The Mary Smokes Boys (10 page)

“No. But they’re your horses–in a manner of speakin.”

“I’ll do half,” said Grey, jumping down off the rail. “So you don’t have to get thrown off all six. Three solid meals of dirt are enough for any man in one day.” He looked up at Tanner. “Full-pay again. Me and him’ll split it. All right?”

“Can you break a horse?”

“You want em done in two days?”

Tanner spat.

“All right then.”

Eccleston turned to Tanner.

“You still got that old white mare here?”

“She’s in the willow paddock.”

“Go and catch her for me, Grey. There’s a bridle and rein in the back of the truck. Ride her back. We’ll quieten em down easier with her in the yard.”

When Grey left to get the mare, a late model sedan neither he nor Eccleston recognized pulled up the drive. The man who
got out wore a suede jacket and sunglasses. His thinning brown hair was oiled firmly back on his skull.

Tanner climbed off the rail.

“If your useless black uncle shows up while I’m inside, tell him he’s not gettin a red cent.”

Eccleston stopped working the filly and spat and took a rolled cigarette from his shirt pocket and sucked on the end.

“You fire another shot at him, old man, and you’ll regret it.”

Tanner was suddenly nervous. He turned to the man beside him and mumbled something and the two of them laughed.

“Don’t set fire to the place while I’m inside, Ook. The bloke I’m sellin the horses to cares about presentation. He won’t want em ripped apart goin over fences.”

Tanner drove the man the quarter-mile from the yards to his house.

“Who’s that?’ said Grey when he returned with the mare.

Eccleston shrugged.

“Looks like a racetrack urger or ex-cop.”

 

THEY WERE TOO tired to speak when they got into Grey’s truck late that afternoon. They splashed iodine on their shoulders and forearms that were wounded from being thrown into the yard rails. Lightning flashed on every horizon and a cloud as black as charred wood pulled wispy orange tendrils beneath it.

Tanner and the man who had visited him came back to the yards. The man got in his car and drove away.

Tanner leant in Eccleston’s window.

“After tomorrow you’ve worked your last bloody day for me, you ungrateful black bastard.”

“Is that right?”

Tanner had spoken words akin to these at least a dozen times before.

“Don’t you ever talk to me like that in front of another man, you hear?”

“Like what?”

“Threaten me like you did about Pos.”

“Settle down,” Grey said.

“Do you hear me?”

“Settle the hell down,” Grey said again. “Who was that bloke, anyway?”

“He takes bets.”

“What on?”

“Whatever you like. He’ll give you odds. I met him at a card game in–Well, at a card game.”

“In a hotel at Dinmore,” said Eccleston.

Dinmore was a nowhere suburb west of the city. It was little more than a stinking abattoir and industrial sheds. Eccleston had only guessed; it was one of only two semi-permanent card games he knew. But he saw by the look on Tanner’s face that he had guessed right.

“I wouldn’t tell you unless you wanted to play,” said Tanner.

Eccleston laughed.

“Do you get a finder’s fee for the poor suckers you bring to the table?”

“The man’s my friend.”

“Your
friend
,” Eccleston grinned. “So you’re mates with a proper moonlight state man now. You must be happy.”

Tanner did not reply.

Eccleston had been once to the clean and characterless bar at Dinmore and seen men dressed in cheap casual wear climb the stairs to a room where they played blackjack, else roulette on a fold-out backgammon board. The set up was childish, but the amounts of money staked were not. The game had driven one man to suicide. So it was said. The men who gambled at the bar were out-of-towners. No one lived at Dinmore. Some came from the Brisbane Valley and further west–truck drivers, gas workers and meatworks buyers–and some were from the city. Some had been local landholders and some were pious Pentecostals who oscillated between vice and piety and, depending on the week, might be present at the table, else preaching about
the evils of such practice in one or other of the shopping-mart churches on the outskirts. Certain bored landholders west of Brisbane had become wealthy by associations made at the table in Dinmore. Men whose country had always been too stony or sour or timbered to run cattle began buying out neighbours.

From the bar at the Dinmore Hotel you heard the occasional table thumped upstairs and a glass smash on the floorboards, perhaps a raised voice. But finally there was quiet. And the bartender would avoid the eyes of certain men who came down the stairs.

And apparently Tanner had linked himself with at least one of these men.

“What do you have to do with him?’ Grey asked.

Tanner took a swig of whisky from the flask he kept always in his jeans.

“He wants me to introduce him to horse breedin. Buy a few good mares and a stallion to start him off. He gives me an investment tip now and then in return. He doesn’t run the card game, that kind of thing’s too risky and amateur for this bloke. He only sits in on it–in order to make friends. Officially he’s in property and development, so he can account for his money if he has to. The cops can’t get anything on him, and he’s got plenty on them. That’s why I was upset when you threatened me in front of him. You’ve got no idea how careful you gotta be around blokes like that. They’re touchy as hell, superstitious and psychological. I don’t want to lose his confidence. If I play me cards right, in a year or two, I’ll be living in a high-rise on the Gold Coast. You see.”

The boys laughed.

Tanner wanted to be impressive.

“That bloke you saw today has a mate who makes weapons in a shed outside Villeneuve. He brings parts from different countries and assembles em out here to avoid being seen. I’m buyin a copy of a sniper rifle from the Balkans war.”

“ Why the hell would an old bastard like you need a gun like that?’ said Eccleston.

Tanner only raised his eyebrows, as though the appeal of owning the weapon was obvious.

Eccleston sighed. He was becoming annoyed. Tanner was talking about things he had not seen, only heard about; and neither of the boys could imagine anything more banal than the underworld Tanner described with envy.

Eccleston tapped Grey on the leg and Grey ignited the engine and shifted the column-shift.

“We’re goin if you’ve got nothin else to talk about, Tanner. All of a sudden I don’t want to hear it.”

Tanner sneered and twisted his mouth.

“Who just put two hundred bucks in your hand, you ungrateful bastard?’

Eccleston opened and closed his empty hand.

“You’ll get it tomorrow.” Tanner stood up. “I’ve had it with your blackfella moods. Like I say, after tomorrow you’ll never work for me again.”

“Good,” said Eccleston.

Tanner walked away and Eccleston sighed. Then he laughed.

“Just imagine the old bastard in a Gold Coast penthouse, watchin bikini girls through binoculars!’

“Or through the scope on his sniper rifle,” Grey smiled. “He’ll fit in fine.”

They both laughed, and Grey took the truck onto the road.

“I’m thirsty,” said Eccleston.

“Me too.”

They drove to the Railway Hotel. They walked past the old men who sat morning until night on the veranda watching the sky. Grey put twenty dollars on the bar and the boys drank pots of bitter and watched rain fall in sheets on the hills.

 

WHEN HE CAME home Irene was plucking apple-mint leaves from the plants she grew amidst milk thistle. She tried to be angry with him.

“You smell like a horse,” she said.

“I thought you liked the smell.”

“You stink,” she smiled.

In the kitchen she crushed the mint leaves into tea that was stewing in a pot on the stove. The smell drifted through the room. She put a cup in Grey’s hands.

For dinner they ate reheated corned brisket and boiled vegetables. Irene cut wedges of butter and slapped them on her potatoes and cauliflower. Grey told her when she grew up she’d be enormous.

She smiled and stuck a fork into a potato.

“Gotta grease em else they won’t go down.”

For afters she had a spoon of days’ old bread-and-butter pudding. She made Grey promise to take her to the northern hills in the morning, to a little stream where fish gathered at the piles of an old rail bridge. She fell asleep on the floorboards in the breeze that rushed through the open front door.

Grey sat up and read from a leather-bound notebook he had found in a chest that belonged to his mother. He ran his thumb slowly across the handwritten words, across the indents made by the nib of his mother’s pen. He listened to the wind in the leaves of the stringybark, then to a Mass by Pärt on the radio.

A horse turned around in the dark outside and he remembered Tanner and the slick-haired criminal at the yards. He wondered how much of what Tanner had said was true.

IRENE WOKE HIM EARLY THE NEXT MORNING. SHE SAT on the end of his bed and held his ear until he groaned.

He went down to the truck to rig the handlines. She came buttoning her shirt and carrying a thermos of last night’s tea and a lunchbox of corned meat and mustard sandwiches along with a half-dozen cold potatoes she had boiled the night before and wrapped in foil. It was near seven and already warm and it would be hot by the time they got to the creek.

They drove onto Wivenhoe-Somerset Road and left the car in front of Eli’s Shoppe at the junction of the two big lakes and walked into the woods. They walked across a splintering of nameless creeks and gullies. Grey made sure they kept their line by lining up distinctive trees in the direction they wanted. When he drew close to one tree he lined up the second with a farther third. Irene laughed and said she did not need to mark the trees to find her way, but she followed her brother.

They came out of the woodland into open country where the water gouged a meadow of wildflowers. They set up near a long-unused girder: a warped structure of railway sleepers that had usurped their bolts and given over wholly to the commands of the weather.

The creek was not six yards across at its widest so they more dropped their lines in than cast. Black she-oaks and grey gums hugged the bank and sunlight filtered through the trees and lit the water that flowed clear and fast over the ribbed bed.
Rocks and overhanging tree roots made shadowy pools where a fish might rest. Grey and Irene sat on the bank and drank tea from their thermos and took cold water up from the stream in their hands.

Irene skittered her hook over the water. Grey did not watch his line. He watched the tops of the she-oaks being smudged by the thumb of the wind, the clear water polishing stones.

At eight o’clock they sat barefoot in the shade of a gigantic grey gum. They ate their sandwiches and listened to the water. Irene would be an hour late for school, but her teacher was accustomed to that.

“Why does food always taste better outside?’ she asked.

“You earn it walking, I spose.”

She looked in the canvas bag at the one big eel-tailed catfish they had caught.

“You can eat catfish,” Irene declared.

She had eaten it often enough in years gone by, when Grey did not have the two hundred dollars a week he made at the service station now.

“This boy is old, though. There’d be more silt in him than on the bottom of this creek. We’ll put him in Ook’s bathtub to drain him out. He’ll be right to eat in time.”

Irene nodded.

“How come you don’t take Vanessa fishing?”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s too dainty,” said Irene. “And she’s probably afraid of fish slime.”

“Probably.”

She took the catfish up out of the bag and kissed its lips and whiskers and then grimaced. “You poor old man.”

Grey smiled.

“Will you come get me after school,” she said, “so we can muck around tonight?”

“I’m working at the service station.”

“I don’t mind the service station.”

“If you like.”

“It’ll mean I won’t have to wait all night at the restaurant with old Minh rousing on me.”

“Then I’ll pick you up.”

She was pleased.

“I’m different to Vanessa, Grey.”

He smiled at the childish competition for his attention. But then a look came to her face that was not childish, one of deep, abstracted thought.

He did not ever truly know what she was thinking.

“What do you mean?’ he asked.

She did not answer him. She curled her toes in the fine gravel at the edge of the water.

He wondered at the strange moods that seemed to visit her from without. He remembered the night their grandmother died: Irene had had delirious dreams that she could not be woken from. She had sat up suddenly. According to their father it was the minute that Margaret Finnain died.

“Grey.”

“Yes?”

She turned away from him and threw the crust of her sandwich in the creek. She watched the lambent light on the water, stared intently into that other world into which Grey could not see but by the impression it made upon her.

“You’ll keep me now–you won’t leave me?”

Grey furrowed his brow. Twice lately she had spoken words akin to this. He wondered why. Perhaps she thought of their father, who had left them for so long when she was younger.

“I’ve taken care of you this long. I’m not about to stop.”

She sighed.

“You treat me different to Vanessa. Is it because you don’t think I’m pretty? Is it because I’m your sister?”

“You are pretty.”