves a hand behind him. Alex looks up and sees the gaping hole, far larger than he expected, almost the size of a room. ‘Two months and I haven’t seen a kopeck.’ A piece of tarp dangling, and through it the loose white band of altocumulus.

  Alex sneezes. ‘Allergic,’ he says, waving a bundle of handkerchief at the dog.

  Mr Ravka’s eyes return to Alex’s stripes. ‘Come back when you have the cheque,’ he says. He closes the door, leaving Alex standing there.

  Alex hears the dog’s toenails scatter across the floor like hail, lifts his hand to knock again, but stops. He can feel his face prickling.

  He gets back in his old Mercedes, turns on the air conditioning, and pulls away.

  Driving on land, Alex feels closed in. Other cars, it must be. Apart from the radio, he is alone up there, in control. Well, as much control as the machine allows. As much responsibility.

  If he hasn’t lost his job, it’s only because of his age. He’s due to go in the next eighteen months and since the incident it has generally been assumed it will be sooner. He is a military man and though he left the real air force long ago, in the dark years after the collapse, he has not lost his military habits. He has lived this job for the last fifteen years and he has little to go home to. A decent house, paid off at last, and the old Mercedes. A woman who comes once a week to clean. No pets, because of the allergies. But he is happy, he would have had a clean record, if not for this one mistake.

  Alex rarely thinks about the difficult years, but he has heard those words before, Mr Ravka’s words: Two months and I haven’t seen a kopeck. Chechnya. Flying tin cans with half a crew. The hell of it, flying for fear, not knowing when your pay was coming. Pilots in the East on hunger strike for their wages. Talk of looting. The condition of the aircraft forced you into bad risks. He was glad to leave.

  But he never lost his judgement and he never missed a target, not by accident. Not since the war. His life would have made a clean white line, if not for this one error. So it was strange, the sensation he felt. The moment of knowing he had missed the high point of the cloud, let go too soon, was bad enough. But afterwards, to hear of the destruction. It shocked him. It shocked him because it felt so perfectly good.

  For some time it has been obvious that the Weather Modification Office is cutting costs.

  The work is expensive, technical, and more common than most people realise. In fifteen years it has gone beyond seeding and into the realm of agriculture. Humans are farmers of weather now, Alex thinks, as we have been farmers of crops. It pleases him that our technologies are so lacking in imagination that we simply repeat the same patterns on different scales: sow, reap, sow, reap, planet or Petri dish. His father and mother kept pigs. And though there are unusual risks in his line, he is glad his work smells of high-octane fuel, ice and chemicals, and not of shit. This is advancement of some kind.

  But advancement is always compromised. There have been cuts. Reallocations. They are down to a skeleton staff. A few weeks ago Alex was in the hall, reading his schedule for the next fortnight. Beside him was Dmitri, who had been training to become a pilot until the program was dissolved. They promise it will be back, the training money, but they don’t say when. Dmitri is stuck on the ground for now. Summer is their busiest time, the highest demand for clear skies. Reading the chart, Alex was shocked at how many shifts he was expected to fill.

  ‘There will be mistakes,’ said Dmitri. ‘No one should be made to work so often on his own.�
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  Alex nodded. He withdrew without remark. But he felt nervous.

  And now the cement, when they are supposed to use silver. Silver iodide, dropped in canisters from the wings. The canisters open and the chemicals disperse; the crystals help the ice to form. It isn’t so toxic. An everyday compound, they use it in photography. But it’s expensive. In the weeks before the incident, the stocks were depleting and there were no fresh orders. And one day Alex came in to find there was a pallet of cement where the silver should have been. Cement in double brown paper, plain as houses. They had a meeting but questions were discouraged. Tests had compared it, they said: sixty-three per cent of the effectiveness at twelve per cent the cost. They had a PowerPoint. You trusted them.

  ‘You fill the canisters,’ they explained, ‘mix a little iodide in, and it disperses. It is all the same.’

  ‘But how will we know how much to mix?’

  ‘A little of the crystal will do; the rest is weight.’

  Afterwards, in the corridor, Alex said, ‘It’s better than bags of shit.’

  ‘Soon it’s you and me,’ Dmitri said. ‘You and me, we’re silver iodide. One day soon, they will hire cement.’

  Since the beginning of the summer Alex has been flying alone, no co-pilot. He is busy. They are in demand. There are summits, sporting events, droughts, visiting presidents, celebrity weddings, national holidays, parades, elections. Mistakes.

  After he visits Mr Ravka, Alex drives two-thirds of the way home, changes his mind, and heads towards the office instead. Both boys are there, Dmitri and Vassily, filling the canisters with the fine cement powder. They wave, too far to speak. Alex goes into his office, sits at the computer, and begins to type his letter of resignation. When he has finished it is late. He prints two copies, places each in an envelope, and puts both envelopes in his locker.

  A week later, he is standing in the same position, a hand hovering over the unsent letters. The boys around him interrupt his thoughts, packing up for the day, changing out of their work gear.