Settlers' Creek (25 page)

Any way you cut it, she was going to be a difficult day.

An uneventful trip from Kaipuna. He’d taken the slow inland road behind the Waimanu Ranges, driving through the heart of several big sheep stations, through open tussock land laced with braided rivers, among the feet of shingle-topped mountains.

There were no Maori waiting for him. No flashing lights loomed up in his rear mirror. The sun shone.

The town of Ashford was tucked into a cupping arc of low foothills on the eastern side of the mountains. Box drove slowly around the streets and finally parked in front of the primary school. He reasoned that the ute wouldn’t be noticed there — just another tradesman’s vehicle. As soon as he got out the sulphur tang of the hot pools became stronger. The pong had started to filter in through the loose seams of the ute as soon as he’d driven into town past the turning rows of maples and ash trees that lined the main road. The odour hung over the whole place like a ripe fart.

In the school playground four kids were using their hands to shovel up autumn leaves, tagging and dodging in the late afternoon sunshine, laughing, chucking them at each other. Three boys and a younger girl — a ‘look after your sister’ sister, he thought. The red and orange leaves stuck to their clothes and caught in their hair. Although it was only four o’clock the shadows of the hills were stretching out across the playground. Box stood at the school gate and watched the kids for longer than he should have. At last he turned away and walked the five minutes down to the centre of town.

He found a shop that was too small to be called a supermarket and too big to be a dairy. Taking a green plastic basket from a stack by the door, he roamed up and down the aisles finding what he needed.

He walked down the street to the white concrete-block public loos, and went inside. The mirror over the basin was made out of some type of reflective metal, which showed him an uneven, fairground version of his face. But it wasn’t just the mirror, or the stark fluorescent lights mounted on the wall above it, that made the face staring back at him almost unrecognisable. Box recoiled from his own image. It was the face of an addled clown. The bruising around his right eye looked worse than ever. His eyebrow was a lumped eave jutting out over the side of his face. He could see out of his eye fine but winced when he explored around it with his fingers. There was stubble on his cheeks. He guessed that he stank. He looked like an outsider — a druggie or alcoholic, a social dropout.

People were wary of him. He’d seen it in the closed-off face of the teenage boy who’d served him five minutes ago. And during the short walk from the school, when he’d
passed a family coming back from the pools, their hair wet, slicked back from their faces. They’d walked towards him on the same side of the wide street, carrying bundled towels. As they’d registered Box, the father had placed a protective hand on his teenage daughter’s shoulder. The wife had moved closer to them both. Everyone’s eyes remained fixed on the footpath as Box passed.

Now, staring into the mirror, Box gave a slow lopsided grin. It was an effort and did nothing to improve his appearance. If anything, the smile made him look worse — unhinged, a candidate for the loony bin. If he was going to make it back to the bay with Mark then he couldn’t afford to be attracting attention just walking down the street.

He turned on the hot tap and waited but only cold water came. Box swore loudly. Christsake, they couldn’t even get hot water in the taps in a thermal resort town. Cupping his hands, he splashed the water up into his face. He used his palms to push what was left back over the raspy growth on his head. From his plastic bag he removed a can of shaving foam and a packet of five yellow plastic razors. The can squirted a large mound of white foam into his cupped palm. It smelt of pine. He rubbed it over his cheeks and down his jaw and along his neck.

The distorted bloke in the mirror wasn’t crying, but he looked close to it; broken and black-eyed.

‘Not as tough as you look, eh?’ he muttered to his reflection.

Someone came to the doorway and Box turned. The man standing there was middle-aged with a paunch. He was carrying a rolled-up towel under his arm. He stopped and eyed Box. He’d probably heard him talking.

That’s me, thought Box, a nutter muttering away to
himself inside his concrete cave; the crazy caveman. Box was tempted to try out a primitive grunt.

Instead, he turned back to the mirror. Even the brand-new blade rasped and snagged over his skin. Behind him the guy made a decision and carried on to the urinal. In the mirror Box could see him flicking glances over his shoulder. He left quickly, without coming over to wash his hands.

When he’d finished shaving Box rubbed his face dry with a paper towel from the dispenser and threw the sodden remains into the bin. When he checked in the mirror there was still a small blob of foam below his right ear and he wiped it away with his hand. There. That was better. Okay, marginally better. But at least now he didn’t look like a sun-mad castaway. Hell, how many ways could he find to describe himself: clown, druggie, dropout, caveman, castaway?

Box took a packet of Band-Aids from the plastic bag — he’d left his first-aid kit in the ute — and ripped open the top of the cardboard container. He chose a wide one, which he laid along the puffy skin next to his eye. It didn’t disguise much, but that’s what normal people did, right? They made an effort to tidy themselves up. Keeping up appearances was what Dee called it. Box used another paper towel to wipe dried mud off the brim of his cap, then slipped it back onto his head. There was nothing much he could do about his clothes.

The takeaway bar was over the road from the entrance to the hot pools. The cray had been hours ago and Box hadn’t eaten so much as a chocolate bar since then. The
salt and grease smell of deep-fried food set his stomach turning over like a tumble dryer. He was almost snarling with hunger as he ordered two fish and a scoop of chips. That was about all he could afford. The Asian guy took Box’s last ten-dollar note without meeting his eye.

Box waited at a small table away from the window. There was a television mounted up in the corner of the room. A preview for the six o’clock news came on, the volume so low that the presenter’s voice was only a gentle babble. Box watched, fascinated, expecting to see a photograph of his face flash up. But there was nothing. Maybe the media hadn’t got hold of the story yet. Possibly the police were hoping to find him quickly and without any fuss. Or the police weren’t even involved yet. The Kaipuna Maori could be keeping it in-house. His name and description were probably being circulated right now from marae to marae, from one Maori to another. Box looked out the window but saw nothing suspicious.

When the fish and chips arrived he ate quickly, with the eviscerated paper packet steaming on the table in front of him. He’d forgotten to buy any tomato sauce, but couldn’t be bothered going back up to the counter. As soon as Box finished the last crispy brown and salt-encrusted dreg he began to regret the meal. All that stodge and fat wolfed down into an empty stomach. He gagged and for a second was sure that he was going to lose the lot. The last thing he needed was to draw attention to himself by putting a slow-motion replay of his dinner all over the linoleum floor. He got up and went out into the cool autumn air.

The light was already fading. He stood on the footpath, taking deep breaths in through his nose until he was sure that he wasn’t going to vomit.

Box went into a phone booth outside a shop selling
merino clothing to tourists. He had bought a phone-card along with his other supplies. He slipped it into the slot and dialled the number and waited.

‘Hello?’

‘Liz.’

‘Box. Jesus. Where are you? What are you doing? I need you to come home.’

‘I’ve got Mark.’

‘What?’

‘I got him back, Liz.’

She started crying. ‘I just need you to come home. Where are you now?’

Box suddenly imagined Liz talking to him while two cops listened in on headphones.

‘I’ll be home soon.’

‘Box.’

He hung up and stood staring across the road at the families queuing to go into the hot pools. The entrance foyer had high walls of glass and was brightly lit. The queue snaked between drooping rope barriers. The people were smiling, relaxed. Most of them were probably on holiday. They would be anticipating the warm water and the way that it kneaded out the tension from stiff shoulders and cricked necks. No one seemed to mind waiting. Standing on the other side of the road, in the dim phone booth, Box watched it all.

His greasy meal was still turning over in his stomach as Box cruised the back streets of Ashford in his ute. It was fully dark now and Box was driving slowly past houses that backed directly onto the wide shingle of the riverbed. He was right on the edge of town. Not that it had taken long to get here; Ashford was a small place.

Stopping here had been a calculated risk. In the end it had come down to what he needed. Mostly he needed to find a new car, with petrol in the tank and enough room in the back for Mark. The ute stood out like a grey hair among dyed pubes. If he tried to drive it back to the city he’d be stopped by the first cop who bothered to glance up from his speed camera.

If he was going to steal a car, he’d figured that Ashford was a better place than most to do it. It was a town people passed through. Here, he’d be just another new face. So far that had worked out for him, or maybe his luck was still holding by a thread. Judging by the yellow signs on
the fences and gateposts, it seemed that most of the houses in the town were rented out. It made sense. The owners probably only used their places for a few weekends a year, and at Christmas for a couple of weeks. The rest of the time they could rent them and cover the cost of maintenance and rates.

But the place he was looking at now wasn’t for rent. He pulled over outside number twenty-two. It was a house that probably hadn’t been much to begin with but now any semblance of character had been stripped from it. Across the rectangle of lawn illuminated by the street light he could see that the original wooden window frames had all been ripped out and replaced with aluminium joinery. The exterior had also been covered in wide aluminium cladding, functional but as ugly as wrapping a house in tin-foil.

Box waited for ten minutes. There were no lights, no blue flicker of a television through the narrow gap between the drawn curtains. Box looked up and down the street. It was deserted.

His boots were unreasonably loud on the loose shingle of the driveway. The garage was set well back, almost against the rear fence of the property. There was a window at the side and, nose almost against the glass, he could just make out the shape of a car. Maybe that meant the owners were inside after all. It was possible they’d just walked down to the pools and would be back at any moment. He looked towards the house but there was still no sign of anyone. The garage door rattled when he tugged on the handle but didn’t open.

Box walked over to the back of the house and up onto the low deck and, without any expectation, tried the ranchsliders;
sure enough, they were locked. The curtains were drawn behind the glass and he couldn’t see inside. The only helpful light came from the moon, which some time in the last half-hour had risen above the trees to the east. The street lighting threw a pale splatter of light over the shingle of the drive and up against the door of the garage, but none of it had the strength to reach the deck.

Box went back into the garden and lifted a large rock, painted white, part of a tacky garden border. He already had an image of the people who owned this place — an older couple, retired, grimly practical. The wife probably thought that the painted rocks were artistic. Box imagined them coming to Ashford to soak away their gout. Cupping the rock in both hands, Box carried it onto the deck. He pulled off his bush shirt and wrapped it tightly around the rock, then tapped the muted bundle tentatively on the glass. He didn’t want to make a lot of noise. Although the neighbouring house on the left-hand side looked empty, there were two cars parked on the grass outside the A-frame at number twenty and lights on inside.

The sliding door was divided into two parts. Box planned to break the topmost pane, close to the handle. That way if the door turned out to be deadlocked he’d at least have a chance of climbing through, once he’d cleared away the shards.

He tapped the glass again. The pane quivered within its frame but didn’t break. He hit it harder. There was a hollow crunch and jagged cracks forked out across the glass but nothing fell.

‘Fuck it.’

He stood back and lobbed the rock into the glass. It travelled through the pane, billowing back the curtain
behind. Most of the glass fell into the house, big jagged shark-fin shards that guillotined down, but some smaller fragments fell onto the deck where they shattered again and splintered out across the wood, washing up around Box’s boots.

He stood listening, up on his toes, on the edge of running at the first scream of a burglar alarm.

But there was nothing. Not so much as a barking dog. No head of a curious neighbour poked over the parapet of the fence.

Box put his hand carefully through the gaping hole he’d made, aware that there was a fair amount of glass still imbedded in the aluminium frame. If he did have to climb through then he was going to have to clear that lot away; otherwise he’d have a good chance of gelding himself. He felt around inside with his hand and found the handle. To his surprise the lever clicked up. Still reaching through the broken pane, he pulled. The door slid back on its tracks.

It was only later that he thought that an experienced crim, a professional burglar — or, let’s face it, even a man with half a brain in his head — would have taken a minute to pull out the bigger shards of glass remaining in the top of the frame. But not Box Saxton; not that stupid prick. In his hurry, Box slid the door quickly back in its track. It ran smoothly for half a metre and then jammed.

If they’d been there, maybe the owners could have told him that the door always jammed at that spot. ‘Oh, yes, that door always sticks a bit. You just need to give it a jiggle.’ Or maybe it had jammed on a piece of glass lying in the track. Either way, the door stopped suddenly. The jarring was enough to dislodge the biggest shard of glass left in the top of the frame. It fell. In the darkness Box barely
registered its passing. He felt something brush against the back of his forearm, heard it land on the carpet and break into smaller pieces. That was close, he thought.

He released the door lever and pulled back his arm. He turned towards the driveway where the lighting was better. The long sleeve of his thermal top had a slice across it as clean as if it had been cut by a tailor’s scissors. Instinctively he put his hand over the spot and pushed down hard. There was no pain. But when he lifted his hand to look again it came away wet and sticky.

Box still wasn’t that worried. The glass must’ve just nicked him. With his hand over his forearm, he pushed through the curtain into the house.

Using one hand he felt along the wall until he found the light switch. He would have to take a chance at being seen from the street. Box found himself in a lounge, cluttered with heavy wooden furniture. A tall oak duchess standing against the wall loomed over him. A tiger-print throw rug was hung over the back of a cracked blue leather couch. His forearm was starting to throb.

Box went through a small kitchen and into a hallway and then into a bathroom, where he found a stained bath with a large showerhead hanging limply over it like the head of a dead sunflower. He lifted his bloody hand tentatively away from his arm like someone revealing whether it was heads or tails. There was a lot of blood now. His arm was dripping with the stuff. The sleeve of his thermal was soaked with blood. He gingerly rolled up the sleeve and looked at the wound. The cut was a lot deeper than he’d thought. A lot. Only the scalpel-sharp edge of the glass had saved him from immediate pain. Blood was welling up and dripping down his arm and onto the floor. Box flexed
his fingers and way down in the meat he was shocked to see a tendon move. Although he couldn’t see because of all the blood, more every second that he stared, he was pretty sure that the damage went down to the bone.

Box broke into a clammy sweat. Eventually, he was going to need a lot of stitches. But right now he just needed to stop the blood. He opened the cabinet above the sink and found a basic first-aid kit. God bless all the anal retentives. The kit wasn’t as good as the one he had in his pack out in the ute but it would do for now. He pushed the edges of the wound together as best he could and stuck a large sterile pad over the whole gory mess. The pad immediately soaked through with dark blood, so he slapped on another and then another until they seemed to staunch most of the flow. Another pad for good luck, and then Box wrapped gauze bandage around his forearm as tightly as he could. So tightly in fact that he worried about cutting off the circulation to his hand. When the roll ran out he split the end in two with his teeth and tied it tightly.

He found a sheet of paracetamol tablets with four left. He popped them all, then cupped water in his good hand to swallow them in one throat-widening gulp. He stood back from the sink and examined his crude piece of triage. His arm looked mummified. All on nice and tight, though. At least there was no more blood seeping through. It would have to do for now.

Box turned off the light in the bathroom and went back out to the lounge, where it took him five minutes to find the keys. They were hanging on a row of hooks on the inside of one of the cupboards. They were even labelled: ‘Back door key’, ‘Spare Nissan key’, ‘Garage door’.

The keys were true to their labels. The garage door
swung up on oiled runners. Inside was a silver Nissan Primera, almost as old as the ute but in good nick. It started first time and the petrol gauge showed three-quarters full. That would be enough to get him back to the city.

He switched off the engine and sat in the darkness of the garage, feeling light-headed. He breathed deeply and slowly until the feeling passed, then got out, walked up to the street and reversed the ute down the drive. The inside of the garage was lit up by the red tail lights. He transferred his pack into the boot of the Nissan. Then he pushed the soft wood and rusted iron aside, throwing some of it onto the lawn behind him, until he had uncovered Mark’s body. With his arm the way it was he couldn’t lift Mark. In the end he had to haul his son by the feet over the back of the deck. The shrouded form landed hard on the shingle.

‘Sorry, mate. Not long now.’

The body was beyond being stiff. The blanket reeked. Box thought that it was a wonder that someone passing by on the street earlier hadn’t sniffed out his secret. Box wrapped both arms around the boy in a bent-over bear hug and with the feet still on the ground dragged Mark through the shingle.

‘I can’t believe that no one’s seeing all this, Tiger. Maybe a couple of Ashford’s best cops — only cops, more like it, eh — are just about to catch us in the act. Red-handed, eh. Ha ha.’

The thought of being caught was almost a solace. It would all be over. He could sleep in a police cell tonight, and a doctor would look at his arm. He could truthfully tell Liz and Heather that he’d done his best, that he’d just been unlucky.

But there were no flashing red and blue lights in the
darkness. No one hailed him from the end of the driveway demanding to know what the hell he was doing.

Grunting and sweating, Box wrestled Mark into the back seat of the Nissan. Because Mark was tall, Box had to angle him across the car, feet down behind the passenger seat. The boy’s head was high, almost touching the ceiling. The back door of the car just managed to push closed.

And then. And then. Always more for him to do — to do and do and do without end, it seemed. Keep it together, he thought. Like Pop said, just take it one thing at a time.

He backed the ute onto the lawn, over the pile of wood and rusted metal, out of sight of anyone passing on the street. He reversed the Nissan out of the garage and closed the garage door behind him, lobbing the garage key up onto the deck. He reversed up the drive to the road. Look right. Look left. Look right again.

There were only a few people around as he drove out of Ashford. He felt heady because of lack of sleep or lack of blood. God knows which, he thought. The holiday park and the motels, the glass entrance to the pools and the mini-golf course were all deserted now.

And then the lights of the town were behind him and he was driving though deserted countryside. He looked in the rear-view mirror at the shape looming up in the back seat.

‘It’s just you and me now, Tiger,’ he said.

And then. The journey home.

Box followed the road — was led by it — the fleeting patch of illuminated asphalt in front of the Nissan. It rolled out straight ahead of him, or sometimes curving to the left or to
the right, demanding small adjustments to the wheel.

But so little of him needed to be involved that it was as though he was elsewhere. Where, God knows. Box certainly didn’t; elsewhere was all.

For timeless stretches he imagined that the car was piloting itself.

Sometimes the fragmented white line would drift across to the left so that he was straddling it, watching it flick away beneath the chassis.

The world around him was dark hills and roadside trees.

He travelled down a narrow tunnel. The red-tipped plastic road markers stood beside the road like huge unstruck matchsticks.

And then he would rouse himself and turn the wheel a fraction so that the broken white line moved gracefully back to the right, swimming like an endless column of luminous fish through a dark ocean.