by Peter Carey
51
A ridiculous number of twenty-cent pieces had been spent by Trevor arguing with Phil about how he was to be transported to Brisbane Airport, every conversation predicated on the notion that even a call from a public phone box in Bli Bli was being listened in on, and sometimes this seemed humorous to Dial, and other times it seemed wise and mostly it just seemed as if it was better to be cautious. Trevor showed a distinct aversion to going anywhere near the airport and she certainly didn’t want him harmed on her account. So very early one misty morning, when the valley surprised her by being both damp and cold, she removed her Vassar skirt and twinset from dry cleaner’s plastic, and walked carefully down to the filthy Peugeot, carrying her shoes and a T-shirt in her hand. The T-shirt was to wipe the mud off her ankles.
There was dew on the police cars as she passed through Eumundi heading for Tewantin. She crossed the bridge at Gympie Terrace at exactly 6:00 a.m., and for a moment a pelican floated just outside her window, finally descending through white streaks of mist to the Noosa River. She was dry mouthed but could still appreciate the beauty of the place, and marvel that working people could live like this, here, now. You could be poor, without snow and shit and Whitey Bulger and his boys, without spending all your life trying to escape your destiny. Of course she thought this before she saw Phil.
She cruised up the terrace and turned back at the roundabout. Now the Noosa Yacht Club was on her right and she could see, out on the roof deck, a clergyman with two small cases who turned out on closer inspection to be Phil Warriner in a strange suit.
Later she drew the garments for the boy, the trouser buttons above his navel, the jacket long, like a frock coat. She drew very well but she could not illustrate the way the trousers melted and floated like a gown.
What is it, Dial?
It’s called a zoot suit.
She thought, My life is entrusted to this fool, God save me.
The extraordinary creature had seen her. He came down the steps, across the grass, paused a second on the median strip. She thought, What on earth am I doing? She should have run away.
Did you, Dial? Run away.
I waited. Like a good girl.
Like a cow, she thought, about to get a hammer between her eyes. This was her lawyer. Her representative. Yet her greatest feeling, watching him cross the empty road, was not fear—which would have been reasonable—but embarrassment. He had white spats, all the fixings. He carried two cases—a fat satchel and a trumpet case, and when he placed them carefully in the back, she made no comment.
Morning, he said, shaking out his trousers as he settled in.
The suit was daffodil yellow.
Hi, she said, but she could not look at him. She thought, He’s going to get cigarette ash all over it. They set off back up toward Eumundi from where they would take the Bruce Highway to Brisbane Airport, and all this time Dial could feel her passenger waiting to talk about his suit. She should have told him, Take the freaking thing off. Burn it. Where in all of the Sunshine Coast would you find a zoot suit? American Negroes wore them, Negroes long since dead.
Why did she not tell him? Because she did not want to hurt him? Was that really true? By the time she was dealing with the bullying trucks on the Bruce Highway, she had sunk into depression. The pleasure of the last few weeks turned out to have been the pleasure of very short-lived things, luminous wisteria, precious for being almost gone.
She had watched the boy collecting every moment of his self. He laid out his blocky dogged drawings of the garden and the beach. She did not ask the obvious, Won’t you miss all this. Won’t you miss me most of all?
For better or for worse she drove Phil to the airport, two hours to Eagle Farm, every minute of which she was tensed against the suit.
He was going down around Greenwich, he told her, and she did not correct him, to look up Max Gordon and maybe sit in at the Vanguard. Every restaurant in New York had huge plates of food. The white people were uptight, he said as if he himself were blue. Americans had no sense of “irony.” The spades were cool. He was going to hang out at Brownies where you got toot right on the bar but you got thrown out for swearing.
She passed the wide-verandaed store where they sold mud crabs to the businessmen about to catch a Melbourne flight. Phil told her all about this, the crab that had escaped and almost crashed a 727. She slid in beside the curb at Brisbane Airport, gave him his expenses in an envelope, and kissed his bristly oddly perfumed cheek.
After Dial got back from Eagle Farm she loudly wished that she had never asked Phil to do a thing. The boy wished too. He was not allowed to say how much.
But a week passed and nothing happened, then another, and after a while all that remained of Phil was Dial’s rolling eyes, and her drawings of the zoot suit, way better, he thought, than anything he could do.
Dial and Trevor and the boy went to the beach six days in a row. They found the best avocados on the Sunshine Coast, hidden from the road behind a stand of Pinus radiata on the Coolum road. Then, the next week, on the road in from Bli Bli, they came across an old foreign guy selling little fish, not sardines, but small. Dial got watery eyed and cooked the fish like she once cooked them for her father who, she said, was exactly five foot four.
Next morning there was rain on the roof and everyone stayed in bed for hours. Then there were a couple of days of steady rain and the boy witnessed the silky pale green stalk of pea unfolding, pushing aside the crumbling soil. In mud and drizzle he mulched the peas with Wappa weed the way he had learned from Trevor long ago, bumping up the paths with his pallet piled high. He patted down the black stuff, leaving a hole so every curling baby could reach the sky—feathery clouds, high and icy in the sci-fi blue.
No word from Phil.
The three of them walked up the hill. Trevor’s tanks were getting nice and full. That night they went to a moon dance at the so-called hall and the boy danced with Dial and then with the little Puddinghead. He learned an Irish jig although the moon was covered up by cloud. He wouldn’t be dead for quids. That was a fact.
Through all his happiness, the boy still carried the shame of the tooting horn. He could not say that he no longer wanted to go back to Kenoza Lake.
If Phil found Grandma he would send a secret telegram to say Dial had been forgiven for her crime. Hamid the postmaster would write down the telegram and put it in a pigeonhole. It would stay there until they asked, Is there a telegram? No one delivered telegrams to hippies.
He stayed in the car when Dial and Trevor went into the post office. When he saw them returning empty-handed his whole body went loose as a puppy’s neck.
There was more rain and Trevor’s tanks spilled over and the ford was flooded and they were just at home playing canasta when they heard the little Puddinghead crying Coo-ee and running over the sodden ground, splash, thump, as she landed on the back step of the hut, no Tinker Bell, her legs what you might call solid, scratched, soft white down all over her. The sodden thing balled up in her hand was the nasty thing, the telegram. Her dad had been given it the week before and he had come home to find the goats among the vegetables.
Brian says, the Puddinghead announced, shivering and holding out her dripping arms. He says, she said, it doesn’t look too urgent.
It was dark and overcast outside, dark inside too. The boy felt Dial shiver and saw her hold her arms around her breasts. She did not say a word.
Trevor lay down his canasta hand, faceup. Then Dial rose to her feet. She took the telegram from the small blonde girl.
Shit, she cried, and flung it on the floor.
The boy’s heart panicked inside its cage.
Dial said, Airhead.
The boy did not know what an airhead was but Dial looked like an earthquake, her wide mouth torn apart. She struck her head against the wall and a plate fell on the floor and broke. What a moron, she cried.
The Puddinghead turned and ran and they heard her splashing down the hill, bawling.
Trevor retied
his sarong and walked to where the crumpled telegram lay dying by the doorway. He passed it to the boy to sound it out for him.
MET J. J. JOHNSON.
Yes, what is it?
He has met a trombone player, Dial said, kneeling beside the broken plate.
What does that mean.
It means he is a flake.
The boy thought, Maybe this is good.
52
The boy saw it happen—the telegram changing Dial’s mind.
He felt the heat of her blood as she rushed out the door. She came back with pearls over her chest and mud on her calves. Her court shoes were in her hand. She climbed up into his loft and came down with the jar of twenty-cent pieces.
Who is J. J. Johnson?
A trombone player.
Her hair was frizzed and mad looking. She wiped her calves with a dishcloth and asked Trevor where they should call from.
Is he really a trombone player?
Shush. Yes.
Trevor said there was a phone box up in the ranges beyond Maleny and this part the boy understood, or almost understood, i.e., the random pattern is your key to freedom. Do you understand?
Not really.
You scattered your dope plants through the bush. You did nothing that could be seen or heard from space. Do you understand?
It was yes, no, sort of.
Come on, baby, Dial said now, we’re going to take a ride. All this alarming activity brought back the bad feeling from the airplanes. He watched her huge long legs, galloping down the hill toward the Peugeot 203.
Trevor took the backseat and was very quiet, not eating, not winding up his radio, leaning forward so his little mouth was near Dial’s ear. He was as alert and watchful as he had been when the police crept across the paddock in their truck.
Where are we going?
Shush.
The boy thought, I am being sent back. His stomach got tight as he listened to them.
He can have my fucking money, Dial said.
Who, Dial?
Shush, she said, talking to Trevor quiet and fast. She would send him extra. He could spend all night at the Blue Note. Or the Gate. And get himself beat up on the A train if that is what he chose. He was way too big a flake for this. She always knew.
Who? the boy insisted, trying not to be whiny.
Please, Dial said. I’ll explain. Trust me.
Instead of explaining she drove six miles to Nambour, then fifteen miles to Maleny and another five miles south until they could see the weird broken teeth of the Glass House Mountains shoving out of the prickly bush below the velvet sky. The road was thin and bright black along the grassy ridge and when they came to the phone box Dial parked the car as best she could, nervous about tipping over into the valley below. She got out of the car with a piece of paper held between thumb and finger, fluttering in the breeze. In her other hand she carried the jam jar of coins and the boy stayed in the car with the window open, the soft breeze washing across his skin.
Trevor pushed into the phone box too.
The boy was left alone to be half sick. He did not want to go, not yet, later. Maybe Dial could pay Grandma to have a visit so she could see it was really nice. The rain had stopped and the rabbit’s fur cloud was high enough to see all the way to the coast. He imagined Lex and Sixty-second, and the deep dark streets, not letting his mind walk very far.
They rushed out of the phone box, Trevor frowning, Dial blowing out her cheeks.
What? he asked when they got in the car. What?
Dial was busy turning the car around. For a moment the back wheels got stuck and then they broke free, tearing away from Maleny, leaving lumps of yellow mud along the center of the road.
We have to go to Brisbane, baby.
Why?
They won’t let us make an international call from a public phone.
At the Brisbane GPO there were police everywhere, like ants pouring from a nest. He looked down at his feet so no one would see his face.
Just be quiet, Dial told him. OK?
He took her slippery frightened hand and stayed tight against her as they walked up the steps of the huge building like a church or synagogue. No air-conditioning. Should have been. At a high counter Dial paid money and was given a ticket with a number on it and then they went into a waiting room with long wooden benches and black telephones around the walls, each one set in its own wood-paneled booth.
This is fancy, the boy said. Old style.
Yes.
When their number was finally called, the three of them pushed together into the booth which smelled of whatever gases people make when they are sad or scared.
Hello, Dial said.
He pressed against her as she asked for Mr. Warriner. Phil.
The boy thought, Flake.
He must be home by now, she said to Trevor.
Hello, said Dial. Hello, Phil.
She listened. She said, Is that Phil Warriner’s room? Then she listened again.
That’s not your business, she said. I want to speak to Phil.
Then, without saying another word, she placed the big black phone back on its hook. The boy did not see Trevor slip away but Dial found him among the crowd out front. Trevor had his hand across his mouth, his eyes flittering like mad, and the boy knew he was scared.
Cop, Dial said. In his room.
Trevor stared into the distance.
He was from Brooklyn, said Dial. The cop. She looked down at the boy.
I bet you know your grandma’s number?
Trevor said, I’ll meet you at the car at three.
The boy thought, What will happen to me? He watched Trevor’s smooth hipless glide, right through a crowd of policemen getting on a bus.
Where is he going?
Do you know your grandma’s phone number?
He looked into Dial’s glaring speckly eyes. Everything was hidden in the black bit where Grandpa told him not even God could see.
Why?
She took his hand and he let her take him back to near the high counter where she did that crouching-down thing.
Listen, she said, the idiot’s in trouble.
Trevor?
Phil. If he’s in trouble I’m in trouble too. Just let me explain it to your grandma before Phil makes it worse.
That’s what I said, the boy said. I told you ages ago.
He was crying now, not knowing what was right or wrong. They did not have a tissue. She fetched him a telegram form to blow his nose and it was hard and smeary on his skin and he had to use his wrist instead. Dial took a fresh telegram and wrote both numbers, Sixty-second Street, Kenoza Lake. Through tears he watched her paying at the counter.
It was nighttime where Grandma was, her little swimming body must be hardly showing beneath the surface of her bed, the crackling radio playing to keep away bad dreams. When the phone rang she must have got an awful fright.
Hello, Dial said, this is Anna Xenos.
Xenos? The boy could hear an ambulance. That’s how he knew Dial called the city first.
I am your daughter’s friend, Dial said. Anna Xenos.
The boy was not mentioned. His grandma could not see him or imagine where he was. A policeman was eating a sandwich and leaning against the counter while he talked to the pretty plump girl who handed out the numbers for the calls. Blood oath, the policeman said.
Dial’s senses were as alive as cat’s whiskers. She noticed how the policeman was staring at the boy. She heard a tumbler being moved across a glass-topped table in New York City.
OK, Anna Xenos, the old lady said. Do you know what time it is?
Dial thought, I’m nuts to have this conversation.
The police have arrested your accomplice, the grandmother said.
The word—accomplice—turned in her gut.
He’s in The Tombs right now.
She did not know what The Tombs were exactly, but what she imagined was pretty close, and she hated the old lady for how she said toombs from a Park Aven
ue address.
She looked down at the boy and saw with what misery he clung to her. He was wrung-out looking, sweaty nosed, tugging at her skirt. Poor boy. Poor Phil in his zoot suit. She had been embarrassed to talk about it, but her prissy silence had gotten him locked in jail.
He’ll be in court in the morning.
For Christ’s sake, he’s a lawyer. He’s my lawyer.
Let me talk to Jay.
No, not yet.
Dial imagined an old-fashioned telephone, its cable frayed like her mother’s corset. She waited while it crackled in her ear.
Do you really have to be so cruel, Mrs. Selkirk said.
Dial pushed the greasy telephone to the boy and he took it in both hands.
Darling, is that you?
The boy heard her voice dragged up from the martini deep of sleep.
Yes Grandma.
Jay?
It’s me, Grandma. He saw her gray hair brushed out for bedtime.
Did they hurt you, Jay?
No Grandma.
The boy had heard his grandma weep quite often, like wind through fall leaves, but not like this, a storm of lashing and bashing and gulping. Then it stopped real quick.
Phil will tell you, the boy said quickly. I’m OK.
Who?
The lawyer, Grandma. He went to fix it all up. Everything’s just fine.
The police have him, darling, don’t you worry.
Everyone is kind to me, Grandma. Phil is nice.
Jay, where are you?
Maybe he should have said where he was. He did not know. The policeman had bushy sandy eyebrows pushing down upon his eyes and he stood with his bottom stuck back, so the lettuce in the sandwich would fall on the floor and not on his badge.
Jay, you have to say.
Dial had her ear right next to the phone. She took it from him and he was pleased he did not have to decide.
Listen, Dial said, I’ve paid for six minutes, so don’t waste time.
I’ll have you in Sing Sing, said Grandma Selkirk making static in her ear. I can trace your call, you little fool. How much money do you want?
Why don’t you just talk to my lawyer and see if you can settle something. I don’t want money.
