The Best Australian Stories (24 page)

I'm after a raincoat, mate, he said. It sounded a bit on the loud side. Got a raincoat at all? Mate?

Somehow it was not quite the way Norm Sharpe would have said it. The shopkeeper did a peculiar thing with his face that made the glasses twitch back up his nose. After a long blank-glassed stare, in which his hand smoothed over the empty counter, he said:

Nope. No raincoats.

It seemed that this was going to be all. Will nearly turned to go, but the image of himself under the garbage bag was vivid in his mind.

Oh well, he began.

But the shopkeeper cut across him quickly.

Not at the moment.

There was another pause. Will started again.

Oh well.

But the shopkeeper might have been waiting for him to speak.

Sold the last, some time ago now.

His words were like a force of nature. Will was silent. He did not think he would say
Oh well
again.

The glasses were slipping down the shopkeeper's nose again.

The man in the red shirt moved now. He turned slowly and methodically and had a good long look at Will Bashford, all the way from the elastic-sided boots to the Akubra. Then he crossed his arms over his big checked chest and gave a short deliberate laugh like a cough.

Not had a drop of rain here for three years.

He turned to the shopkeeper.

That right, Lance?

Lance nodded and stared at Will.

Before he could explain about the big flat-bottomed heavy-looking clouds, and the way they were heaped up against the hills, the shopkeeper cackled and pushed his glasses back up with his thumb. You could see he was enjoying the anticipation. He was going to make a joke.

Not a real lot of demand, for a raincoat, just at the minute.

He and Lance both laughed thoroughly. Will tried to smile but it felt like a snarl. He wished he could think of something else to ask for, so he could leave with dignity, but he did not want a cube of cowlick.

He tried a joke of his own.

Be prepared, that's what I always say!

It was not what he always said, and it did not sound as if it was. His witticism was received in silence.

Will felt his mouth shaping a stupid meaningless smile.

Oh well, he found it saying again. OK mate. See you later.

He was turning away from the counter when Lance gave him a fright by saying suddenly:

Pump's pressing charges, you know.

Will was confused, his mind full of anxiety to get outside and check the clouds. Surely he had not imagined them. He felt as if his mouth was hanging open.
Pump? Pressing?

The shopkeeper said loudly, as if he thought he was deaf, or slow:

Charges. About the cattle.

He and Lance exchanged a tiny smirk.

When you was out for your walk. This morning.

Lance gave Will a fright, slapping his hand on the counter suddenly.

Been bad blood there for years.

Will turned from one face to the other as if he was lip-reading.

Business about an easement. Reckons he'll sue this time, but.

They both watched Will. Even if he could still remember what came after
sweeping plains
, he had a feeling it would not help him now.

Um, he said, and wished he had not. They were both watching him as if he had something more to say.

After a long silence, the shopkeeper said kindly:

So, if you saw, mate, you should say.

Will was feeling congested, as if his pipes would burst from sheer incomprehension.

Yes? He tried.

Don't want to see her go to jail, do you, an old thing like that?

He twitched the glasses up his nose again.

Mrs Quincy, mate. You give a statement, she'll be right. Small, in at Willoughby.

He was speaking very slowly. Each word was beautifully clear. No problem at all with the words.

The man in the check shirt broke in impatiently.

The cops, mate. Go to the cops, give a statement.

A statement, Will repeated. The cops.

They were waiting for him now.

He imagined himself going into Willoughby and finding Constable Small. Norm Sharpe had introduced him to Constable Small, outside the Criterion. Gregory Small did not seem like a young man to hurry or cut corners. He had shaken Will's hand at length, as if testing it, and inspected his face closely.

Bashford? he had asked. Or Brashford?

He would be slow on the big black Remington that the Willoughby police station would be managing with.
I was proceeding along Seven Mile
Road in an easterly direction at about 7 a.m. on Tuesday the 14th of February
. Read out in Gregory Small's loud flat voice, it would make Will sound more of a no-hoper than ever.
At Lot 84 known as Braeside I saw eight cows
proceeding through a broken fence.

The exact number of cows would cause a bit of a bottleneck.
About
eight
or
approximately eight
, Will would want to say. But he did not think Gregory Small would be the sort of man likely to be comfortable with approximations. Cows were either
eight cows
, or
nine cows
, or
seven cows
. You could not have
approximately eight cows
.

They would sit there at the desk with the Remington between them and Will would feel himself going red in the face and his ears swelling, the way they did when he was embarrassed.

Course, your mate Norm's on Pump's side, the man in the check shirt suddenly said. They're cousins through old Grant Pump.

Plus Norm married the sister-in-law's girl, the shopkeeper said. They own that, where you was going this morning. For your walk.

There could have been another little smirk exchanged.
Click go the
shears, boys, click click click.

Will stared at the dusty boards between his boots. He could feel the blood pouring up into his cheeks, his neck, his ears. He seemed to be radiating heat, as if these two could warm their hands at him.
And curses the old something with the blue-bellied joe.

There was a little jump on
blue-bellied
where his voice always cracked. It would have been funny if you had been a person behind a tree, listening.

Well, he said. OK.

They did not ask him exactly what it was that was
OK
, but watched with interest as he backed away from the counter, got himself turned around, and headed for the doorway. It seemed to have got lost among the shelves of dim things. Dodging a pyramid of something in big tins, he lost his balance and had to put a hand out to save himself, knocking a big box of Ratsak onto the floor. His bottom felt a huge ridiculous target for the two faces watching as he bent over to pick it up. Then he could not find the right shelf for it and had to stuff it in next to a bundle of axe handles and some funny-looking leather appendages.

He felt he would never reach the hard white glare of the doorway. It seemed centuries ago that he had set off in the cool of the dawn, when he had not known that there was no such thing as a private walk in the country.

Hooroo, mate, the shopkeeper called, but he could not bear to turn.

Shooting the Dog

Peter Goldsworthy

Each time the gravel slid off the shovel
it sounded like something
trying to hang on by its nails.

—P
HILIP
H
ODGINS
, ‘Shooting the Dogs'

He was long in the tooth now, although no one in the district could put an exact figure on the years. His name offered a clue: even this far from the city it had not been possible to call a dog Nigger for at least a decade.

‘You get jailed for it these days,' Hedley Stokes liked to joke, ritually, to his daughter-in-law Meg, city born and bred and blamed for all kinds of city nonsense.

Hedley had bought the dog, fully grown and pre-named, years back.

Two droughts back, he sometimes joked – but the worst drought had been the absence of his son Ben at the time, playing football in the city and searching for Meg, or the idea of Meg, and trying to get the farm out of his blood. When Hedley's left knee finally gave way (cack-footed, he had been no mean player himself in his day) and Ben reluctantly returned to take over the place, the name-change insisted on by Meg – ‘Nugget' – would not be answered to by the dog. Dogged herself, an English teacher anxious about the influence of language on impressionable minds, she tried one more time – ‘Nipper' – but even the softening of a single consonant was stubbornly resisted by the black dog.

And even more stubbornly by Hedley and his wife, Edna, who still drove over most days from their retirement unit on the coast. Hedley gave the notion nothing more than an incredulous snort; it was Edna who took the young woman aside and suggested that it might be cruel and confusing for the dog.

Largely retired from farm work, Nigger was allowed to tag along with his son, Blue, as the younger dog went about its shepherding. Blue was an athletic, wide-casting dog – the best in the district, many thought. If Ben was caught up in the crutching or drenching he would sometimes leave a gate or two open, and rely on Blue to bring up the sheep from the bottom paddocks unsupervised. Nigger was more of a loose cannon now. Slower, arthritic in the hips, he would break out about the flocks ever more lazily, much to the younger dog's frustration. The winter before, while bringing in the Angora goats that Ben had briefly diversified into, then rapidly out of (‘Another get-poor-quick scheme, son?'), Nigger had cast far too narrowly, dividing the herd and stampeding half of it through a fence. Half a day's work went down the drain, and far too much torn hide and bloodied fleece. The younger dog had taken it upon himself to admonish his sire's clumsiness, chasing the astonished Nigger back to the ute, and then directing an equal amount of dog invective at an even more astonished Ben for his lack of leadership.

Hedley couldn't believe his ears when told the story over that Sunday's roast. ‘Who's running this farm?
You're
the top dog, Bennyboy. You've got to lead by example – not leave it to the dogs to sort it out.'

Edna, for good measure, said, ‘It's not fair on Blue, dear.'

‘But they do the work,' Meg put in, ‘maybe they should have more say.'

‘Votes for dogs!' Ben added.

Hedley allowed himself a chuckle. ‘I tell you one thing, girl. A kelpie-cross or three would do a hell of a better job of running the country than this mob.' He chewed a little more lamb before remembering his main theme. ‘You can't spoil them, Ben. Next you'll have them sleeping in the house.'

Meg's eyes slid immediately to her husband's, alarmed. He winked, reassuringly. He wasn't about to confess.

‘Woof!' he said, and grinned. ‘Woof, woof!'

After Blue's rebuke, Ben kept the sire chained in the tray of the ute while working the flocks, often with Hedley –
his
sire, it occurred to him – sitting in the front seat for company. He toyed, briefly, with the idea of moving Nigger to the coast with his parents, but Meg refused to allow it. A working dog would be bored to death inside their tiny, enclosed courtyard, she argued. In fact, she had grown attached to Nigger, and often kept him inside the farmhouse herself, spoiling him with tidbits, enjoying his company, a familiar presence in the corner of her eye.

‘Well, if it isn't the house nigger,' Hedley declared over another Sunday roast, as the dog tried to remain invisible beneath the dining-room table.

‘Hedley!' his wife warned him before Meg could bite. ‘You mustn't say things like that.'

‘Sticks and stones, Edna my love. Sticks and stones.'

It was a theme he often returned to, liking to shock his daughter-in-law with his version of straight country talk – but liking, also, her cheek in return, her willingness to give back as much as she got.

‘He's not a full-blood nigger,' he announced one morning. ‘Look here –' And he ruffled the white patch, roughly diamond-shaped, that stained the dog's black head like a horse's blaze. ‘Bentley mark. Know what a Bentley mark is, Meg?'

‘Yes, Dad. But don't let that stop you telling me again.'

He grinned, pleased. ‘Sign of the true heeler. He's got more than a bit of Queensland blue in him, this feller.'

‘I don't follow. You mean they crossed a dog with a cheese?'

Dash of blue heeler or not, Nigger was mostly kelpie. His coat's blackness took on a reddish kelpie sheen in the afternoon light, although Hedley liked to claim it was mostly dust.

Once, after Meg had spent the morning washing the old dog in a plastic washing tub, Hedley had leaned forward from his chair – a sort of cane throne on the veranda – and spat on the dog's coat as it slept in the sun at his feet.

‘A working dog should be dirty,' he said, with that glint of mischief in his eye that Meg was beginning to enjoy, and that she knew, also, was his harmless way of flirting with her.

Blue's dam had been a red kelpie from a property further down the Peninsula. The mother's redness had come through almost undiluted in the son, hence his name. He was a beautiful dog to watch at work, prick-eared, sleek as a seal, forever on the move. As a pup he had shown no interest in the sheep, and Hedley had almost given up on him. Then suddenly, at six months or so, watching his sire squeeze sheep into a pen for jetting, some sort of lightbulb had gone on in the pup's head. Within minutes he'd been walking across the backs of the penned sheep, up to his hocks in their thick wool. He hadn't stopped moving among them since.

‘Gentler than his old man,' Hedley liked to boast. ‘The cattle dog hasn't come through. Which is why he's not a biter. Never even nips. Doesn't need to.'

For a time, chained in the ute, Nigger seemed to take a similar pride in watching his son at work. But after a few days the whining started, and then the frustrated straining at the chain. The last straw came with the arrival of the alpacas. Ben bought the small herd against his father's advice, or perhaps because of that advice. (‘Rooster one day, feather duster the next in that caper, son.') When the bottom fell out of an oversupplied alpaca-wool market (‘Can't say I didn't warn him, Meg. Only the breeders made any money.') Ben offloaded the herd at dog-food prices. The sight of Blue bringing these alien animals – half goat, half bonsai camel – in for transport drove Nigger into a frenzy. Maddened even further by Hedley's dressings down, he managed to scramble over the near-side of the ute and almost hang himself on his chain.