His Illegal Self (22 page)

50

The word
conspiracy
was later attached to what happened on Remus Creek Road but in the weeks while Phil “prepared” himself to travel, the only conspiring the boy noticed was on the deck where he once saw Dial kiss Trevor late at night. Maybe also some noises in the dark.

Early every morning Dial climbed up into the loft and they played poker and ate leftover dinner. He knew this was because he would soon go home, but once that had been decided, the weeks or months that followed were like a vacation and he no longer needed to worry that his grandma would die or that his dad would never be able to find him.

He had bad dreams at night, but each new day brought a lot of Dial-type driving between the mountains and the coast, between one red phone box and another. These telephone boxes would finally be revealed as part of the conspiracy, but they hardly mattered to the boy. What he cared about was the beach, eating pearl perch, teaching Trevor how to swim. Why they drove so much, he did not ask, but they traveled the winding throw-up roads to Mapleton, Maleny, then down to the muddy river at Bli Bli, up to dry Pomona, back to Maroochy which was the name of a pretty aboriginal girl long ago. The boy occupied his rightful seat. Trevor lay across the backseat winding up his cyclone radio. He said that the engine block interfered with his reception—a falsehood that the boy would believe for twenty years—and he would not take the front seat if you paid him. He could not read but he knew everything—five men got caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel. B-52s were bombing Vietnam. The boy did not want to think about the war which seemed to have taken everything from him. He preferred to study the line between his chest and swimsuit to see how brown he was. Sometimes he lay on the dusty floor. Dial had a jade anklet. He watched how her foot moved, the stick shift too. He could do it better but was not allowed.

You crazy thing, get out of there.

They parked beside a red telephone box in the middle of the sugarcane on a bend in the road between Coolum and Yandina, and another above the surf at Peregian Beach.

There was also a phone box in Pomona, the tiny rusty town where they first bought swimsuits from the thrift shop. Maybe Trevor used some twenty-cent coins from the phone money jar they carried with them everywhere. These phones had two buttons
A
and
B;
he did not try to work them. In Pomona Dial bought a black swimsuit covered with white flowers, some printed and others stitched onto her breasts. Trevor called her Mrs. Flower. Her skin grew dark quickly on account of she was a Greek with Turkish blood.

The boy also got real dark, his hair bleaching white as white, as he persisted teaching Trevor how to breathe in water. No matter how sad you were, swimming always cleaned your soul. The boy said that to Trevor, those words exactly. He showed Trevor the dead man’s float, but the surf picked him up and dumped him and soon they were just running at the waves and it did not matter that the London orphan could not swim because he caught the waves, at Marcus, at Sunshine, Peregian, Coolum.

Che, Trevor, Mrs. Flower, got dumped, got their faces pushed down into the sand and their legs kicked and tangled in the air and that was the point, that plus the feeling of the skin going tight across your back and face, and some days they were almost the only ones between Coolum and Sunshine. It was almost winter but completely perfect—no one else but a single leather-kneed geezer sweeping a bag across the wet sand to gather worms, they guessed; they did not know.

Trevor loved a band called the Saints. He played them over and over: I’m from Brisbane and I’m rather plain. He carried a whole stalk of bananas beside him on the backseat and they ate them all day long, but when the sun in the west touched the low clouds along the eastern horizon they danced and jumped under the cold shower in a trailer park and headed off in search of fish. Pearl perch. Red snapper. Reef fish. They found old codgers with missing fingers selling fish from the back of plywood vans on roads out of Noosa and Alexandra. And after that they drove back to the valley, which always lost its light before the world outside, and there Dial and Trevor cooked while the boy washed and cleaned the labels of the ice-cream cones to keep as souvenirs.

He collected exactly eighteen of these papers, all identical, white and blue, and marked
BUDERIM,
and when they were washed he laid them flat on the deck and the next day they would dry and he would put them to one side. Other things he saved were shells, stones, dried grasshoppers. Obviously he was getting ready to say good-bye, but that did not occur to him just then and no one tried to tell him what he really felt.

The three of them began to fix up Dial’s garden and although time is the element that makes a garden, the boy did not think of it in those terms. They drove to Wappa Dam with rakes and took the rich smelly carpet of weed for mulch. He got drenched in lake slime, hugging the wet bundles as they filled the trunk with them. The Peugeot sagged and water leaked behind them all the way back home.

They borrowed a rotary hoe from the Puddinghead’s father, then broke up the clods by hand, their brown skin coated with sweat and mud. They wound string onto a stick and made the rows straight. They planted broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, parsley, rocket, spinach, silver beets, onions, carrots, radishes.

The boy kept the seed packets, and in each one he placed a single seed and then sealed the packet with masking tape.

It was hard to believe he was not already filled to bursting with regret, and when his brown back began to itch and peel, when he shed his powdered skin onto the Australian floor, Dial watched with her hand across her mouth.

What is it, Dial?

I’m good.

Penny for your thoughts, Dial.

Nothing really, she said. She could not have explained it to anyone, just motes of dust in sunlight, nothing anyone would ever see.

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.