Four Fires (3 page)

Nancy Maloney drove the garbage truck, a big, clapped-out old army-surplus Diamond T Tommy had bought at a US Army Disposal Depot. The Yank sergeant in military transport told him it had a donk like a Texas mule, slow and stubborn, but would go anywhere and never fail to arrive at a destination, that it would virtually last forever.

He probably didn't think we'd take his words literally. The only thing was that the Diamond T ate up tyres and, while we drove them right down to the canvas, the tyre piggy bank, a Milo tin kept on the kitchen shelf, never seemed to contain enough when we needed a new set.

When that happened, we all knew it was offal week! Kidneys, tripe in white sauce, ox bollocks, lamb's brains done in breadcrumbs, pressed
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sheep's or ox tongue, and lamb's fry for the next week or month and nothing much to eat you could buy in a grocery shop.

Sarah, our oldest sister, stayed at home first thing in the morning and got things ready for when we returned from our rounds. I was christened Peter but everyone called me 'Mole', because as a baby I'd burrow down under the blankets, even covering my head. I still do.

Me and my two brothers, Mike and Bozo, both older than me, went out in the Diamond T from Monday to Friday with Nancy to collect the town's garbage.

Nancy was no lightweight and would have gained the respect of any sumo wrestler. Each of her arms could have won prize ham at the Wangaratta Show and her legs were like old-man Yarra trunks. She sat

behind the wheel of that big, old garbage truck practically filling the entire cabin with warm, pink flesh. Because it was US disposal, it had a left-hand drive, so the driver's side was on the wrong side of the road, which caused no end of confusion to other drivers. Especially the local yahoos in their old man's ute yelling out abuse as they passed us pissed after a bender. They'd be on their way home or out for an early-morning burn and they'd stick their heads out the ute window, only to see no driver where a driver was supposed to be. Sometimes they'd skid to a halt and reverse fifty yards to take a gander and get an earful for their trouble from Nancy.

The three of us used to have to push Nancy up into the driver's seat, our hands placed flat on her bum with room to spare, our legs propped, straining, our heads down, pushing upwards with all our might. Then, from her position behind the wheel, she proceeded to direct operations.

Mike, Bozo, his five dogs and me would run behind the Diamond T, us boys emptying everyone's garbage into the truck. 'Put the bloody lids back on quietly!' Mum would yell at us, making more noise with her shouting than the clanking bins and the neighbourhood dogs that came out to bark at us.

Bozo's dogs never joined in the noise. Bozo wouldn't allow it. They all answered to the same name, 'Bitzer', which was what they were, mongrels of every description, except large. Nancy wouldn't let Bozo have a big dog and her objection had nothing to do with how much it ate. 'It tells people things about you, you don't want them to think,'

she said.

Bozo's dogs all came from the pound in Wang, which is short for Wangaratta, and were more like dogettes than what you'd call a proper dog. Except for the little Fox Terrier-Maltese cross, where you could see a bit of light under its tummy, all of their chassis were pretty low to
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the ground. They were piebald, smooth-haired, long-haired, furry, curly, pop-eyed, eyes you couldn't see behind an awning of hair, sprig-eared and floppy, stump-nosed or long-snouted. Several of every combination of small-breed dogs seemed to be represented in each of them. None could, by any stretch of imagination, be called a good looking mutt. But I tell you what, they were bloody smart doggies for all that.

There were Bitzers One, Two, Three, Four and Five. When Bozo shouted 'Bitzer!', just the single name, they all came. 'Bitzer, sit!', they all sat. 'Roll over!' 'Jump!' 'Play dead!' They did everything in unison like it was a circus act. But if he called out 'Bitzer Three!', the little mutt, who was mainly Fox Terrier and Maltese Terrier with just a hint of sausage dog added to the blend, would come running and sit in front of Bozo, tail thumping the dirt, waiting for instructions. They all knew their own number. Those dogs loved my brother to death and would do anything he said. Also, they wouldn't eat anything without first hearing the password, which was 'Bog in!' That way they couldn't be fed a poison bait, which was common enough if someone didn't like your dogs.

If one of the neighbourhood dogs thought to have a go at one of us, Bitzers One to Five would immediately surround him and the errant dog would soon enough show his neck to Bitzer One, a fearless little bloke mostly Dandie Dinmont and Pekinese and a few other things you couldn't even hazard a guess at. He was the enforcer of the pack. Bozo said when a dog lifts its chin and shows its neck to another dog, in dog language that's putting up your hands and saying 'Okay, fellas, I'm outta here!' Bitzer One, with the others doing the growl chorus, could intimidate a full-grown Doberman.

In those days the garbage cans were made of tin and we clattered from house to house like an off-key brass band, brakes squeaking as we slowed, pistons rattling like the clappers of hell, the exhaust pipe vibrating, madly spewing out dark exhaust fumes, which polluted the bright, clean morning air as the clapped-out engine, badly in need of a de-coke, over-rewed every time we pulled away.

We would start the run at three o'clock in the morning. The route would be different each day because it took a week to do the whole town, But on a Monday we'd begin at number 50 Hill Street, at the home of Oliver Withers, the stipendiary magistrate. Mondays we'd do all the other bigwigs that lived up on the higher part of the hill looking down their nose at the town in the valley below. The magistrate's house was at the far end of the street, which ended on the edge of a small cliff. We'd go to the end of the street first and turn the empty truck around. The reason for this was so that we didn't have to make a difficult turn with the old Diamond T full of rubbish in case the brakes failed and the weight took it over the cliff. This meant that Oliver
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Twist's rubbish was the first to be emptied and always well before dawn.

By the time Friday came we'd do the workers' cottages, which included our own street, Bell Street. Nancy said this was our way of sticking it up the rest of the town. By Friday the nobs on the hill would have full garbage bins and still have the weekend to go, but the Bell Street mob would have nice empty garbage tins for the weekend. I could never quite see what the point was, but it was Nancy logic and

you couldn't argue with that.

Our street was called Bell Street because, to add insult to injury, the Anglican Church was at one end, its bell tower casting what Nancy called 'its long, dark, treacherous shadow' over the first half-dozen houses in the street. All the cottages in Bell Street belonged to Catholics and Nancy saw this as a deliberate act of provocation by the Church of England, another example of what she constantly referred to as 'the bitter divide'.

It would be seven-fifteen when we finally got back to Bell Street.

Most of the workers who lived in the street would already be up, or if they weren't they'd use our arrival as their alarm clock. In the cottages, all of which were identical and had the kitchen facing the street, you'd see their men sitting in their singlets and braces, already having a first ciggie and cuppa tea in the kitchen, the wives fussing with breakfast at the stove. We'd usually cop a thank-you wave as we emptied their bins with barely a clank.

Sometimes one of the men would stroll out and hand Nancy a leg of mutton or half a sack of spuds, or a couple of cabbages or a bag of carrots from their vegie garden. 'Good on ya, Nance,' they'd say, hoisting the stuff up into the cab for her to grab a hold of. Nancy would smile and quietly thank them, no big display. But you knew that if one

of them had a baby, they'd be getting a christening robe with the full rosebuds and forget-me-nots, wrapped in brown paper. It would be left in their emptied garbage bin with the person's name in Nancy's neat as-a-pin handwriting so that they'd know it wasn't garbage left behind.

Nancy didn't like to make too much fuss.

'We don't take charity,' she'd say. 'It's not the Maloney way. But we're not up ourselves neither. Someone is kind to us, you remember it, you wait long enough, the opportunity will surely come when you can return the favour.'

Getting up at three in the morning in the summer wasn't too bad.

With a hot day ahead, at that time in the morning there was usually a bit of a breeze coming up the valley. Winter was a different matter
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entirely. Every minute out there on the run was bloody awful and us kids had chilblains and runny noses all winter long. For chilblains we had to soak our feet in a bucket of boiling salt water for hours until they turned red as a lobster.

Mike, ever the questioning one, once pointed out to Mum that it would be far more logical to start work in Bell Street on a Monday. It took a good fifteen minutes of wasted time in an empty truck to make the slow climb to Oliver Twist's house on Hill Road. 'Fifteen minutes saved on the entire morning's run meant we could hose out the back of the truck and be back home by seven instead of a quarter past,' he explained to Nancy. Bozo and me immediately agreed, nodding our heads. In terms of getting ready, if we were late to school on a Monday morning we got detention as well as a caning. A quarter of an hour saved on a Monday was valuable.

'Well, darlin', you're probably right,' Nancy replied, leaning down from the cabin and putting her big hand on Mike's shoulder. 'But there's a principle involved, what I call "Maloney payback".'

'Huh? What's that when it's at home?' Bozo asked.

'Well, it's like this see, every time that pompous, self-righteous old bugger Oliver Twist places his scrawny elbows on the bench and removes his glasses and sets about wiping them with his clean linen handkerchief and at the same time proceeds to give Tommy another one of his half-arsed twopenny lectures before sentencing him and then adds a second helping, another six months, I say to myself, "Right, Your Honour, that's every Monday you're going to start the week having had a bad night's sleep!"' She hesitates and looks at each of us in turn,

'Just because Tommy's done a bit of time on the hill in the past doesn't mean he can treat us like dirt.'

'But we are dirt!' Bozo says, grinning. 'We collect the garbage.'

Nancy doesn't laugh. I guess she doesn't like what we're doing for a crust any more than we do. 'It's honest work, Bozo, which is more than can be said for a lot of the locals. Right then, where was I before I was so rudely interrupted by my own child?'

'Maloney payback,' Mike reminds her with a bit of a sigh.

'Yes, righto. Well, us getting Oliver Twist's two German Shepherds barking their heads off and you three banging the bins and me yelling out at you at the top of my voice to keep the noise down so as to make absolutely certain the miserable bugger is good and awake, that, my dears, is Maloney payback.'

I have to admit, we had the routine down pat. Bozo would line
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Bitzers One to Five up in a row directly in front of the magistrate's gate, right up close. 'Okay, sit!' he'd command, then 'Silence!' he'd order next, bringing his forefinger up to his lips as if they were humans. You see, Oliver Twist kept these great big ferocious German Shepherds running loose in his high-fenced, quarter-acre property because he was paranoid that someone he'd sentenced might some day come after him. He probably thought that someone would be Tommy, who was one of his more frequent victims.

The two dogs would come hurtling down the side of the house, skidding, their nails scrabbling on the cement path as they tried to gain traction around the corner to the front, both barking fit to kill.

Bozo's Bitzers would be waiting, their snouts just out of reach beyond the wrought-iron gate. The German Shepherds would push their noses through one of the fancy iron grilles, slavering at the mouth, fangs flashing at the sight of Bozo's mutts, who would sit there staring at the two killer dogs, like they were dirt or something. Which goes to show how well they were trained, you try stopping a small dog barking at a big one. I swear Bozo had taught them how to do a bored sort of a yawn in sequence.

It never failed to work, we'd hear Oliver Twist cursing and trying to get his upstairs bedroom window up to abuse us, whereupon Bozo would give this little whistle and his dogs would leave the gate and hurry to the blind side of the truck so that their intimidation act couldn't be seen by the furious beak.

The window would eventually go up, but before the furious magistrate could ever get the first word in, Nancy, her head already stuck out the truck window, would shout up at him, 'Better call those brutes off, one day they're going to get out and bite one of my boys!'

Her tone of voice always suggested that such an event would be more trouble than even Oliver Twist could handle on his own.

The magistrate in his red-striped pyjamas would open his mouth to say something and Nancy would quickly add, 'They're a menace to society!' Which was what Oliver Twist had once said about Tommy. Lost for a reply, he'd try to call his dogs off and we'd be away with a clank and a roar, sending a perfumed cloud of carbon monoxide up through his

bedroom window. Nancy would yell out over the noise of the engine,

'Half-past three and all's well!' like the night watchman in that movie Great Expectations, or was it The Hunchback of Notre Dame?

Oliver Twist really pissed Nancy off. Tommy never took personal property, like jewellery and stuff, or broke into someone's house. He only did warehouses or commercial premises where the insurance would cover the loss. He mostly worked in Albury-Wodonga or the industrial areas in the western suburbs of Melbourne and only occasionally in Wangaratta. Nancy reckoned that Tommy didn't deserve more than one
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stretch at a time for being such an honourable crook.