The Legend of Winstone Blackhat (7 page)

A gust of wind pushed past him and onto the dam. It was late getting up. That or the sun was going down early.

He didn’t see the kitten on the way home, though he walked around all three rock tors. It was a long way for a kitten to come, but that night, just in case, Winstone saved three of the sausages from his spaghetti-with-sausages can and almost half his vanilla creamed rice and put them on a flat rock outside the cave.

Zane would have known about corned beef hash, for sure. He was always making stuff to eat, and he knew a lot of things, even though Winstone had been wrong about him being a teacher. It had just been lucky, Zane being there, parked outside school that day. Lucky for Winstone.

Lucky for both of us, Zane said, or we wouldn’t have got to know each other. Hey you want some cheesecake?

Zane worked for the council, he wrote reports and ticked boxes and filled out forms, and he started at seven o’clock and worked through lunch so he could finish early. Which was why he was hungry when he got home and ready for something good to eat, a toastie with Mexican beans and onions and cheese, or a potato-top pie or oven wedges with tomato sauce and sour cream. He knew Mexican like in the films and even though it wasn’t his job he taught Winstone some.
Salsa. Tortilla. Guacamole. Si senor
which sounded hard but just meant
yessir.
Vamoose,
which wasn’t anything to do with a moose but meant
go away
and John Wayne made a lot more sense when you knew that. Winstone learned to say a whole phrase.
Hasta la vista, baby.

Winstone was always amazed at the stuff other people knew.

Don’t let him touch you, Courtenay Thomas whispered to Kelly-Anne Jones as she handed out their maths tests. He’s had his hand down his pants. He plays with himself.

Winstone didn’t put out his hand for the paper but let Kelly-Anne put the test on the edge of his desk while he stared at a spot in the opposite corner. Bic was working for Courtenay’s dad and Winstone wondered if he’d told her.

She knows, Zane said, because she does it too. Everybody does.

But Courtenay’s a girl.

Yeah them too. Don’t they teach you this stuff in school these days?

Winstone shook his head. Not at any school he’d been to, but then he was forever missing stuff on account of all the moving around and he was just about to ask Zane how and what girls touched when he thought of something important.

Does John Wayne play with himself?

You bet he did.

Do you?

Zane blinked. Yeah. Sure.

Why?

I told you, everybody does.

But why do we?

Because we’re lonely, Zane said, and he looked a wee bit funny.

Winstone thought about that for a while and it felt true.

Because we need to practise, Zane said. Because it feels good.

Practise for what?

For when we meet someone we love. So we know how to do it right.

Winstone was lost. You mean they’ll see us?

Yeah, sort of. Sometimes. Yeah.

Winstone knew about sex, of course he did. He’d seen it, and not just on TV. At parties, through the windows of cars, sometimes late at night when he got up for a piss and Bic was
too wasted to have closed the bedroom door. One time Grunt had come into his room all slurry and giggly and said hey Winnie are you asleep and when to be on the safe side Winstone hadn’t said anything back Grunt and Kirsty had done it right there on Bodun’s bed. But he hadn’t seen anyone touching themselves, and he was pretty sure he didn’t want to do what he had seen them doing to anyone, especially somebody he loved.

Zane said touching yourself didn’t always happen and everybody felt that way at first.

So why do they do it then?

Because when you love someone you want to make them feel good. Touching yourself feels good yeah? Well it’s even better when somebody does it for you.

If Grunt had been making Kirsty feel good she’d had a funny way of showing it, but Winstone didn’t want to argue with Zane, so he didn’t say anything more about that. You’re talking about girls, he said, and he thought about Marlene and her smelly pinkness. I don’t want to touch girls.

I’m talking about someone you love, Zane said, and he was nothing like angry with Winstone but not very pleased. It doesn’t matter who, he said. And it’s not always about what you want. That’s what love is, not being selfish.

Winstone was pretty sure he’d heard that before, on TV, or Wednesday mornings at Brownburn School from the Bible lady or a poem Mrs Clarke had read out and maybe all three, and it seemed like everyone had already agreed and it was decided.

How do you know if you’re doing it right? he asked Zane.

Doing what right?

Winstone looked down over the crotch of his tracksuit pants at the toe of his sock and scuffed it on the carpet. When you touch it, he said. You know. When you play with yourself.

Well. Zane put his spoon down on the coffee table and sat
back and shifted a little on the couch. Why don’t you show me how you do it?

Winstone felt himself go very still like when you’ve grabbed an electric fence by mistake and you’re waiting to see if it’s on and Zane laughed and said, Hey it’s okay. We’re mates aren’t we? Mates do this kind of stuff all the time. Haven’t you ever had a pissing contest?

Winstone hadn’t, except maybe with Bodun back in the day, but he’d seen quite a few and although this didn’t feel like the same thing at all it was true that guys saw each other’s dicks all the time and maybe the weird feeling was having a mate and if he’d had them before he’d have done this for years and be used to it by now. He bit the inside of his lower lip but he didn’t move his hand.

I tell you what, Zane said, how about I go first.

Winstone wasn’t looking at Zane but it sounded like he was smiling. Winstone’s tongue didn’t want to move either, it was stuck to the back of his teeth, so he just nodded a bit, his chin tucking into his chest, his neck shrinking into his shoulders. He wondered what the rules were, when he should look and how much, and he heard and felt more than saw Zane’s hands move and unzip the front of his trousers. Then he did look, and he got quite a shock and suddenly all the stuff people said about woodies and boners made sense because there it was, Zane’s dick, not floppy but standing straight up, and Winstone had thought Bodun’s was getting big but this was massive. He couldn’t look away.

You want to touch it?

Winstone kind of did, just to see if it was as hard as it looked, though not with his fingers.

Here, Zane said, it’s okay, and he showed him how to move his hand and it was just as well really that Winstone had asked because it turned out he’d been doing it all wrong. It still didn’t
work that well, though, when he tried it on himself and Zane won the contest easily but he said, Don’t worry, mate, it’s practice that’s all, and when Winstone went off for his shower Zane said he could do with one too and they hit the bathroom together like the All Blacks.

Zane helped Winstone get clean and dry and they sat back on the couch and had ice cream and watched
Winchester ’73
which was all about the best gun in the world and then Zane took Winstone home.

Walking the last of the way down Boundary Road Winstone thought about the soldier who only got to say one thing in the film, that he didn’t like yellow hair and his wife’s hair was brown, brown with red bits in it, and then he was dead and he never saw his wife’s hair again no matter what colour it was.

While he was getting out of the car, Zane had said, You know mate if anything ever, and then stopped, looking down the road towards Winstone’s house even though you couldn’t see it from there. If you ever need me I’m here. Just call and I’ll come get you. Winstone just nodded and opened the door like he didn’t understand what Zane meant, but he did, and the time Bic used the jug cord to whack him and the plug went all the way in came to mind, and he wondered what Zane would have done about it.

There was nobody home at his house, not even Marlene, and nothing to eat in the fridge but that was okay because Winstone was hardly hungry. He left the lights off in case he used up all the power again and sat on the floor in the lounge and turned on the TV. There wasn’t much on, just old-people stuff, and the house was cold and he thought about calling Zane and he might have done if they had a phone.

He watched a show about cops and tracker dogs and then the one Bodun liked where girls in bikinis got sweaty and dirty
and were made to do all kinds of weird stuff, whatever the show could think up, and the girls cried and screamed but they did it anyway, no matter how gross it was. They couldn’t say no because it was TV. It was called a reality show but Bodun said that was shit and not even the tits were real. He wanted to see them, though, those fake tits. That’s why he watched the show every week, waiting for a big fake tit to fall out. So far none had, and they didn’t tonight, not that Winstone saw, though he might have missed it because next thing he knew there were car headlights sliding over the walls and the clink of bottles outside and a show he didn’t know on the screen and Bodun kicked his foot and said, Hey shithead wake up, we got you a quarter pack.

Bodun dropped the paper bag on the floor beside Winstone and flicked on the lights and then Marlene trotted in yawning and covered in fried chicken grease and holding an empty bucket of KFC like it was a prize. She sat down beside him and she was excited because she’d been all the way to Dunedin and when Bodun wasn’t looking Winstone let her have one of his fries.

Then a woman Winstone had never seen before walked in and said
Hi!
like she’d been waiting to do it all day and Bic was right behind her. Bic didn’t say anything because he had a rollie in his mouth and a six-pack of something pink in one hand and a twelve-pack of stubbies under the other arm and he was watching the woman’s arse, which was hard to miss. Winstone stared at it too.

What’s
your
name? the woman said, slow and bright and loud, like Winstone was retarded.

His mouth was full but he caught Bic’s look and said his name fast and a bit of chicken fell out and the woman smiled. She smiled a lot and her smile was almost as big as her arse and she laughed a lot too and Winstone wondered what she had to be so happy about and he figured it wasn’t going to last much longer.

Bic put the drinks down and took the rollie out of his mouth and said finish your chicken and go to bed and Winstone did as fast as he could. Sure enough, the banging and moaning started up pretty soon after that and it was coming under the doors and through the walls from Bic’s room to Marlene’s to his and filling up the whole house and Winstone heard Bodun swear and his bed creak but it was too dark in their room to see what he was doing.

Winstone got up and went into Marlene’s room and he found her down in the smelly centre of her bed under all the covers. He got her out and she held his hand down the hall and climbed into his bed and he lay between her and the wall and she pushed her bony back and bum into him as hard as she could and put her hands over her ears. Winstone put his hands over the top of hers and held her like that until the banging stopped and she went to sleep and then he did too. Later there were car headlights again and the chug of the Commodore’s motor pulling away and Marlene got up and he checked and his bed wasn’t wet but it did smell a lot of KFC.

THEY WERE FLYING
, the Kid and Cooper, along a pale road, tearing up the dark, and the moon was on their hats and the shadows fled and tumbled under their horses’ hooves and the hooves beat the night like rain on a tarp, like shower jets on glass. They rode, and the range grew wide around them, and the road ahead was empty and they were alone.

The range grew wider yet, and the road ran on until it slipped off the edge of the world and there, small and red, at the very brink, a fire burned beside it.

Closer, someone stirred the fire and the sparks swarmed orange and gold and the embers blushed and crumbled. Beyond the fire there was a blanket and under the blanket there was a girl with yellow hair, long yellow hair spilling into the grass, yellow hair with red in it, and it was everywhere yellow and red and thick, red and yellow, and Winstone woke up and the camera rolled back to where it belonged, tracking Cooper and the Kid as they raced the night on a white dust road.

We’re close, the Kid said, we aint never been this close, but the palomino was walking now and his neck was low and his hooves were heavy. No one could run for three days and three nights, not even the grey, and up ahead his foot buckled over a stone and Cooper said, Whoa easy now, and reined in. I’m sorry Kid. We got to rest these horses.

We’ll lose em, the Kid said. They’ll be through the pass.

We got to rest.

We’ll be too late.

We’ll find em, Coop said. Trust me.

Yesterday’s sausages were all gone. The vanilla rice too. Just two dark greasy stains on the rock outside the cave. Winstone hoped the kitten had got them. He imagined it tucked up in the rocks somewhere, its stripy belly stretched and fat, warm in its fur and sleeping soundly. It was cold this morning, a new kind of cold he’d felt on his cheeks, in the tip of his nose, as soon as he woke up enough to feel anything, cold enough to put his khaki fleece on and climb through the grey to the top of the gully to get warm and when he did he saw why.

There was snow on the backs of the mountains beyond the range to the west, not the usual patches but a thick cover glowing peachy yellow and pink above the shadows of ranges and valleys soft as smoke. The backs of the mountains, because Winstone had been in front of them once and there was a lake with a steamer and a wharf and an old hotel where cowboys from Califor-ni-AY stayed in the Gold Rush. Winstone had sat on the wharf watching the steamer come in and he’d looked at the old hotel with its name carved into the stone and Todd Jackson had taught him how to say it right which wasn’t how it looked at all.
I-carts,
Todd had said,
like pie carts,
and Todd laughed and Winstone didn’t know what a pie cart was but he said it like that anyway and he laughed too and the steamer took a long time to come and he looked at all those stealthy letters that made no sound until he could see them with his eyes shut.
EICHARDT’S.
It was German.

That had been a long time ago. He was behind the mountains now, at the back of beyond, and Todd wasn’t laughing any more. He wouldn’t show Winstone anything ever again, leastways nothing that Winstone wanted to see, and the last time he saw Todd was the kind of mean and maggoty thought that would eat you out and buzz in your bones if it got inside and he could feel it coming for him, crawling up the white dust road in the driver’s seat of Todd’s Pajero.

Winstone turned around and went back down to the cave and found the tin of All Day Breakfast he’d been saving and heated it up and sat in the shadowed gully and ate and waited for the world to get a little lighter.

IT’S NO GOOD,
the Kid said with his ear to the ground in the grey breaking dawn. They’re too far ahead. We’ll never make it.

You wanna give up?

No, the Kid said, and it was a lie and Coop knew it, the whole wide waking world knew it, even the buzzards up in the sky. But what do we do Coop?

Only thing we can do Kid.

And so Cooper and the Kid saddled up and rode, rode the cold trail west, away from the rising sun and into their own shadow. They had their faces to the tattering dark and the country ahead was the colour of ash and the road ran through it and out of sight and if they should ever reach its end the Kid didn’t know where they’d be and all Coop ever could or would say about it was that they’d be on the other side.

But behind them the sun was coming up and lighting the grass and pretty soon it would be on their shoulders. The Kid watched the range grow sharp and gold and the sky turn blue
and the sun warmed his back and the palomino shook the cold from his mane and stepped a little higher. The range ran forever and it was empty and free and theirs for the riding and as long and wide as it ran there was no need to stop or turn back or get anywhere because there was no place better than this and not everything had to …

Winstone froze, a chunk of All Day Breakfast sausage between his teeth. The kitten. It was creeping over the rocks, a cartoon cat, placing each paw with exaggerated care, watching him as it wound its way up and over and through to the vanilla rice stain and when it got there it sank, ears back, a pressed spring, and began to lick the stone.

Slowly, Winstone took the sausage out of his mouth and the kitten’s ears pressed even tighter to its head and its stripy tail batted side to side on the rock like a rattlesnake someone was trying to kill but the kitten stayed where it was and very gently, with just his fingers and wrist, Winstone threw the sausage onto the ground between them.

The kitten exploded out of the rocks as if the sausage had been a grenade and Winstone stared at the empty air and chewed and he half expected to see some bits of fur come down. When they didn’t, he got on with his breakfast, and he was picking the last bit of bacon out of the beans when the kitten came back, through the grass this time, stalking that Wattie’s canned sausage like it was a gazelle on the Serengeti.

The kitten snatched up the sausage and then it didn’t know what to do first, run or chew, and it glared at Winstone and hissed like it was all his fault it was in such a difficult situation. In the end, it scuttled backwards a bit and dropped the sausage
and licked it and turned it about and then ripped into it with its kitten teeth and bolted it down.

Winstone threw a bit of potato next because those weren’t as good as they sounded. The kitten seemed pretty keen on it though, so he threw it another chunk and this time he didn’t throw it as far. The kitten didn’t like that one little bit, you could tell, but it wanted that potato bad and so it had to come closer.

The kitten was right to be nervous. It was on the run too. Wanted, just dead. People were probably hunting it now, laying traps and poison. Its kind had no right of their own to a place in the world, all they did was hurt good things, lizards and birds, the things people cared about, and sometimes they enjoyed it. That’s why people wanted to destroy feral cats. ANNIHILATE them, which was another word Winstone had learned how to spell in Glentrool after Tom Barker threatened to do it to him and he’d found it in Todd’s dictionary, waiting for him between ANNEX and ANNIVERSARY, a long cold word, a line of traps around a silence.

Winstone fed the kitten all the potato and himself all the beans and by the time they were finished the kitten was really quite close. Then there was no more food and the kitten ran away but not as fast, and that afternoon when Winstone broke into the hut with the sliding door, as well as caramel condensed milk and a bottle of Coke he stole a tin of cat food.