Pepsi Bears and Other Stories (4 page)

T
he shoeless German boy lost his dog at least once a week, which was fun for me. He'd wander our neighborhood calling, ‘Villi … Villi…' Villi wasn't a bad dog but he sniffed bitches on the breeze and was conscripted by his libido to sally forth and wage a courtship. He was a scruffy yellow terrier, as important as a duke, with an incurable ache. My Uncle Don, though a redhead, had a similar importance and ache, so I knew the type.

I was two years older than Villi's owner, the shoeless German boy. And I was grandly conceived, a lawyer's son, who knew myself superior to the other people of Shepparton. As the shoeless German boy went past my front gate calling for his dog I said to him, ‘Villi is mine doch.'

He must have known it was coming, but he always fell for it. His eyes filled with hurt. ‘No. Villi is mine doch.'

‘I have Villi in mine house.' My house was the town's largest, a double-storey fortress of brick and tile in a deep garden which Talinga Crescent wrapped around like a moat. A brooding, dark building likely to be crammed with pilfered terriers.

‘No. But Villi is mine doch.' The German boy blinked at my house, bewildered at the pleasures corrupting Villi in there. With what exotic delights was that pooch being spoiled? Tinned food? A bone? A ball? The shoeless German boy's house was a tiny effort of cement sheet and tin. In a mansion like mine Villi would quickly be ruined for the kind of life lived there. The shoeless German boy began to cry, pouting viciously at the wonderland of my garden where endless fun could be had. ‘Can I have my Villi?'

‘No,' I said sadly, shaking my head. ‘Villi is mine doch now.'

The war was only twenty years over and krauts were still on the nose, so there was no reason not to break a shoeless German boy's heart. I would usually continue teasing him until I was called for tea or Villi came staggering home from his debauch. Then the shoeless German boy would chase Villi down into a hug and flee with him past the blacks' camp across Quinane Parade and on into the broken wilds of the Housing Commission estate.

It was October 1969 when Villi caused a race riot. Or anyway, what a senator from Queensland wanting to sully Victoria's reputation so his state wouldn't be lone exemplar of racism in the Commonwealth stood up in Federal Parliament and called a race riot, before mentioning the hospitalisation of eighteen people. At our town council's next meeting my dad rose to his feet and said this senator's allegation was an unwanted goddamned blot on us, and most of the hospitalisations were anyway from a house collapsing amid the confusion, and what had occurred was really just an oversized kerfuffle caused by international athletes and a dog and, naturally enough, the out-of-control good-for-nothing aboriginal youth of our town. He then proposed the purchase of a water cannon to make sure such a kerfuffle wouldn't occur again. His proposal made the Melbourne papers and he was called a Boer by pinko-bastards. But I was proud of him. Me and my friends couldn't wait for the arrival of this new ordnance. Water cannon. We had visions of black kids spun and flung across the streets, scrabbling at the footpaths with their fingernails, their features distorted in the deluge. To us, convening in our tree-huts and vacant blocks, there wasn't any racial or social problem that couldn't be cleared up by water cannon.

We were jealous of the black kids, whose fathers were barbarous and drunk all week long, making them truant and free. Our fathers were forced by convention or expectation or women or some other constriction to confine their barbarism and drunkenness to weekends, leaving them sober five days of seven and us suffering a reign of
refinement: shoes, school, household jobs, combed hair, visits to grandparents, peeling the Virginia creeper off the chimneys of the cottages of maiden aunts. We hated the black kids for every indignity heaped upon us.

Most of our town's blackfellas lived not far from me. Talinga Crescent ran off Quinane Parade and on the other side of Quinane Parade the land dropped away into river flats where the State Government had built a flood-prone fibro cement settlement for the traditional owners. The homes were broken now and dead cars and fridges lay in the yards where the earth was barer than the earth anywhere else.

In most towns a yellow terrier couldn't spark either a race riot or an oversized kerfuffle, I suppose. So I have to admit our town had some tensions. And probably Villi blundering home with a smile on his face was more or less just a flashpoint for them.

His urges had been momentarily placated by Myrna Stuart's pedigree black poodle Charlize, who not only shared a hairstyle with Roberta Flack but the hankering for free love that woman sang of in her hits. Villi had breached the Stuarts' chain-link fence, Charlize's chook-wire cage, and her counterarguments, if any. Now happily fatigued, he wandered home. I believe he was mentally waving at adoring crowds as he walked along. Or perhaps he was replaying Charlize's conniptions, marvelling at her ways.
Whatever, his distraction was deep, his reverie impervious to the pelleton.

The pelleton. It appeared once a year, like Christmas. My father spoke of it with awe, as if it were some supernatural beast. ‘Quick. Finish your cereal; the pelleton will be here soon. It just went through Mooroopna.'

This was the sixties and colour hadn't come to our world yet. Shepparton was dull-toned as a Gallipoli photo. Blue jeans were thought dangerously festive, possibly linked to Melbourne. We dressed in browns and greys. Our houses were cream or fawn or tan. The only adult who ever wore a primary colour was Santa.

But once a year this pelleton more gaudy than a flock of rosellas flew through the town and we all turned out to cheer it. Reds and golds and greens and blues. One rider was covered in purple polka-dots on a white base. Champions branded with the names of mighty and mysterious corporations: Postale, Rabobank, Peugeot, Giro, Lampre-Fondital. It was rumoured these men were so focused on victory they urinated while riding without stopping pedalling. Not even kamikaze pilots went that far.

The Sun Tour seemed like part of the space race to us. Supreme heroes from advanced countries. The quicksilver whirr and flash of their spokes. Their shiny helmets and skin-tight nylons. You could hear them talking to each other in alien tongues as they flashed past. This was the future visiting Shepparton. A tight stampede of cosmonauts blasting through our town. None of us breathed as they rode past.

The day of the race riot or oversized kerfuffle we bolted our breakfast and got out to Quinane Parade to wait. People lined the road as far as you could see. Ahead of the pelleton, clearing the way, came a Sun Tour utility with lights flashing, moving fast, a man leaning out the window with a megaphone alternating warnings to ‘Step back. Step back off the road. Here they come' with an invitation to ‘Say hello to Miss Shepparton, Debbie Ramsay'. Miss Shepparton was standing in the back of the ute on the point of tears, waving frantically at her subjects with one hand and clinging to the roof rack with the other while her hairdo was demolished by wind.

Then the pelleton itself. Forty gods at breakneck speed. And Villi, his senses dulled by fornication, his mind set on getting home, staggered out into their path. I don't believe any dog was ever better loved by his owner than Villi was loved by that shoeless German boy, whose name I never bothered to ask. I owned several dogs myself and threw more sticks at them than for them. But that shoeless German boy, seeing Villi in danger … he called his name and ran to him.

The pelleton, which I had thought bristling with individual genius, was actually a flock. When the leading rider veered left, his evasive action became a contagion and the others followed. The pelleton went west off Quinane Parade down the slope onto the river flat and into a fibro cement shack that belonged to an aboriginal elder known as Lost Billy. Most of the riders flew head-first through the fibro wall of his sitting room. It was like drumfire as they hit that shack one after another so
rapid and uniform, not a shout or a squawk from their lips, just
thud
,
thud
,
thud
and shattering cement sheet and breaking glass as they disappeared inside.

Lost Billy could take or leave supreme athletes, so he hadn't bothered to come out to watch the pelleton. It was superheroes he loved. He was inside sitting cross-legged on his living-room floor watching
Batman
on TV with a flagon of sherry in his lap when nylon-clad cyclists began flying helmet-first through the wall. Drunk, watching Batman hoodwink evil masterminds, it naturally seemed to Lost Billy as if a phalanx of super heroes had been sooled onto him by a Chief Commissioner acting on the will of the people. In these garish athletes he recognised The Green Lantern and Captain America and The Silver Surfer and The Flash and Superman and Spiderman. Seeing the odds, he scrambled to his feet and put his hands up, shouting, ‘You got me. No need for your webs. No need for your rays. I'll go peaceful.' (Ever after if a cop was arresting Lost Billy he'd ask if he wanted to do it the easy way, or the hard way, ‘With webs, Lost Billy … and rays.')

Perhaps thirty men flew through the wall of his shack at sixty kilometres per hour. It was something to see, and I was up on my toes wide-eyed. The dwelling was severely wounded and began to list. Lost Billy stood among the pelleton in his living room, surrendering as they began to disentangle themselves from the wreckage
and get to their feet, swearing in a dozen languages, shaking their broken bikes at each other, flaunting the carnage. Then the roof came down on them and the pelleton was crushed and I was slapped on the ear by the widow Long for laughing.

Disgruntled blackfellas began to drift up from everywhere once the house caved in. To them it must have seemed as if hundreds of whitefellas had gathered to watch a black man's domestic bliss get shattered in a new and devilish way. It must have seemed like the town council had met and decided to fix Lost Billy once and for all using a cavalry charge of gaudy runts. There were white kids laughing and hooting openly in the crowd.

Lost Billy's people sprang to his defence. Thirty white men had attacked one old black man. A low and cowardly intrigue. Lost Billy might have taken to drink and superheroes, but people still bore a faint memory of a faint respect they once had for him. So they began to lay about the cyclists with knuckle and stick and the pelleton scattered like wedding rice up onto Quinane Parade, where the townsfolk defended them and the altercation bred into scuffles and skirmishes of a general nature, people kicking and swinging punches and brandishing fence-pickets, old scores being settled. In the mayhem someone laid out the widow Long from behind with a sun-brittle garden hose. She had enemies.

Seeing it had got to where widows lay in gutters, my father ran for his gun cupboard and began to loose birdshot over the melee, which didn't slow proceedings
so much as make the participants conduct their endeavours in a crouch like they were fighting in a wine cellar.

Most of the violence this day was blackfella-versus-whitefella, and may, at a stretch, if you were visiting from Queensland, have appeared like races rioting one against another. So I was pleased to see that when the Sun Tour utility realised it had lost its pelleton and pulled over, clods and driveway gravel rattled down on Miss Shepparton in an assault that wasn't race-based in any way. People of every colour passed judgment on her via a general bombardment. And from beneath a substantial helmet of ruined hair she shouted at them, her subjects, to go get knotted and called them a pack of dickheads. Being a boy who enjoyed stories of kings and queens walking to the guillotine in brave silence, her rantings were the low point of the day for me.