The Glass Canoe (10 page)

DOG MAN

Friday night some of the boys take the casual barmaid up to the Lake. Actually it's only Dog Man takes her, the others go up in their cars to watch.

He finds a place in among the trees and goes to town, the others kill their lights and cut their motors and glide down near. Then they get out and creep over and look in the window of Dog Man's car while he's up her.

After a bit they hear him say Let's get out, there's more room outside. The boys creep back behind trees and he gets out with the barmaid, their backsides white in the dim light from the streetlights two hundred metres away.

They get stuck into it again. On a blanket, and his knees keep digging into bits of rock.

Suddenly there's a car round a corner over to the
right and another at the same time to the left. Very slow. Too slow.

The cars watch the ground for a bit, then douse their lights and men get out. The Great Lover's got his eyes peeled and a paddy waggon comes round the corner with its lights out.

‘The feds!' he yells. And goes for his life.

‘No. Can't be,' says someone else.

But it is. All run, including the barmaid. Some bad-minded citizen in one of the nearby houses has been minding other people's business.

Come Saturday morning and we get the Great Lover's story.

‘I'm first away, off like a shot. Next thing they're firing guns at me. So I stop, hands up. Into the waggon I go. In the copshop this bull says to me, I've seen you before. Christ almighty, I thought I was gone. Two stretches before, now this. And I haven't done anything. I'd be up for eighteen months. I've seen you before, he says. OK, Dick Tracy, I say. But I'm not feeling cheeky. If I go up again I'll neck myself, for sure. So they leave me and I'm wondering how to kill myself, I think I'm gone. History. Then bugger me, this morning they let me go. No charge, nothing. Just the dollar.'

Dog Man fronted about eleven. He had grazes over his face, on his forehead, he was limping with a dirty great bandage round one knee and the other ankle wrapped
in white rag and his foot in a soft slipper. He had red hair, it always stuck up and out, all over. And wild eyes.

‘Well, pants man,' the Great Lover said. ‘What's the strong of you?' Sibley was listening, for once, instead of talking.

‘Bloody feds,' Dog Man says. ‘Feds. Wouldn't feed 'em. If my dogs behaved like that I'd shoot 'em. There I am, rasping away and someone gives the alarm they've sprung us. Up I get, into my strides in half a second, and off. Went for me life. Over to the right I see you'—the Great Lover—‘bail up, but I put me head down and keep going. And it's getting darker and darker the way I'm going. I bump into a few trees and go through plenty of bushes, prickles and all, and suddenly I'm flying. I've gone over this thirty foot cliff, legs still running in the air. Would have been better if I'd landed in the water, but oh no, I've got to land in a heap of rubbish where someone's shot branches and plants and Christ knows what. Did me ankle. But at least I got away. Didn't spend no night in boob.'

We talked the subject out until it was like a punctured balloon.

Someone asked about his dogs.

‘No good,' he said. ‘Shot three of 'em last week. When they won't run and don't bring me in anything, they're dead. Can't afford to feed 'em like kings and have 'em live like kings. Yeah, three last week. With a
lousy twenty-two. That's all you need to kill 'em. I'd feel better if it took a twelve gauge shotgun, or a proper rifle to kill 'em. But they got no heart. Die without a murmur. Not even a kick. No heart at all.'

He shook his head. He looked very sad. I know for a fact he paid four hundred dollars for one of those greyhounds.

‘How do you get rid of 'em?' I ask. ‘The bodies, I mean.'

‘Easy as shitting in bed,' he says. ‘In the cemetery.'

And he stands there, lowering his beer—he drinks new beer—and keeping us waiting.

‘Cemetery? You don't pay to bury 'em, do you?'

‘Don't have to. Up Castle Hill where I go, they dig fresh graves in the cemetery for tomorrow's bods. OK? Now I'm not about to dig holes just to bury dead dogs. Far as I'm concerned Manual Labor is a Mexican bandit. So I just drop 'em in one of the holes, one to a hole I mean, sprinkle earth over 'em and that's it. Next day they bury some stiff on top of the dog. Plenty of bods up there on top of dogs. You know the place, off Showground Road.'

We knew the place.

I wondered, as I swallowed a mouthful of Resch's, what archaeologists of the future might say about twentieth century people buried with their animals.

Dog Man started to say something.

‘This sheila invited us up to her flat. There was five of us,' then in the middle of the sentence he excused himself and went for a piss.

We didn't see him for eight months.

ANOTHER WORLD

Into our world of the Southern Cross came a small sharp corner of another world.

A girl and a boy came in for a drink, early afternoon. It was a Thursday. They were nicely dressed, and clean, with shoes on.

‘This haircut cost me three-ninety, actually.'

It wasn't a good haircut. His auburn hair fell to shoulder length, but it wasn't a patch on Noel's, or Bleachy's young brother. Theirs just grew, and they washed it; theirs shone so much that girls would look after them in the street and shake their heads and put a hand to their own hair in that gesture women have; theirs they cut with a pair of scissors and a mirror, for free.

It fell sort of straggly, thinned and not shiny. The girl looked at it without much expression. She'd lived with hair all her life.

‘It costs me at least that,' she said. ‘But there's a boy at work pays thirteen dollars for a haircut and styling. It doesn't look any different from yours. I don't think that's too much to pay,' she said supportively.

They finished their drinks and departed, walking busily to the boy's car. They didn't see us, didn't notice the cracked wall, they were the only inhabitants of the planet.

I leaned on the bar, looking out after them, thinking how many days thirteen dollars would keep me in schooners. Nearly three, if I only drank in the pub and didn't take any cans home.

A hair cut could last a few weeks, it wouldn't be over in three days.

Just the same, it was another world. I wondered what they did of an afternoon when work was finished. I mean, what sort of a tribe did they have. Did they drink? Did they fight? A fight now and then might stir them up to live, to have solid enjoyment, bright eyes, quick muscles and life on every face.

Maybe. Maybe they had those things, but if so, how? I only knew the way of
our
tribe.

The comfortable liberals with fine minds might shake out equality over us like salt over stew, but the lower middle class up the hill at the bowling club would make sure there was no equality in the suburbs.

And we were glad to help them.

BRIGHTON ROCK

Alone at the red bar, I looked at my fingertips. Those lines, forming loops and whorls on the ends of my fingers, reached inside me as if they were the ends of cables, keeping their pattern like Brighton Rock right through my insides.

Cut me in half and you'd find those patterns even in the tumbling rivers of my blood.

The rest of me was just insulation. The secret was somehow in the cables.

When I was with my darling I thought of this, and gave her something to hold, for the pleasure of seeing her little hand cupped, delicate as an eyelid.

TERRITORIAL ANIMALS

From where I stood near the door I saw the pub dog, a large black individual with plenty of labrador, checking on various points and command posts round his territory.

He walked to the corner of the snack bar and sniffed the concrete edge. He nodded and grinned and walked calmly to the other end of the covered beer garden, sniffed again. This time he waved his tail. When he'd been right round the traps in his afternoon patrol, he settled back in his guard house, which was a niche in the wall out front near the bottle department. He hadn't quite worn away the patch of grass that formed his couch. It was very comfortable. If the sun had been hotter he would have taken up his post just inside the door of the bottle-oh, on the wooden floor.

Passing dogs in cars and trucks boasted to Blackie, Look how fast I can go. But he knew.

An old Airedale with a bad leg limped down the street. Blackie watched. The Airedale saw him a long way off but didn't falter; he was too proud to get off the path.

Blackie let him pass without getting to his feet. You don't fight a three-legged dog.

His muzzle was right down along his left forepaw when the brindle boxer came along. Now this boxer had a very real inferiority complex. He wasn't the right colour and his owner had impressed on him from the time he was a pup that he was worth next to nothing.

His body was nearly black instead of the right boxer tan, his nose badly formed—the part where his head joined the top of his nose wasn't the right shape. He was a mess as a boxer, he might as well have been a mongrel.

Sometimes he got very sad, and didn't go out. Other times, like today, he went round saying, Look, I haven't let these disadvantages get me down, I'm normal, well-balanced, friendly. And when he saw Blackie he wagged his stump, where the tail had been docked, to show his equable nature and friendly intentions, and avoided staring—a signal of aggressive intent—but glanced and let his eyes roll away as his head went from side to side, hardly ever looking directly at Blackie on his home ground.

His wagging stump didn't show, but Blackie knew what was what from the other language.

He got up hospitably, exchanged a few pleasantries with the boxer, took him round to show him the boundaries of his kingdom and showed him the view from each corner of the pub yard and let him look inside the pub door and round the back, in at the covered beer garden to see the humans he looked after, and the snack bar, which interested the boxer by the way it smelt, and finally took him to one of his far boundaries, well away from headquarters.

He looked at the newcomer, at the traffic, at his domain, then with more energy than he had yet displayed, went outside his boundary and had a businesslike pee. The visit was over.

His ears were up as far as he could elevate them, his tail too. His eyes were bright. He looked straight at the boxer. The boxer caught the straight look, took a step back.

Blackie walked straight at the stranger, so he either had to attack before he got to him, or get out of the way. The boxer turned and gave a little spurt of a run—he was light on his feet despite the wrong colouring and bad shape—stopped and turned to look. Blackie was still advancing.

The boxer turned and walked away up the street with great dignity, but not too slowly. Blackie followed him for perhaps twenty metres, seeing him off his spread, then turned and walked slowly home.

In the pub you saw the same piece of theatre. Down to the harmless look, the no staring, no frowning, the slight cough to indicate weakness and mortality, the shoulders unassumingly slumped, the eyebrows raised to accompany the favour of a beer received from the barmaid, the slow gestures, the looking away, when the locals turned to see who the stranger was in enemy territory, so they got a good look but no confronting examination.

And not a word spoken.

The little old man with the sack patrolled his own beat. I never saw
him
challenged for his territory. Maybe it was a big territory. I guess it has a boundary, too, and another old man with a sack recognises the boundary. Little men with sacks have cut up the land into their own private territories and no one but them knows where the boundaries are.

MUSCLES

Mick came in later, worried. He looked round for someone to play pool with, or Flash to talk to. No one. His eyes found me.

‘Just saw me mate off.'

‘The jug?'

‘Nothing like that. New Guinea. Got a job there for two years. It all started when I had some time on me hands six months back. I got in this pub one day at Dulwich Hill and was pleasant to the girl behind the bar, and she had a bit of time on her hands. One thing led to another. She was married, and she came right out and said she played round a bit, she and her old man. Well, the upshot was I said, What time'll I meet you? She said ten-thirty. At ten-forty-five, she came out, very careful, looking in all directions. She gets in the car and off we go to Cook's River. I didn't want to be trapped
anywhere near where her old man might be looking for her.

‘OK. So far so good. I get into it and I have one. Give me another, she says. I can't, I'm dying, I say. You know, he's just about to go right down.'

I made a sympathetic noise, and Mick got on with it.

‘Suddenly, without a word of warning, these muscles of hers grab me. Before he has a chance to go down. Hurt like buggery. Stopped the blood in the old feller. Before I know it he's hard again.

‘What are you doing? I said. Just lie on me, she says, and keep still. So I keep still. Without a word of a lie, these muscles that she's got down there, they move back and forward on it, like a hand. I've never felt anything like it before or since. It was beautiful!'

I believed him.

‘Well, I went out with her for five months. Did me job over her. What should happen but me mate gets her. He speaks better than I do, and I make the mistake of telling him about her. He starts chatting her up and soon she likes him, likes him a lot. That's what she told me, anyway.

‘So I go along with it, and by that time I'm fixed up with another sheila.

‘We get to this ball. Her old man's at work, but I told me mate not to have her out with him in public like that. He wouldn't be told. So what does he do but get set up for a group photograph. I warn him, but he's
too far gone on those muscles of hers to listen to me. OK, so he lets 'em take the photo, I'm in it too, and that's that.'

He looked round quickly, as if someone might be behind him. No one was. His knee, against the tiles, brushed a few spatters of stale blood.

‘Anyway, she must have shown the photograph round, like women do, or maybe left it round at home, but—you guessed it—her old man gets hold of it and next thing my mate knows, he's going out the front door of his house and just as he opens the door a bullet thuds into it beside him. Only a twenty-two, but it could make a mess of you, hollow point and all. He ducked and ran, and looked back to where the slug came from. Her husband was crouched in a tree in the paddock opposite and he'd been there for hours. He'd tied a piece of cotton to the door handle and run it across the road to signal him when someone pulled open the door. My mate's so scared he gets a job in New Guinea. And he's gone today.'

‘I suppose you're hoping he doesn't come after you,' I said.

‘Why me?'

‘You were into her.'

‘He doesn't know that.'

‘He might have belted her. Women like to talk. When they spill, they spill.'

‘Yeah,' he said, gloomily. ‘Yeah, they talk.'

He began to look worried. I'd been a bit hard on him.

‘How did she manage to grab you like that? With those muscles?'

‘Oh, that. She told me she practised from the time she was sixteen, when she—well I suppose she was playing with herself and found she had muscles—found she could put a bit of pressure on her finger, or something.'

A BB thudded on the glass door then. We both ducked automatically. Didn't even look outside.