Pepsi Bears and Other Stories (7 page)

Wolfi has hired Cards on many occasions and knows him well. He is an affectionate chestnut gelding of nine years with the temperament of a sloth. Wolfi pats his neck and walks him alongside the desert oak. Whitewash down the tree trunk proves the birds are in residence and he ruffles Cards' mane and speaks to him of their good luck in German. Then, one arm wrapped around the tree trunk for balance, he stands on the saddle, reverting to English in this serious moment, ‘Whoa … Whoaaa, boy.' He reaches with his left arm to the hollow in the tree just above his head and puts his hand inside. The rapid cacking alarm of the peregrine rings out and Cards shuffles his hooves and Wolfi tells him, ‘Whoaa … whoa. Is our friend who lays the golden egg.' Waggling his fingers to distract the bird he snakes his hand down the hollow until he grasps the falcon.

Standing on tiptoe on horseback, he feels a band on the falcon's leg and takes hold of it and smooths
his fingertips over it reading it in Braille. The triple crown of the Hamburg World Wildlife Park. That is enough for him to know exactly which bird this is. And cannot be.

Understandable that he jumps, swears, squeals, reels. Wolfi is a man with a snarling impossibility coursing his veins. One suspects conspiracy when one is confronted with the impossible. One feels people or gods are treating you as their plaything, watching from behind a rock, sniggering.

A current of fear is fed into Cards from the man on his back. He bolts and Wolfi is left hanging from the desert oak, his arm bent at the elbow down the hollow. Unable to straighten his arm, unable to lift himself to pull it out, he scrabbles at the ferrous bark with his boots and free hand for purchase and finds none.

Hanging by your elbow from a tree in the desert it is improbable you will find the equanimity to entice a horse to come to you. Even a hire horse of insurable disposition. Instead you will writhe and heave and scratch and kick and shout and curse that horse in your several languages. You are a monkey on a hotplate and an unsettling exhibition for a horse. He will whinny nervously and snort and trot to a distance that allows his uneasiness to subside. Which might, if your contortions are violent, be a great distance. Cards was found wandering with a herd of brumbies in the Western Desert.

We knew Wolfi was out there somewhere. After he didn't return to his room the police were called and when they found the eggs they called me. I found him hanging from that desert oak six weeks later, a black husk swinging in the wind out beyond the West Macs with his riding boots still on. I didn't dance in the pool of his secretions as I told Lars. But I didn't shed any tears, either. After I took him down I trousered his Garmin eTrex GPS, hoping all those hundreds of nests were now lost in the desert once more, all those thousands of birds were saved from the culture of Europe and similar privations.

I found the falcon dead in the bottom of the tree hollow. The opening having been blocked by Wolfi's arm, it had been trapped. Evidently it lived on his flesh for some days, his hand was stripped, several fingers missing entirely. But the bird would have succumbed to thirst inside a week. I phoned the number on its leg band and was astounded to be talking to Germany. The mystery opened up before us. The ornithological blogs began to chatter and regrettable suggestions were made about my honesty by Twitcher Lad of Kent, whose eye I have promised to blacken if we ever meet.

Viewing the body of his darkly leathered lover in the Alice Springs morgue, Lars breaks into a style of mourning befitting a designer of a semi-successful break-dancing-rabbit motif. Throws himself down on his knees and bangs his head against the aluminium framework of Wolfi's trolley, shaking and rattling it and wailing, rocking Wolfi back and forth like the dead-come-to-life in a showground Haunted House, his
skeletal hand clawing two-fingered at the air. Senior Sergeant Walker and Doctor Hutchins back right out of the room by way of showing respect and by way of not wanting to have anything to do with this display, and I'm damned if I don't find myself lone comfort to this fabric designer and throwing a consoling arm across his shoulders and asking if there's anything I can do.

‘The ring I give him.' He points to Wolfi's denuded hand. ‘Where is? The matching ring of mine?' He holds his hand up, the ring finger extended. ‘Spun gold with a Horst-faceted amethyst. Design of Juan Hoogenfeld. Especial for Wolfi/Lars union.'

‘A ring, Lars?' I try to maintain a sad tone, keep the excitement from my voice. ‘A matching ring. Sacred to your memory of Wolfi. That's … that's … I'm not married, but that's lovely. You've got to have that ring, man. And I know where it is.' He looks up at me from his knees, gratitude in his wet eyes. ‘And I can get it. That sacred ring. Would it be right to call it “sacred”?' Lars nods emphatically. Good. A sacred ring. Now I have some leverage on the guy. A treasure with which to buy the treasure map I suspect this weeping, chubby, parrot-haired, anally-herniated Hamburger possesses.

‘Raptors regurgitate pellets of non-digestible material, Lars. Wolfi's ring will be in the tree hollow. I'll take you there. We'll get it. But I want something from you, too.'

He stands and takes hold of my hand in his and nods, eager to comply, nothing is too much to regain his precious relic. ‘You will have, at home in Hamburg,
a micro SD data card. A little card that fits into Wolfi's handheld GPS system.'

‘Ja, yes, yes,' he nods. ‘In Wolfi's sock drawer. The backup of all the valuable information he has worked so hard to create.'

‘I want it. I give you the ring. You give me the data card.' He nods again, this time not looking at me, his mind away, in contemplation, clearly running through all the possibilities. When he snaps out of this reverie he takes my right hand and we shake. ‘We have the deal,' he confirms. ‘You give to me Wolfi's ring. I give to you the freedom of all those little future birds.' The freedom of all those little future birds. So, he knows exactly what this data card is worth.

Next morning Lars greets me at his hotel reception outfitted in a sort of Arab burnoose and sandals ready for a Lawrencian Middle-Eastern adventure. I mean, a German in a burnoose. Such a sight hasn't been seen since they were looting the Valley of the Kings.

We ride out to that tree on a quad-bike with an aluminium ladder strapped to the front, following the eTrex directions. Lars sits behind me with his arms around me, hanging on. I ride fast and the ground is rough and he whimpers in my ear at every jounce and corrugation, calling over the engine noise, ‘Mine piles, Smokey Bear. Mine tenderness.' I find I am actively seeking out the fiercest terrain. Thrice we are airborne, Lars' burnoose
trailing in the air like a loose sail while he squeals disapproval. When we arrive at the falcon tree he climbs off the quad gingerly, white-faced, and insulted, as if a queue of homophobes stretching all the way from here to Alice Springs had taken turns to kick his arse as we rode past.

‘So, this is where my Wolfi died.' He looks sorrowfully at the tree. The panicked scrabblings of his husband's boots are still visible in the ferrous bark a metre off the ground. He looks out across the rolling red land. ‘So lonely. Like to be in an ocean.'

‘In there,' I point up at the hollow, ‘is his ring. It'll be in a pellet of feathers and bones and other indigestibles. About marble size.'

I set the ladder against the tree and work its feet into the sand. ‘Go on. Don't worry. The nest's empty.' He makes sure the ladder is stable before stepping onto it, almost tripping himself on the hem of his burnoose. ‘Take that off, man. That's an accident waiting to happen.'

He disrobes, folds his burnoose neatly, laying it in the red sand. Dressed only in a pair of boxers, covered with a cartoon rabbit in a tuxedo holding a conductor's baton, he begins to climb the ladder. Supposing me watching he explains, ‘My classical rabbit. Not so good seller as my break-dancer.' Standing on the top rung of the ladder his head is just below the hollow and he reaches up with his left hand, twinkling his fingers nervously at its mouth. ‘I am not like Wolfi so brave in nature.'

‘Just do it, man. It's in there. The sacred ring. Juan
Hoogenfeld.' Slowly, with his teeth bared, he eases his hand down inside the tree trunk.

Looking up at him as I hold the ladder I see high overhead a pair of wedge-tailed eagles corkscrewing aloft on a thermal, scoping the world. I wonder are they the parents of many abducted broods? Is their futile courtship beginning again? How many more of their chicks will end up in Vienna tethered to a perch with kids waggling fairy floss in their faces?

Before we hear the clatter of the aluminium ladder on the stony ground, before we hear Lars shrieking at the pitiless desert and pleading with Smokey Bear, let us ask some questions.

How much money can a man generate churning out rap-dancing-rabbit motifs? Because Lars' fabric designing doesn't sound to me anything more than an effort to fill the day and give him some whiff of relevance, something to mention at parties to offset the fact his Indiana Jones husband brings back treasure from the wilderness. Pirates' wives, after the breadwinner had met his inevitable fate, were known to knit at home in penury. And it seems to me with Wolfi gone, hard economic times are about to swoop on Lars Schmidt.

So, does he have any intention of returning that micro SD data card to me? The backup for all the information in Wolfi's GPS? Coordinates of rare nests are routinely traded on the black market among the egg
bandits of Europe, and a haul such as this could be sold for millions. There are endangered birds on that database, whose eggs, as they teeter on the brink of extinction, are becoming priceless. Those coordinates are a treasure map to a yearly harvest of fabulous jewels.

He is a jolly man, Lars. In different circumstances I could like him. But he is Northern man, too. A beast from the deep megalopolis, ineluctably civilised. A victim of clarinet notes and stained glass. He said right to my face the falcon was no more than a pig to him.

He is reaching down elbow-deep in the tree when he calls, ‘I have it, Smokey Bear. I have it.'