His Illegal Self (9 page)

19

She lay on the mudflats between nightmares and the ropy unknown day. A magpie sang. In November, the creepy Rabbitoh had told her, the magpies pecked your head and made blood pour down your face. Some country she’d been sent to.

Dial, the boy said.

She was sleeping in a nest of pillows and musty rugs beneath a ceiling of worrisome water-stained wood. She did not want to wake and deal with what she’d done. It was too hot already.

Dial.

Her skin was itchy, her hair still dirty. She had slept with her head wedged into the tight dark angle where the ceiling met the loft.

Dial!

He needed too damn much too often. She hid her face in her hands, playing peekaboo but also hiding from his breath. She must buy him a damned toothbrush.

Dial, when can we leave?

She opened her arms to him and he buried himself in the warm cave beside her neck. Whatever had happened to him you could feel he had been loved. No matter what a cow his grandma was she had cuddled him and kissed him. He had told Dial the names of the puddings Grandma had cooked: queen, sticky toffee, pineapple upside down, unbelievably Victorian.

When can we leave, he said now, but she could not deal with that. She could feel his immense fragility but what could she do? This place might be their only hope. It was in the middle of the outback, as she understood it, with no phone and no mail delivery. They were off the grid. How else could she use the money to make them safe.

No matter what happens, Dial, can we? Leave?

She looked at his small determined face, his frown, the searching intelligence in those gray eyes.

He’s
worried,
she said, mocking Adam, not so much to change the subject, as to begin leading the boy toward the matter that he really must address. They were not going to start drifting.

He has to
confer
with someone, she said, and rolled her eyes.

Can we stay in a motel? Can we?

The dope is
worried
the pigs will grab him for having U.S. dollars.

Finally, she saw him understand. It made his body rigid. You’re trying to
buy
it!

Baby, you said you wanted to stop going places.

He jerked away from her. She hardly saw him go, but heard him on the ladder, half falling, landing heavily. As she rose from her blankets the flies rose too and she felt one crawl along her bare arm. She slapped herself.

Che? I’m trying to look after you. She pulled on some underpants so she could decently descend the ladder. The rungs were thin. They hurt her feet.

All I have is U.S. dollars. I don’t have a lot of choices.

He did not answer.

She said, It’s useless to them, you heard that. We’re rich, but the money’s worth nothing.

She took his hand. He snatched it back. Come on, she said. She was pleading with him, really, to understand what had happened to her life.

Come on, she said, show me all the stuff you found yesterday.

He kept his hand to himself but he led her out into the long wet grass and took an obvious sulky pleasure showing her to the so-called bathroom, a rusty four-gallon can inside a square wooden box.

Come on, she said. The place itself is sort of pretty. Let’s look in the other hut.

And it would have been pretty, in photographs, the varied greens, the log-clad huts with their low sagging verandas. Inside the second hut they found shirts and trousers hanging from four-inch nails. A netted bed faced two windows. Between the windows was a door which opened onto a low dark veranda where bats hung like broken rags.

It’s a real jungle, she said. It looked poisonous to her.

There’s another hut down there, she said. Do you want to check it ount?

You said
ount,
he said.

No I didn’t. She laughed but she hated people doing that to her, pointing out the moments when Boston surfaced. He had done this to her at Australian customs, the little WASP, announcing she was saying
mayan
instead of mine. Well, he would have more foreign stuff than that to deal with.

This was going to be his home, not just the acres, or the two huts, but this small third hut down in the darkness of the rain forest, creepier than the others, with nothing in it but an empty pickle jar.

Outside, on the stoop, someone had carved a face into a block of stone. It was not exactly sinister, but it suggested superstition, witchcraft and some very lonely lost life reduced to a hidden corner of the earth.

What does
conferring
mean? The boy pushed the stone over so its face was hidden.

He’s chickenshit.

You should not use curse words, you know.

He was hugely upset. She was hugely upset herself but she was the adult and could not show it.

What’s the matter, baby?

You shouldn’t curse.

Shut up, she thought. She brought him out of the forest, emerging just below the deck of one big leaky shaky hut, beside a bush with shiny leaves and bright red berries which she said was coffee. She wasn’t even sure that this was true.

Go on, she said, peel one. You’ll see.

Inside the red skin was a white, moist seed, slippery and somehow wrong. The boy was peeling a second bean when she heard an engine and saw the dirty blue-oil smoke, then the car itself. When the motor was turned off it continued knocking and coughing. She was expecting Adam, not Trevor. Now both of them walked through the grass toward them, Trevor staring at the boy a little too intently for her taste.

Hello boy, he said, shirtless, oily, hipless in the sun.

Hello Trevor.

She saw how the boy lifted his chin, allowing himself to be silently interrogated.

She said, Fancy seeing you here.

Trevor chewed his smile in the corner of his mouth. Well,
someone
has to change your money.

Of course, she thought.

The boy also understood. His howl came out of nowhere, like something teased and taunted in a cage. He charged at Trevor like a mad thing. He punched him in his hard hairless stomach and between the legs.

Che! she screamed at him, but Trevor had lifted him up and away and he was still hitting and scratching in the air.

When he was still, Trevor put him back on the ground and the boy looked hatefully at Dial, waiting for her to do something. When he understood she would do nothing, he slashed at the coffee bush and tore a handful of leaves and then he ran through the long dewy grass, leaping with fright at something on the way, continuing through the dense tangle of lantana which would doubtless rip his skin.

I’m sorry, she said to Trevor, but she was frightened now, of everything she’d done. I better go and talk to him, she said.

No, said Trevor, he’ll be fine. You have to talk to me.

And she obeyed. She walked with them up the traitor’s path, thinking of the boy, knowing exactly where he was, what he felt, inside the empty shed with the pickle bottle, curled up on the filthy floor, growing cooler, slowly more ashamed.

20

Was she really going to buy these mad vines and raging wild lantana, palm trees, chaos, coffee. She might as well have bought an elephant—but you could not hide inside an elephant and you could certainly hide here. That was its single virtue, to place her up a dirt track at the asshole of the earth.

The boy did not like it here, but he could not decide his fate. She was the adult. She followed the two men inside the hut, completely unclear about everything, whether she should buy or walk away, whether they were here to rob or help her. Surely she could defeat them if she had to—one man who could not see and a second man who could not read.

She sat cross-legged in the hut and watched, through a lead-light window, a tiny yellow bird, hovering. It was exquisite, beyond use or understanding.

Adam “located” the tea and “organized” the kettle and Trevor rubbed papaya salve onto the long thin cut that the boy’s toenail had made on his hairless barrel chest. He was a mole, vole, pit bull, otter, seal, just not her type, although he didn’t understand that yet. They all sat on the cushions and Adam poured the tea, smiling at some out-of-focus fact that was his alone to know. He was emaciated as an Indian ascetic, as unrelated to any life she knew as the yellow hummingbird outside the window.

So! she said. Because she wished to appear definite.

So? said Trevor. Was he mocking her?

So, we’re here to talk business, I assume. She was a child playing with money, not her money, but thousands, almost countless.

So, you want to live an
Alternative Lifestyle,
said Trevor.

He
was
mocking her, but she was way tougher than he was. Another thing he did not understand.

So, Dial, you know there are problems.

She heard him say
vere
for there and
pwblems
for problems. She had a degree from Harvard. He couldn’t speak or spell. She raised an eyebrow.

You pay Adam foreign money, what can he do with it?

You quite like my foreign money. I see you everywhere these days.

Trevor exhaled, as if offended. But of course he was a criminal, one of the shifty classes her younger brother found so admirable.

All right, he said, now listen.

I’m listening.

No, you are being twitchy and sarcastic. You don’t know who I am. You think I am a creep. You don’t understand what I have given up to come here.

What have you given up?

There you go, he said, that’s what I mean. I was in the middle of building a new gate.

Well she had been about to take a job at Vassar. A gate, she said. Mocking him.

A stockade, said Adam, sucking up. A bloody stockade, Dial, he pleaded.

There was some weird unworldly singsong in their voices, like elves, she thought.

I had six strong men all lined up to work with me, said Trevor, and now they’ve gone away. Thank you, Trevor, he said. That was nice of you, Trevor.

Meanwhile the disgusting little flies crawled across the surface of the table. She covered her skin with her dress and she could feel the weight of her remaining money—all there was now between her and Sing Sing. She could not ask him if he had already robbed her.

He said, Do you know how much an American dollar is worth?

He said “worf.”

Australia has a dollar of its own, Dial. You’re in Australia now. An Australian dollar, he said, is worth more than an American dollar.

Oh God, she thought. This is like the health food store. They hate us. We didn’t even know they fucking existed and they’ve been down here hating us. What did we ever do to them?

I bet that just seems
wrong
to you, he said. You know every country has a telephone code. You know what America’s is?

It was 1, of course. She got the point. She said, Why don’t we just cut to the chase. You’re saying I would have to pay Adam more than we agreed. Is that it?

It’s number one, he said. God bless America.

You’re jacking up the price.

No.

Just say it, man. Like to my fucking face.

But Trevor wouldn’t fight. He produced a pouch of Drum tobacco and got busy with a cigarette. He looked hurt and offended and why wouldn’t he if he was what he said he was. But if he was cheating her he would act the same.

I don’t understand you, babe. Why would you want to piss me off.

He engaged her eyes directly. Way too invasive. She couldn’t hold them long.

Who else is going to help you?

She looked away, as if impatient, but really fearful of being wrong.

Maybe you shouldn’t buy Adam’s place, he said. You don’t look like a farm girl to me.

Well, it was not her money. It was all she had.

Just give me a figure, she said. Just do it.

Six thousand Australian dollars is six thousand six hundred American dollars, Trevor said. He said “fowsand.”

Ten percent of that is six hundred and sixty-six.

And he continued but she could not hold the numbers still. She was a Harvard graduate but she could not even do the math. He meanwhile, the autodidact, was spinning numbers in the air.

All right, she thought, I’m doing it.

She pulled out the fuse wire and ripped off her hem. She counted out the money, showing the full length of her gorgeous leg and pushing out currency like cookie dough onto their filthy table.

The boy was going to hate her—tough!

Trevor grinned—the broken teeth, the injured ear.

Excuse me, she said.

She was a fool, a total fool. She felt the wet on her cheeks before she understood that she was crying. Trevor called after her, but she fled the hut, walking briskly. As soon as her feet were on the earth the tears arrived in floods. Then she ran, along the path up to the bananas and down the hill to the spring and from there to the rain forest where she ran to hide inside the shed.

The boy was standing. Diane Arbus. Clenched jaw. Holding out his arm to show his insect bites. All across the floor were bits of paper, not a single one torn straight, some white, some folded over and over, and also little stones and seeds and a pack of playing cards that had gone missing from her bag.

Mommy.

The dark strength of the misunderstanding squeezed her gut. She felt his body hard against her, so familiar, so foreign. As she held him she looked down at his magpie nest. There was a picture of Dave Rubbo which brought her heart into her throat, and a torn pack of impatiens seeds which was somehow almost worse.

We’ll get used to it, he said.

You’re a brave boy, she said. He squatted over his stuff and gathered it together. He knocked over the jar. It rolled all the way across the floor and fell into the forest with a small fat thump.

Floor’s not level, she said, her voice all thick with snot.

Will I have my surprise? he asked.

Surprise? She laughed, self-mocking, desperate.

When we went to Philly, you know.

What a shitty time you’ve had, poor baby.

The boy clocked the ruined velvet hem tied around her waist.

How can my dad ever find us now, he said.

Suddenly, it was time for truth.

Your dad doesn’t want to find us, baby. You know that. Once she had said the words they settled in her gut like a large gray river rock, little bugs crawling out beneath.

No, he said, gathering himself into himself again. He wants us. He wants me. She could see the tendons in his neck, the tightness of his little jaw.

You remember, baby. In Seattle.

No, he cried.

She thought, I cannot do this, not now. He’s too frail.

Shush, she said.

She had heard the cat, that’s all. It was a straw. She grasped at it.

Shush. Listen.

She got him to crawl, reluctantly, by her side until they were at the doorway like a pair of andirons waiting for a fire.