The Mary Smokes Boys (16 page)

GREY WALKED NORTH ALONG BANJALANG STREET. HE stepped off the asphalt for the speeding tourists who had come to use this road as a back way to the north coast from the west. He walked across the overgrown railway line, past unpainted houses with their front yards full of old stoves and car parts rusted by the rain. A shaggy pony with sweet itch and deep scratch marks in its hide leant across sagging wire to take what little green pick remained on the roadside. It was invisible at this hour, but at night, looking west, you could stand here and see the white haze of the new shopping centre’s sodium lights. Parents took their children out of school to work there in the late trading hours, so this afternoon the town was empty.

Grey looked up and down the disused railway tracks, at the decrepit railcars where his sister and her friends sometimes played. She was not there. It seemed she had forgotten the arrangement they had made in the morning.

He sat in the gutter in front of the school and watched unknown cars go by.

He drove home. The boys were all standing on the road.

 

HOURS LATER, HAVING used up the town’s bars, Matt Thiebaud, Raughrie Norman, Gordon Eccleston and Grey North walked down the midnight street with nowhere left to go but a half-mile beyond town to where they had hidden Grey’s truck to avoid having to drive past the police.

Grey’s birthday was gone and he had still not left town. He kicked loose stones south along the road. They came to the road sign that read “Mary Smokes. Inhabitants: 976.” The sign did not bother with any note of welcome. No one was stopping here but those who called the place home. Thiebaud banged the sign with his fist.

“Let’s steal it,” said Raughrie Norman, wisps of untended hair blowing about his eyes in the dry cold wind.

“And do what with it?’ said Thiebaud.

So they kept walking.

Grey had asked Bizzell for the week off leading up to Christmas in July. He looked inside the service station to see who was taking his place tonight. A red-haired boy of about fifteen who he did not recognize stood flipping through magazines on the rack.

In the pitching land just south of town woolly unridden horses stood sleeping in defiance of the weather. A half-dozen black-bally cattle picked grass around degenerate car bodies.

The iron skeleton of the drive-in movie theatre still stood above town. The drive-in had been shut down in June. Even the demolition job had been aborted, half-done. The canvas screen was torn by winter winds. The poles that held the speakers for cars still stood in lonely rows on the empty bitumen lot.

Grey’s truck sat inside the drive-in’s broken gates. It was safer leaving it here than at the service station. The police were awake to that. But the road tonight was free of police, and it would not have mattered.

From the top of Solitary Hill the boys saw fires in a sweep along the western horizon. Someone was burning raked timber. From this distance and at night they could not be sure who. For a time they all stood still, transfixed by the plain lit red.

Grey fell into the truck.

“Let’s see if I can get my head straight enough to drive this thing.”

He pumped the accelerator to get the fuel moving and the
hundred-and-fifteen horsepower motor heaved into action, blowing heavy smoke into the cold.

They took a dark and winding back road on which they were unlikely to meet anyone.

They did not walk to Mary Smokes Creek tonight. Tonight the creek was a muddy trickle choked with weeds, and the water stank with algal blooms.

At home the yellow veranda light was on as he had left it, but all the windows were dark.

Eccleston walked to his own house. Matt Thiebaud lived at Helidon now to be closer to the new abattoir where he worked, so he would stay the night at Grey’s along with Raughrie Norman.

Grey turned on the kitchen light and lit the potbelly stove and the boys sat down at the table. Bill North had taken a cash job fencing for the winter and Angela was spending the week with her sister, so Grey and Irene were alone.

Thiebaud put a cigarette in the stove pinchers and lit it in the flames.

“Where’s Irene?”

“At Amy Minh’s.”

Grey looked at the clock on the wall that showed five minutes to one.

He took a mattress and blanket from the spare room and laid them down for Thiebaud and Norman in front of the stove. He threw a block of railway sleeper into the stove and stirred the coals.

“That’ll burn through the night.”

Raughrie Norman fell asleep as soon as he lay down.

“Irene comin home tonight?’ asked Thiebaud.

“I doubt it.”

“I’m glad. She might have seen this set up and reckoned me and Flagon were a couple of drunk queers broken into the place.”

Grey smiled. The drink had worn off him and he did not feel like joking. He did not know where his sister was.

 

SHE CAME TREADING along the gravel way to the house. She opened the gate that sang on its hinges and stepped across the front yard wrapped in blue dark. She stood on the veranda while the west wind picked up and blew hard against the wallboards carrying smoke. She pulled back the hood of her duffel coat.

In his room Grey listened to his sister come in and kick off her boots. He heard the door of her room shut carefully, and through the wall he heard her pray the Hail Mary. After that there was quiet.

He had been sitting up in the house with Matt Thiebaud, but Thiebaud had gone to sleep an hour ago and now it was very late. He lay in bed and listened to the wind romp on the flats outside the house. He turned on the radio to a city station and listened to a performance of Bach’s preludes and fugues that fell out and became static.

GREY SLEPT UNTIL ELEVEN. WHEN HE WOKE, THIEBAUD and Raughrie Norman were gone. He washed dishes and tidied the kitchen to wake her and she came out from her room rubbing her eyes.

He did not know why he did not ask her where she had been. It was his right as her custodian. But he felt more anger than was his right, and there were no words that would fit his anger. So he was silent.

He sat on the front veranda and drank black tea and watched the shadows of clouds glide across oats in the north.

Soon Amy Minh came by to take Irene to Mass. She did not return until late that afternoon.

 

IRENE AND GREY drove into town to get fish and chips and Matt Thiebaud sat down at their table. He had left his own car at the garage and was looking for a ride to Helidon. Grey had nothing better to do.

The three of them left the café with Thiebaud carrying his dinner in newspaper. They drove to a service station and Grey put twenty dollars in the tank and went to the counter to pay. Irene got out of the truck to sit on the bonnet. A couple of boys were filling up beside. One of them watched her. They were out-of-towners. The one who watched Irene was a pretty, greasy-blond-haired boy who Grey thought he recognized, but could not say from where. Grey imagined the boy was eyeing he and his
sister in turn. Grey held his gaze and then the boy turned away to where the highway ran into the dark. Irene shivered in a T-shirt and hugged her arms into her chest. Grey watched the boy who smiled at Irene before he got in his truck and drove south out of town.

On the way to the big highway Grey delivered Irene home.

He and Thiebaud drove into the Darling Downs at dusk. The sky opened up. Starry and cold. The lights of cars and roadtrains flickered down the road. Runs of winter oats broke the miles of dry grass.

A biting wind blew through Plainlands where they sat drinking black tea at Rusty’s Roadhouse cafeteria. Out the wide glass window were railcars loaded with coal. The railcars sat beneath sepia lights and ran far into the dark.

At Helidon derailed and graffitied railcars sat rusting beside a smoking, stinking abattoir and neglected football field.

“You should stay a while,” said Thiebaud.

“I’d better get back.”

“There’s a game here tonight.”

Grey looked down at the field that stole light from the glowing abattoir.

“We should have brought Ook,” Thiebaud said. “Where is he tonight?”

Grey shrugged.

In truth, Grey had some idea. There was no more horse work, and Eccleston was back doing the same work he had skipped school to do as a fourteen-year-old boy: hunting and trapping in woods and scrub. He killed feral dogs, hares and foxes, though he could only collect a bounty on the foxes. He sold the salted fox pelts to a hawk-faced man at a pelt box for a few dollars apiece. The hares, he ate. The dogs he shot while contracted on a retainer by pastoralists or the DPI. Feral dogs were fiercer these days than they had ever been; his first contract came in autumn after a pack had carried off a four-month-old calf. The work meant Eccleston must be away, farther and for
longer than he had ever been from his home, driving long hours alone.

Thiebaud slapped Grey’s shoulder. “So you’ll stay?”

Grey felt the cold bite his face when they were out of the truck. He took his duffel coat from where it was hooked over his shotgun on a mount behind the seats. He and Thiebaud stepped down onto the pitch where other hooded boys stood breathing smoke.

The rare game began and rolled on toward no foreseeable end. Grey was glad to be out of Mary Smokes.

 

BACK ON THE highway he remembered Vanessa. She might be in town tonight. It was a long weekend. He might stop in now before heading home. But he drove past the Haigslea turn-off. He wondered if she would have welcomed him.

The house was empty when he returned. He drove into Mary Smokes and walked by a military recruitment night at the Lyceum Hall. He stood by the window listening to a shaving-rashed major talk about duty and prosperity in the same breath. He walked north then south along Banjalang. There was nothing and no one on the street save the light of spare orange lamps and a couple of boys loitering in that light outside the Workers’ Club. He put his head in the door of the club but saw no one he knew. He got back in his truck.

 

HE SAW A human shape on the side of the road in front of his house. As he drew closer, the figure became two. Eccleston and his sister. Grey imagined Eccleston had her by the arm. At fifty yards this was not the case. But he could not dismiss the notion that when he first saw them Eccleston had hold of her.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said directly he pulled up. She did not give Grey a chance to ask questions. “We were walking home. But I’m tired.”

“Get in,” Grey said. He looked into Eccleston’s eyes. He read some discomfort there, but he could not define it.

“You want to come to the house?’ he said. “No one’s home.”

“No. Thanks. I’m goin into the hills early tomorrow.”

Irene clung onto Grey’s arm. She sighed deeply. Her black hair fell from her hood across her face.

“Take me home, Grey.”

Eccleston stood with his head down in the dark on the road.

“What is it, Ook?”

“Nothin.” Eccleston slapped the roof of the cabin. “Goodnight, Grey.”

 

IRENE STOOD WAITING for him on the stairs. From the truck he watched Eccleston walk along the way to the big white house.

 

HE CHOPPED WOOD by the light of the moon with a bottle of beer. The beer ran quickly through his blood. In time Irene came and stood in the back doorway. He had been drinking and splitting blocks for some time before he knew she was there. He looked up.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you want to go into the shed and get me a couple more logs?”

“Grey,” she whispered.

He threw the halves of a split block on the pile. He waited.

“I’ll get the wood,” she said at last.

She returned with only one more block.

“Come in and sit with me,” she said after he split the block.

He did so, but she did not speak for the rest of the night. He felt there was some significant revelation or question teetering at the edge of her silence. If once she had told him that someone pursued her against her wishes, if that was what this was, then he would have done anything to stop it. He wondered why she kept so silent?

She went to bed leaving him alone by the stove.

GREY TOOK HIS BREAK-ACTION SHOTGUN FROM THE mount in the truck and packed a box of rifled slug shells and slung his leather water pouch over his shoulder and walked across the grass to Eccleston’s.

“North?”

“Ook.”

“What are you doin here?”

“Day off. Last night you said you were goin into the hills. I thought we’d shoot together.”

Five traps hung on the bullbar of Eccleston’s International. He would usually take them off before driving through town, as they made people nervous, but dawn was still an hour away. Grey saw apple mint under Eccleston’s stairs. A little garden of it, cordoned off by smooth stones.

They drove onto Wivenhoe-Somerset Road and left the truck on the northeastern edge of Lake Somerset. On foot they followed a faint track through eucalypt woods and came into dense forest on the old southern fall of the Stanley River catchment. They walked up a creek called Gregor, high into the hills. They drank stewed tea from Eccleston’s thermos and water from Grey’s pouch.

There was a crackling of dry leaves and Eccleston set his bag and traps down behind a tree and slung his rifle from his shoulder to his hands. The boys knelt in the brush. Eccleston imitated the sound of a wounded rabbit and a red fox moved out of the
mist in the light timber. They stalked the fox up a gully and along a dry creek bed. The fox ran from scrub to tussock to iron bark. Eccleston had no dogs to flush the fox. He knelt on one knee for a quarter of an hour, fingering the inside of the trigger housing, then fired into a sliver of light between trees and shot the fox dead.