Into the River (14 page)

“So how was life in the boondocks?” Steph asked, on the first night back.

“Never again.”

“That bad?”

“It would have been okay, like bearable, but he had this four-hundred-year-old grandfather who wanted to refight the Maori wars every time I showed my head.”

“Well I did warn you about spending time in ‘the land that time forgot’.”

“Yeah, you did, but it was either that or hang around the hostel for two weeks being an unpaid caretaker.”

“You should’ve come to my place.”

“Yeah? You should’ve invited me.”

“I spent the whole time lying around reading. Watching my father come and go. I reckon we wouldn’t have said more than a hundred words the whole time. ‘I’m back.’ Or ‘I’m off now, Steph!’ That was like a full-length conversation.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Not much.”

“How about meal times?”

“Meal times we both read. All you could hear was the sound of pages turning.”

Mitch arrived.

“Hey, you two. Guess what I got?”

“I give up,” said Devon.

“You, Steph?”

“Same.”

“I got a car.” The words spilled out into the room.

“Wha…”

“You guys gotta come and see it. Come this weekend.”

“You can’t drive, Mitch,” said Steph, “I know for a fact that you’re still thirteen, same as me.”

“I know, I know. I just drive around the junkyard. This car’s not street legal anyway. Half of it’s missing, been chopped off. There’s this little road through the stacks of cars in the yard. I’ve been spending the last few weeks teaching myself to drive on it. I’ll teach you, too.”

“Thanks, but no thanks, Mitch,” said Steph. “I come from a long line of non-drivers. It’s a family tradition.”

“I can already drive,” Devon said. “My cousin’s been teaching me on the way home to Whareiti.”

“So you don’t want to come?”

“Course I’ll come,” said Devon.

“Next weekend then.”

“You’re on.”

“You, Steph?”

“We’ll see. I’ve got choir practice, I think.” Which was another way of saying that he didn’t fancy it.

That Friday night, when Mitch’s dad, Big John, finally showed up, it was nearly dark. Mitch spotted the derrick of the tow truck weaving through the lines of parked cars.

“There he goes.” There was pride in his voice.

The truck was moving much faster than the usual measured pace that cars travelled at on the school grounds and the next thing that Devon knew his hand was being wrung by a muscular blond man with a spot tattooed below each of his eyes.

“Yo, Mitch, Mitch’s mate.”

“It’s Devon, Dad.”

“Yo Devon-dad, that better? I’m John. Big Bad John.”

“Not that big,” said Mitch.

“I used to be bigger, shrunk in the wash.”

Mitch turned to Devon. “That’s why he stopped washing.”

“Are we gonna stand here all weekend being wise arses? No? Let’s roll then.”

They climbed into the cab of the truck. It was crammed with RT gear, all set to different wave lengths. Fractured messages ripped out of these from time to time and Devon couldn’t understand a word. Every now and then John would grab the hand piece and bark something out into the air waves.

Before long they were belting along the western motorway and weaving through the zone of small wooden houses and graffitied fences. Then they got to an area of factories, and finally stopped at a high corrugated iron wall with mountains of car bodies behind it.

“Why have scrap yards got such big fences?” asked Devon. “I mean it’s not like people are going to run off with a wrecked car under their arms.”

“Why the big fences?” repeated John as he slid from the front seat. “That’s to keep out people like me.”

“And your friends,” added Mitch.

There was the sound of a dog going mad.

John swung the gate wide. “Take her in, Mitch.”

Mitch slid across and nosed the pick-up through the canyons of stacked cars until they got to an old house with all the lights lit up.

“This is it. No palace, but it’s home.” There was obvious pride in Mitch’s voice and Devon felt instantly at ease there. John was wandering over through the gap in the car stacks, with a couple of Alsatians going mad and leaping up all around him.

“Meet my two employees from Germany. This is Blitzen and this other guy is Schiesen.”

Devon could tell that they were young dogs, very playful and eager to please. They all went inside and the dogs immediately threw themselves on the floor next to the heater.

John was more like an older brother than a dad. The house was decorated in a style that could have been called “morning after the
party”. The two couches had suffered from dog bites. There were oily engine parts lying in places you wouldn’t expect. Nothing was tidied away, anywhere. Nothing seemed to matter much. This was all new to Devon, and he loved it.

“I know what you guys will be wanting. I know it because I was once a boy like youse — well, not as runty as you two — and I was always hungry. The only time I wasn’t hungry was when I was asleep.” He roared with laughter at his own jokes.

“Break out the beans, Mitch. You boys like a beer? Oh sorry, you’re too young. I’ll have to drink it for you.”

Mitch went over to the fridge. He pulled out a massive tin of baked beans and poured them into a pot that he dug out of the clutter in the sink.

“Did you wash that pot first, Mitch? Number one rule of cooking. Hygiene.”

“Stop pissing us about and give us a beer. I wonder why I put up with you,” said Mitch, then he turned to Devon. “We only ever cook two things, beans or eggs.”

Big John threw Devon a can and walked over and balanced one on Mitch’s head.

“That’s the great thing about having a kid with a flat head. Somewhere to park my beers. Started when he was a baby. Evolution.”

“You were never there when I was a baby.”

It seemed a bit sharp.

“Look, mate. Reality check. They don’t let you out of rock college every time there’s a nappy to be changed. Anyway, Gordon was doing a great job.”

“Who’s Gordon?” Devon asked.

“One of Mum’s boyfriends. My sort of stepfather. Put some toast on, Devon.”

Before long the three of them sat down to a big feed of beans.

“Ah! Genius. Feed the man beans. Keeps a fightin’ man fuckin’.”

“Keeps a truckin’ man fartin’ more like it,” Mitch said, looking at his father for a reaction. Big John’s head was trained at a sheaf of invoices but he still managed to give his son the finger with his free hand.

Devon mulled it all over as he tucked into his beer and beans. He’d never had beer before. Ra never had it in the house. Mitch’s place was filthy but he loved it. Big John didn’t seem to care what other people thought and Mitch had inherited his attitude. He wished he could be just like the two of them. But he knew he never could.

“You guys have got …” Big John paused to look at his watch. “… thirty minutes, then we’re out of here. I’ve got two hungry mouths to feed and I can’t do it by sitting on my bum in a junkyard.”

True to his word, after half an hour they were cruising. Devon thought Big John was a great driver: like Paikea, but he was of the street fighter and trickster variety. It was as though every road rule had been invented solely for him to break, and his main role was to entertain the two boys. When a driver cut them off he tailgated the car until it pulled over in submission at the next set of lights, where he yelled to Devon, “Wind the window down!”

He leaned right across Mitch until his face was in front of Devon’s, then bellowed “Cunt!” out the window. The businessman in the Lexus kept his hands tight on the wheel and his eyes fixed on the road ahead, until finally the lights changed and he disappeared down a side road.

Big John turned to the boys. “I’m all for improving road manners, aren’t you?”

Later, when he was speeding along and talking to the two boys at the same time, they were alarmed to see a stationary bus looming up ahead.

“Dad, a bus …” said Mitch as they were only thirty metres from ploughing into the back of it.

“Where? Where?” said John looking everywhere else except
straight ahead. At the last minute he veered around it. Devon had never seen a vehicle pass so close to another without hitting it; the bull bars almost brushed the wing mirrors of slower traffic.

Later the call came in to pick up a stalled car on the motorway.

“We might get it,” John said as they did a U-turn in heavy traffic. The idea was then to drive as fast as possible because all the other towies out cruising would be after the job too. As luck would have it, there were three other trucks ahead of them. John jumped out but made the boys stay in the car.

“He’ll be ages,” said Mitch. “That guy with the beard is a real chatterbox. Dad is bad enough but him …”

There was another burst of crackle on the RT.

“It’s Marj at HQ,” Mitch said.

Devon couldn’t understand a word, but Mitch flashed the lights again and again until Big John reluctantly walked over to find out what was going on.

He climbed back into the truck, just as a cop car arrived, lights flashing.

“Good time to leave,” said John. “It’s Carmody. He’s a born-again.”

As they waited for clear traffic, Devon saw the policeman climbing out of the patrol car. He gathered up his torch and his ticket book, checked his appearance in the rear view mirror, then swung out. He had the rolling walk, the swagger, everything that you would expect from someone coming over to ask for a dance.

They watched him, bemused.

“Used to be a car hoon but he crossed over to the dark side. No more tickets but he gets to hoon it for the cops, driving a police Holden instead of a Mitsi Evo. He’s written a few off too. What a prat!”

The next call was to a repo on the Shore. “Some guy defaulted on his payments,” Big John said. “If we can get the wheels off the ground without the alarm going off … well, that’ll save a lot of
aggro.”

Before long they were powering over the big bridge towards Takapuna, or Pack o’ tuna as John called it.

The main street was very busy with groups of drunk people surging in and out of the restaurants and bars. Kids no older than Mitch and Devon, too, were out having fun. Some drinking, some snogging their girlfriends, others just generally yahooing.

Mitch, as if he read his mind, said to Devon, “See what we’re missing out on, locked up at Barwell’s? We could be out there too. This is what everyone else does on the weekend while we’re stuck in the dorms beating off.”

Devon flashed a look at Big John; he couldn’t imagine saying something like that to Ra.

What Big John said next surprised Devon; there was a change of tone, it almost held regret.

“Nah man, do the hard yards first. Otherwise you’ll end up like me, in and out of the clink all your life. It’s like smoking,” he said, reaching for his fags and making a joke of it, “a hard habit to kick.”

Mitch looked unconvinced. “What’s the difference? We’re all locked up till we’re sixteen or so, all the time this …” he said, pointing at two young guys trading punches, “this is going on.”

“No fair, no fair …” he added in a baby voice.

“Hold up!” said Big John, “Here we come …”

It was a house set well back from the road with a big old Jag and Legacy wagon parked in the car port.

They stopped out on the road while Big John assessed the situation.

“Here’s how we’re going to do this. I’m going to back up the driveway, hoist the wheels and we’re out of here. Normally I’d knock at the door, do the informing thing, but this guy’s been a bit of a trickster.”

As soon as Big John put the truck into reverse a loud beeping noise started.

“It’s a case of ‘fuck the formalities, full steam ahead,’ as
Winston
Churchill used to say,” said Big John as he backed up the driveway.

They came to a stop behind the green Legacy. Big John plucked the hand control for the electric hoist from a box in the back and immediately the high-pitched whine signalled the unravelling cable. Mitch seemed to know the drill; he gave Devon the torch and grabbed the hook.

“Shine it in towards the back axle, man,” he said, pulling the slowly unwinding hook and dropping to his knees.

The two of them went low while Mitch found the spot to anchor the cable. Big John put a spare tyre in place to protect the body-work and then cranked the rear of the car clear of the driveway. As soon as it came up it swung slightly to the right and clipped one of the pillars of the carport. The response was immediate. The quiet neighbourhood got a wake-up call.

Waa woo waa woo!

The car lights all flashed. There were signs of movement inside the house.

Big John turned to the boys with a goofy expression like, he’d just spilled the salt. “I hate it when that happens. Let’s hit it.” They were all in the tow truck within moments, powering the flashing, wah-wahing vehicle out down the street. Devon could see a couple of guys in shorts and singlets standing on the lawn, watching them recede into the distance.

“Maybe you should have told them what’s up. They might think you’re stealing it and set the cops onto you.”

Big John was sceptical. “Yeah, Mitch, right. I knock on the door.” He put on a poofy voice. “Hi Chief, I’m lifting your car. Sorry for the inconvenience. Maybe your people can talk to my people. Work things out.”

They laughed.

“I guess,” Mitch said.

“There is another old saying dear to the heart of every towie,”
said Big John. “Or it should be. ‘Possession is nine tenths of the law’.”

Mitch turned to Devon. “He should know. The last thing he was inside for was possession of stolen property.”

As they began to climb the slope towards the top of the harbour bridge, Devon was lost in the vision of the city at night. The tall buildings, the sky tower, and the waterfront restaurants all shimmered in the gleaming water. They were impossibly beautiful. This is what it was all for. This was the city of light that lay at the end of his schooling.

Back at the yard the doors were open and the house was all ablaze. It was as though every light in the house had been turned on.