Pepsi Bears and Other Stories (5 page)

The oversized kerfuffle or race riot wound its way down, as kerfuffles and riots mostly do, when enough of its leading participants were strewn across Quinane Parade poleaxed with bin lids and fence pickets and tomato stakes, or hopping on one foot, or holding their faces, or bent double, or clutching their chests, or hiding in hydrangeas, or cornered and surrendering, or pinned down and swearing, or run off to a safe distance to shout threats. Women still barracked from each side of the road but the fight had evaporated. Hundreds of us stood around wondering what came next. A posse of
concerned had gathered around the widow Long, who was lying there giving off moans like a haunted house and one leg jittering with spastic voltage. I moved away so as not to be traumatised by the sight of her.

Four cops arrived and walked among us looking disappointed, telling people to lay their sticks down and wake up to themselves. Asking how in the hell this could happen. Seeing the cops my dad hustled back home with his shotgun so as not to be mistaken for a vigilante or a hothead.

With the mayhem abated people's thoughts rose up from murder, and what they wanted instead was justice. Everyone wanted to know whose fault this was and what could be done about it. A house lay in ruins. International guests had been assaulted by traditional landholders. A beauty queen's reign had been cut short. The widow Long lay moaning. Bad things had taken place here and it became important for the future of the town that none of us was to blame. The crowd looked around for justice until it found a suspect that couldn't state his innocence. Accusations came to rest at the feet of a low and sheepish source. Villi, proud yellow-haired squire of pedigree bitches, feeling himself the centre of malign attention, began to skulk from the scene with his tail low.

People pointed at him and he was called a dangerous maniac and a little yellow bastard. A wiry hatchet-faced cop by the name of Noonan, who was known to beat singing drunks unconscious in the lock-up so the sergeant's wife could sleep at night, snatched Villi up by
the collar and held him high so the crowd could see what he had.

People began yelling for Villi's blood. If he were sacrificed, if blame were legitimately apportioned to him, then this thing that had happened could be taken as more or less just a big mistake that said nothing about us but everything about the dog. Constable Noonan flipped the press-stud on his holster. Villi was about to be shot with a police issue thirty-eight right here with the hundreds willing it on. ‘Euthanise the bloody thing.' ‘That's a dangerous animal.' ‘Someone coulda got killed.'

‘Whose damn dog is this damn dog?' Constable Noonan asked as he drew his pistol.

And the shoeless German kid said, like he always said, ‘Villi is mine doch.'

‘Is that right, is it?' Constable Noonan asked. With his hand hooked in Villi's collar he lay him on his side on the ground and touched the muzzle of the pistol to his chest and said, ‘This dog's a public menace, son. And you as its owner … you're a public menace, too.'

That's when the shoeless German kid turned and looked at me. He had no reason at all to expect me, who had only ever taunted and teased him, to help him now. I could safely ignore him. Not a person present knew what that look meant. No one would ever know he asked.

And how, anyway, did that shoeless German kid understand about this place, our town? How did he understand about people? About how I was one kind of person whose dog the cops couldn't shoot and he was
another type of person whose dog they could shoot? How did he understand all this, the shoeless little German bastard, who looked at me with those damned eyes of his?

Constable Noonan pulled the hammer of his pistol back with his thumb and the shoeless German kid didn't blink or wince while everyone else blinked and winced. Just looked plain-faced at me, expecting me to do it. People began to put their fingers in their ears and look away. ‘Willy is my dog, Mr Noonan.' The cop eased the hammer down softly.

‘Your dog, young Franklin?'

‘Yep.'

‘This boy said it was his dog.'

‘He's a liar. He's German.' Constable Noonan stood up and holstered his pistol. He stared at me a moment before slapping the shoeless German boy with an open hand in the middle of the back, sending him sprawling onto the road. ‘Lying to the police,' he explained. Then he handed me Villi. ‘Take him home, then. And tie the little bugger up and don't let him out on the streets again. He's caused more trouble than he's worth today.'

‘Sorry, Mr Noonan. I'll tie him up.' A few blackfellas shouted obscene remarks at me as I walked through the crowd and up Talinga Crescent and into my garden. None of the whitefellas said anything, though a lot of them must have known I was lying. All the eyes of all the people were on me, all thinned and hostile, everyone hating me. Because I'd made off with the dog who
was going to be blamed for this day. So now the blame had shifted back onto the town. And if I wasn't who I was, then they could've shot my dog and got the whole incident cleared up and put behind them. Only now it wasn't cleared up, or put behind them.

Villi squirmed in my arms and licked my face as we walked away, not wanting to go with me. I held him tight and whispered to him to cut it out you ignorant little bastard. When I finally reached my house and walked inside I dropped Villi on the kitchen floor and slumped beside him on the lino. I was shaking and I began to cry. I was angry at the shoeless German kid for making me do it. And I was angry at myself for doing it. I told myself I only did it because I liked Villi as a dog and I was going to keep him and teach him cool stuff and sool him onto cats and that shoeless German kid if he ever came around.

That night there was a faint knock at our front door. The German kid was wearing old shoes that I guess he'd stolen off someone's front veranda. He had his shirt buttoned right up to his Adam's apple. ‘Did the cop hurt you?' He shook his head. ‘He's upstairs. You want to come up and get him?' I asked. He shook his head. No kid from the housing commission had ever been upstairs anywhere. They thought me a daredevil for living in a two-storey building. I brought Villi down on a lead and handed the lead to the German kid. The dog was happy
to see him, jumping and wagging and barking. Then he stopped suddenly and sniffed at the shoes the kid was wearing. ‘I am for having shoes now,' the German kid said to us. No one was going to shoot this kid's dog.

S
he died young, never really knowing happiness, but holding her head high all the same. And such was her dignity on her last day she was able to shame twenty-thousand men, a feat that gives her a special place in my heart. I can think of no other zebra who has shamed as many as a dozen.

As a filly she was gifted by the Governor of the new Protectorate of Uganda in 1914 to a visiting party of exploration geologists from the state of Victoria, Australia. New Uganda and old England were hoping to become coal-rich, but, sadly, at the cost of one zebra, the Australian geologists pronounced the soils of the protectorate ‘eminently devoid' of sub-bituminous materials. She was shipped back from Africa with the
party of geologists on the liner
Nyx
and, upon docking in Melbourne, was presented by that party, which had no use for a zebra, to its patron, the Governor of Victoria, Sir Welsley Bolt. People gave Sir Welsley many animals and it was his habit to call them rare jewels and name them. He pronounced this zebra a rare jewel of Africa and named her Nyx.

Today a powerful man might give his son a sports car as a symbol of his own status. For if the lad drives a red Ferrari or a black Porsche doesn't it redound to his own glory? Imagine the pride Sir Welsley must have felt when he bestowed on his eight-year-old son Albert this exotic striped equine of Africa and watched him trot the lawns of Government House among his friends on their dun-coloured ponies and piebald Shetlands.

Next day little Albert, in his knickerbockers and waistcoat, had Nyx saddled and rode the stripy wonder down from Government House into Richmond to his college as people waved and hurrahed him and stood agape and called their families from their houses to see. Albert patted her mane and waved back and, figuring the people would want to know, called, ‘A zebra. Denizen of the Dark Continent.'

But the hollow-gutted dogs of Richmond, rather than smelling a denizen, smelt a zebra. In a pack they came howling and snarling and leaping at her and little Albert was carried away into Fitzroy at a gallop with his arms around her neck and his legs flapping behind.

The shaken boy and the flighty beast were returned to Sir Welsley by the police. The zebra was clearly too
dangerous to ride, so Sir Welsley released her into the Botanical Gardens to lend those concocted wilds an authentic flavour. Whereupon she lay waste the rhododendrons and agapanthus and with a bray to frighten a lion sent the Box Hill Ladies Art Group stampeding through their easels and into a bamboo thicket where they were snagged by their ankle-length dresses and puffy sleeves and wailed undiscovered for hours while their bladders swelled, until finally they wriggled from their clothes and crept through the gardens in their underthings and formed an orderly queue behind a sequoia as if it were a bluestone water-closet.

After this disgrace Nyx was donated quietly to a travelling dramaturge. A man with snowy hair who had adopted the stage name Winslow Swiggins and owned a gaudy red wagon that housed a puppet show called The Dad and Dave Biffo Ripper. The zebra trod the dirt roads of provincial Victoria, grazing the yellow grasses, exchanging snickers with farm horses, pulling the puppet theatre behind, a sight so strange even shearers wandered out of pubs to see her.

The puppet show itself was not complicated. It consisted of a puppet-Dad committing woody domestic violence on a puppet-Mum and a puppet-Mabel for a variety of paltry offences. The puppet-Dad hit his womenfolk hilariously with a club upwards of three hundred times during the performance, before they stole upon him in his sleep and slit his throat to the cheers of the children and the contentment of the female part of the audience who nodded their heads and pursed their
lips, but who then got their comeuppance when the bed-sheet was thrown back in the last act and it was revealed that the puppet-Mum and the puppet-Mabel had killed the puppet-Dave by mistake. Which contented the male half of the audience and seemed such a profound lesson against attacking sleeping husbands they nodded their heads and called to their loved ones, ‘See, woman? See?'

The Biffo Ripper had always gone down well in the bush and provided Winslow Swiggins with a decent living. Now, with a zebra pulling the wagon it was an even more exotic entertainment and drew larger crowds. Winslow Swiggins sold sugar cubes to the children and they placed them on their quaking palms and fed them to the zebra, squealing as her lips reached for them.

Business was good. But there was something troubling the puppeteer. He noticed his audience had begun to drift away during the Biffo Ripper to gaze at and fondle his zebra. Sometimes half the crowd would be gathered around the beast stroking her stripes and sniffing her flanks by the time the bed-sheets were pulled back to reveal the murdered puppet-Dave. Every day Winslow worked up a lather buffeting the wooden womenfolk and here now these hayseeds were more fascinated by his zebra than his art.

Call it professional jealousy, but the man was wounded. He had always been the star of his theatre and was not about to share top-billing with a dandified mule at the age of sixty-two. In the riverside town of Echuca he went to the hardware store and bought a gallon of Croft's Wood Stain and a brush and took Nyx down to
the river and in the shade of the redgums painted her as brown as every other wagon-pulling nag in the district. She would not upstage Winslow Swiggins again. And, who knows, the zebra may well have thought herself cursed by her exotic looks, always admired for her stripes instead of her inner beauty, and may have been pleased at her new appearance.

If he had not made her a horse he might have kept her. Likely the war did not want zebras. But in 1916 the horses of Australia were being chewed up by the guns of France. Many had left these shores already and many remounts were needed to feed the great carnivore in Europe. A gang of Commonwealth Purchasing Officers was scouring the district at the time for horses. Leading a string of misshapen compulsory-purchase nags they overtook Nyx and Winslow and the Dad and Dave Biffo Ripper on the Echuca–Swan Hill track.

Scratching their heads, they inspected her. She didn't look good in brown. She was short-legged and potbellied, but seemed to have good wind, hard hooves and iron legs that could obviously pull a load. They offered Winslow twenty-five pounds, and while Winslow Swiggins counted himself a man of principle, he was hardly going to complain about an Australian Army promissory note for twenty-five pounds for a horse that came into his possession as a gratis zebra. ‘Her name is “Nyx”,' Winslow told them. ‘She likes sugar cubes.'

‘She'll get plenty sugar cubes in France,' the Chief Purchasing Officer told Winslow before offering to have Nyx pull Winslow and his theatre to the next town. Fearing discovery, the impresario thought he'd wait alongside the road and see what turned up. As they rode away he sat on his wagon steps wondering at the durability of Croft's Wood Stain and whether he had just committed fraud on the Commonwealth in a time of war.

Nyx was branded with the government broad arrow and the initials of the purchasing officer and an army number on one hoof and slung by rope-and-pulley with a harness beneath her belly once more into the dark hold of a liner. This time she was surrounded by many horses, all similarly doomed.

She arrived at Ypres in Belgium three months later and was put to work carting water through the mud to the front line and exchanging it for wounded men who she carted to the rear. Her driver was a young private from Sydney who had been extracted from an orphanage with the promise of avenging an insult the Kaiser had offered his King. The orphanage had named him after a brand of cigarettes, Wild Woodbine. Private Woodbine, on the troop transport before he went to sleep at night, imagined himself duelling the portly Kaiser of the newspaper comics with a rapier, dancing around that buffoon and slicing his finery to shreds. He was disappointed in Belgium. It was not a duel with rapiers, trench warfare.

The earth at Ypres was churned to bottomless mud by rain and bombardment, and men and horses and
guns and wagons began to sink beyond sight. A horse pulling loads through this would soon be broken, lame, shot and pushed into a shell crater. Wild dreaded this. Having never had a living thing in his charge he fell in love with Nyx quickly and tried to shield her from overwork and shells and disease. He gave her wisps of mattress stuffing stolen from a billet in a village to the rear and rubbed his hands along her back and apologised for what he was making her do. But one day soon they would be going home to Sydney where there would be girls for Wild and grass for Nyx and peace from the shells and bullets.

Nyx pulled the water to the front line and the wounded to the rear and chewed wisps of seaweed mattress stuffing. She had once been a wild zebra. Once been part of a governor's retinue. Once been in show business. Now she was a brown horse in a World War.

After weeks hauling the dead through the Ypres mud one of Nyx's stripy socks began peeping from her wood stain. When he saw this Wild poured water on her leg and traced the stripes of her fetlock with his finger tips asking her, ‘What's this, Nyxy? You aren't about falsifying yourself, are you, girl?'

Wild knew for certain horses were not striped. He bartered a pint of mineral turpentine from a quartermaster with a bottle of wine and took her to a sheltered churchyard a few kilometres behind the front line. Here
he began to splash her with the turpentine and rub at her with a hessian sack. At first he felt a little disappointed that she hadn't confided in him. He hadn't kept any of his life back from her, and here she was … striped.

He stood back from her as the patterns of her stripes appeared. The prettiest thing he had ever seen. Like undressing a woman for the first time, he was astounded and frightened. ‘Well, Nyxy. Well. Aren't you the shy one? Letting on to be a dumpling, and all the while a princess.' He rubbed at her as if he were Aladdin rubbing his lamp, drawing forth a genie. And when he had finished he stood back from her again and because she was so beautiful he began to cry and told her, ‘Nyxy, young Nyxy … you are a zebra.' She would be withdrawn from service, he told himself, and he smiled. There was no place for zebras in the Australian Army.

Wild Woodbine was sitting smoking, smiling at his revealed zebra when a German shell took the steeple off the little church they were sheltering behind. Bricks, mortar and pieces of a marble Christ rained down on them. Wild had taken Nyx's halter off in order to clean her head and she bolted out through the gate of the churchyard.

The path of her flight is unknown, but it ends in no man's land at Passchendaele. She stands hock-deep in the smoking, cratered mud halfway between the Germans in their trenches to her right and the Australians in
their trenches to her left. She stares along no man's land, the shattered barbed-wire coils and the earth churned and seeded with human bodies, looking neither at one army nor the other, as otherworldly as a unicorn.

The soldiers stop firing, feeling with this bizarre visitation a truce can be assumed. This thing, so out of place, so unexpected, an alien come from another planet, takes precedence over the slaughter. They begin to poke their heads up from the trenches to get a better look at her. Silence falls across the battlefield.