Two Wolves (4 page)

Ben stood outside the closed cabin door, still wearing his school uniform from two days ago. Olive stood beside him, hair mussed up, holding Bonzo the rabbit by one long, grubby ear. She wore her uniform, too. Feet bare, as always. No shoe had been invented that was comfortable enough for Olive.

Early morning light poked at the cabin through sky-high pine trees. Mum was passed out in the car, still parked in the sandy clearing in front of the small timber building.

Ben's heart went
blump
,
blump
,
blump
. He could hear his father inside. A piece of furniture scraped across the floor. He waited a few seconds before giving the door a little push. It swung open with a
raaaaaaark
.

Dad stood on a chair in the dim light of the room, reaching up into the open roof area. Exposed timber beams ran from one side of the room to the other. No ceiling. Just the rusty corrugated iron of the peaked roof high above. Dad looked down at Ben and Olive.

‘Get out of here!' He quickly covered something with a piece of black plastic. ‘What are you doing sneaking around?' He jumped off the chair and stormed toward them. Ben and Olive backed away. He slammed the door in their faces.

Mum sat up, woken by the sound, and opened her car door. ‘What?'

Olive giggled.

‘What are you laughing at?' Ben whispered.

‘Dad being cranky. What was he doing?'

‘Are you guys all right?' Mum asked.

‘Yes, but Dad has poo in his pants. Again,' Olive said.

That almost made Ben smile but his pounding heart stifled the grin before it reached his lips.

‘What's for breakfast?' Olive asked. ‘I want sugar on toast. Can we have sugar on toast?'

‘We don't have anything. There's half a Kit Kat but you can't have that for breakfast. We'll work something out,' Mum said, closing her door and lying back in her seat.

‘Can you hear water? Maybe it's a river,' Olive said. ‘Let's go exploring.'

‘I want to go home,' Ben said. He headed to the car as the cabin door opened.

‘We've got to clean this place out so we can sleep in it tonight,' Dad said.

‘No. I want to go home.'

‘Well, you're not. You're helping me clean up. You think I want to do it? No, but some things in life just have to be done.'

Ben looked into his father's eyes, deciding whether or not to challenge him. Dad was still a good thirty centimetres taller than him – thin but strong, lean arm muscles tanned dark.

Some holiday,
Ben thought but he dared not say it.

Dad went back inside. Ben followed and was smacked with the stench of mould and death. He looked around. There was a shelf on the back wall, jammed with things. Next to it, a creepy built-in cupboard with large doors yawning open. On the right-hand wall, a solid timber workbench and a rusty green trunk. Under the window, a small wooden dining table and chair. To the left, behind the front door, there was a torn camp bed with a grubby sheet and leaves on the floor all around it. Up high, a window that had been smashed. And the clump of black plastic sitting on a wide timber slat up in the roof beams.

‘Get to work. We'll chuck most of it out,' Dad grunted. ‘And don't ever sneak up on me like that again, y'hear?'

Ben nodded.

‘What?' Dad snapped.

‘Yes, Dad,' Ben said.

He scanned the floor for rats, spiders, snakes.

Over the next three hours, as the sun climbed high in the sky, they pulled everything out of the cabin and laid it on the ground in the clearing. Ben was forced to sweep, de-web, wash windows and throw stacks of old, mouldy junk down the side of the cabin. Dad wanted to get rid of most of Pop's things.

Ben saw seventeen spiders. Every time he screamed or jumped back Dad would help him get over it by saying something like, ‘You want me to put a nappy on you? Just hit it with your shoe.'

Olive didn't do anything. She just poked her tongue out and asked the same knock-knock
joke over and over again. ‘Knock knock. Who's there? Banana. Banana who? Banana walking down the street with his head split open.' She'd made it up herself. Ben didn't think she understood the prin­ciples of knock-knock jokes and he threatened to split her head open if she told him the joke again. Which she did. But he did not.

Ben kept himself occupied by stealing looks at the black plastic in the open roof space. He tried to imagine what it might be. What would his father hide in the roof and get so angry about? Chocolate? Beer?

As he worked, Ben found interesting things – peacock feathers, handmade arrows, two metal traps with tough steel jaws and an old, open safe with a combination lock. Dad sat and looked at it for a long time. When Ben asked why, Dad snorted and muttered something about Pop, then chucked the safe down the side of the cabin.

Ben found a copy of a book called
My Side of the Mountain
. He wasn't a big reader but the book had an interesting cover – a kid in the wilderness with an eagle or a falcon flying down to sit on his arm. Ben suspected that things could get boring out here so he slipped the thin book into the back pocket of his school pants.

He asked Dad about things that he found, trying to make conversation as they worked, but Dad was even more distracted than usual. Ben desperately wanted to ask him what was going on with the cops and coming to the cabin and the thing in the roof and why Dad was so angry and when they could go home, but he thought better of it.

In the large, dark cupboard at the back, Ben found a hunting gun, old and rusty, and a bow for the arrows. He asked Dad about the gun and bow, and Dad grunted something about Pop hunting rabbits and then left the room.

Fishing rods, a rickety old ladder, loose pieces of timber. And that clump of black plastic. Ben wanted to ignore it but would-be detectives are curious by nature.

Mum was speaking to Dad out near the car. Ben tiptoed across the cabin and listened carefully from just inside the door.

‘Tell me when we're leaving,' Mum said in a low voice. ‘We're in the middle of nowhere.'

‘I think that's the idea.'

‘There's no running water, no toilet. There's not even
phone
reception. I
hate
it.'

‘Read your magazine,' Dad snipped.

‘This wasn't the deal.'

‘Let's just pretend we're adults for a minute, April. Think about it,' Dad said. ‘Oi, Big Ears!'

Ben knew who Dad was talking to. He poked his head into the doorway. Dad gave Mum a look and walked toward Ben, who swallowed hard. Dad placed a hand on the back of his neck and spun him around so that they were both looking into the cabin.

‘What do you think?' Dad said. The room was cleaned, restored and only smelt vaguely of mould now.

‘Not bad,' Ben said.

‘Apart from listening in on conversations, you've played hard, done good.' Dad took his hand off Ben's neck. ‘Pull my finger.'

Ben did.

Parp.
A sharp, loud trumpet sound from Dad's behind.

‘Ray!' Mum said.

Ben laughed but Dad didn't crack a smile. He never did, which made it even funnier.

‘I've got to find some reception up the hill, make some calls.' Dad headed for the car, grabbing his new phone off the front seat. He had bought himself and Mum new phones on the way up the coast and dumped their old ones in a bin outside the store. He walked off up the dirt road.

Ben watched until he disappeared around the corner. Mum went back to the far side of the clearing to lie on a rock in the sun. Olive sang loudly to herself and marched up and down a tree branch, barking orders to invisible people on the ground – something about her kingdom and loyal subjects. Ben wandered into the cabin. He looked up into the open roof space, his eyes settling on the crumpled black plastic sitting on a timber slat toward the back of the cabin.

Ben pushed the door closed and crossed the floor. He climbed onto the dark timber workbench to get a better view. He would be quiet and get this over with quickly.

He stood on his tiptoes and strained to see but he was too far away. Dad had used a chair to reach into the roof area but Ben was not tall enough for that.

Hungry.

So hungry.
He had eaten a tiny morsel of chocolate as they cleaned up the cabin but that was it.

He slipped down from the hardwood bench and tried to push it but it wouldn't budge. He moved in behind the bench and put all his weight against it, shoving with everything he had. It moved a few centimetres, grinding across the wooden floor. He gave it another push then crept to the door and looked out. No Dad. Mum still lying, lizard-like, on her rock on the opposite side of the clearing.

Ben rushed back across the cabin floor and pushed the bench about ten centimetres. He stopped, listened, breathed hard, shoved it another ten. Another low wood-on-wood groan. He wondered if he'd be able to reach the plastic now, but decided he needed to get another metre closer. He ran to the door and checked again, heart thumping lickety-split. Mum rolled over on her rock to face the cabin.

‘What are you doing?' she called across the clearing.

‘Nothing,' he yelled back. ‘Just bored.'

‘Well, find something to do,' she said, closing her eyes. Olive was at the base of the tree now, still addressing her loyal subjects.

He ducked back inside. He would have to push the bench across the floor in one almighty shove. It would be loud but otherwise it would take forever and Dad would return. He gripped the thick timber edges of the old bench, stretched one leg back behind him and readied himself.

‘One, two, three . . .' he whispered. The bench screamed across the floor and came to a stop. So loud. He stood, breathless.

‘Hi,' said a voice. Ben's heart leapt from his throat. He turned to the door.

‘Shhh!'
he hissed at Olive. ‘Get out!'

She stood there, bottom lip out, then she pointed at him and screamed, ‘YOU'RE MEAN!' and ran away.

Ben eased the door closed. He heard Mum ask what had happened. He jumped up on the bench, reaching as high as he could. His fingers managed to push the black plastic aside enough to scrape the bottom of something, but not quite enough to get a hold on it. He reached again and opened the plastic further.

Ben recognised the bag as soon as he saw it. It was grey nylon with black handles. He positioned his toes on the very edge of the bench and reached for the stars, pinching a corner of the grey nylon. He steadied himself and pulled at the tiny corner of material. He seized a handful of bag and lost balance, falling off the edge of the bench and pulling the bag down on top of him. Large clumps of something fell out.

Ben landed awkwardly on his side. One of the clumps that had fallen from the bag lay on the floor in front of his face, lashed together with an elastic band. Ben took it in his hand and sat up. A serious-looking man with a large forehead, thick eyebrows and a bushy moustache stared back at him from the top of the pile he was holding. All around the man were pictures of cannons, soldiers, images of battle.

Ben was holding money. A lot of money. He had never in his life seen a single one hundred dollar note. Now he clutched a wad of the green bills. He smelt it to see if it was real but he had no idea what money was supposed to smell like. He flicked through it with his thumb. The pile of cash was four or five centi­metres thick. How many hundred dollar notes would fit into a four-centimetre tall pile? Three hundred? Five hundred? Ben calculated it in his mind.

Could he really be holding $50,000? He glanced around and stood up to look in the bag, which lay twisted and open on the workbench. There were fifteen or twenty identical piles of cash in the bag and on the floor.

Dad and Mum never had spare money, even for shoes or haircuts. One of Dad's favourite sayings was ‘Money makes the world go round' but most of the time their world stood still. Ben had missed out on the science excursion on sand dune ecology a week earlier because they didn't have the fifteen dollars. But now they had lots of money. Why wasn't it in the bank?

A noise out front. Ben grabbed the sports bag and stuffed thick blocks of cash back in, carefully watching the door and window. Fear roared through him, making him clumsy. He tried to close the bag but the zip was broken.

Dad said something to Mum. Ben's throat closed. He jumped up on the bench and reached high, trying to shove the bag back into place, but he wasn't tall enough. He took steady aim and threw the bag onto the wide timber slat but it fell back into his hands.

‘Where's the boy?' Dad called to Mum, his voice very near to the cabin now. Mum said something about Ben moving furniture.

He tried again, throwing the bag up onto the timber slat that ran across the roof beams. The bag held, but one end hung down, revealing the money. Dad's footsteps sounded on the gravel near the cabin door. Ben jumped down, giving the workbench two tremendous shoves into position next to the wall just as Dad walked in. Ben breathed hard, guilt painted across his face in sweat.

‘What're you up to?' Dad said, propping just inside the door. ‘Decorating?'

Ben took a slow breath and said, ‘Yeah. I tried moving things around but I reckon it all looks best where you had it.'

Dad studied him for a few seconds. Ben took long, slow breaths.

‘Can we go outside?' Ben asked.

‘What for?'

‘Explore . . . see the creek.'

Dad looked at him. ‘You sick? You never want to go outside.'

‘Yeah, but . . . there's all this nature.'

Dad eyed him, walked to the table, grabbed his keys. ‘I've got to go out.'

‘Where to?' Ben asked, an awkwardly long time after his father had spoken.

Dad shook his head and looked at Ben, puzzled. ‘You're a weird bloke.' He headed for the door.

Ben breathed out slowly and hope flooded in. He wished his father out of the cabin with everything in his soul.

Dad stopped in the doorway and turned, clicking his tongue like he had forgotten something. He looked up into the open roof space.