The Legend of Winstone Blackhat (3 page)

So how was New Zealand’s hottest home baker? She getting on okay up there?

She’s doing all right.

Kids behave themselves?

Yeah they were good.

So. You coming in?

I got to get home.

Where’s the fire?

I got a friend coming over.

Oh yeah? What’s his name?

A girlfriend.

So call her. Tell her you’ll be late.

I can’t.

You could before.

I got to go. Ruth clunked the car into reverse. I’m late.

As the car moved off, Bic stood back, spread his arms and laughed. Aw c’mon Root, don’t be like that! I won’t hold you up. It’ll only take a minute.

Ruth, looking over her shoulder, accelerated towards the road.

Bic crumpled the can in his hand and lobbed it over the fence. What are you three standing there for? Get your stuff inside.

Winstone watched Ruth’s car disappear and the first fat spots of rain dampen the dust. He felt a lot more like aggregates than concrete.

Mrs Clarke taught Winstone’s class for a fortnight. She read them
The House at Pooh Corner.
They learned about honey and bees and blew up balloons and played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Winstone quite enjoyed being Winston minus an e for a week and a half, but then he went off Mrs Clarke even though he knew that wasn’t really fair, because it wasn’t her fault. But he couldn’t help it.

It was Mrs Clarke who found him behind the boiler shed and pulled off Harry Tait and took Jack Baxter’s phone. She was surprisingly fast and strong, it turned out, for such a scrawny old woman.

He was spying on girls in the toilets. Harry Tait’s voice cracked
with indignation. He’s a pervert Mrs Clarke.

He was trying to see them with their pants down, Jack Baxter explained. He’s a sex offender.

I don’t care what he was doing, yelled Mrs Clarke. Give me that phone. And the rest of you, go away.

We were just going to teach him a lesson, Janelle Lindsay said. See how he liked people looking at him.

It’s disgusting, chipped in Lola Price. He’s a paedophile. And he’s got dirty pants.

Go. All of you. Winston, pull your pants up.

But Winstone couldn’t do that. He lay flat on his back in the grass with his wet eyes squeezed shut and both hands over his privates – except that they weren’t any more – and he couldn’t reach down for his pants without letting go and he couldn’t even curl up in a ball because then his bare arse would be showing.

Winston?

He tried to say something to Mrs Clarke standing way up there, but no words would come out, just a squeak like a farm dog locked in the back of a ute, and he tried to sniff back the snot that was tickling his chin and he willed her to see.

What’s the matter? It’s all right. They’ve gone, you can get up now.

Squeak.

Pause.

I’ll turn my back, all right? There. I’m not looking. Is that better?

It was. Winstone pulled his pants and his trousers up and wiped his eyes and nose on the backs of his hands and his hands on the front of his hoodie. Mrs Clarke was looking at Jack Baxter’s phone. He could see it in her hand.

Don’t watch it.

I’m not going to.

You are.

I’m just deleting it. There. It’s gone.

What if he sent it to everybody? What if he put it on YouTube?

Mrs Clarke’s fingers moved over the phone. He didn’t, she said.

Are you sure?

I’m sure. Nobody’s going to see it.

In that moment, Winstone felt a wave of love for Mrs Clarke, and his eyes got wet again. Then he remembered it was just the video that was gone, and that the whole school had still seen his dick and his shitty underpants and were waiting for him, and that Mrs Clarke had seen them too.

Winston? Were you looking at the girls? You know that’s a bad thing to do, don’t you.

I wasn’t.

Ah. So why did the boys think you were?

Because Harry had walked round the corner and caught Winstone with his eye pressed to a hole in the side wall of the girls’ cloakroom.

I didn’t want to.

Bodun had told him to look. Winstone wasn’t sure what at – there was no one in there and all he could see was the floor. Then Harry grabbed him and Bodun wasn’t anywhere and he couldn’t look up because of the headlock Harry had him in but he recognised Marlene’s scuzzy grey and pink trainers trotting alongside as he got dragged past the boiler shed and he yelled at her to go away and he could hear her crying. There didn’t seem much point in saying any of that to Mrs Clarke, so Winstone just pulled his hoodie down a bit more and stared at the torn-up grass.

All right, said Mrs Clarke, but it sounded more like
we’ll see.
Go and get yourself cleaned up. Give your face a wash.

Winstone didn’t though. There was no way he was going into the boys’ toilets alone. So it wasn’t until he got home that he realised there were sooty black tear-streaks all down his face and his nose and chin were powdered white with dried snot and there were grass stains in his hair.

All the kids at school called him Winnie the Poo for a week or so after Mrs Clarke left and after that they got bored and just called him Shit-Stains. Winstone thought a lot about this, but there wasn’t much he could do. He thought that if Janelle and Lola and Harry and Jack had to wipe their arses with a ripped up copy of
Farming News
then they’d have skid-marks too. He thought he’d like to find that A.A. Milne and kick him in the balls. He started stealing toilet paper from school and he washed his pants with the sliver of yellow soap and he made Marlene wash hers too. But no matter how hard they scrubbed they couldn’t make the pants go back to their old colour.

Winstone watched the wind shift. All evening it had broken behind the rocks at his back, but now between one breath and the next it was running towards him skittering like rain across the dam.

He reeled in fast and the bait on the end of the line skipped and splashed as it came through the cut-up water. You couldn’t stay ahead of the wind up here but with all the rocks around the dam it wasn’t too difficult to escape it. You just had to keep moving, that was all. If it wasn’t for having to keep out of sight of the huts as well it would have been easy.

The line bucked out of the water and he caught it and turned his back on the wind and eased the crawly head off the hooks and threw it back into the dam. The bean tin was really starting to stink so he threw the rest of the bait in too. He waded back in to the muddy beach where a trout barely the length of his forearm was already staring up with a fixed yellow eye and he didn’t pick it up by its gills but by its stiff cold slippery tail.

He’d got better at this. The mean squirmy parts they didn’t show in those father–son bonding films, the part where someone smashed the fish’s head with a rock and sliced its white belly open gills to tail and ripped its slimy heaving guts out. It had come as a bit of a shock, the first time, realising it would have to be him. After he’d reeled the fish in and held it up and there was
no one to show and he’d thought how Todd Jackson would be proud of him and then remembered that Todd wasn’t. After he’d been so careful, unhooking the little trout’s lip, trying not to hurt it. It had lain there gasping and looking at him like maybe he knew where the water had gone and he’d picked up a stone and he wasn’t even sure if a trout had a skull but he couldn’t smash it.

He’d left it there and he’d fished some more and he’d thought a bit about drowning. He’d heard somewhere that it was peaceful. But after a while he’d gone back and picked up the trout and carried it down and put it back in the dam. It had sunk. Then it had floated back up and washed about on its side with its little eye staring up at the sun. So he’d fished it out again and gutted it and it wasn’t too bad because he knew for sure it was dead and being dead meant you’d gone to a better place where no one could hurt you.

Now when he gutted a fish Winstone raced, and he didn’t think about its sad eyes and round head and its baby teeth but the imaginary clock ticking down that he had to beat and if he could break the world record. He usually did, now that he’d taken to borrowing the big curved knife from the Green Camo Hut along with the fishing rod. There were some things a Leatherman just wasn’t good for.

Behind the wind, lines of rain drifted over the mountains to the west, a black net across the last band of sun. The light on the ridge was soft and thick with the dusk, rock dissolving into grass and mud and cloud and water, the perfect hour for a small grey boy and his bucket and his dead fish to slip along the seam between earth and sky.

Winstone put the rod and knife back exactly where they belonged, neatly stowed in the upturned dinghy that leaned against the back of the Green Camo Hut between the corrugated iron wall and the rock, and he sat there under the hull for a
while in the narrow sheltering dark and the cold chimney smell until he was sure no one was watching. Then he untaped the key from the base of the galvanised rubbish bin and went into the hut and took three old newspapers from the box beside the wood stove and a fork from the drawer and he found the roll of tinfoil under the sink and ripped off a length and folded it up and put it in his pocket.

As he climbed the ridge, sidling through the sparse scatter of huts hunkered down in the lee of their rocks, picking up a log or two from each woodpile he passed, a window above caught the slicing yellow sun and glowed just as if someone had fired up the stove inside and set a lamp of welcome.

IS IT THEM?
the Kid asked.

No, Coop said, just a farmhouse is all, and they sat their horses in the gathering grey and looked at it some more. There was woodsmoke drifting out of the iron chimney above the shingle roof and in the chill of the falling night it hung in a feathered grey line across the snow-pocked mountains.

The Kid’s palomino whinnied low and the grey snorted and stepped out and his bit jangled. They heard a horse fuss behind the closed doors of the barn. A dog barked, once, then twice. The porch door opened.

Yellow light poured out and a woman stood against it. She held up a lantern and it lit her face and her snowy white blouse and her soft brown skirt and she was an hourglass standing there with the warmth and the glow of the fire running through her into the night, lighting a path for them to follow.

Evenin, ma’am, Cooper called, and he took off his big white hat and rode into the light.

The sparks of Winstone’s fire swarmed red in the ruined chimney. He poked at the logs with a dried speargrass stem and blew out the tip and stepped out over the fallen wall and made his way down through the deepening blue to the dam and filled his bucket with water. While he waited for the fire to burn down he squatted on his heels on the floor of the old hut all grown over with grass and he wrapped his trout first in the foil and then in the newspaper and when the embers were red and soft he soaked the newspaper-trout in dam water and set it in the centre of the fire and raked embers over the top and put another log on. Then he sat back and drew up his knees and the embers hissed and the new wood caught and behind the ridge the wind tore the cloud and he looked up from the yellow flames and through the missing roof saw the steady wheel of the stars.

WILL YOU
have some more stew? the woman asked with the spoon in her hand. Don’t be shy now. I made plenty.

Thank you kindly ma’am, Cooper said. I don’t mind if I do.

Billy, pass our guests the biscuits.

The big old dish came on up the scrubbed-pine board hand to hand along a row of children clean and white and soft as whittled willow. Two boys and a girl sitting youngest to oldest, one, two, three.

A thud of boots in the porch and the door burst in with the dark and the cold and then it was shut and a man stood there with the sting of the wind on his face shrugging off his big coat and hanging his hat and hooking his rifle behind the door.

Daddy!

The little girl ran and jumped and he caught her sure as eggs and swung her around just as gently as if she was china. Then he set her back down on the floor and she laughed and pretended to fall and he held her in his big hands until she was steady.

Again, she said.

But the woman said, We got company Jed, and if the man had overlooked Cooper and the Kid at his table and forgotten their horses out in his barn he recollected them now and he stood up and held out his hand.

Howdy boys.

The little girl stepped back and stumbled over the leg of a chair and the Kid reached out and caught her. Whoa there missy, he said and he set her back on her feet. You be careful there now. Watch out for the table.

Martha Mae, the woman chided, the smallest crease in her white brow, go on and sit back down. I don’t believe I heard you ask to leave the table.

Martha looked up at the Kid all doe-eyed and shy, but she wasn’t scared, and she smiled him a little thank-you smile under all that wavy gold hair falling over her face and smelling of soap and flowers and then she ran back to her seat and picked up her spoon and the woman got up and opened the oven door and brought out an apple pie.

Outside in the dark the crickets and coy-otes sang and starlight frosted the ground and the horses sank to their knees in the warm barn and under the mountains the little square house stood firm with its windows edged in lamplight and behind the house the old dog lay with an ear to the wind and tucked his nose under his paw.

Inside they wiped the dishes and damped down the stove and the man kissed his children before they went to their beds
and through the open door to their room the Kid could hear the woman singing low as she brushed out Martha’s hair. The man showed Cooper and the Kid to a room where two bunks were made up with pillows and high feather quilts and sheets that smelled cleaner and sweeter than hay, and then anyone still standing out there alone in the night would have seen the lamps go out, one by one, and the yellow windows fade.

In the lower bunk the Kid lay with the night on his face and he studied the dark until he could once again make out the check of the gingham curtains.

Coop?

What is it Kid?

What happens tomorrow Coop?

Tomorrow Kid? Cooper paused. Tomorrow we get up and we do what we got to do and we move on.

Something – a feral cat, probably, so close to the fire – crossed the dark at the edge of Winstone’s sight. He fed the head and bones and fins of the trout back into the fire and watched them melt and poked the ashes a bit to make sure they were all burned up and then he collected his things and tipped the bucket of water over the hearth. The fire hissed and spat and was gone and in its absence night and cold and sullen smoke circled all around. Winstone pulled his hoodie sleeves down over his hands and hugged his arms to chest and waited for them to clear.

The night was never as dark as you thought. You just had to be patient, that was all. After a second he could see the stars, all of them layered up, big and small, and the distant dust between them. Behind the black hills to the west a deep blue ghost of the dead sun rose and far away to the east, beyond range after range, Rock
and Pillar, Lammerlaw, the lights of the settled east stained the sky a faint red, a premonition of disaster or the dawn. He could see the tumbled walls of the hut and the square of the window frame and he sat in it with a foot in the grass either side of the wall and scuffed his toes to keep warm and waited some more.

The dark shaded around him like a drying ink wash, and when he could make out the grass at his feet, he slipped down through the speargrass mounds and across the old dirt road to the creek and he followed its loud liquid line down the gully, bending low, another shade of the night. There was no one there. He could have carried his torch and waved it on high and still have passed unseen. But careful as he was, only night eyes as good as those of the kitten stalking the scent of rotting crawly and warm fish oil could have made out Winstone’s shape in the long grass.