River of Salt

by Warner, Dave;

  ‘I’ll handle it.’

  Nalder studied him. ‘You think you’ve got the juice for that?’

  ‘I’m not worried about them.’

  Nalder clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Good. For now let me write it up as a break and enter: Andy surprised them, they beat the shit out of him. If he doesn’t pull through …’

  ‘He’s going to pull through.’

  ‘I know … but if he doesn’t, then it’s a different game, you understand?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Nalder turned to go, paused. ‘You don’t think these two …?’

  ‘The Ocean View Motel? They know what time she died?’

  ‘Close to midnight, no later.’

  ‘Then it’s not them. I had eyes on them. Your cop friends any closer?’

  Nalder sighed, pained. ‘They have a couple of sightings of the car Monday at Greycliff and Toorolong.’ Both towns within thirty miles to the north. If true, it meant the victim had travelled further south than the Ocean View. ‘The servo bloke at Greycliff is sure it’s the car he filled up, woman on her own driving. We’ve also got a girl on her bike who reckons she saw the car Thursday evening just a few blocks from your place but she is less credible.’

  None of this was good.

  Nalder continued, ‘On the other hand, they’ve interviewed a stack of people and nobody says they saw her at the Shack.’

  That was something. ‘Sounds like she’s been in the area a while.’

  ‘Yeah. Somebody knows a shit lot more than they are saying but so far there’s no ID on her.’

  Nalder said he had to go but asked to be kept informed.

  ‘You told his parents?’

  ‘I don’t even know his last name.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘I gave him a job. I pay him cash. He’s just Andy. Doreen probably knows.’

  ‘Leave it with me. I’ve seen him talking to the Greeks in the fish and chip shop. They’ll be open for lunch.’

  Doreen did know Andy’s last name. Of course she did, she knew everything.

  ‘Wellard.’

  ‘You know where he lives?’ Even when he’d thrown the party for Andy, the only guests had been the other staff and the band.

  ‘He talked about the Baxter shops being his local.’

  There was a public phone box out front of the hospital. Blake walked out and waited patiently while a middle-aged woman made three calls. She had been crying so Blake didn’t hassle her. Perhaps her husband or mother was really ill, or had died. Hospitals were all about loss. Except for maybe the maternity ward and he’d never been in one and never expected to be. He took the phone book and scanned for Wellard. Only one Wellard was in the book. All he could think of was exacting retribution on those two who had done this. Andy had counted on him to protect him, and he had failed. Just like he had failed Jimmy. But exacting justice, that was something Blake could do. He called the number for Wellard but the phone rang out. He got his coin back and dialled Nalder’s home number. His wife answered. Nalder wasn’t back yet. Blake passed on his information and returned to the hospital and Doreen.

  It was another hour before the surgeon found them. He was clinical: brain damage was the main concern. The skull had been fractured but Andy was not in obvious imminent danger, although the unexpected could occur with these sort of injuries. They’d reduced swelling of the brain and were taking precautions to prevent a blood clot, so far so good. They were debating whether he might actually need structural support for the skull but for now it was wait and see. They were keeping him sedated, allowing the body time to heal.

  ‘Is it true you stuck him on a drinks trolley?’

  Blake admitted it was.

  ‘Lucky you didn’t kill him. As it is you’ve probably given him a good chance to maintain all his functions.’

  Doreen asked how long before Andy was likely to regain consciousness.

  ‘We don’t know. Some people never do but like I say, we got to him early, the skull is cracked but intact. He might be conscious and able to interact in a couple of days, couple of weeks … months.’

  ‘Can we see him? Sit with him?’

  The surgeon considered Blake’s request, assented.

  The sight of Andy lying there unconscious swathed in bandages made Doreen cry. Blake felt doubly useless. He squeezed her hand and the tears slowed. They sat side-by-side for a long time. It was the first time he had held her hand.

  ‘Have you done much of this?’ she asked. Her voice was unusually dry, like a brown leaf off a gum tree, crumbly and scratchy. ‘Waiting by a hospital bed?’ she added, in case he hadn’t understood.

  Yes. He’d done more of this than he would have liked. He was fourteen when his mother caught pneumonia and died. He and Jimmy sat like this for two straight days. At the end of it they were orphans. Science could put a man into space but it couldn’t save a forty-three year old woman from a chest infection.

  ‘Not so much,’ he said. ‘You?’

  ‘I’ve been lucky. My grandmother was sick but I was really little and we didn’t stay long. Your brother died, right?’

  ‘Yeah but it was quick. Hit by a truck.’

  ‘You have other family? Your mum, brothers and sisters?’

  ‘Dad ran out on us when we were little kids,’ Blake said. ‘We didn’t know that then. It was still wartime. Mum said he’d gone to fight in the Pacific. More likely he’d gone to fight at the Tiki Bar with other drunks.’ That was all the truth.

  ‘Your mum is still alive?’

  ‘Lives in Pittsburgh with her mum, my grandmother.’

  ‘No other brothers or sisters?’

  ‘No there was just Jimmy.’ That was all he’d ever needed.

  ‘I’ve got a younger sister and an older brother.’

  ‘They say the middle child is always difficult.’ He liked that she smiled at him when he said it.

  ‘I think Andy has a brother. In the army.’

  ‘Two,’ he enlightened her. At least he remembered some things. ‘Both older. The other one is a builder or something. We talk, Andy and me.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Mainly about the fish. I just didn’t know his surname.’ It still worried him that she might have thought he didn’t care about Andy as a person.

  ‘You talk about the fish in the tank?’

  She had this kind of cute smile on her face.

  ‘Audrey is his favourite. He’s going to be heartbroken.’

  ‘We’ll have to get some more.’

  He liked that she included herself in that. Yes, she was right. They would get some more fish. He was going to take care of everything.

  He found an envelope under his windscreen in the hospital carpark. They must have known he would come here sooner or later. Inside was a badly printed note on a page torn from a school exercise book. It said he should drive to the point near the toilet block at the beach at four o’clock. DO NOT SPEAK WITH COPS was written large. It was five to four already. Doreen had stayed with Andy’s parents who had turned up a little after two o’clock when they’d finally been contacted. The parents looked like poor Okies. Blake had already told Doreen to open a savings account in Andy’s name. He would pay Andy’s wages into that till he could come back to work. He didn’t tell the parents though. The lessons he’d learned about human nature and money suggested that people could always find a reason why somebody else’s money should be theirs. He crumpled the note in his fist: case in point.

  The wind was blowing in strong off the ocean and the skies had clouded over again. There weren’t many people left but a few families were still goofing about in the water and on the sand. The car was easy to spot, a light blue FJ. He pulled in beside its driver side. Harry was working his mouth with a toothpick. From the passenger seat, Steve looked over with lizard eyes. Blake wound down his passenger window.

  Harry said, ‘Hear your bar had one of those unfortunate accidents we were discussing the other day.’

>   Easy, Blake told himself. He was ready to explode, but years of dealing with wise guys tempered his behaviour.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What we’ve always wanted, to offer our services.’

  Steve piped up across the way. ‘But it’ll cost you more now. You should have taken the deal.’

  Harry said, ‘He’s right. Our costs have increased because it looks like your business really is in need of some serious protection.’

  ‘How much are we talking?’

  Harry looked over at Steve and they grinned at one another: got the sucker.

  ‘Thirty pounds deposit, payable immediately. After that it’s only ten bob a day. Bargain.’

  Three and a half pounds per week. Fourteen pounds per month. That was about half Doreen’s wage.

  ‘I don’t have thirty pounds lying around. Tomorrow midday is the earliest.’

  ‘Don’t be late. See you at your bar tomorrow midday. On the dot.’

  Harry started up his car and reversed. Blake watched them in his rear vision mirror as they faded up the coast.

  Just because you think you are the only shark in the aquarium doesn’t make it so.

  He knew what he was going to do, had known since that first moment he clapped eyes on poor Andy. Once before he had walked away, taken the easy option. Not that this was easy. He had thought he’d travelled far enough away, thought he’d left his old self behind along with everything else that was corrupt and wrong, thought he had found paradise. Well, no, he had found paradise. He looked out now at the ocean in the last throes of the day.

  ‘I wanted you to see this, Jimmy. To be part of it, to be proud of me.’

  He might have said the words or just thought it. What did it matter? The truth was he had not discarded that part of himself of which he was ashamed, and he was even more ashamed right now because he was glad it was part of him. He needed the him that had waited calmly outside Benetti’s apartment block looking for any telltale sign that he might be expected, that word might have got out, that he might have walked into that building and had his guts blown out with a pump-action. He needed the quiet resolve that had allowed him to sit at the table in the restaurant for a week, letting Little Joey’s boys come to see him as no more than an empty chair. He needed the him that understood one failed day at the office meant he was maggot food, the him that had been hidden away like a baseball mitt in an old cellar, waiting for winter to pass, but when you brought it out and slipped it on, nothing had changed, the magic was still there; it was your glove and nobody else’s, shaped by a thousand hours together.

  The stepladder was folded flush against the wall of the broom cupboard. He brought it out, carried it into the bedroom, stood before the wardrobe, travelling back in time to the mouldy, scratched door of the wardrobe in his room in Philly. Now he opened the ladder and climbed it. He pulled down the suitcase that he’d stored on the top shelf at the back, noted it was a little mouldy and the lock clasps were rusty. They were slack and did not readily spring open when he slid his thumbs in and squeezed, so he had to really force it. When the suitcase opened he placed it on the floor. On top was a bunch of old clothes. He dug through them and hefted out the tin, which was far too heavy for the fading biscuits depicted on the lid. It had to be prised off with effort, more corrosion. Inside were two items, soft cloths wrapped around something deceptively heavy. He lifted the cloths off: the Beretta .22 or the Browning? Both looked good as new. He checked them out quickly, likely one of them was never coming back. He decided on the Browning.

  Doreen’s directions were spot on. He had parked on the lower arm of Barraclough road and hiked three miles uphill across an adjacent property to wind up exactly where he wanted, in the bush out the back of the target house Doreen had described. The houses on the ridge were farmhouses now, spaced acres apart and on a Sunday night there was no traffic about at all. This wasn’t like a hit in a Philly restaurant where you needed to worry about identification and exit routes. It was a clear sky, the thunderclouds having rolled on, the moon a low-watt pearl globe, Blake just another rat in the basement. Earlier he had stripped the pistol, finding it clean as a whistle. He still had a couple of boxes of cartridges, which he retrieved from his garage. He had driven south to deserted bush. There he had raised the weapon and pointed it at a tree trunk twenty feet away. Surely now he would feel something? He didn’t know what exactly he thought this would be: excitement, shame, fear? But there was an absence of any emotion. He felt nothing except the familiar weight of the gun, natural as it had always been, like it was his own palm grown suddenly heavier. In a way it disappointed him, mocked his concept of himself as a musician, a businessman, a surfer. Put a gun in his hand and he had not changed at all. In a practical sense that was a positive but all it said about him was that he was incapable of anything more than the primal. He was no better than Harry or Steve when it came down to it. There is a world that exists outside of me, he thought, a world he could not step into, as if some giant soap bubble was always between himself and it. Doreen was in that bubble. And Andy and Carol, and even Crane the bum, but he was trapped outside of it.

  He raised the gun and fired a spread of shots. Even under a half-moon he did not miss.

  So here he was now, squatting at the back of the bungalow with prickles up his ass. Just as Doreen had described, a wooden staircase ran to the back door. In Queenslander style, the wooden house was built on stumps high enough for the car to be parked under the house in an open garage. Blake couldn’t imagine there was a flooding problem this high up but he supposed it helped cool the house on hot days. It was past eleven-thirty, and he had expected Harry and Steve might have been asleep but he heard them clinking beer bottles and calling out to one another, with a boisterousness that suggested a skinful of grog. Though he would not have hesitated to wake them from their sleep before shooting them, he preferred it this way. He waited nearly an hour. A bare-chested Harry came to what must have been the kitchen window at the back. Looking straight out into the night he poured himself a glass of beer. Then he turned back inside. It was time.

  Blake left cover and moved quietly as cancer up the rear steps, waiting on the landing, pistol ready at his leg. Through the flywire door he could see parts of the kitchen, an old meat safe, a rough wooden table. The smell of cooked chops lingered. Conversation ebbed and flowed. He guessed they were in some kind of lounge room in the centre of the house but every now and again they were coming back towards the kitchen.

  ‘… I said fuck that. Remember that?’ Harry.

  Followed by a mumbled response and a loud burp. The voice came closer. Blake caught a glimpse of shorts.

  ‘That wharfie prick. Took care of that bastard.’ Topping his beer. Then, ‘… need a piss.’

  Outside on the small landing, Blake tensed, remembering Doreen’s story, expecting Harry to head towards him through the kitchen to piss outside. He raised the Browning ready, but instead of heading through the kitchen, Harry walked down the hallway past the open kitchen door, staring at his feet. A door banged. Make that the dunny, as they called it here. So there was an indoor toilet after all. Blake quietly pulled open the flimsy back door with its window of flywire and slipped into the kitchen. The floor was warped, the lino cheap and chipped. Leaning against the wall was a cricket bat, edge stained with blood. Dead ahead, the doorway led to the narrow hall which ran left and right, dunny to the left, lounge room to the right. He heard the clink of a glass from that direction, turned out of the kitchen and started walking down the hall, turned into the first room on the left: low light from a standard lamp, sofa with its springs out, Steve sitting back, singlet and trousers, glass of beer in his hand, sawed-off shotgun resting on the arm of the sofa. Blake could have shot the dumb shit right off when Steve looked at him with the confused expression on his ugly mug but he waited for the reptilian brain to warm.

  ‘What the fuck …?’

  He brought up the Browning, aimed. Steve reached for the shotty. Blake
pulled the trigger, put a bullet through the thug’s forehead. He walked to the shotgun, checked it was loaded, swivelled at the sound of rushing feet. Harry stopped dumb, the shotgun facing his bare chest.

  ‘Hang on. We can sort something out.’

  ‘You crossed a line.’

  ‘We work for people. They’re gonna …’

  Blake had not worked with a shotgun before but at this range he could not miss. Both barrels. Harry’s chest spread open, the force knocked him back. He lay on his back gasping for air, his lungs shredded.

  Just like Audrey, thought Blake. The sucking sound continued in the background while he picked up his spent .22 cartridge. Most times he never got the opportunity to tidy up but this was important. He looked for more shotgun cartridges and eventually found them in a kitchen drawer. He reloaded the shotty. By the time he walked back in the lounge room the sucking had stopped. He stepped over Harry’s body and advanced to Steve. Blake pulled a stick of kid’s plasticine from his pocket. He broke off two pieces and shoved them in his ears. He stuck the barrel of the shotgun right over the bullet hole the Browning had made, picked up Steve’s limp hand and manipulated it onto the trigger. Then he squeezed.

  Sometimes you hear people saying so and so looked peaceful when they were dead. Blake had seen more than his fair share of dead people and none of them looked peaceful. They looked caught out, like they were passengers in a bus and a driver had slammed on brakes and they’d been thrown this way and that and then just frozen haphazardly. But Andy looked peaceful. Maybe because he wasn’t dead. He had tubes rigged up, he was bandaged but his head was on the pillow and he could just have been in a deep sleep. Blake had come straight to the hospital. It was three fifteen in the morning and there was nobody around, nobody to stop him from dumping the flowers from the glass vase in reception and then using the vase to scoop a goldfish from the ornamental pond right outside the front door, nobody to see him walk up the hallway to the ward. The only sign of human habitation had been the hollow echo of a door closing somewhere and the squeak of a wheelchair or trolley. No sister or nurse was at the ward desk, so he’d invited himself in. Any family had long since taken off. Blake cast his mind back earlier. Just him and Doreen here, and he’d reached out and squeezed her hand and that small gesture made him feel so good and so human. Of course it couldn’t last. He had no idea if Doreen would approve or not of his actions. It didn’t matter either way. You simply could not live your life based on what you thought other people wanted, no, you had to set your own rules. In his case, those rules had been set in that car with Vincent with his breath steaming up the window. What he had done, or not done then, was going to define the rest of his life. Maybe, even if Harry and Steve had not beaten up Andy, he would have arrived at the same course of action. It was moot. They had made their choices. They had to live — and die — with them. He placed the vase on the little bedside table so that if Andy woke, the first thing he would see would be the goldfish. Blake felt sorry for that fish all by itself but the sacrifice was necessary to make somebody else’s world better. That was the thing with aquarium life. You all had to find your own space, deal with what the world threw at you. There was a food chain and you never, ever knew where you resided in it. That was just life.