His Illegal Self (23 page)

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 Avenue 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.

Lawyer, oh please.

In that
oh please
Dial heard only privilege and condescension.

You’re not helping yourself, you silly old woman.

Excuse
me?

Jay is here. You want him? Or not?

Dial thought, I have become a kidnapper.

I lost a daughter. I can’t lose a grandson too.

Listen to me, please, Dial said, we just want to come home.

Do you have any idea what trouble you are in. Put him on, let me speak to him again.

There isn’t time.

You’d better not have hurt him.

Listen to me, Dial said. You’ve only got one chance. Do you want it?

No, you listen to me, the old lady said.

Shut up and listen, Dial said. She was scaring the boy. She could not help herself. She was in a mad place, swinging a length of two-by-four.

Yes, the old lady said very quietly. Go on, I’ll listen.

Then she could hear Phoebe Selkirk crying.

Shut up, Dial said. You rich spoiled bitch. You want to see this boy again, you talk to Phil. You get him out of jail.

She put down the phone, and began to take stock of the damage.

53

The boy and Trevor were digging behind the hut. When the hole was finished you would be able to lie in it and see all the way, above the roof of the hut, to the broken yellow strokes of road. That was the plan, being presently executed with great urgency. In the hut Dial could feel the regular thud of Trevor’s pick.

Behind the sink there was a thin lead-light window through which she could, depending on where she stood, see the boy with his head down in the hole scratching dirt behind him like a dog. Gravediggers, she thought, and that was pretty much her mood. She, Anna Xenos, had brought all this about. If only she had not done this. If only she had not done that. Everything she touched was broken. As Rebecca had said to Trevor, Why doesn’t she just bomb Cambodia?

It was Trevor’s conviction that Phil would quickly confess the boy’s location to the New York cops. Who wouldn’t? he said and in the hard glaze of his eyes she saw sufficient bitterness to trust. By tomorrow morning the Brisbane police will be out here, he said. Just before dawn. Wait and see.

It was already late now and the valley had lost the sun, and although it was worse than gloomy inside the hut, Dial thought it wiser to not light the lamps. Did the Alice May Twitchell Fellow really believe that they were being spied on from outer space, that her alarm clock was her key to freedom, that she needed to crawl into a muddy hole to keep her liberty?

She changed into a tank top and a pair of shorts and walked barefoot up the hill where she found the boy naked, lying on his stomach, digging with his hands. Trevor, wearing underpants out of some perverse politeness, was shoveling, grunting, the muscles on his back shaded with dirt like charcoal on good linen.

There had been sufficient rain to make the path slippery with mud, but all that rain had not penetrated far below the surface of the hill. It was the dry season, and after a few inches of moist earth there was hard yellow clay which had already broken the boy’s fingernails.

Are you OK, baby?

I’m OK, he said, but she thought of trapped animals gnawing off their limbs. He had to go, to be released, but first they must survive the night, so the three of them worked awkwardly together until it was necessary to bring hurricane lamps up from the hut. It was still not finished when the boy was dead eyed and droopy and she took him down to wash. Then he sat on the countertop with a towel around his hunched-up shoulders, and they both listened to the scratch and scrape of Trevor’s shovel as she made a kind of ratatouille with pumpkins and potatoes, a bastard thing without a name.

While the rice was cooking, they went up hand in hand and found that Trevor had already roofed the hole with a sheet of tin and covered it with dirt and Wappa weed. He had lined the inside with the black plastic from the garden.

Won’t the police find us here? she asked.

They’re afraid of the bush, he said. Trust me.

They ate their dinner in darkness on the deck of the hut and afterward they showered and dried themselves and put on what clean clothes they had. Finally they carried and dragged blankets and cushions up the hill, bringing with them twigs and leaves and spiders swept up in the dark.

They crawled down into the cushioned dark, the boy between Dial and Trevor, and although their positions suggested some familial protectiveness, Dial could not forget how she had hurt the boy, screaming like a harpy at his grandmother in that sweaty colonial post office. She imagined her own teeth like de Kooning’s mama, growing up into the base of her nose, the criminal auntie, rattrap jaws to mince him up. But of course what she wanted was not this desperate criminal last stand but to take him like a poor injured bird and place him in a box of cotton balls and feed him warm milk from an eyedropper. She loved him, loved his smooth brown skin, the leafy smell of his tangled hair, most of all the eyes which were once more open, limpid, filled with trust. He loved her too.

God bless Phil and keep him from harm, the boy said, and in the stunned silence that followed the prayer, he fell asleep, sliding into a whispery almost silent not-quite-snore.

The hole was tight, the blankets tangled and the boy kicked as usual in his sleep, but Dial fell asleep quickly and did not stir until Trevor shook her shoulder, once, very hard. As she woke, he placed his earthy hand across her mouth and she understood the boy was sitting up. All three of them could see through the gap between the roof and the earth: yellow headlights and brighter, whiter quartz lights sweeping over the hut. They heard men’s voices, suddenly very loud, as the unlocked door of the hut was broken open and lights brushed everywhere inside, like mad swooping things with sharp glass wings.

The worst was the breaking of the door, the malice of it. She held the boy and covered his small flat ears and he pushed himself against her but he must have heard the true splintering, cursing, stamping boots, the discordant choir of radio instructions. She was her father’s daughter as she waited for the men to come. They laid his hands on a pillow before they shot him. She could have burned them all alive.