Tim Winton (7 page)

In those early days, whenever Eva was around, Sando was formal with us, even a little circumspect. Eva was often tired and only seemed to tolerate our presence for his sake. The few times I considered her for more than a moment she struck me as a brooder, an unhappy soul. I caught the faces she made at callow things we said; she could give the most neutral turn of phrase a sarcastic edge, so I did my best to avoid her. All my attention was on Sando anyway. I loved being around that huge, bearded, coiled-up presence. His body was a map of where he'd been. He had great bumps on his knees and feet from old-school surfing, his forearms were pulpy with reef-scars and years of sun had bleached his hair and beard. He was, for us, a delicious enigma. He never quite did what we might expect him to do and there wasn't a man in Sawyer or Angelus in his league.

During the last good swell of the season, on a Saturday at the Point when the Angelus crew was over and Loonie and I were out trading waves with them at the very end of the headland, taking drops so steep that our guts rose to the back of our throats, Sando turned up on the beach without a board, pulled on a pair of fins and swam out in his Speedos to bodysurf the biggest sets of the day. He never even nodded in our direction. Between waves he bobbed in the rip like a seal, as though he didn't share our DNA, let alone our language.

Ten of us sat there in the noise and spray doing our best not to stare at him, because even without a board he outsurfed us all. Nobody dared paddle for a wave that Sando showed interest in. For the first time as surfers we found ourselves -- man and boy -- deferring to a mere swimmer. When he shot in to the beach one last time and flicked off his fins and walked up into the trees, I think most of us were disappointed to see him go.

I was pedalling alone on the coast road one day in December when I saw Sando's VW pulled up askew on the gravel shoulder.

Dark smudges of rubber stretched back along the bitumen and when I arrived he was standing over a crippled roo. I saw the jack handle at his side. He looked miserable and angry. The intensity of his gaze scared me.

This is what you get, he said. This is what happens. And isn't it lovely.

He killed the animal with a couple of blows to the head, then hoisted it onto the tray of the Volkswagen and looked back up the road to where it must have leapt out. It was a western grey and not a big one. I wondered what he was doing with it. Other people just dragged a carcass off the road and out of the way; some didn't even go to that much trouble. On the varnished pine flatbed, the roo's blood was impossibly bright.

Well, said Sando. Come if you're comin.

I threw my bike up beside the roadkill and climbed in beside him. He smelled of sweat and animal. He didn't speak and I didn't dare ask questions. When we got to his place he got out and tied up the dog. He went into a shed and came back with a meat hook and a length of rope. I stood by while he strung the roo up by the tail. Then he stalked off to the house and left me there beneath the marri tree. From up at the house there was muffled shouting. Eva sounded upset but I couldn't hear what she said. The dog whined, tugged at its chain.

The roo twisted on the rope and blood dripped slower and slower from its snout to the leaf litter below. With its forepaws outstretched, the animal looked as though it was caught in a perpetual earthward dive. I stared at it a long time. The roo aimed and aimed and never arrived. Only its blood made the journey.

I thought of it at the roadside, in the heavy thicket, gathering itself to leap across the bitumen. I wondered if kangaroos had thoughts.

Because if they did, then it seemed to me that this roo's intentions might have made it across the road, landing ahead of it the way its blood did even now. The idea made me a bit giddy. I'd never thought something like this before.

Sando came back with a knife and steel. He was agitated, but honing the blade seemed to calm him.

It's the least we can do, he said. Waste of life, waste of protein.

Yeah, I said uncertainly.

Lean meat, he said.

I didn't reply. I watched him skin the carcass and then open it up so that its entrails poured out onto the ground.

I gotta go, I said.

Wait, he said. Take some home to your oldies.

I stood there grimly, shrinking from him a little. He seemed to know how to butcher a beast but it was obvious that he was from the city. Otherwise he'd have known that my oldies wouldn't eat roo meat in a million years. We didn't even have a dog we could feed it to. Kangaroo was like rabbit; it was what you ate when you were poor and hopeless, and you sure as hell didn't eat roadkill of any description.

Eventually Sando sent me on my way with two cord-like fillets in a flourbag that I hoiked into the bushes on the ride back to Sawyer.

Summer came and the holidays with it, but the sea was mostly flat. One surfless afternoon Loonie and I pushed our bikes up Sando's drive in search of something to do, but he and Eva were out. The sheds were locked and the car gone. Only the dog was there. We waited around in the hope that Sando would show up but it was clear that we'd made the long ride for nothing.

For a while we sat on the steps pinging bits of gravel at the tree where the hook and rope still hung. I didn't tell Loonie about the roo business; I didn't know how to represent the peculiarity of it to him without making Sando seem ridiculous. Loonie was a harsh judge of people and talking about the roo would have made me feel disloyal. Besides, I'd gone riding alone that day in the hope of finding Sando and having him to myself for a bit, and I didn't want Loonie to know. After we got bored throwing rocks we started prowling about in the cool shade beneath the house, looking at all the boards hanging in their racks, and it was there that we found the banana box full of surf magazines that somebody had left on top of our own boards beneath the workbench. I was annoyed to find a box dumped on our gear. I yanked it out and dropped it on the benchtop. Loonie snatched a magazine off the stack and flicked through. It was an old number from the sixties with black and white photos that featured riders with short hair and boards like planks. I rifled through the box and found others of more recent vintage that were printed in colour. They were American magazines, lavish and confident in their production, with a welter of ads and products and images of famous riders at Hawaiian breaks like Sunset Beach and Pipeline and Makaha.

Within a few minutes I began to recognize a familiar stance, a silhouette I knew very well.

Shit, I said. Look!

Loonie leant over and didn't really need to follow the caption beneath my finger.

Billy Sanderson, styling at Rocky Point. Jesus!

Look. There's more.

We strewed the contents of the box across the bench and clawed through them to find other images of Sando. There he was, in Maui in 1970, in Morocco in the winter of '68, and at the Hollister Ranch in '71. I found him in aviator shades and a Billy Jack hat in a full page ad for Dewey Weber boards. There was even an old picture of him as a jug-eared kid in sandshoes, noseriding a longboard with his back arched and his arm and head thrown back like a matador: The urchin and the urchins -- Australia's Bill Sanderson, Spiny Reef.

For an hour and more Loonie and I tried to piece together a story from all these disparate captions and photos, but all we could really glean was the fact that Sando - for a time, and in places that were legendary to the likes of us - had briefly been somebody. I felt stupid for not having known, and somehow the shame of this, and the realization that Sando had kept it from us, dampened the excitement of the discovery.

Then the dog mysteriously deserted us and a moment later the VW lurched up into the clearing. We hurled everything back into the cardboard box but before we had it stowed beneath the bench Sando was in the doorway. The smile slipped sideways from his face.

Loonie and I spent half an hour sitting on the bottom step while Eva and Sando bickered and squalled up in the house. We looked dolefully at our bikes, longing to escape this scene, but neither of us had the nerve to defy Sando whose request for us to stay and wait was delivered with the gravity of an order.

What game are you playing? he yelled at her. What was the fucking point of that?

Well, you're their guru, aren't you? Eva screamed. Don't they get to touch your holy relics, read your scriptures? Deep down, didn't you secretly want me to reveal you. to your disciples?

You know what I think about that shit. I don't understand you.

Well, right on, Billy. You finally got there on your own; you don't understand me at all.

Don't be bitter.

You don't have the goddamn right to tell me not to be bitter.

You're only like this --Like what, honey? Nasty? Don't you like nasty no more?

Jealous isn't just nasty, Eva. It's sad.

Then she was crying. A tap began to run and when it stopped the pipes clanked. In the fresh quiet, the dog came back downstairs to sniff at us and spread its rank meat-breath around. I couldn't help but think of the roo.

Shit, said Loon
ie.
They're gunna kiss'n make up. Let's go.

No, I murmured. Wait.

I thought of the look on Sando's face, how instantly he'd read us.

Before he'd even seen the mags he'd sensed something different in the way we looked at him. It was hard to believe that we'd been so obvious. But it was true. Our admiration for him had enlarged; it had metastasized. I remembered how we leapt out of his way as he lunged for the box. He stood back with it under his arm like a man holding something dangerous and unstable and I had the queerest feeling of having transgressed. His gaze was more wounded than fierce, not unlike the queasy misunderstood look old soldiers gave you from the pub verandah.

But when he came back downstairs he'd lost that look. He just seemed exhausted and stood there a moment while the dog licked his big bony feet.

Didn't mean to piss anyone off, said Loon
ie.

Oh, it's just old crap, he murmured. Forget it. Load up and I'll drive you back into town.

For a good mile on the way home there was no talk. The cab always felt pretty snug but now it seemed way too small for the three of us. I was conscious of Sando's clean animal scent and the size of his fist on the gearstick.

Listen, he said at last. Eva's doin it tough, just now. It's a hard time for her.

Neither Loonie nor I knew quite what to say to this.

And I've been away a lot. So.

We puttered along the edge of the estuary where the sloughing white skins of melaleucas spilled onto the road.

Is it the pills? asked Loon
ie.

I glared at him in surprise. I'd never seen any pills.

She takes pills, said Loonie defiantly. I seen her.

There was a long pause.

No, said Sando. It's not really the pills.

I sat there in a funk. Loonie hadn't even told me.

She's always bloody cranky, said Loon
ie.
I just figured it was them, that's all.

Just shut up, I hissed. It's none of our business.

And it's not what you think, anyway, said Sando.

Loonie shrugged. The gesture was defiant, so emphatic in that tight space it hoisted my shirt an inch. He was sullen the rest of the way back and when it became clear that he was being dropped off first, his mood darkened further. Outside the pub he got down, pulled his bike off the tray and wheeled it away without a word.

The mags, I said to Sando. They were just there. On our boards.

All in the past, mate. No worries.

How badly I wanted to say something about the photos then, just a gesture of esteem, but it was clear this wouldn't be welcome.

There was something about Sando that wasn't settled. He wasn't fixed like my father, and intrigued as I was I found this aspect of him confusing to the point of anxiety. It was as though he wasn't quite as old as he looked, as if he hadn't yet finished with himself.

Tell Loonie not to be too uptight about the pills, he said. They're just painkillers.

We can leave our boards somewhere else, I offered.

Nah. It's cool. Really.

Okay, I said, unconvinced.

And listen, there's a little spurt of swell coming. Day after tomorrow, if it's blowing offshore, get up early.

Early?

Sparrowfart. I'll pick you both up. We'll go somewhere . . .

discreet.

Secret.

Yeah. I think you're ready.

We trundled on up to my place and I climbed down and grabbed my bike. As I pedalled up the choppy drive in the last light of day I could hear the VW labouring back out of town towards the coast, and the sound of it still clattered through the trees when I reached the house in its tufty paddock and its aura of roasting smells and radio.

The next day Loonie and I had a job pulling down a shed behind the butcher's, and while we twisted out nails with pinch bars and claw hammers, I tried to engage him in speculation about Eva and Sando. Personally I found the tears and arguments enthralling.

Nobody blued like that over at my place and it was as exciting as it was disconcerting. I was curious about what it was between them that set them off, but I couldn't interest Loonie in anything beyond Eva's many shortcomings. He saw the whole scene as evidence that she was nothing but a stuck-up pain in the arse. She was a drag, a bitch, a stupid Yank, and a junk
ie.

Painkillers, my arse, he said.

But, what about that limp? There's something wrong with her.

Yeah, she's a whingein female.

Still, I said. You notice how she always wears jeans? You reckon people still get polio in America?

Jesus, who cares? I wish she'd go back there.

She's not that bad.

You saw those mags. He was famous, mate, and maybe if it wasn't for her he still would be. Chicks, Pikelet. They drag you down.

I thought you fancied her, I ventured.

You're full of shit.

I let it go and kept working in the grit and mildew of the old shed. I knew I was on dangerous ground here with Loonie, yet his bluster made me smile because I'd seen him look at her - all those sidelong glances, the way he took in the heavy swing of her braid and the solid curve of her breast - but since the day she drove us back in the rain, his dislike had been implacable. It was as if his contempt for her fuelled his devotion to Sando. For in Loonie's mind, Eva would always be the millstone around our hero's neck.