When Colts Ran (26 page)

Colts was getting petrol one day when he saw an unusual vehicle half-shadowed in the workshop doorway of the service station. At first he thought he was looking at the back of a specially outfitted lorry. Then he saw it was engineless – a four-wheeled, horse-drawn wagonette. There, around the corner, tethered to verandah posts, were two draught horses and a seventeen-hand stockhorse known to Colts as a rider. A dog growled at Colts while he stared, knelt and offered his fingers to chew.

The scene needed no interpretation. Tim Knox and his wife came swinging down the lane with their arms around each other.

‘It's something we always planned to do together, drift across country like you and Randolph did when you were young,' said Pepita. ‘Along the Darling, down from the Cooper.'

‘It was just Randolph,' said Colts.

‘Was it?' said Pepita. ‘He gives such a picture of you, Kings, you're always in the camp.'

‘Now it's our turn,' said Tim.

Pepita looked absorbingly at Tim. ‘Most men can't face their own dreams without a push.'

‘Really,' said Colts.

‘They say it's quaint,' said Tim, lifting his hat to a passer-by. Having much older brothers, one successfully dead, the other emotionally dead but financially and studwise alive, Tim chose the third way always. Defending the advantages of hay-burning propulsion, he made living on nothing seem a triumph inevitable as defeat.

Randolph still owed them payments.

‘He's your friend,' Pepita said. ‘Your best friend.'

‘That's a stretch,' said Colts.

Word was that Randolph would do anything for Colts if Colts asked him, but there had to be the question.

‘You go round getting money out of people for Hooke. Can't you do something about Randolph? We're skint.'

‘I'm skint,' said Colts.

‘But you're on your own,' said Pepita. ‘You don't have family expenses. You've always kept to yourself. You are lucky as tumbleweed, living from a suitcase, driving a company car. You have the luxury of the single life, you don't realise how everything multiplies, not two by two but by some sort of weird algebra as a family grows – where there's a tap in your bank account and it all gets siphoned out.'

Colts reeled back at this summary, questioning his right to a life of his own.

Before heading west, Tim took the wagon for a test run through the Junction with the kids waving to their friends out the back. The draught horses stamped and snuffled, their hairy pasterns sweeping the bitumen surface of the road. Pepita, wiping her eyes with the corner of an apron, stood on the running board suppressing her pride. Love was the window to the soul. Only sometimes the shutters came down, the blinds were drawn, the lamps extinguished and the rheumy whiteness of a blind man's eyeballs common currency. Janelle presented them with a Spangled Hamburg layer. The hen must have come from Wirra-ding as Janelle had no chooks of her own. Tim tied its leg with string and placed it between the kids who held tightly to the stiff wing feathers as the horses began a ponderous gallop up the last rise from town.

Colts sat at home scraping the label from a flask of Corio whisky, 325-ml size. If he managed to tear the label cleanly off he would reward himself by finishing the bottle: that was the vow. It was sacred, a pledge to the heavens above. The glue was viciously strong. A small nip every half hour was the reward of effort, a result that seemed intolerable after five minutes and which Colts overcame by using his pocketknife and getting the label off just on dark. With blurred vision he counted the sticky moons of paper on the formica tabletop. They added up to the years of his life. A man on his own. What to do now? Up to the Five Alls seemed a pretty good answer, so he went.

FIFTEEN

NOW THAT COLTS HAD HIS
driver's licence suspended and a large fine to pay, with more penalties to come if he so much as climbed behind the wheel of a vehicle for the next eighteen months, Alan Hooke found himself getting out of the office dealing with clients more.

Hooke spent the whole wet afternoon with Ted Merrington walking cows and calves down narrow gullies to a set of yards and drafting them out. It was miserable weather but satisfying work for men. Angry with Colts for backsliding, Hooke saw the day coming, and soon, when Colts would be sacked. But he'd said it before – been saying it on and off for twenty-five years, and Careful Bob before him. He was reminded by everyone who knew them. Colts's life savings were wasted, the weatherboard house in Woodbox Gully was sold, the rental house was gone, movable assets all cashed, and God only knew where the money had gone. Down the hatch, obviously. The hundred acres Colts briefly owned on Duck Creek disappeared back into the landscape. Colts lived in a rented ruin Hooke found for him in a thistly paddock on the town creek. Hooke reflected that if he put him off he'd still look after him. That was a proven habit. The cost to his pocket would hardly exceed the cost to his feelings so far.

Hooke, a man surrounded by women – wife, daughters, sisters, mother, aunts – needed male friendships to balance women's utter convictions of how life should be lived. A vestige of this was Colts turning up for work each day with smiling, trembly-handed concentration, wafting an air of shamed cunning, blocking Hooke's every attempt to understand him with stubborn pretence that nothing was wrong.

Hooke and Merrington had opposite styles of doing the required job – Hooke being a quiet, effective prodder whereas Merrington swore and whacked animals' rumps with a length of plastic pipe to get them moving. If a beast proved stubborn, craning its neck, red-eyed across a bony shoulder, Merrington took it personally while Hooke whistled and waited.

Rain slanted from the south and ran over their hat brims and down their noses to their chins. Alan Hooke was a lean, light-complexioned man with a narrow, intelligent face and a flattened nose from boxing. In his youth he'd won the regional light heavyweight belt and few ever forgot that.

Merrington was a big, jokey sort of a man, used to getting his own way, and when he didn't, enforcing it. He was physically, naturally strong, but a bit slabbily overweight with a plum-coloured complexion, and gave his opinions freely. He was known to Hooke, and now Hooke was getting to know him better. Merrington had located this chunk of land while scouring the landscape for scrap steel with his sons and was in the business of turning himself into one of the types he'd bought from – a squatter of the Upper Isabel persuasion, semi-retired while his sons took over the running of the firm and dealing with scrap iron-hungry China.

When a cow lurched heavily through the wrong gate, banging it sideways, splintering a panel, Merrington squatted in a puddle and belted mud with his polypipe, swearing in a rhythm of frustration and sending splats of wet manure all over himself.

Alan Hooke had never quite seen that kind of thing before.

When they got the cows away Merrington switched in the middle of a rant and turned to Hooke, raising a wild eyebrow: ‘Shall we take horses next time? Do you ride?'

No answer needed to that. Hooke was raised in dealing stock for a family living, scouring the gullies of the Dividing Range from early youth with a hard-headed father on an irascible fat-bellied pony kept for the muster. There didn't seem much point in taking horses when a walk along a ridge-top with a cattle dog was effective. But if Merrington wanted some galloping fun he'd oblige.

Why Merrington had this effect on him Hooke couldn't say. The divorce from Colts was part of the explanation. The man was well past fifty but like a spoiled child. It was the charm of the cheeky kid making demands, Hooke supposed – you might want to kick them but they made you grin, made you feel you could get them what nobody else could. Maybe that was the key to Merrington's success in scrap, whittling down offers to the point of being begged to take it.

Merrington looked for trouble on the simplest pretext.

‘You don't always have to please me, Alan.'

‘I like to try.'

‘I don't have to please you, though.' Merrington threw a piratical grin. ‘Use your agent as a floor mop, as the old saying goes.'

Hooke enjoyed the banter, the game of words. Merrington brought matters chin to chin and then swerved away with opposite meanings. So many of Hooke's clients were hard-dealing men with no imagination to be otherwise. Judge Frederick Knox, who'd sold Merrington his house and land, was an example. Merrington's fancy, it appeared, was to be in the Knox class. Tussock barons, Hooke's father had called them, with never as much cash as acres since the 1950s but with resources to answer higher callings by virtue of being born to rule.

Six months before, on auction day (Hooke wielding the hammer), Merrington won the homestead block excised from a larger spread. It offered barely a basic living in the chewed-out hills, but the riverbank house was a famous pile, a Professor Leslie Wilkinson design from 1923, and Merrington bragged the acreage would yield an impressive costs-to-income potential through his adroitness in beating the arse off a Knox.

Except Merrington was a mere trier in the poverty stakes, really – Hooke's rare contact with an owner who wasn't an authentic hard case but wanted to be seen as one. The money he'd paid for plant and equipment after the auction was way above what anyone else in the district wanted to give. It reversed a trend of gentlemanly conduct when Merrington wrote a cheque without much haggling. It was always Hooke's precaution, Dunn and Bradstreet-wise, to bite silver back to the source. This time no need for that – Merrington Metals was solid – but Hooke's question was why Merrington had this almost wheedling need to be seen as someone he wasn't. It turned out that Merrington had something to hide. Hooke learned he was the son of the madam, Betty Truegood, who made a fortune during the Second World War by converting terrace houses at the back of Victoria Street, Potts Point, into flashy brothels for American servicemen. A ringleted eight-year-old boy, Edward Truegood, being debouched from a limousine at the gates of Cranbrook School was photographed in
Pix
magazine in 1950: this was this same florid Ted Merrington now transplanted to the Upper Isabel.

Merrington wore a pair of stiff leather leggings found in a shed. Draped around his shoulders was an oilskin cape left hanging on a peg since the 1940s. He brought to mind a squatter from the Joliffe cartoons in
Pix
– a comical geezer with galahs in the corn and a Bugatti in the woolshed. Hooke calculated bringing Merrington up to date from the workwear side of the agency. He felt warm about his ironical client in the cold rain, catching a glint in Merrington's eye that seemed to suggest Merrington reading Hooke's thoughts and finding them tartly agreeable. They might even become friends. Hooke had reached a stage of life of wanting more zest from his usual cronies, denizens of the Apex Club and the Five Alls Hotel Galloping Wombats Polocrosse Squad, with Merrington a stiff breeze battering up from where housing estates crowded the boundaries of his scrap-metal yard and former farm acres.

‘That's the way, Ted,' said Hooke, with the calves jammed black and glistening in the race, smelling of panic. ‘You've got them sitting pretty.'

Merrington accepted the tribute with a twisted smile.

‘You're limping,' Hooke observed.

‘It's from a rodeo fall years ago.'

‘No kidding?'

Merrington gave a toss of the head: ‘I went jackarooing up Wanaaring way, in the school hols. Stayed with the Jacky Whites, entered the bullock ride as a dare. I was a stupid young booger and now the sciatica stabs like a knife. Our generation needed a war but didn't get it – cracked ribs and a fractured pelvis, they're my battle scars while your old man got his medals at Tobruk, I understand.'

‘We had Vietnam,' countered Hooke.

‘You believe so?' Merrington's neck elongated and his head wove like a alarmed snake's, arrested in exaggerated surprise. ‘You were in that?' He steadied and stared hard. It was possible that Merrington's slum-terrace inheritance was revived for the R and R traffic of the 1960s and '70s and Merrington a beneficiary.

‘I was in the lottery but my number never came up,' said Hooke.

‘Would you have gone if it had?'

Hooke barely understood the question. Of course he would have gone. That was the deal offered, just as it was when Careful Bob went to North Africa to fight the Eyeties and then to Ambon against the Nips. Only later he might have seen things differently.

‘I was a tad too old for that game of marbles,' said Merrington, giving his polypipe a flick on the rails to clear it of muck. ‘So I wasn't given the privilege to serve.'

An almost sneer accompanied the words, again leaving Hooke wondering what Merrington meant. That Hooke should have enlisted anyway? That he was, on the contrary, wrong to have even taken his chances?

A phone call came. Merrington's wife, Dominique, relayed information from under an umbrella at the side garden gate. The semitrailer Hooke promised was delayed past dark.

Merrington said, ‘Well!' and shot an intense glare at the agent.

Hooke said, ‘Easy does it,' and reminded him that nine calves were not a full semi load, and the driver was doing the rounds of the district, so might he just be patient like everyone else? Thus reprimanded Merrington became almost timid and asked Hooke down to the house.

With double whiskies replenished twice over they awaited the semi. It arrived past seven in the sodden winter dark. Half sloshed by then they loaded the stock by headlights, the driver using an electric prod and scampering terrified calves up the race in the rain. Merrington took the prod and tried it, liking the feel. ‘This is more humane than people make out,' he said, jolting a poor animal more than was warranted. Then with a reckless leer he reached around behind his back and gave himself a wallop of volts in the left rear buttock.

‘Whoa baby! Order me one in the morning!' he yelled.

‘Done.'

They took more drinks afterwards to re-warm their saturated bones. Dominique Merrington attentively plied them with
potage velouté aux champignons
and home-baked baps as they sat at the kitchen table, telling Hooke he must bring his wife next time. Hooke then rang Liz to explain his lateness and heard the arch humour in her voice, the note of interested surprise over who was getting him plastered. ‘Ted came to the school on Careers' Day,' she said, ‘with a stack of slides, and talked to Year Twelve about import–export. They thought he was funny.'

‘As in?' said Hooke guardedly.

‘Ha-ha. They all want to make their fortunes now selling junk to China.'

‘You've met my Lizzie, then,' said Hooke when he came off the phone.

Merrington shot Hooke an empty glance, grinding his bottom jaw sideways as if about to spit.

‘Have I?'

‘She's a teacher.'

‘Oh, delightful. The little English one with plaits?'

‘Yes, she's a Pom,' acknowledged Hooke.

‘We liked her, didn't we, Dom?'

Merrington's wife turned from the stove ready to agree with him, but then catching herself and laughing and putting a finger to her chin, and saying, ‘No-ooh,' that she hadn't actually met Liz yet.

The two men moved into the expansive living room with dogs on the rugs and a fire of red gum in the grate. Hooke talked about his children – his own twin daughters by his first marriage and Lizzie's two boys, Matt and Johnny, by hers. The twins lived with their mother, Barbara, in Sydney, in their second last year at St Catherine's, and visited their home town irregularly. It broke Hooke's heart missing them through their growing years, and now when they came it was only for a few days at a time because there was too much else going on for them in the 'smoke.

‘How old are the girls?'

‘Sixteen.'

‘I understand that age,' said Merrington in a tone that implied, mysteriously, that Hooke didn't. ‘They should come and visit some time.'

‘Visit?'

‘Look around.'

Merrington gestured about the room, indicating the rooms branching from rooms, to the boot room, the billiard room, the boiler room, to the north and south wings, the attic staircase, the attic rooms, the architectural legend of the Knox House by Leslie Wilkinson on the fabled Isabel. Dozens of paintings hung in the semi-gloom from the ceiling down to the backs of sideboards and couches, ornate frames, historical scenes of sailing ships and artic inlets, willow-lined creeks and standing cattle, blocky abstract squares, carnival clowns and botanical illustrations all mixed in together. The whole thing would mean little to the girls but the offer felt friendly.

‘This one's called
Springtime
,' said Merrington.

Above the fireplace a painting of female figures gave an impression of half-circles overlapping. Merrington stood beside it with a look of shy cunning, inviting a response. There were small floating leaves like mini-bikinis covering the obvious bits. Hooke peered close and recognised the signature.

‘I'll be blowed,' he said.

‘Yes, you've found me out, Al, I don't just deal in rubbish, I dabble with the brush.'

He seemed genuinely humbled by the admission, by the revelation of a side of himself that he might possibly disdain revealing, the little ringleted boy with an artistic blush.

Dominique took Merrington's arm and looked at him admiringly. She was French, angular and graceful, and as tall as he was. ‘We met in a galleree,' she said, ‘by good chance. I had no idea who he was, rough-and-ready he wandered in from the demolition site next door. After that, well . . .'