His Illegal Self (10 page)

21

There was no kitty. The ground dropped away below them, and there, in the broken shadows amid the speckled light that gave the forest floor a spotted skin, was a fat, stumpy-tailed bird with emerald along its back, turquoise on the shoulders, a red rump, a lovely blue beneath its wings. All its sudden beauty made him sad. He wished that it was dead.

Did I talk to my dad in Seattle, he asked.

She shrugged, exhausted.

I didn’t, he said. I never saw my dad. What do you mean that he won’t come here?

Throughout all this, the bird was part of some dumb dream. It picked up a snail shell and hit it against a rock. For a moment a beam of sunlight got it. A minute later it was gone, swallowed by the wild lantana.

Where was my dad?

On the lawn, with the hose.

That was my dad? No.

As they came out of the rain forest, the boy did not know what he felt. He saw Adam arrive on foot. He was a loser. He had a wad of money, too bright to be worth anything.

That was my dad? With the hose?

The mother would not answer. He saw how she looked around the land as if she had just woken up. She rubbed her sweaty nose with the back of her hand, squinting up the hill behind the dark huts where the sun caught the wild trees. Smooth trunks burst out of the shadow, waxy white, at the same time shining green, and it was absolutely clear, even to a boy, that the mother could not take care of him. She had no idea of where she was or what she’d taken on.

22

His best memory of Seattle was an ice-cream sundae. They had just flown from Oakland. They had taken a taxi. They sat together at the counter and listened to the Jefferson Airplane, chocolate fudge pooling in ice cream.

She said: Are you happy, babe?

He did not understand he was going to be robbed of his father. So he was very happy. There were posters on the wall. He said, They’re really trippy.

And she laughed, and laid her hand across his back.

After the sundae, Dial was pretty much cleaned out. So they walked down the Ave to the unisex, hand in hand. She told the unisexer she was good for it. He said OK. That was Joel, a freak with no shirt and long curling black hair and a big Jewish nose.

The mother told him how the boy must be fixed up.

Oh man, he said, don’t make me do this, Dial. He had a whiny New York voice and the boy liked him without knowing why.

I’m good for it, Dial said. She winked at the boy.

The boy felt his hair lifted with the end of a comb and dropped back against his neck.

Don’t make me cut this, babe.

Don’t shit me, man. You know what’s going down. You know who this is?

Hey, Che?

Hi.

You’ve got great hair, Che. It’s real pretty. You sure you want me to cut it off?

The boy wanted it so much he could not speak.

What do
you
think, man, the mother said.

Joel wiped the boy’s face and sat him on a box.

As the tickling clippers approached his ear, the boy waited with his eyes scrunched up.

Yeah, right, said the barber. You don’t mind, kid? Times are tough for you.

I’m OK, he said. He opened his eyes to see the mother walk out on the Ave and close the glass door behind her. He was excited by almost everything that had happened to him, the hotel, the airplane, the sundae, but particularly this high hard buzz against his neck. He was being liberated, as Cameron had said. They will break you out, man. Your life will start for real. Dial was so cool. Men turned their heads as they passed her. Now one walked backward smiling. Dial rolled a cigarette—long fingers, swift pink lick. By the time she had smoked it all his childhood was on the floor.

The barber spun the chair and the boy saw he had become a redneck kid from Jeffersonville. He was a cicada underground.

Dial came back to do inspection. She touched his cheek and winked at him. Give the man some color, she said.

Oh, babe! He’s just a kid, Dial.

Black.

The barber raised an eyebrow and it seemed as if he would suggest a different shade, but a moment later he came back with some stuff mixed in a bowl.

Organic, it ain’t.

The boy felt the cold chemicals sucking on his scalp and he wasn’t scared about this or anything. This was his destiny as he had been told. He was on TV now. He was going to have to be with his dad, his mom, where he belonged. One of these days you’re going to rise up singing.

While the dye took, he looked at a comic book, soft and furry pages, stroked by so many hands. In the Batcave Bruce Wayne showed all the different Batman costumes including a pure white costume to make him invisible in the snow. It was the first comic he had ever seen, a hard dark thrill that made his eyes narrow. By the time he finished it he had become a
completely
new person, ink-black hair, two years older easy. The unisexer closed his shop and drove them to the underground which turned out to be a house whose porch had got filled with old carpet and boxes of books that had been rained on and melted like chocolate in the heat. This too excited him—the books—as if nothing that had mattered before would matter now. It was in a street of colored clapboard houses and kids playing stickball and greasers working on their cars.

If his father was there he should have been told.

He and Dial walked straight into an empty hallway where no one ever swept, and then passed into a large high room from which all of normal life had been removed. No one even smiled, not the fierce bearded men, not the women who had not washed enough. The boy had a good eye, an
excellent
eye, which had been proven at the Guggenheim. He had not been told anything but he guessed this was
underground.
He looked out for his handsome dad, their leader, staying close to Dial as she moved around the room, through the echoes, across the opinions, sharp like rocks and broken bricks. When anyone looked at him, he smiled, figuring his father would smile back at him if he was here. But no one smiled, which would be weird even on the main street of Jeffersonville, New York.

The whole house was stressed and angry, with him, it seemed. They were stressed he was on TV. They were stressed Dial was on TV. They should not have come here because it was a secret place. They did not mince their words, as Grandma said. They spoke their minds.

While he held Dial’s skirt balled up inside his fist, they began to beat on her. Dial was on an ego trip. Why was she telling jokes? Had the Vietnamese won? Had the pigs left the ghettos?

This was the opposite of everything he had expected from Cameron. Behind a bad-smelling sofa he discovered a slippery bright green sleeping bag and into this he crawled, wedging himself as far under the sofa as he was able. He wished he could go to the bathroom. They beat on her and beat on her. She was a petit bourgeois adventurist. And she brings this fucking brat here, now. She just went and did it. She thinks the revolution is a part-time job.

The boy needed a poop.

What was Dial going to do with the kid now? Did she plan to give him to the pigs?

He could not poop. He was very hot inside the bag.

He heard Dial crying. She was a giant among them and they dared to make her cry.

She screamed at them that they were heartless bastards. Maybe they were talking about the boy. He was scared they would off him.

A man said to leave her alone and that was when he pooped. It snaked out of him and settled in his underpants, hot and stinking, and he put his head inside the bag and pulled the string closed so no one else would know.

Dial said, Do not shoot the messenger.

The boy began to cry and he was still crying when they pulled him from his bag and carried him through the room and out onto the front lawn where a big man with hair across his face and head pulled off his soiled clothes and made him stand facing the wall while he hosed him down. The water was warm at first because the hose had been lying in the sun but then it turned cold and hard and it hurt his skin and only when Dial came running, screaming, from the house, did the man stop.

Fuck you, she said.

He would remember nothing of the man except his watery gray eyes. He rubbed Che’s head. He held out his hand to Dial but she turned her back and soaped the boy down gently and he watched with his arms folded and then stamped his foot and walked a circle on the grass and came back one more time to watch.

All around was gentle summer, the cars on the street, the green grass, the ice-cream truck playing “Greensleeves.”

The man was holding a big blue towel, not to the boy, to Dial.

I’m sorry, Dial said to him. I guess I’ve fucked this up.

She wrapped the towel around the boy and then she really cried, great loud gulps of air and snot and the man put his hands around her from behind.

The man said, Don’t worry, baby.

His eyes were kind, and wet. His own son was maybe eight inches from his own skin. Later the boy thought there was likely a code the father must live by so no matter how his heart was hurting he could not speak to his son, not even touch his hand, just live his secret itchy life enclosed in hair.

In a humid garden on the other side of the planet earth, his child was lost to him, and he to the child. Clouds of insects were illuminated by the disappearing sun. The boy was an assistant to a starving hippie. The boy had had the air sucked out of him. He was lackluster, without hope. When asked to help he cut the stalk of a big orange pumpkin, but only halfway through. He pulled up two onions and picked one eggplant.

His dad would have introduced himself if he could have foreseen this unhappiness.

Back in the hut, his gut a sloshy sump of misery, the boy watched the skinny hippie “locate” the “spuds” and grease a crusted black roasting pan and fill it with chopped pumpkin and potatoes and onions. He saw how he hung the hurricane lamps beneath the sleeping platform and another in the middle of the doorway to the deck and another off the wall, its usual place because you could see the long thin streak of carbon rising on the yellow tar paper. The boy would live worse than trailer trash. There would be no light switches in his life.

Adam lit a mosquito coil and they had to gather close around it. He had been the owner but now he was free of it. He rolled a joint from three papers and the smoke from the coil was like incense, musty as burning cow poop which he said it was.

The dark came down and the air stayed hot and thick and after a while you could smell the vegetables roasting and the boy lay with his head on the mother’s lap. They were tender with each other but he had a secret buzzing anger quiet inside him, a vibration in his chest that got bigger all the time. She should have told him that was his dad.

He heard a meow and there Buck stood. His anger grew some more. In the cat’s mouth was a dead creature almost half his size.

Jesus, said Adam.

Buck dropped the dead thing, and showed the boy his wet pink mouth.

On the floor a pitta bird gave up its lifelong secret—the blue beneath its crumpled wing. The boy was crying. His dad was mad at him. Everything in his whole life was crushed and dead and beside this the fact that the pitta was protected, or that humans could only see that blue in flight or death—none of this could mean a thing.

He kicked Buck, lifted him like a football that did not land until the open door.

23

You saw the cat, Dial said to Adam. You fucking petted it, man. You had it on your fucking lap. You can’t take my money and then say cats are against the rules. So give me my money back, if that’s how it is. Deal is over.

Adam was all hunched up and twisted like a pipe cleaner on the windowsill. I’m into cats, he said, peering sideways at his lawyer, begging him to come and save his life.

The lawyer’s name was Phil Warriner. He was tall with surfer’s shoulders. He had a big dumb paisley tie, long peaked collar, bushy sideburns, a droopy black mustache.

I’m into cats as well, Phil Warriner said.

Then give the money back, Dial said, almost high on relief. She didn’t want to live there anyway. Your client knew about the cat from the beginning, she said.

Then she waited for the lawyer, watching him stroke his mustache like a fool. She could not imagine how this man had ended up in this crappy little office with felt tiles on the floor. All those years in law school and then spend your life in fucking
Nambour,
staring through the window at the Woolworth’s loading dock.

The problem isn’t cats, he said. It’s birds.

Dial turned to Adam, who was hugging himself and rocking. When we got in your car, Dial insisted, when you picked us up. You had a rooster, Adam. We had a cat.

The lawyer took a yellow legal pad and drew a line down the middle.

The question is, babe, Phil Warriner said, do you plan to honor your commitment to the Crystal Community.

She let the
babe
go by. She said, No, no, don’t start that. I don’t have an obligation to anyone. Adam is the one with the obligation. He didn’t tell the truth.

As she spoke the boy, who had been standing hard behind her all this while, lifted Buck from his cardigan pocket and pushed his face into his fur. So now he was kissing his cat. Great. Last night he was kicking it.

The lawyer rolled a thin straight cigarette. We’re going to transfer Adam’s shares to your name, he said to Dial. That’s what we are gathered here to do.

But you can’t do it, see, said Dial. She was smiling at him now.

Oh? He tucked the ends in with a red match and lit up, holding in the smoke too long.

There’s a rule against the cat.

There is no rule, said the lawyer. They’re hippies, jeez.

I’ve been in communes before, Mr. Warriner. They’re full of fucking rules, believe me.

Phil, said the lawyer.

We’re
Australian
hippies, Adam pleaded. It’s different here.

Dial groaned. The boy was pushing the cat’s face into her neck. The kitten licked. Stop it! she cried.

You buy shares, Dial. You get your own land, your own house. It’s yours. Tell her, Phil. She can do what she likes, man. Anyway, she paid.

Phil smiled down at his desktop. Dial thought, Are you patronizing me? She watched the lawyer as he brushed the crumbs of tobacco from his desk to his lap, from his lap onto the floor.

You’ll discover, he said, still looking down, that there are not many rules on Remus Creek Road and what rules exist have all been broken many times before. And then he smiled at her, his eyes crinkled. She thought, He’s hitting on me.

You’re meant to be the lawyer.

I’m an organic lawyer. He grinned, his cigarette jammed in the corner of his mouth.

I can’t buy this land, she said.

Look. Phil Warriner arranged his hands in his crotch. You already paid Jimmy Seeds the purchase price.

Jimmy Seeds?

Adam. Same thing.

Same thing? Really. Well once this
person here
had my money he told me I could not have the cat. That’s a deal breaker, said Dial.

There are all sorts of families, Adam said. We know that, man. We’re against the patriarchy, man.

You are
what
!

The cat is part of your family. The cat has to live there too.

What Jimmy means, said the lawyer, is that you’re not meant to have a cat, but no one’s going to stop you. They’ll just say, That’s Dial, she’s into cats. She’s cool.

So what did you mean, saying I was going to have to do something about that cat?

I was stoned, man, jeez.

So we can have a cat.

Yes, said Adam. Y-e-s.

The mother turned to the boy and sighed.

The boy imagined he was being asked to decide. It would be years before he saw this made no sense. He always remembered the way her brows came down, all black and witchy. He had to answer did he love the cat. Would he live in the outback with no toilet or light switches, where no one would see him ever? It was not fair. He looked out to the lane. A sheet of newspaper was fluttering back and forth, blown by the hot wind. Then a truck arrived and he looked back into the room, avoiding people, staring at a photograph on the wall. It was the color of dead families, long ago.

You know Bo Diddley? the lawyer asked suddenly, unhooking the frame and handing it to the boy. We hung out together in Sydney.

The mother took the picture from the boy and returned it to the lawyer’s desk.

Well? she asked the boy.

She was blaming him, but what had he done? He was sorry he kicked the cat. He loved the cat. Not more than he loved his daddy though. It was not fair with everybody looking at him. He was just a little boy.

In any case, Phil Warriner said, picking up a folder, you seem to have made a verbal contract. He upended the folder and watched its contents spill across the desk.

Pull up your chair, he said to the mother.

As she read the document, the boy could hear the paper on the loading dock flapping like something wrecked and broken in a trap.

The mother asked, Who is James Adamek?

That’s me, said Adam.

The lawyer pushed a drugstore Bic toward the mother.

The boy watched as she studied the clear plastic pen and then the filing cabinet and the picture of Bo Diddley and the spill of documents now lying in the dusty sunshine. She asked, Where did you go to school?

Phil Warriner laughed.

This is all legal? You’re telling me?

Warriner picked up the document and read it quickly once again. He flicked Dial’s passport open, read it, checked her face, closed it shut.

Just sign it, Anna, he said. You know what I mean?