by Peter Carey
It was always summer, always chilled by fall, the mother’s absence everywhere in the air, in the maple leaves, for instance, lifting their silver undersides in the breeze which corrugated the surface of Kenoza Lake as his grandmother swam to and fro between the dock and a point in the middle of the lake where she could line up the middle chimney with the blinking amber light up on 52. Later he would wonder more about his missing grandfather and the Poison Dwarf who had once been Grandma’s friend, but that would be a different person who would ask those questions, all the old cells having died, been sloughed off, become dust in the New York City air.
He could swim too. He had the shoulders even then, but the lake water was slimy and viscous and it left a clammy feeling on his skin which the sun would not burn off. He never did ask but he was certain it was millions of little dead things and he thought of the wailing signals on the radio and lay on his stomach on the dock and his back became black and his stomach was pale and ghostly as a fish.
Small black ants were almost everywhere. Some he killed for no good reason.
He looked up at Dial. She had huge dark eyes, like an actress on a billboard in Times Square. He would have swum with her any day he could.
Would you like to go to a beach? she asked him now.
But this wasn’t what he wanted.
Will we stay in a motel?
She looked at him with wonder. You outrageous little creature, she said. We’re just going to a sort of scuzzy house. We’ll probably be sleeping on the floor.
Maybe there’s TV, he said. None of this was what he really meant. It was his upbringing, to “not say.”
A lot better than TV, she said.
That’s where the surprise is, Dial? In the scuzzy house?
Yes, Jay.
He was so happy he thought he might be sick. He snuggled into her then, his head resting against her generous breasts, and she stroked his head, the part low on the neck where all the short hairs are.
Maybe I can guess what the surprise is, he said after a while. In the scuzzy house.
You know I won’t tell you if you do.
He did not need to say. He knew what it was exactly. Just as Cameron had foretold. His real life was just starting. He was going to see his dad.
3
Except for one single photograph, the boy had never seen his dad, not even on TV. There had been no television permitted in Grandma’s house on Kenoza Lake, so after he had helped light the fires in fall the boy picked among the high musty shelves of paperbacks—some words as plain as pebbles, many more that held their secrets like the crunchy bodies of wasps or grasshoppers. He could read some, as he liked to say. Upstairs there was a proper library with a sliding ladder and heavy books containing engravings of fish and elk and small flowers with German names which made him sad. On the big torn sofas where he peered into these treasures, there was likely to be an abandoned Kipling or Rider Haggard or Robert Louis Stevenson which his grandma would continue with at dusk. In this silky water-stained room with its slatted squinting views across the lake, there was a big glowing valve radio which played only static and a wailing oscillating electric cry, some deep and secret sadness he imagined coming from beneath the choppy water slapping at the dock below.
Down in the city, at the Belvedere, there was a pink GE portable TV which always sat on the marble kitchen countertop; once, when he thought his grandma was napping, he plugged it in. This was the only time she hurt him, twisting his arm and holding his chin so he could not escape her eyes. She spit, she was so crazy—he must not watch TV.
Not ever.
Her given reason was as tangled as old nylon line, snagged with hooks and spinners and white oxidized lead weights, but the true reason he was not allowed to watch was straight and short and he learned it from Gladys the Haitian maid—you don’t be getting yourself upset seeing your mommy and daddy in the hands of the po-lees. You never do forget a thing like that.
Cameron Fox was the son of the art dealers in 5D. He had been expelled from Groton on account of the hair he would not cut, maybe something else as well. Grandma paid Cameron to be a babysitter. She had no idea.
It was in Cameron’s room the boy saw the poster of Che Guevara and learned who he was and why he had no mother and father. Not even Gladys was going to tell him this stuff. After his mother and the Dobbs Street Cell had robbed the bank in Bronxville, a judge had given Che to the permanent care of his grandma. That’s what Cameron said. You got a right to know, man. Cameron was sixteen. He said, Your grandpa threw a Buddha out the D line window. A fucking Buddha, man. He’s a cool old guy. I smelled him smoking weed out on the stairs. Do you get to hang out with him?
No chance. No way. The one time they found Grandpa and the Poison Dwarf at Sixty-second Street, the boy and his grandma went to the Carlyle.
Cameron told the boy he was a political prisoner locked up at Kenoza Lake. His grandma made him play ludo which was a game from, like, a century before. Cameron gave him a full-page picture of his father from Life. Cameron read him the caption. Beyond your command. His dad was cool looking, with wild fair hair. He held his fingers in a V.
He looks like you, said Cameron Fox. You should get this framed, he said. Your father is a great American.
But the boy left 5D by the Clorox stairs and before he entered his grandma’s kitchen he folded up his father very carefully and kept him in his pocket. That was the beginning of his papers more or less.
In the boy’s pocket there were clear bits and mysteries. Cameron would sometimes try to explain but then he would stop and say, That’s too theoretical right now. Or: You would have to know more words. Cameron was six feet tall with a long straight nose and a long chin and an eye which was just a little to one side. He read to Che from Steppenwolf until they both got bored with it, but he would not let him watch TV either. He said television was the devil. They played poker for pennies. Cameron put on Country Joe and the Fish and he sat in ski socks before the electric radiator, spreading the skin condition that he hoped would save him from Vietnam.
The boy looked out for TV but never saw too much. Once or twice they were in a diner with TV but Grandma made them turn it off. She was a force. She said so.
So when Dial and Jay came into the Philadelphia Greyhound station, it was a big deal to see the black-and-white TV, high up in the corner of the waiting room. The 76ers were losing to Chicago. Old men were watching. They groaned. They spit. Goddamn. The boy stared also, waiting for the show to change to maybe Rowan and Martin, some other thing he’d heard of, Say good night, Dick. He was excited when the mother went out to find a telephone.
Don’t talk to anyone, she said, OK?
OK, he said. He stared at the blue devil, knowing something wonderful would happen next.
The Bulls fouled three times before the mother came back.
What next? he asked, noticing she had gotten sad. She crouched in front of him.
We’ll stay in a hotel, she said. How about that?
You said we were going to a scuzzy house, he said.
Plans have changed, she said, getting all busy with a cigarette.
With room service? He was acting excited, but he was very frightened now, by her smell, by the way she did that thing—kind of hiding her emotions in the smoke.
I can’t afford room service, she said, and wasted her cigarette beneath her heel.
In the corner of his eye he could see cartoons. That was nothing to him now.
Are you listening to me, Jay?
There’s no one else, he said. He meant, Who else could he listen to, but she understood something else and hugged him to her tightly.
What’s wrong?
I like you, Jay. Her eyes had gone all watery.
I like you, Dial, he said, but he did not want to follow her outside into the dark and shadow, beside tall buses pouring their waste into the pizza parlors. When they were walking upstairs he imagined they were going somewhere bad.
What is this?
A hotel, baby.
Not like the motel in Middletown, New York, where they stayed in the snowstorm, not the Carlyle, that’s for sure. He was gutted as a largemouth bass. Something had gone wrong.
They had to climb the stairs to find the foyer. The desk was quilted with red leather. Behind it sat a woman hooked up to a tank of gas. She took fifteen dollars in her fat ringed hand—no bath, no playing instruments of any kind. Then they walked along green corridors with long tubes of light above, and the sounds of TVs applauding from the rooms. Dial’s face was green in the hallway, then dark and shrunken inside the room. There were lace curtains, a red neon CHECKS CASHED. A single bed with a TV near the ceiling.
Not yet, she said, seeing where his attention was.
You promised.
I promised, yes. We can lie in bed and watch TV, but you must wait until I come back.
Where are you going now?
I have to do some more stuff, about the secret.
Is the secret OK?
Yes, it’s OK.
Then can I come?
Baby, if you come it won’t be a secret. I won’t be long.
She was kneeling. Looking at him. Pale. Way too close.
Just stay here, she said. Don’t let anyone inside.
And she kissed and hugged him way too hard.
After the key turned in the lock he stood beneath the television. The screen was dusty, spotted. Someone had run a finger down it.
He sat on the bed and watched the door awhile. The bedspread was pale blue and kind of crinkly, nasty. Once someone walked past. Then they came back the other way. He stayed away from the window but he could see the red wash of the CHECKS CASHED sign.
Dial had left her backpack on a chair. Its mouth was tied up with a piece of cord but you could still see some stuff inside—her book and a box of something small and bright like candy. That was what he went for, naturally, fishing it out with just two fingers. UNO is one of the world’s most popular family card games—he read this—with rules easy enough for kids, but challenges and excitement for all ages. He dropped the Uno back inside the pack, thinking she did not know her son.
The TV was beyond his reach.
He dragged across a chair and sat on it, still looking up. He could see the small red button. POWER.
A woman in high heels clattered down the hallways, laughing, crying maybe. He climbed up on the chair and pushed the button.
He was real close as the picture got called up from the tube, gathering itself and puffing out until it almost tore his eyes.
He saw the picture, did not understand who was sending it—there he was, him, Che Selkirk, at Kenoza Lake, New York, holding up a largemouth bass and squinting. The sound was roaring. Everything was gold and bleeding orange at the edges. He turned it off, and heard it suck back in the tube.
Something very bad had happened. He did not know what it could be.
4
What had gone wrong was not explained to him. Did the TV cause this or not? All Dial said was—We’ve got to go.
Tomorrow?
Right now.
When they fled Philly he had still not gotten his surprise or called his grandma. He had never been in an airplane and then he was bouncing around the sky above the earth, living in black air belonging to no place. He had flown to Oakland to a motel which turned out pretty good. He did not know exactly where he was. They did not watch TV but she read him all her book, out loud, the one with the fighting dogs. He thought The Call of the Wild must be the best book ever written. Dial never said anything but she had lived at Kenoza Lake and knew he came from a house almost identical to Buck the dog’s. The judge’s place stood back from the road, half hidden among the trees, through which glimpses could be caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around all four sides. So Jack London wrote.
They ran across the highway to the pizza place and back. They ate so much pizza the whole room smelled of it, and they played Uno together which turned out much better than you would think. He did not mention poker yet, but they played Uno for Days Inn matches.
Dial tried to call Grandma but she did not answer. The boy listened to the phone himself. It rang and rang.
When they were nearly out of cash they went to Seattle and Dial got a heap of money and after that they flew to Sydney, Australia. She told him it was a long way. He asked was the secret still OK. She said it was. He did not mind then. He beat her at poker. Then she taught him solitaire. Plus she had so many little tricks and puzzles in that pack of hers, rings you had to learn to pull apart, another book by Jack London, and all the way to Australia he was happy. He had been busted free by parents, just as Cameron had predicted.
Sydney turned out to be a big city so they got a bus to Brisbane. He got bored with that, they both did. Brisbane was really hot. Dial went looking for a head shop and he assumed it related to his dad but all that happened was they met a fat freak girl and learned that if they went north they would find places not even on a map.
Turn on, tune in, drop out, the fat girl said.
Later Dial said, I never want to hear that hippie shit again. He did not tell her Cameron said that all the time.
But Cameron could not imagine the boy hitchhiking in this world beyond the Clorox stairs—the foreign sky, bruised like cheekbones, heavy rain streaming in a distant fringe. A spooky yellow light shone on the highway and there was a fine hot clay dust, dry on the boy’s toes, mud on his now homeless tongue, powder on the needles of Pinus radiata plantations.
It was one hundred degrees Fahrenheit more or less. They kept on walking.
Two black lanes north, two lanes south, some foreign grass in the middle. To the east and west were neatly mown verges about thirty feet wide and then there were the dull green walls of the Pinus radiata plantations, sliced by yellow fire roads but deathly quiet—not a possum or a snake, not even a hopping carrion crow, could ever live there.
The boy had no idea where on earth he stood. He understood the names of hardly anything, himself included.
In this entire continent he knew only the big-faced, big-boned mother with her bag full of entertainments. She was two long strides ahead—long, long hippie skirt, T-shirt, rubber flip-flops, walking way too fast. What he really knew about her, he could have written on a candy wrapper. She was a radical, but that was as obvious as the exit sign ahead.
The boy spelled out the sign. Caboolture?
A town, she said, it’s nothing. She would not slow.
What sort of town?
His strong hair was now disguised, dyed black, cut like a hedge, revealing a band of pale untanned skin around his neck. He rubbed at the crown and squinted up at the sign—CABOOLTURE—dumb black letters on a dumb white board, an ugly redneck sort of thing, he thought.
What sort of town, Dial?
Come on, she said. An Australian town.
He should have asked other stuff, Where is my father, where is Grandma, but sometimes it seemed she was sick of him already.
Morons, she shouted at the passing car. I hope you drown. She was so tall, so pretty with a big farm boy’s stride. His cup of tea, his flesh and blood, forever.
No one is going to pick us up here, Dial. They’re all going the other way.
Thanks, she said. I hadn’t noticed. She was not used to little kids.
The cars on the southbound road were bumper to bumper, their yellow headlights glowing the color of the Pan Am Building at dusk. It was sometime around noon. He wished she could find a place to curl up with jet lag.
We could go to that town, he said, or words like that. Maybe there’s a motel. That was what he loved the most, just to be with her cuddling while she read to him, her hair tickling his face.
There’s no motel, the mother said.
I bet there is, he said.
She stopped and turned.
What? he demanded. What!
Her hair had so many shifting tones you could never say exactly what it was, but her eyebrows were plain black, and when they
pressed down on her eyes, like now, she was a scary witch.
OK, she said, that’s enough.
She had done this once in Port Authority. She had scared him then as well.
Around this time, a beat-up 1964 Ford station wagon, its paintwork gone powdery with sun and age, paused at the exit of the Golden Fleece service station on the Brisbane side of Caboolture. The driver revved the engine once and a flood of oil-blue smoke spread slowly across the pump island and dispersed into the scrubby field where two itchy-looking horses stood, their bony haunches directed at the fleeing cars.
Look at the bloody lemmings, said Trevor.
The boy did not know Trevor but he would be familiar soon enough, and for a damn long time after that as well, and he would always connect the name to that particular body—a strong man, sleek as a porpoise, sheathed in a good half-inch-thick coat of fat which seemed to feed his brown taut skin, giving it a healthy fish-oil kind of shine. He had a mashed-up ear, a short haircut, as short as a soldier’s, reddish brown, smelling of marijuana, papaya and mango. When Trevor was not naked, and he was naked every chance he got, he wore baggy Indian pajama pants, and when he smiled, like now, at the fleeing tourists, he revealed a jagged tooth.
They reckon destructive winds off Caloundra of two hundred K’s, said the driver. This was called John the Rabbitoh but was really Jean Rabiteau, of so-called French extraction. No one knew where he came from but he was a drop-dead handsome man of maybe twenty-five. He had high cheekbones, long black hair, brown eyes and a whippy wide-shouldered narrow-waisted body. He had a broad nasal accent and he smelled of cut grass and radiator hose and two-stroke fuel.
Bang! Trevor made a pistol with his hands which were as broad and stubby as his strong barrel of a body. Bang! Bang! He showed his chipped tooth and shot the drivers one by one.
Turning up the road toward the storm, the Rabbitoh stayed quiet about Trevor’s murders. He had his own thoughts involving the damned souls and the wrath of God. He hunched over the steering wheel peering up into the lowering sky and the nasty yellow light around its smudgy skirts.
