The Forrests (3 page)

‘Don’t tell your mum,’ Daniel said. ‘They’ve got a shotgun. Rena keeps talking about rabbit stew.’

‘Do you want it back?’ Once he took it, Evelyn was free to move. She followed him out of the pines to the long grass, the feathery tips brushing their knees, and he squatted down and opened his hands just enough and the rabbit disappeared, but Daniel kept the steadiness it seemed to have given him. He rose and looked calmly at the field, and smiled at the distance, and together they walked down the dip and over the rise towards the mudflats, where the other kids were playing.

Dressed in a singlet, shorts and work boots, braless, Rena squatted in the catcher position behind Michael, who was at bat. If you walked past her you could see down her top, her melony breasts. Michael swung the bat and missed the ball and Rena lobbed it over his head to Evelyn, the pitcher. ‘Foul ball,’ she called.

‘But he tried to hit it.’

‘Yeah, well he shouldn’t have.’

Michael called, ‘Just pitch again.’

‘Yeah but strike one, OK?’ and Evelyn pitched and he thwacked the ball and flung the bat aside as he launched into a sprint that made it to Dorothy at second base. He grinned crookedly, as though his face was doing something against his will.

When Rena hit the ball – miles out, low-bouncing into the tawny
edges of the field – she ran like hell, her breasts joggling side to side, and made it to home base while Daniel still mooched through the bunny-tailed grass, hunting for it. Michael, who was catcher now, tackled her to the ground and they rolled around in the pale dust, legs flailing, laughter hooting from Rena, Michael’s face shiny and determined, the top lip downy. He was ready to start shaving but there was no man here to teach him how. Dorothy saw his body against Rena’s, the way his shoulders had broadened, his strong leg jammed between that woman’s, breath coming from her in a regular panting sound, a sound that made Dot grind the nubby end of the baseball bat into the dirt as though she could drill a hole through the earth.

The humidity of the day gathered at last into rain, and the ball game was abandoned. ‘We’re going to play cards in my cabin,’ Rena said, an arm slung over Michael’s shoulder. ‘Anyone else?’

‘No.’ Daniel lifted Rena’s rusty bicycle from the grass and rode it over the ground towards the children’s cabin like he was Butch and Sundance both at once, wheeling in the rain. Dot and Evelyn looked at their brother, who flicked his head to get the wet hair out of his eyes, a short, proud gesture. ‘No,’ the girls said in unison. They passed the vegetable patch on the way back to their cabin, where Name was jogging along the rows of seedlings with her arms above her head in a rain dance, watched by the cat, who shivered under the tool-shed eaves, droplets scattered over the ends of its puffed fur like a net of crystals, and a trail dragging through the dirt behind them from the end of the baseball bat, showing where they’d been.

Daniel stood by the weir in the braided stream, poking its bank with a long stick, the water halfway up his shins. Stepping
through the trees Dorothy saw him, and stopped under a gap in the branches, where white sunlight pooled onto her shoulder and ran down one arm. ‘Have you got anything?’

‘Got an eel. Had an eel.’

‘We could put it in Mike’s pillow.’

‘Mike says we’re too old for this place.’

‘True.’ But she liked it here. Their bare feet and strange clothes were like everyone else’s, and the food was good. At school people looked oddly at their American T-shirts emblazoned with brand slogans for a petrol company or bank or some other giveaway, Lee’s old clothes baggy on the girls, Michael in some handed-down shorts held up by Frank’s belt with extra holes punched along the leather. Ruth hated it the most, and had made friends with an older girl who passed on clothes made for an actual seven-year-old. She looked close to normal.

The water ran green-gold over the rocks, spangled where light came through the trees, and in places the current formed a pattern that was like the dévoré-velvet dress Lee wore. Dot’s heels skidded as she picked her way down the muddy bank, leaving soft grooves, and she stumbled into the water, bone-cold under the arches of her feet and between the toes, where silty mud oozed. Moss and waterweeds streamed in the current, as though they grew out of rocks. ‘Where’s the eel?’

‘His name’s Gordon.’

‘Where’s Gordon?’

‘Gone in there.’ A silky shadow brushed through the water and Daniel jabbed it with the forked end of his stick. Dot sploshed down on the stream bed, sitting up to her waist in water that soaked quickly through her shorts, T-shirt, over her skin, and she lay back
so that it inched and breathed right over her hair, into her ears, and sound belonged to the submerged world. She stopped trying to fight the cold and it became bearable. The trees were dark in the periphery and the sky very faded and far away, and there was the splash of Daniel marching upstream, past the channel bend, towards the rocks where they had hidden the chocolate money.

Water pushed her hair around and from below the surface her cold ears heard a holler and Dot sat up and twisted to see. Down the stream floated a large, thick leaf, dark green with, now, as it bobbed closer, brown mould spots and a larger spot, a gold foil coin, resting in the scoop along its spine. With a shout of delight, she reached for it.

Michael and Daniel sat on the side of the bunk reading a floppy, faded comic, their heads close together. Daniel scratched. ‘You got cooties?’ Michael asked, but he didn’t move away.

In the comic an advertisement offered them the chance to earn money by selling another magazine, ‘Sunshine’, to their local community. Daniel already had a paper round. ‘I could sell Sunshine too,’ he said.

‘Sunshine’s for little kids,’ Michael said. ‘Babies.’

‘What do you know, you’re only fourteen.’

Michael didn’t say anything.

‘What?’ asked Daniel. He turned the page. Michael said, ‘Hey I haven’t finished.’ He turned the page back. The air in the cabin smelled like hot dust, but here in the shade of the bunk it was cool. A blowfly stuttered at the rust-clogged window screen. Michael said, ‘Which superhero do you want to be?’

‘Hey.’ Daniel closed the comic. ‘Let’s go frog hunting. It’s always good after rain.’

‘Nah.’

‘We should make our own Sunshine and sell it.’

‘OK.’ Michael leaned over to check the praying mantis that was in a jar on the bedside fruit box, its matt apple green different from the blades of grass they had provided it with to climb on. The mantis waggled front legs at the cling film covering the jar top, as though to poke more holes in it.

‘That campground shop’s got paper. Come on. Let’s get some now.’ Daniel stood and stretched, his stripy T-shirt pulling up over his lower abdomen, the stomach muscles that pointed in a wide V down into the waistband of his shorts.

‘We’ve got no money,’ said Michael.

‘So?’

He thought a moment. ‘Rena’s got loads of money,’ he said. ‘In her room.’

‘Have you been in her room?’

Michael shrugged and gathered the collar of his polo shirt –
Firestone Tyres –
and bunched it around his neck. ‘No.’

Daniel reached up to pull the collar aside. Michael swatted him away. ‘Fuck off,’ he said. ‘Are we going to the shops or aren’t we?’

‘Hang on,’ said Daniel. He moved the praying mantis jar out of the sunspot on the bedside cabinet and into the shadows, the glass warm beneath his fingers.

Lee was somewhere in the bush, helping dig the new long drop, when a strange station wagon drove up. It parked by the cattle stop,
on the other side of the chain-link gate that marked the commune’s boundary. The back doors of the car opened and Daniel and Michael got out. Without a backward glance Daniel trotted over to the cattle stop, leapt the chain and disappeared behind the cookhouse. Michael stayed by the car, staring a hole into the ground, and Frank emerged from the driver’s seat. A baseball cap shaded his eyes from the afternoon glare. He called for his wife.

‘I found these boys two miles down the
road
,’ he shouted. ‘The camp owner wants them for
shoplifting
. What kind of operation
is
this?’ Leaning into the car, he honked the horn. The purple spiral on the commune entrance sign sent out a force field, keeping him from crossing the gate.

Dorothy and Evelyn ran up and stopped shy of the chain, waving. ‘Hi Daddy,’ they called. He looked American again, he looked bigger and different and so much more like a man than anyone they’d seen for a long time. The boys were young, Dorothy realised: the boys knew nothing.

Frank took off the cap and waved it. His hair was plastered to his head with sweat. ‘Girls! Go and get your mother!’

They stepped closer together and Dot reached for Eve’s hand. ‘What happened to New York?’ she asked.

An emergency meeting gathered outside the cookhouse to decide whether to let him onto the property. Wimmin stood on the sunflower-seed sheet in their dirty, cracked bare feet. Everyone went silent, and Dot turned to see that Rena had emerged from the tool shed. She lifted her arm to reveal the communal shotgun. From the distant estuary came the sharp whine of a speedboat. The shotgun was thin and dark, catching the light as she shook off a hovering fly.

‘What do you want?’ she called.

Their father had raised his palms in surrender and now lowered them again, as though he’d realised what he was doing. ‘Rena, put that down. I just want my family.’

‘You sure about that? You’re a family man?’

Frank’s words fired from him separately, crimson. ‘I caught these boys in the camp store. Shoplifting. The owner saw them.’

The gun waved in Michael’s direction as Rena turned towards him. ‘Is this true?’

‘Fuck you,’ he said, quietly, but enough so it carried. Dorothy felt it tight in her chest.

‘You ladies should expect a visit from the cops.’ Frank was breathing heavily, craning his neck. ‘So check your patch, Rena, check your fucking patch.’

‘Frank!’ Lee burst out of the tangled trees, her face wild and smeary. Daniel followed, carrying Ruth on his hip. He must have run and got them, Dorothy realised, with a swell of gratitude. It was Daniel after all who knew what to do; he was the only one who did.

Their father’s shining face, his grim mouth were terrible to see but impossible to look away from as he advanced on the group of wimmin and his children. Dorothy felt Eve’s face buried in her neck, her fingers painful in their grip. Rena stepped forwards with the gun.

‘For god’s sake Rena,’ Lee said, ‘he’s my husband.’

Just before the chain fence Frank’s body halted with a jolt, unable to go further: the cattle stop had trapped his foot. Deflated, he shrugged, a one-man pantomime. ‘Everything’s gone,’ he said.

Lee shouted at the kids to get their clothes out of the cabins, they were going
home
.

Rena leaned the gun against the feathered, worn planks of the cookhouse and said, ‘Just making sure.’

‘Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you write?’ Lee said to Frank. He was meant to bring back some gold dust, some kind of
mojo
to carry him through the rest of their lives.

‘Jesus Christ hell.’

Dorothy was afraid that he would cry. Lee crossed the fence and hugged him. He melted into her.

‘Everything’s gone,’ he said again. ‘Everything.’

‘Oh darling,’ she said. ‘You know, I actually feel relieved.’ She held his face. ‘Don’t leave again,’ she said. ‘I need you here.’

She helped his body find the angle it needed to slide the foot up and out of the grid, though at first he shook off her help. It was like when they fed turnips to the feral horses, Dorothy thought, feeling acutely the limply socked foot emerging from the trench beneath the bars, his sneaker trapped still. He bent and wrenched it out and stood there with one shoe on his foot and the other in his hand, and his cheeks were flushed and sweat blistered his forehead. Ruth ran now, scissor-legged the fence and wrapped herself around his waist. From the cookhouse came the toasty smell of burned rice. One of the wimmin said, ‘Oh no,’ and disappeared inside.

In the cabin Dorothy and Evelyn collected their and Ruth’s things in silence. There wasn’t much to carry.

Their mother said, ‘Sorry, Rena,’ and, ‘Thanks,’ and kissed her on the temple and gathered the unrolled sleeping bags up from the
girls and threw them onto the bonnet of the car, where they slid off into the dust.

Rena said, ‘Ah, what are you going to do,’ in a tone that meant she didn’t expect an answer. She pulled Evelyn to her in a pungent hug and reached next for Michael but he ducked out, raising his forearm in defence, and said, ‘Piss off.’

‘Michael,’ Lee said.

He turned and walked to the car and Dorothy saw his face, clouded with fury.

‘What’s up?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. I want to go home.’

Dot was jammed in the back seat of the car next to Evelyn, who was next to Daniel, who checked the time on a grown-up’s large watch, the new digital kind.

‘Where’d you get that?’ Dorothy asked.

He smiled and pressed a button and made the display light pulse. Michael was in the back, Ruth hefty on their mother’s knee, and their father slammed shut the boot and Name came running down the gravel road, waving her arm above her head, Dot’s paperback of folktales in her hand.

A fresh start.

After the New York trip Frank was obsessed with Leadership. This, he maintained, was what had failed his family, the Forrest seniors whose money had vanished, poof, in tanking investments: no unity, no vision. Every book he read was on this subject, as were the status games he introduced over dinner, where there
was always one fewer chair than person, and whoever was last to the table had to stand and serve everyone else. ‘Lead,’ he roared at the rest of the kids, the ones sitting down, but all of them resisted. Instead they worked on different ways to revel in the lowliness and make the others laugh, which made him angrier, which made them laugh more. Evelyn passing the tomato sauce around on her knees, Ruth bowing so low after handing out each plate that her fringe scraped the floor.