Jake's Long Shadow (9 page)

JAKE HEKE GOT as much a surprise to see Beth’s man, Charlie Bennett, out there in good pig country (even if we didn’t have legal right to hunt there) as Charlie did. He didn’t shake my hand, but turned away and walked.

Well, he didn’t know the favour he did because he had us red-handed. The Douglas brothers knew it was Bennett’s tribal land and he had a right to ask if we were legit. Might’ve been awkward being taken to court by a man married to the woman used to be my wife. (And I still kind of miss you, Bethy. Maybe I miss you a lot. Though I know it was my fault, the life you had.)

We were laughing at Bennett walking off like he did. The Douglas brothers know everything and everyone in our town, so they knew that Charlie was living with my ex and it was cause for more humour at my expense. They started teasing me that Beth had a man on a good salary (so what?), who lived in a big house (who cares? I’m happy in my rented
cottage), drove a flash car (big deal, my ole jeep takes me to rugged hunting spots, ain’t no one to show off to out in those parts), and if he was a bit outta shape he was still a big strong-looking man so how would I have gone with him? (I’d have eaten him alive.)

’Cept I threw that last one back at Gary and Kohi. Asked them, at what? Shooting a rifle target? I’d win that. Climbing rough country hills with a big pig on my back? I’d win that, do it without puffing. So what’re you fullas talking about?

So Kohi tried to twist the knife a little. I meant in the sack, Jakey boy. With that sly look he gave me from the off, when I first met him, of
challenging
me, even though we love each other now. (It’s like he’s one wrong move of mine away from smashing me.)

So I said, Oh that? I guess we’ll never know. She won’t be saying and I won’t be asking. So what else you got to say on the matter? I’m used to these brothers, any excuse to mock and tease, and I’ve learned how to give it back, without getting wild, which is how I used to react. (Though, come on, Jake, be fair to yourself, that was some years ago now. You ain’t had an incident for ages.)

Felt like calling after Charlie to stop, to talk to me. About whatever was on his mind, what Beth must’ve told him about me, what I was like. He mighta found a man willing to listen and then maybe say I’d changed. But he never gave me a chance. And several months later I still think of it with a kind of frustration, like I’d been sentenced by a judge without the chance to explain my side, to just say sorry. (It needn’t have been. I’ve known a while now all the shit I caused, the misery, the heartache, the pain, that it needn’t have been.)

But hey, Charlie, ya are what ya are at the time. How can it be any different? A baby doesn’t know it’s messing up its nappies, it just shits and pisses. And adults (except not you, Jakey, it was never you) clean up its mess, kiss it, cuddle it, no forgiving nor accusing to do. Because it’s a baby, right, don’t know no better.

Well, call me a baby during my adulthood, a big grown-up baby, a baby’s mind inside a man’s (terrible, fighting) body. Can’t bring my two dead children back and had my times of dying inside at realising what I’d done to them, to Grace. (Oh kid, and finding out it was my mate Bully who’d raped you. And I hurt him so bad I near killed him. Yet I have recurrent dreams with you telling me off, that what I did to your rapist wasn’t a solution, but
more of what had made you take your life, that it was me indulging my violence again.

But let me tell you, Grace, let me
swear
to you, I did it with purity in my heart. A father’s love and his outrage at you being violated like that. Okay, I know I was a bad father, but rape my own child? I’d deserve to be killed and burn in hell for that. I believed, truly, I was doing some small gesture of punishment on your behalf.)

Then Nig got killed in the gang fight. Someone shot him with a
sawn-off
shotgun. Nig. (My Nig.) Beth and I gave him that nickname because very young he had an ear for black music. (Like he was born in the wrong country, or like he knew he wasn’t on this earth for that long and was soaking up everything he could: Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, Bobby Womack.)

(Boy, I know I let you down, as a father, as someone who shoulda been guiding you in life, keeping you away from those gangs out prospecting for new young blood, trawling the tough Pine Block neighbourhood for members, getting them to do burglaries and rapes and vicious assaults on innocents to get membership, gain that stupid gang emblem patch. I could’ve at least stopped that, couldn’t I?

But I can’t bring you back, son. Can’t. All right, so I screwed up. So call Jake a baby, a child who never grew up till very late in life. But least I did, didn’t I, Nig?)

Seeing Bennett unexpectedly that time months ago, he kind of
understood
Bennett’s attitude towards him. Got him to thinking of his years with Beth and what he could have done better — like everything. (The whole lot of it, Jake, you could have done better at.) The relationship after that, with Rita, that had ended over three years ago.

I made the mistake of reverting to Jake of old, hit her one night. She told me to walk and never come back. But I won her back by changing my drinking habits, drank less and behaved better. I guess part of her never forgave me for laying hands on her; she told me, No man ever touched me violently, Jake, till you.

I think it was gonna end at any rate. We started realising it in bed, Rita and me. Just wasn’t the same any more. The passion had gone for both of us. And though we talked a lot, something vital was missing, or it was like she didn’t want to be in my presence but couldn’t tell me; I could see her backing gradually away, inch by inch, till I knew I could no longer reach her. And I
felt the same way. It had just gone, the thing we thought was love.

Still, Rita was the person who grew me up. I owed her my life, the light she flooded me in so I could see I’d been living in darkness. She used to laugh and tell me what a changed man I was, but I still wasn’t gonna end up an executive type. Not a chance.

I’d say, who said I ever wanted to be one a them? And she’d say back: I’m just saying so you know change is a relative thing.

Relative? I didn’t know the word.

She explained it was compared to how I was, the friggin’ a-hole, as she put it, that I was to everyone except those I called my mates but who she said were just the same ratbags as me. Said me and my boozing mates were in a club — a seedy one — and our clubrooms were bars and each other’s — rented, not owned, she threw in — houses for parties. Our club had no women in it, except to use for sex, nor children allowed (except to stand there in witness of our violence and more often its victims along with their mothers). This is what we were in our terrible state of unknowing.

To come from that to just being able to hear her point it out without getting mad was progress enough. You’re an executive of personal growth, Jake, she’d say, but I can’t ever picture you in a suit and collar and tie in some office. Told her I’d never had a thought to be in a suit and collar and tie.

Rita would call me Jake the Puss, for pussy. Not a woman’s thingie, but puss for soft and cuddly. She’d tickle me in the side and meow like a damn cat, and I used to laugh and make like how her cat (who I hated ’cos it was so selfish, or maybe I’d just never grown up with animals and didn’t
understand
them) purred. Was good at it, too. If Beth’d tried that cat stuff on me I woulda turned the lion and bit her head off.

I miss Rita, the woman who gave me so much. Not, though, the woman I thought I loved. We moved on. Just as I don’t miss for one second the mates of old and nor the times I thought were so good I never wanted them to end. My new mates, the Douglas brothers, their whole extended and very close clan, I can miss them on just the weekend, even though we work five, often six days a week together, and hunt and fish and up to two years ago played in the same rugby team till middle-age claimed us.

If it rains on a Saturday and we can’t go hunting or fishing, or dive for mussels and kina, in the rugby season Gordon Trambert and I will go and watch a premiere senior game. Or I might get lonely being the bachelor and go to the Douglas cluster of houses built on family land of their late
father’s, mess around, might make a new crayfish pot, do work on one of their houses. Their mother is like a queen, surrounded by her loyal family, six sons, four married daughters and their husbands, who’ve made me a family member. The first time I knew a proper family (I blew the chance with my own).

And though the Douglas males seem rough if you don’t know them, they think about things. We talk about concepts I’ve often never heard of. Talk about values, morals,
responsibility
to self, how it enables you to show responsibility for others. So you never allow the standards to drop, but never.

That’s what I learned from them, when I’d always thought your responsibility was to buy your share of the beer and never take a backward step in a fight, never turn down a challenge to fight and never let a woman talk back to you. Now I know different.

But, hey, no one’s gonna take away my (private) pride of the times I took on two or three guys at the same time, or a man twice my size. That takes courage. It takes hardness, inside and out, to wear their blows, face two or three of your fellow human beings out to hurt you, trying to take away the only meaning that’s important in your life: your manhood. In my case, my reputation for being a top fighter and maybe the top. No one will ever take away those triumphs from me.

LOOK AT (US) them. Can’t walk nowhere without puffing ’emselves up with attitude. Not even in this hellhole full of us losers, shunned by the true world, rejected by proper people, they (we) can’t help ’emselves, have to show each other how staunch (stupid), how effin’ mindless they are.

Who’s to see (us) you in here, who effin’ cares how (we) you look, how tough, how (blindly) faithful we are to the cause of being blindly unknowing to ourselves? Who’s here that counts? Who’s here to impress with our uniform sneers, our electric-needled maori warrior masks — spelt with a small m ’cos this is not Maori, it’s some warped notion, a comic-book perception, we wouldn’t know true Maori warriorhood till it confronted us with the truth of ourselves, that we’re nothings. Look at our fixed snarls and the hatred that puts ice into our already cold eyes.

Why’re we doing this? What’ve we done to ourselves? (And who am I?)

Never mind who I am, I shall remain nameless because I am nameless,
other than the name on my cell door, my prison ID number, length of sentence, but my name don’t mean nothing.

I’m a question.

I’m the doubt set into a once hard head and started growing like a most wondrous plant. I’m despair turned itself into enlightenment. I woke up yesterday, last year, this morning, doesn’t matter when, a train screaming through my head. Nameless! its message read trailing like a banner behind its thundering two-hundred steel wheels. First you become nameless. Then you can start the process all over again, of growing anew.

Listen to me, Nameless, you must listen, the train message screamed. Someone, something, some process of outlook has made you lot like you are. Take a look at yourself, Nameless, then at the mirrors of you, at those
swaggering
oafs on this concrete and steel landscape, this cesspit of humanity; look at these six-foot plus, gym-weight-pumped little kids turning thirty, forty, fifty, sixty till the sand runs out —

Listen to them, the pus they call talk, pouring, oozing from their
tattoo-surrounded
wounds of mouths. Just look at us (would any of you?) being you, Nameless.

Take a look, watch and hear each take their turn of going off, of psychosis laying its claiming hand on one, then the next. Another mind gone mad with too much dope, turning the brain to mush; can’t think. Only feel. Only see what ain’t there and what should’ve been there and what can’t be there. Come to the Hotel Bad-arses, see men go mad on themselves.

Someone’s done this to them, to us. Sure, we ain’t here because we’re angels. But ain’t all but a few who are complete evil-doers. In another world there might still be hope for us. In another, more listening world, a lot of us might be salvaged. Flawed we surely are. Not as intelligent as the average, absolutely. And it’s fact most of us can’t read. We went to school, same as everyone else, but I guess we defined ourselves by not letting in literacy to our peculiar brains. But damaged beyond repair?

I can’t accept that, not now. Or if we are beyond saving then
something
made us like we are; and I want at least to point a finger at not who but what and why.

It can’t have just happened that we, every Maori inmate here, the
overwhelming
majority, got dealt the same bad hand. There must be more to it than that. If our reality wasn’t so bloodied and claiming of all our attention just to survive, we might realise we’re some club where our Maoriness has
gained us membership. And not a club most folk are busting to join.

The laws of odds and chance just don’t work like that, though. I can prove it by tossing a coin, they end up about even, heads and tails. Yet nothing even about this mix — it’s damn near all Maori brown. With our Pacific Island cousins, physically dangerous like us but somehow not as bitter. It’s as if we start the day drinking from a sour brew cup. Listen (someone, whoever you are), I’m talking twelve per cent of the population and over fifty per cent of prison inmates the same race — why?

Why us? What the hell are we doing wrong? What are we notioning wrong? Is it that our race can’t, genetically, capitulate to another race’s perceptions? Is it because we’re most of us illiterate? But why, when we went to school? Are we so genetically, culturally hard-wired we’re fated to be the idiot race whom the other is yelling that our houses are on fire and we still turn our backs and tell each other, Don’t believe those people. Even as we choke on the smoke, even as our burning children scream? Another
generation
of mothers sob for their children burning alive, in meaningless marriages that are violent, and we still can’t hear and see and smell the stench of burning flesh, including our own?

Something’s responsible for us predominating in here. Something is to blame for us being failures. We can’t all have been born to fail. Can’t happen like that. Yet here’s the evidence, a clear indictment: one race is
disproportionately
out of kilter with life more than any other.

Are we a bad race? How can that be when even we know good, happy, loving types who are brown and Maori like us? Who are the country’s
comedians
? So why are we also the nation’s jokes? If we’re such a tragedy, how come nature gave us such a sense of humour? Why are we gifted with natural sporting skills? Why can we smile when all around us is in despair? Why are even us lowlifes so talented musically? And how is it we can see beauty in love songs, sing so beautifully ourselves?

I tell you, walk along the landing any time day or night and you’ll hear voices singing (crying) on all our behalf; sad (Negro) spirituals, even the occasional learned Maori tangi waiata. You can hear from a cell love sung for a woman, a child.

I will tell you this, before I die, before I get killed in here, or take my own worthless life, I’m gonna go down with some answers. Gonna bury myself wrapped in the shroud of truth, if nothing else is going for me.

I’m going to reach that place where truth resides. Then they can do what
they like with me. For I’m not getting released, not with taking one life out there and one in here. They think I’m quite the most dangerous of prisoners. If only they knew what has gone on inside the man inside.

Look, there, across the landing, a man scowls murder at another. Down on the second-floor landing the arrogant Black Hawks posture, and plan who is next on their victim list. Apeman’s there, sitting brooding, his revenge festering. Down on the ground floor two guys are punching each other, one’s screaming, his outpouring reverberating like an indictment on not so much us, as the mystery, the confoundment at not knowing what made us — him — like this, so wretched. The other’s pouring blood, and with it his place on the ladder. He’ll have to pump iron longer hours, do press-ups and sit-ups and throw punches by the thousand sets, fight the man again to regain his place. If only they would look, they’d see the ladder standing against a concrete wall higher than its reach and with razor wire along the top and higher towers still with guards looking down, laughing at us chumps. While the guards have homes and wives and children and friends and normal social activity to go home to.

On the ground floor two fullas’re holding hands and heading for
somewhere
to give it to each other. No, not love but to express their self-loathing. They’re not even having sex, ’cos sex is joy and these dudes don’t know joy. Not if joy has a touch of purity in it.

Who made us like this? Why are we the only ones nailed to the cross?

In the drying room they’ll be fighting for supremacy, die if that’s what it takes. Physical pride means so much they think it struts into death with them. In every cell each man’s got his name, and with it his place in the pecking order; he clings to his name believing it his identity — when it’s not: it’s a lie.

Our names have a stranglehold on our self notion. It’s why we all,
eventually,
inexorably, succumb. We get subsumed by our tortured minds. I’m saying: some process of thinking, of outlook, or conceptual blindness, ended us up here. No sooner released than we’re back in, repeating the same pattern of mindless behaviour. Without ever questioning why.

Well, I’m gonna make something of this sentence, this time I am. If just to find out why, so at least I go to my grave seeing light before the lid shuts all (pain) out. Least that.