The Rest is Weight (UQP Short Fiction) (17 page)

The boy waits in the driveway, keeps close to the bus. He
glances at Ant’s heavy fingerprints as he takes the mug.
He sucks at his tea.

‘You need anything?’ Ant says.

The boy shakes his head.

Ant grips his cup. He is doing the boy a kindness. Just a kindness. And the bloke from the spastic school is pulling up in a taxi. By the time Ant gets back to his tea it’s gone cold.

Tuesday. The boy has washed his clothes. They hang on a rope in the yard, a soft scarecrow strung between the shed wall and the Dodge. The magpie’s back and it warbles awkwardly overhead, its voice breaking as it practises its morning song. There’s a twin song ringing with it: the kid’s ringtone, coming from the shed. It doesn’t stop. He stares at the washing. He could have asked. Thinks of the kid pushing at his things in the sink.

‘Yeah?’

When he hears the boy answer the phone, Ant goes into the office and shifts his pens. Looks at the priorities for the day – got to get through everything. Pick up some parts from Donna’s. The pie place bringing in their van at ten. He drops a bit of paper, scrabbles for it. His head’s a mess, he didn’t sleep well.

He goes out the back to check on the kid. The boy sits up, shirtless. Ant sees ribs and milk-white skin, almost glowing. No hair. Nipples brown as brick. His voice catches on a greeting the kid doesn’t bother returning. He coughs into his fist.

‘Listen. I can’t have customers – You’ll have to clear this up.’ He points his face into the yard and feels a flush in it. He’s mad about the washing, is all.

‘You don’t have to use the sink,’ he mutters. ‘I would have done it for ya.’ But the boy’s out of earshot, up in his shorts, pulling his clothes down from the rope, shoving the long legs into jeans, something in his face defiant, the hardening of a grown man.

‘You need me to go?’ The kid’s eyes close as he buttons his shirt; Ant doesn’t watch the pale skin disappear.

‘No.’

‘I can go,’ the kid says, and shrugs. Barefoot, he’s not so tall. Still skinny. The foot tapping again. His toes must be blue with cold, Ant thinks.

‘No, it’s fine,’ Ant says.

The boy frowns, smiles, sticks his hands in his pockets. ‘Work, yeah?’ he says. He heads into the shed to get his boots.

All day the boy wears his earphones and hardly speaks to Ant. All day they’re run off their feet; Ant is glad he doesn’t have time to order the kid around.

Soon after five Ant feels the chill in the air and starts locking up the office. The boy stands stiffly near the door to the yard, like he’s waiting for instructions.

‘You can finish up,’ Ant says.

‘Yeah,’ the boy replies. He glances over his shoulder to the shed and his hands flex inside the pockets of his jeans. For a minute Ant thinks he’s going to thank him. He’s not sure he wants that.

‘Goodnight, boss,’ the kid says instead. He’s never called Ant that before.

Ant locks up the front and makes to leave. He does the whole routine fast without thinking and is sitting in his ute, holding the keys in the ignition, before he reconsiders. Nah. Thursday is wages. After that the boy’s free, more or less. Pay out his leave and he’ll be gone.

Ant turns the key, lets his foot off the brake, almost makes it away, but then the charged feeling comes again, eating into his hand. He turns the car off, eases himself off the seat and steps around the back, past the Dodge and the
hz
. He stops at the line of car doors, leans into the shed and breathes for a minute.

The light’s not on but it’s not dark yet and he can see the boy lying there, the swag open to his chest. His eyes are closed, but he’s not asleep. Ant can tell from the breathing.

What happens now?

The boy’s eyes open, he’s looking at the roof. There’s something moving on his lips, not speech and not expression, like a cipher. Ant stares over him, waits for it to mean something. The magpie sings at the hollowing chill. As the light goes, the milk of his skin starts to shine. It doesn’t mean anything.

Ant lets go of the door and moves inside, in search of heat. All the glass in the workshop breaks, the windscreens, everything. Metal all over, bursting.

Or the boy’s eyes stay closed. Ant goes home.

The rest is weight

Alex is a spider’s thread, the stick-point at the end of a long white line. There is a high rough whine and that’s it.
You disappear into one small mistake.

Two weeks later, he is knocking at a door. The knock makes a strange echo inside the house. Alex supposes this is because of the hole in it. There’s no answer at first, just a scuffling sound that might be a person or a mouse. He looks up. White altocumulus flocks in a band overhead. There’s a vague itch in the back of his throat. The scuffling clarifies, becomes steps.

A man stands in the doorway in his dressing gown and pants, flanked on one side by a scrap of white mutt, a tiny cloud that flickers with electricity. At a quiet command the dog sits still. Mr Ravka is not a tall man but his body is tall-shaped, bent from ducking. He has a clipped white beard that makes his face look doctor-ish. Alex sees they are about the same age, retirement age. Mr Ravka looks at the stripes on Alex’s breast pocket. Alex looks at the piles of newspaper on the floor, peers into the dark behind Mr Ravka’s head.

‘Hello, Mr Ravka,’ he says.

‘You took your time,’ Mr Ravka says.

‘I didn’t know I was expected.’

The man grunts, picks at something behind his ear.

‘Alex Kuchin.’ Alex holds out a hand.

Mr Ravka doesn’t take it. ‘You’re from the government,’ he says.

‘Not exactly. May I come in?’

His head is tugged a millimetre back towards the interior, but he doesn’t turn.

‘No,’ he says.

The dog shifts on its hips. Alex feels his sinuses prickle.

‘Mr Ravka –’

‘They told me they had everything they needed,’ he says.

‘I’m not here about the compensation,’ Alex says. Mr Ravka’s eyes focus out of their weariness. They are small eyes, rimmed red. His expression is hard to read.

‘I am still waiting for the cheque,’ he says.

‘It is not my area,’ Alex says.

Mr Ravka’s hand clamps on the doorhandle. ‘What then?’ he says. His voice is clipped. ‘What is your
area
?’

Alex clears his throat. A hand dives into his pocket for a handkerchief. ‘I have come to apologise,’ he says.

Mr Ravka smiles. ‘Oh, apologise. You want to apologise. You think you can apologise? Look at this.’ He waves a hand behind him. Alex looks up and sees the gaping hole, far larger than he expected, almost the size of a room. ‘Two months and I haven’t seen a kopeck.’ A piece of tarp dangling, and through it the loose white band of altocumulus.

Alex sneezes. ‘Allergic,’ he says, waving a bundle of handkerchief at the dog.

Mr Ravka’s eyes return to Alex’s stripes. ‘Come back when you have the cheque,’ he says. He closes the door, leaving Alex standing there.

Alex hears the dog’s toenails scatter across the floor like hail, lifts his hand to knock again, but stops. He can feel his face prickling.

He gets back in his old Mercedes, turns on the air conditioning, and pulls away.

Driving on land, Alex feels closed in. Other cars, it must be. Apart from the radio, he is alone up there, in control. Well, as much control as the machine allows. As much responsibility.

If he hasn’t lost his job, it’s only because of his age. He’s due to go in the next eighteen months and since the incident it has generally been assumed it will be sooner. He is a military man and though he left the real air force long ago, in the dark years after the collapse, he has not lost his military habits. He has lived this job for the last fifteen years and he has little to go home to. A decent house, paid off at last, and the old Mercedes. A woman who comes once a week to clean. No pets, because of the allergies. But he is happy, he would have had a clean record, if not for this one mistake.

Alex rarely thinks about the difficult years, but he has heard those words before, Mr Ravka’s words:
Two months and I haven’t seen a kopeck.
Chechnya. Flying tin cans with half a crew. The hell of it, flying for fear, not knowing when your pay was coming. Pilots in the East on hunger strike for their wages. Talk of looting. The condition of the aircraft forced you into bad risks. He was glad to leave.

But he never lost his judgement and he never missed a target, not by accident. Not since the war. His life would have made a clean white line, if not for this one error. So it was strange, the sensation he felt. The moment of knowing he had missed the high point of the cloud, let go too soon, was bad enough. But afterwards, to hear of the destruction. It shocked him. It shocked him because it felt so perfectly good.

For some time it has been obvious that the Weather Modification Office is cutting costs.

The work is expensive, technical, and more common than most people realise. In fifteen years it has gone beyond seeding and into the realm of agriculture. Humans are farmers of weather now, Alex thinks, as we have been farmers of crops. It pleases him that our technologies are so lacking in imagination that we simply repeat the same patterns on different scales: sow, reap, sow, reap, planet or Petri dish. His father and mother kept pigs. And though there are unusual risks in his line, he is glad his work smells of high-octane fuel, ice and chemicals, and not of shit. This is advancement of some kind.

But advancement is always compromised. There have been cuts. Reallocations. They are down to a skeleton staff. A few weeks ago Alex was in the hall, reading his schedule for the next fortnight. Beside him was Dmitri, who had been training to become a pilot until the program was dissolved. They promise it will be back, the training money, but they don’t say when. Dmitri is stuck on the ground for now. Summer is their busiest time, the highest demand for clear skies. Reading the chart, Alex was shocked at how many shifts he was expected to fill.

‘There will be mistakes,’ said Dmitri. ‘No one should be made to work so often on his own.’

Alex nodded. He withdrew without remark. But he felt nervous.

And now the cement, when they are supposed to use silver. Silver iodide, dropped in canisters from the wings. The canisters open and the chemicals disperse; the crystals help the ice to form. It isn’t so toxic. An everyday compound, they use it in photography. But it’s expensive. In the weeks before the incident, the stocks were depleting and there were no fresh orders. And one day Alex came in to find there was a pallet of cement where the silver should have been. Cement in double brown paper, plain as houses. They had a meeting but questions were discouraged. Tests had compared it, they said: sixty-three per cent of the effectiveness at twelve per cent the cost. They had a PowerPoint. You trusted them.

‘You fill the canisters,’ they explained, ‘mix a little iodide in, and it disperses. It is all the same.’

‘But how will we know how much to mix?’

‘A little of the crystal will do; the rest is weight.’

Afterwards, in the corridor, Alex said, ‘It’s better than bags of shit.’

‘Soon it’s you and me,’ Dmitri said. ‘You and me, we’re silver iodide. One day soon, they will hire cement.’

Since the beginning of the summer Alex has been flying alone, no co-pilot. He is busy. They are in demand. There are summits, sporting events, droughts, visiting presidents, celebrity weddings, national holidays, parades, elections. Mistakes.

After he visits Mr Ravka, Alex drives two-thirds of the way home, changes his mind, and heads towards the office instead. Both boys are there, Dmitri and Vassily, filling the canisters with the fine cement powder. They wave, too far to speak. Alex goes into his office, sits at the computer, and begins to type his letter of resignation. When he has finished it is late. He prints two copies, places each in an envelope, and puts both envelopes in his locker.

A week later, he is standing in the same position, a hand hovering over the unsent letters. The boys around him interrupt his thoughts, packing up for the day, changing out of their work gear.

‘She’s all refuelled and loaded for the morning,’ says Vassily, the words muffled by the shirt he’s lifting over his head. ‘I thought you’d gone home already.’

‘Who’s on tonight?’ says Alex.

‘Security? Pyotr, I think.’

‘Good. I have some paperwork,’ Alex says, waving a hand. ‘I’ll be in later.’ He locks up the letters and goes out to the car.
The evening is light and warm and cumulus fractus recedes beautifully into the far distance towards Siberia. From habit he traces the scars of wind across the sky to the east, checks the budding cauliflower formations, the updraught pressing against their flat bottoms. Tomorrow there will be good seeding clouds.

Vassily passes him in the car park, offers a nod. ‘See you tomorrow, Captain,’ he says. ‘Don’t work too hard.’

Alex drives through the gate and turns the wrong way. He heads back towards Mr Ravka’s place, to the north of the city. It’s a long drive. The press of houses turns into sparser villages and then into woods.

He knocks three times before Mr Ravka answers. There is a
tv
sound coming out from the top of the house, floating through the hole.

‘Good evening, Mr Ravka,’ he says. ‘I am sorry to be so persistent. But the thing is this.’

‘Yes?’

The tarp behind him flaps a little in the summer breeze.

Alex means to apologise but when he opens his mouth, it is too ticklish for speech. He coughs, embarrassed. ‘You see, I –’

‘Something wrong?’

He waves a hand in the air and sneezes. The allergies. The back of his nose feels strafed by fire.

Mr Ravka steps out onto the mat, closes the door
behind him. ‘What do you want?’ he says. He is a short man but his face is threatening, tilted up at Alex’s. Alex composes himself.

‘I am sorry, Mr Ravka.’

‘Which is useless,’ says the shorter man.

‘I know,’ says Alex. Useless, he thinks, and not even true. The apology solves nothing. He feels no better. A sneeze clusters in his nose but dissipates before it bombs. He presses the handkerchief to his face.

‘Look, do you want to try it?’ He snuffles.

‘Try what?’

‘The thing is, Mr Ravka, I have a house. If you would like to try.’

He peers at the pilot stripes, the small eyes blink. ‘You were flying the plane,’ he says.

Alex nods.

‘I’ll get my shoes,’ he says. Before Mr Ravka goes back inside, he turns his neat little head and shakes it at Alex, like a teacher confronted with an amusing wrong answer.

In the car Mr Ravka tells Alex that his name is George. He’s not a doctor or a teacher; he used to fix radios, but he’s retired. They stop at Alex’s house to turn on all the lights. The summer nights are bright, but lights will help.

‘You live alone?’ Mr Ravka says, looking at the few neat ornaments, the small kitchen table with two chairs, one covered in books. Alex nods.

‘Daughter?’

‘Niece.’ The girl is pictured at her graduation. Now a microbiologist in America, grown kids of her own. Alex is embarrassed. His house is bigger, cleaner, more intact than Mr Ravka’s. But empty.

‘You should get a dog,’ Mr Ravka says.

‘My allergies.’ Alex shrugs.

‘Ah, bad luck.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Alex says.

He’s looking out the tall window at the trees in sideways sunlight, now also lit from below by his strong outside lights. They look like rustling green storm clouds, cumulonimbus, cumulus congestus, dark and patient. Alex grabs his coat off the couch, because although it’s warm outside it’s cold up there.

‘Let’s go,’ he says.

Alex tells Mr Ravka to climb into the back and hide his head under the coat as they approach the airstrip, and he does so without protest.

‘Hello, Pyotr,’ Alex says into the guard’s box. ‘I have some paperwork. How are the wedding plans coming along?’ His daughter, next weekend.

‘Vicious,’ he says. ‘I am being mauled by women.’

‘There are worse fates. See you on the way out,’ Alex says.

‘All right, Captain.’

Alex opens the roller door and shows Mr Ravka the bags of cement. The boys have stacked them neatly on top of each other. Most of the labels face the same way. They are good boys and he will miss their professionalism, which has endured so much.

Alex shows him the canisters and the instruments. Mr Ravka moves restlessly around the room, nodding at everything.

‘The canisters break open and the powder spreads into the cloud and weighs it down,’ he says. ‘The silver iodide makes it crystallise.’

‘And last month it didn’t,’ says Mr Ravka.

‘A little water gets into the canister here, and –’ Alex makes the slide-whistle sound of a bomb falling. Then he turns off the tap and closes the canister.

‘You can make it snow?’

‘Yes. But mostly rain.’

‘Can you make it stop snowing? In a hard winter?’ He turns to examine a poster of a Polikarpov Po-2.

Alex shakes his head at the man’s bent back, a lifetime of broken radios. ‘I’ll get the keys,’ he says.

Mr Ravka turns around. ‘Why are you doing this?’

Alex hesitates. ‘Think of it as . . . an eye for an eye. A roof for a roof. Because of all your trouble.’

‘Surely you’ll lose your job,’ he says.

‘I retire tomorrow.’

Mr Ravka hesitates, then nods, settles on something, and grins. There’s a tooth missing on one side, towards the back.

‘Okay,’ he says.

Alex straps Mr Ravka into his seat and gets Pyotr on the radio. ‘I’m taking the 340 for a test run, she was playing up today. Won’t be out long.’

‘Right you are,’ says Pyotr.

‘Safety first,’ Alex adds. ‘Over.’

Mr Ravka stifles a noise in his throat. Alex runs through the routine instrument check, buckles himself in. He shows Mr Ravka the button that releases the catch on the wings where the canisters are held.

‘Don’t press that until I tell you,’ he says.

Alex takes off to the south and flies in a smooth arc to the west, towards his house. The wind is light and they reach four thousand feet without difficulty.

‘There’s your place.’ Alex spots the patch of blue tarp and points it out to Mr Ravka. The sun bobbing along the horizon gets into his eyes, so Alex banks and turns to head east, towards the village near his own house. He can soon see it shining in the distance, bright as an alien ship in the long St Petersburg dusk. He flies over once at a comfortable altitude. Things don’t just look smaller from the air, they look more connected. You can see the patterns, the way people clump together. Alex points out his house, sees how it sits apart, snug with the curve of a hill, pushing out a circle of trees.