The Promise (3 page)

In the last week before the end of the school year I was asleep in bed early one morning when I was woken by a knock at the window. I turned from my side to my back and the sound came again. I crawled out of bed and opened the blind. Red was standing in the middle of the street wearing a pair of pyjama shorts and a singlet and was throwing pebbles at my window.

‘What are you doing, Red? You piss the bed?'

‘No. That's my Pa's job. Get down here. There's cops everywhere.'

‘Cops? Where?'

‘Out the back. Where the hole's been dug. There's TV people there too. I'll meet you at your back gate.'

I grabbed some clothes from the floor, pulled my jeans on and ran down the stairs with a pair of runners in my hand and a T-shirt over my shoulder. Red was standing by the gate. Behind him were police, TV news cameras and a crowd. A policeman was knocking a metal picket into the earth. He tied a length of rope to it and paced out the ground until he'd decided on a second spot to bang in another picket. When he'd finished he tied the length of rope to the second picket, stood guard in front of it and ordered the crowd to stand back.

Red clapped his hands together like he was at a football game.

‘Whoa, Jo-ey. This looks serious. Let's get a better look.'

He was off before I had my shoes on. The ground was sticky with mud. By the time I got to the roped-off area my shoes were black. Red was in the ear of Telegram Simms, who, at around the age of eighty, was the oldest paperboy in the world. He knew everything. They say he broke the Kennedy assassination before Oswald had fired a shot.

‘A dead body? You sure?' Red asked. He turned to me and whispered, ‘Joey. It's a body, Telegram says. In the ditch just there. He says someone was shot.'

‘How's he know?'

‘Same way he always knows.'

‘And what's that?'

‘Mental telepathy. My old man says that Telegram is gifted.'

‘Maybe he should get a proper job then.'

Word about the shooting spread quick as lightning. The crowd got bigger as people waited for the body to be brought up from the ditch. I listened in on one of our neighbours, Kitty Marsh, talking to a policeman. She said that the shooting had taken place somewhere else and the body had been dumped.

‘I would've heard a shotgun going off. I haven't slept through the night in over ten years. I wake to the heartbeat of an ant.'

The policeman looked at her suspiciously.

‘Who told you it was a shotgun?'

‘Well, Telegram there just said that half his face is missing. It's got to be either a shotgun or a cannon ball.'

The crowd hushed as two men in grey coats struggled through the mud with a stretcher carrying a lumpy body bag. Police ran ahead of the stretcher and held the crowd back until it had passed through. It was placed on a slide-out tray in the back of a van with darkened windows. A police car pulled in front of the van, turned its siren and flashing blue light on and took off with the van close behind. It was only then that the crowd thinned.

We talked about the dead body on our way to and from school that day. Red thought it was probably a cheating husband who had been caught with another woman.

‘How could you know that?'

‘I've been watching
Divorce Court
on the TV, with my mum and sisters, and there's a lot of cheating husbands. Everywhere.'

‘And you think that a wife could blow her husband's head off and dump him here? Drag him through all that mud. I don't think so.'

‘No. Not the wife. Maybe a husband who's been cheated on. Revenge. My Pa says that if a man wants to get himself in trouble, serious trouble, he cheats with another man's wife or girlfriend. Says it's more dangerous than doing a bank job.'

‘And when does he pass on gems like that? While you're watching
Divorce Court
?'

‘Yep. We have to tell him to shut up so we can hear.'

That afternoon Red's Pa was sitting on the front verandah in a broken lounge chair catching the sun. He held up the newspaper.

‘Hey ya, boys? It was Dessie Sharp.'

‘Who was?' Red asked.

‘The stiff in the hole. Desmond Arthur Sharp. A robber.'

‘Bank robber?'

He dropped the newspaper onto his lap.

‘Anything. Banks. And pubs. Gambling joints. Dessie wasn't fussy. He'd rob his mother if she were holding. His face is gone. They identified him through a tattoo on his arm –
Death Before Dishonour
– he must have been a comedian. He wouldn't know what honour was.'

I tried reading the headline.

‘Does it say why he was murdered?'

‘Well, sort of. There was a big robbery in Sydney only a few weeks back, one of the biggest ever. Says in the paper it was a Melbourne crew. A hit-and-run job. Dessie was one of the suspects, it says here.'

Red scratched at his chin.

‘But that doesn't tell you why he was murdered, does it?'

‘No. But it don't take much to put two and two together.'

‘Which adds up to what, Pa?'

‘The Toecutters, of course. Has to be.'

Red and me gulped at the same time. While nobody had ever laid eyes on them, everyone had heard of the Toecutters, a criminal gang that made their living torturing other robbers, after an armed robbery on a bank or TAB. If the robbers didn't hand over their takings they had their toes cut off, fingers and maybe an ear or a nose.

‘Does it say in there if this fella, Dessie, has some toes missing?' Red asked.

‘Not yet. But don't worry, it'll come out later. The coppers might hold it back. They do that. There'll be grief over this. Dessie won't be the only cab off the rank.'

Red's mother came out of the house. She was wearing an apron and holding a walking stick in one hand.

‘Stop filling these kids with stories, Dad. Come on, inside. You too, Redmond.' She waved the stick at me. ‘You get on home, Joseph. Your mother will be worrying over you.'

Red took the stick from his mother, handed it to his Pa and helped him to his feet. She had a fierce look on her face.

‘Are you going, Joseph?'

‘Yeah, I'm going.'

As soon as she'd walked back inside the old man was at it again.

‘Don't listen to your mother, Red. This is no story. I'd bet my pension he won't be the only one cut loose. There's big money involved in this. And it'll be play for keeps.'

The dead man was named in the newspaper a few days later, just as Red's Pa had said, as ‘a key suspect in a major armed robbery'. He was also missing a big toe from each foot and had some broken fingers. I was around at Red's the next night, sitting with his Pa while his parents were out at the 50–50 dance, when a newsflash interrupted the episode of
Tell The Truth
we were watching. A skinny-looking fella wearing a suit and tie and standing in the middle of a street in Carlton reported that a woman had phoned the police two days earlier to tell them that three men wearing balaclavas had chopped her front door down with an axe and dragged her boyfriend into a car with a sawn-off shotgun at his head.

The dead man's name was James ‘Rabbit' Patterson. He was ‘known to police', and hadn't been seen since the abduction.

Red looked at me, rolled his eyes and turned to his Pa, sitting on the couch, necking a bottle.

‘What do you think of that, Pa? What's it mean?'

‘Well, it figures. The Rabbit runs with a different crew. And he's always used an over-and-under, and not a side-by-side.'

‘What's that mean? An over-and-under?'

‘Don't be asking me. Your mother's already got the shits about this. We're not to talk of this again. She's warned me off. I don't want to be turfed out of here.'

‘Come on, Pa. She won't be home for ages. What's it mean? We won't say anything will we, Joe?'

‘Nothing,' I added.

He rested his beer bottle on the floor.

‘Well, they're both double-barrels and if they hit you direct they do pretty much the same job. But the over-and-under's always been the favourite for a head shot.'

He picked up the bottle of beer, toasted no one in particular and downed it.

‘Dessie was shot in the head, and the Rabbit's signature was an over-and-under. And now he's off too. Case solved.'

‘Where do you reckon he's off to?' I couldn't help asking.

‘We won't go there, Joey. I've said enough. Help us up, Redmond.'

‘Not until you tell us where he might end up.'

‘I hope you're fucken kidding me, son. When I tell you it's enough, it's for your own good. You boys haven't a clue how the street works. Learn quick, before you find yourselves in trouble.'

It was the first time I'd seen menace on the old man's face. He was frightening. Then he smiled and the threat was gone.

‘I'm sorry, Pa,' Red said. ‘But tell us. Please.'

‘You really want to know?'

We nodded.

‘Okay. Not a word. They could chop him up into pieces and smuggle him into the fertiliser works they use over in Footscray. Cost them a packet at the gate. But it's worth it. Turn him into blood and bone in around a minute. Do some good in the garden. Or there's the furnace at the glassworks. Been used before. Temperature's so high the body disappears before your eyes, like magic. But my bet, seeing as they'd want to be rid of him straight off, it would have been the river or the bay. Collect him from home, knock him, weigh him down and send him off with a water burial. Quick and simple. But who can be sure? It's like this TV show we're watching, boys. You got three to choose from and two of them are bullshit artists. Take your pick.'

The summer was hot and we swam in the river each day. We'd given up searching for the bunker. It was too hot to be hiking along the banks armed with our golf clubs, and as it was we were bored with the search anyway. There'd been little more news about the murder of Dessie Sharp or the disappearance of Rabbit Patterson. There were whispers about the Toecutters in the pubs and on the street corners, but no talking out of turn to the police, so the police were stuck.

By New Year the digging for the freeway had reached the river. A fence line was marked out along the bank and post holes had been dug. We'd soon be cut off from our regular swimming hole. We sat on the bank above the river on New Year's Eve and watched as the workmen laid out rolls of wire. Red declared that we should sneak down to the river in the night and cut a hole through the fence.

‘Fuck them. They can't keep us out.'

‘And what will we do when we want a swim? Even if we cut through the fence and get to the water, they'll kick us out anyway, once they spot us. We have to find another place to swim.'

‘Why should we?
This
is our place.'

‘I know it is. But I want a swim and we can't do it here.'

‘Where then?'

‘On the other side. Let's walk across the falls and try for a new spot.'

The weir wall above the falls was capped in cement. The river was running low. We walked knee deep across the slimy surface, heading for the far bank. Red struggled like a tightrope walker trying to keep balance.

‘Jesus Christ, it's slippery, Joe. If we go over the edge we'll be smashed on the rocks.'

‘But we're not going over. Don't look down and keep your eye on the bank.'

We slid and skated our way to the bank without taking a fall. We sat on a sandstone ledge and dangled our feet in the water. It was a nice spot.

‘We can't swim below the falls. It runs too fast and the water's too shallow. But,' I pointed to a dead tree upstream, leaning badly towards the water, ‘just there, where the cliff drops into the water, it's calm and should be deep. There's a diving spot and we could hitch a rope to the tree.'

We walked along the sandstone ledge until we were directly above the dead tree. I looked across the river to the other side. A wrecking ball was attacking the red-brick wall of the cotton spinners and a bulldozer worked along the bank below it, clawing at the dirt. Our old swimming hole was a bombsite. I climbed down the sandstone steps and stood at the river's edge. There were plenty of spots to dive or jump from. All we needed was deep water. The dark colour was promising.

I stripped off my T-shirt and slid into the water. I swam away from the bank and trod water, waiting for Red to swim out to me.

‘Let's see how deep it is.'

I duck-dived and headed for the bottom. The light faded around me. My ears felt like they were about to burst and I had to surface before touching the bottom. We swam around in a circle, diving again, testing the depth.

It would be safe to jump.

Red perched on one ledge, me on another. On the count of three we lifted off and bombed into the water together. We swam back to the edge, climbed out, and took off again and again. We jumped until we'd worn ourselves out. We shared a ledge and lay in the sun smoking cigarettes, me on my back and Red sitting up. He pointed to the highest point of the ledge.

‘Hey, do you think we could jump from up there? Would we clear the bank?'

The ledge was thirty, maybe forty feet above the water.

‘You'd have to fly to clear the bank.'

‘I could do it. Easy.'

‘Easy, my arse. Maybe you can do it, but it won't be easy.'

He stood up and flicked his butt in the air.

‘Watch me.'

He scrambled up the ledge and stood with his toes curling over the edge. He swung his arms back and forward like he was about to take off, stopped, and dropped his arms to his side. Just when I thought he'd talked himself out of it he bent at the knees, lifted off and jumped from the ledge, screaming his lungs out and waving his arms about as he fell. Just before he hit the surface he straightened his body and plunged into the water with hardly a splash. He disappeared for a few seconds then popped up again, screaming, ‘I hit something, I hit something.'