Chopper Unchopped (112 page)

As I turned, I thought I noticed her grab Charlie’s gun out of his belt. I walked fast towards the door. I didn’t hear the shot until after a red hot poker and a sledge hammer hit me in the back. They used to joke that you don’t hear the bang until after the slug’s gone through because the slugs travelling faster than the speed of sound. Now I knew it wasn’t a joke, it was true.

I stepped out of the pub and tried to walk a few steps more, but I couldn’t feel my body any more. I’d gone numb from the neck down. I could hear screams and men yelling and more screams and John Rowles singing that damn song.

‘Kerry, Kerry,’ I said.

I thought I was going to fall forward, but I went backwards and this is where the story started …

JUST me and the princess of evil dancing in my brain. I don’t think my dream princess will be with me for long, them and the horses they rode in on. Ha ha ha.

That’s what the tattooed lady said. I reckon my little dancing queen will be joining me for real very soon, dreaming her own dreams. I wonder if she’ll dream of me.

So long Kerry, I wonder if she’ll ever remember my right name? Oh, yeah. About names. I haven’t told mine. Dead men don’t have names.

MY publishers contacted me roughly five minutes before publication and requested one more short story, so I sat down and pondered writing a short murder mystery called ‘Death of a Publisher – by Slow Strangulation’. However, the night before, I had been dreaming about a strange man with a pot plant so, with that as a start, I allowed my pen to stagger its way across the page, at first not knowing where I was heading from one word to the next. Then the plot took over.

I started with a pot plant and ended up again at the Caballero nightclub and beyond. This short story took me a night to write and would never have seen the light of day had my lunatic publishers not demanded just one more nutty yarn.

Don’t blame me.

– Mark Brandon Read

I SAT there watching Old Man Dawson as he walked up the road toward me and the rest of the kids at the bus stop. He was a local legend, a famous mental case. He had a mouth full of gold teeth and a big smile and he laughed when he smiled. A sort of mocking, knowing laugh.

‘Yeah, Pot Plant Dawson,’ said a fat kid sitting next to me.

‘He’s a mad old bastard. Look at the old goose.’

Old Man Dawson walked past us, carrying a pot plant as he always did. All the kids thought he was mad, and all the locals thought he was a little odd, to say the least. But I knew different.

The truth was, he was rich. Really rich. He owned the Dawson Cement Works and the Ice Works and the Dawson Iron Works. He was old, and his sons and grandsons ran the businesses for him, but he had plenty and his house on Military Drive was a bloody palace, worth a million bucks, my dad said. So how come he carried a pot plant around with him, no-one knew. It was just a little mad thing he had taken to doing for the past three years.

I smiled at Mr Dawson as he walked past and he gave me a gold-toothed grin and a wave, yelling ‘Hello Young Jackie.’

That’s me, Jackie Young. But everyone calls me Young Jackie. Old Man Dawson looked down at the pot plant he was carrying and back to me, and roared with laughter. He and I shared a private joke – and the joke was the secret of the pot plant. Mr Dawson carried his front door key inside the pot plant.

It all started about three years before. I was 11 years old and I found out that Old Man Dawson put his front door key into a pot plant. The trick was that he had a massive garden collection of more than 3000 potted plants in his front and back yard. I’d made various raids on his home, in search for the door key, until the day he caught me red handed. I thought he was out, but he was home. I was in the front yard tipping pot plants over when he came out and sprung me.

‘Hello, Young Jacko,’ he laughed. ‘Looking for something?’

I froze and stared at him as he locked his front door and put the key into the dirt in a small pot plant, then picked it up and walked off, laughing as he went.

Then he stopped and turned and said to me, ‘You’re a shifty little bugger, Jackie. But I tell you what, there is $2500 on top of my fridge. If you can pinch my front door key when I’m not home, the money is yours and I won’t ring the police. All you got to do is catch me when I’m not home and guess which pot plant the key’s in without tipping them over. Now clean up that mess and put them plants back in them pots. Dirt and all.’

As he walked off he said: ‘A riddle and a challenge, Jacko. That’s what life is, and there’s $2500 if you can solve it.’

I stood there and watched the old man as he walked away. To me, $2500 was all the money in all the world. But how could I find the key if he carried it with him in the pot plant. It took me a full year of spying to realise that he may not be carrying the pot plant with the key in it, and that the pot plant he was carrying was only a throw off.

Meanwhile, the pot plant collection was being added to by a dozen or so per week, and I’d stuck my Smokey Dawson super duper pocket knife into the guts of at least 1000 potted plants in search for the key. Then I just gave up, but I never told Pop Dawson and he just kept on hiding his front door key inside a pot plant, then carrying either the correct plant or a throw off with him wherever he went.

I had grown tired of it all, but Old Man Dawson was still much amused and quite convinced that I was still in search of the front door key and, I guess, the $2500 he’d told me was sitting on top of the fridge. But today as I saw him walk past, a thought occurred to me … run down to Military Drive and search the pot plants near the front door. The first dozen right near the front door. If I fail, I will walk away and never bother with Old Man Dawson and his stupid pot plants ever again, I told myself.

I got up and headed off to his place. It took me about five minutes. I jumped the front fence and made my way up the front path in between what seemed like a million pot plants, large and small, until I came to his front door. Sure enough, there was a line of about 50 potted plants running from his front door along the front of his house, under one of the windows. I thought to myself, to hell with it, and began to pick the pot plants up and tip them out. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Then, bingo. After about 20 plants I struck it lucky. My heart jumped. I grabbed the key and looked at it. No rust. It wasn’t old. It was a nice, new, well-used key. I stuck it in the doorlock and, the door opened.

I ducked inside and closed the door behind me. Inside, the house was dark. I could hear the loud ticking coming from a giant grandfather clock. My eyes grew accustomed to the dim light and I looked around the house. It was full of animal heads and paintings hanging from the walls and old wooden furniture, brass and marble statues. And, you guessed it, bloody pot plants. Big giant potted plants, palms and ferns in huge brass pots.

Old Man Dawson was mad about pot plants, all right. I walked tippy toe through this insane maze of bric-a-brac and bullshit and went in search of the fridge in the kitchen, all the time thinking that I must replace all the dirt in all the pot plants I’d emptied out.

I opened a big wooden door that led into a rear hallway and wished I hadn’t. I stood, staring in horror at a massive bottle some five feet high and three feet wide, filled with clear liquid. In it was something that looked at first like the body of a small ape or a large monkey. I turned on the hall light and took a closer look. Shit, it wasn’t an ape. It was a boy, a dead aboriginal kid, about 10 or 11.

I looked closer. His face was all swollen and sort of washed out by the liquid, but there was something familiar. I thought I recognised him. God yeah, it was Spit Lovett. he’d gone on the missing list about four years ago. Most of the kooris in town went looking for him. Everyone reckoned that he’d drowned in the Yarra and been swept away. Well, they were half right, I thought to myself.

Spit drowned alright. he’d got himself stuck into a giant bottle. Then I saw it in his hand. He was clenching something in his fist. I had a closer look. It was a key, very much like the key I’d used to open Old Man Dawson’s front door.

I began to wonder at this. I didn’t want to admit to myself that what my heart was pounding out and my brain was screaming out was true. I just walked down the hallway and turned and tried the knob on another large wooden door and entered a large trophy room. It was full of silver shields and cups and assorted football, cricket, hunting and fishing photos. And on the far side of the room was another giant bottle. And in it was another swollen kid in clear liquid.

First, I checked the hands. Sure enough, there was a clenched fist holding a key Then I looked at the face. I didn’t recognise this kid. He looked about my own age. A white kid with blond hair. I shuddered and walked out of that room and into another. And saw yet another giant bottle with a dead child in it, holding a key.

This time I recognised the swollen face. It was ‘G-clamp’ Gibson. Garry Gibson. he’d gone missing about a year ago, and there’d been a statewide search for him.

I ran out of that room and into another – and another giant bottle. This time it was a little girl I didn’t recognise.

I ran out and down another hallway and into the kitchen. Then I remembered the money. I checked the top of the fridge. No money – but there was an envelope with my name written on it: Jacko.

I opened it and pulled out a bit of paper. It read, ‘Dear Jacko, I lied’. I was terrified. I had to get out. I ran to the back door but it wouldn’t open. I began to panic. My heart was pumping, and my brain was spinning with fear. Get out of here, get out. I ran toward the front of the house into another room – and screamed with shock when I ran face to dead face into yet another giant bottle with another dead kid in it.

I stepped back, fell against a table and knocked over a small marble statuette. I grabbed the statue and hurled it at the big bottle – smashing the glass, spilling the clear liquid along with the floppy dead body. I ran screaming, panic-stricken into another hallway and ran back past the first bottle with Spit Lovett in it. I made my way to the front door, but it was locked. I’d opened it to get in, so how come I couldn’t open it to get out. I screamed and started to smash my fists against the door. Then I felt it a cold shiver ran up my spine.

‘Hello Jackie.’

I turned. It was old Pop Dawson, standing behind me. He smiled his golden smile and said, ‘so you finally found the key …’

THEN I woke up. I lay in my bed, shaking and sweating, a strange mixture of terror and relief. Did any of that ever really happen? The pot plant dream always seems to come back whenever I’ve been eating cheese on toast, which is generally Friday night.

Every Friday bloody night I get the pot plant dream. Saturday night it’s steak, eggs and chips, which means Wendy the weather girl generally pays me a visit with a bottle of baby oil. That dream I can live with, but being captured by an old psychopath pervert killer with gold teeth and a pot plant every Friday night is a bit of a worry.

I managed to doze off back to sleep, and woke up refreshed with the morning sun pouring through my bedroom window. My mad dad came in to my bedroom with my breakfast. More bloody cheese on toast. My dear old dad’s cooking skills didn’t run to much: cheese on toast, steak, eggs and chips, plum puddings, porridge, pie and peas, humbug stew, bubble and squeak, Irish hot pot and banana custard. Any one or two or three of them could be served for breakfast, lunch or tea.

I ate my cheese on toast and drank my mug of tea then got up and headed for the shower. Dad was busy watering his blooming pot plants.

I checked my face in the mirror. I needed a shave. I took my cobalt chrome false teeth out of the water glass and put them in my mouth and gave myself a big silver grin in the bathroom mirror. One day I’d have to get my nose fixed. The badly busted and broken nose didn’t fit a face as baby beautiful as mine.

‘God you’re a good looking bugger,’ I said out aloud to myself.

My old dad roared laughing from the next room.

‘Ya got a head on ya like a busted arse, Jacko. Ha ha.’

‘I’m your son,’ I yelled back.

Dad walked down the hallway of our Ascot Vale home and stood in the bathroom door with his pet Siamese cat Napoleon. He was holding Nappy upside down and looking at his bum.

‘I think this bloomin’ cat has got piles,’ said Dad.

‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘Cats don’t get piles.’

‘Then what’s that?’ asked Dad, pointing to a red grape-like lump growing out of Nappy’s backside.

I grabbed a toothbrush and gave the offending lump a good poke, and Napoleon gave a meow and jumped out of dad’s hands and ran into the bathroom, jumped up onto the window ledge and vanished out the open bathroom window.

‘That’s my toothbrush!’ yelled Dad, and snatched it from me.

The morning comedy with my father was routine. We generally argued over his cooking, or the medical condition of the cat, or where he had hidden my gun, as was his habit.

I walked out into Racecourse Road in the warm morning sun and stood, waiting, lighting up my seventh cigarette for the morning. I’d cut myself down to a modest 30 per day in keeping with my new keep-fit program. An old Dodge Phoenix pulled up. My father’s best friend was at the wheel, Arnold Maloney, or ‘Redda’, as he was known from Fitzroy to Ferntree Gully. An old time welterweight prize fighter, Redda was an old man and an alcoholic but he could still punch holes in most of the so-called up and coming punk false pretenders that infested the Melbourne criminal world. I called him Uncle Arnie.

I enjoyed the company of men older than myself and Uncle Arnie was a toff, one of the last of the old-time hard men.

‘How’s ya dad?’ said Redda.

‘He’s as mad as a hatter,’ I said. ‘All he talks about is the cat’s piles and how the Australian Labor Party is being taken over by the Catholic Church.’

Redda gave me a puzzled look as I closed the car door behind me and settled myself into the seat beside him.

‘But it is, isn’t it?’

‘Isn’t it what?’ I said.

‘The Labor Party,’ said Redda. ‘The Church has been running it for years.’

I sighed. ‘Shut up and drive, Redda.’

WE were heading to a brothel in Tope Street, South Melbourne. We knew it would be closed, but the lady who ran it lived above the joint. Her name was Georgina. Don’t ask me her last name or her real name. All I knew was she owed Rolly Wooden $15,000 and I was on a one third recovery fee. Five grand for collecting 15, that’s not too bad. It was an old and long lost debt.

Georgina was the defacto wife, girlfriend, whatever to Machinegun Bobby Dixon, a so-called union boss on the waterfront, and a Trades Hall heavy. Rolly Wooden’s problem was that he was an honourary Life Member of the same union. He wanted the money back but he didn’t want to upset Machinegun Bobby. But, as old Redda was fond of saying, ‘Piss on ’em all, Jacko. We are surrounded by poofters and fools, piss on ’em all.’

I checked my 9 mm Beretta while Redda held the car steering wheel in one hand and a bottle of Vic Bitter in the other. His fourth for the morning by the look of the three empty aristotles rolling around on the car floor.