Two Wolves (15 page)

Grey light crawled into the sky and Ben came to from a deep, eyes-wide-open doze. He looked down at Olive, who was lying across his lap, limp.

‘Olive?' he said.

He shook her gently.

‘Olive, it's day.'

She didn't seem to care. He watched her chest but he couldn't see it moving in the gloom. He put his fingers to her neck and found no pulse. Dread shot through him even though he knew that he often had trouble finding his own pulse – and he was alive. He pressed his fingers under the other side of her jaw and at last he felt the deep throb of her life against his skin and he had never been more thankful for anything.

He looked around.

Today
, he thought, and as the word came to him through the grey of early morning, he saw the silhouette of a pine tree.

Ben had not seen a pine tree in days.

He leapt from boulder to boulder, sloshed into the creek, Olive on his back. On the far side of the creek, trees gave way to the beginning of the rock wall that he knew from his days at the cabin. He laughed. It was an unhinged laughter that he had not heard from himself before.

‘This is it!' he said to Olive. Her cold, grubby cheek was pressed flat to his shoulderblade. She did not respond. ‘This is it.'

Ben stumble-ran for ten minutes in the shallows as the creek wandered deeper into the pine forest. His knees cried in pain. He could hear the waterfall. It was drawing him upstream, like a fish on a line. Soon he saw a rough dirt path beside the creek and he made good time then.

Ben thought of the police helicopter and he wished he had not been so stupid, had not hidden from the police and almost killed his sister. As he climbed the hill, past where Dad had shot the rabbit, he called out, ‘Hello!'

Birds.

‘HELLO!' he screamed.

He could feel the weight of the money rubbing at the raw place under his arm. He would hand it over if the police were there. He would tell them everything. He made it into the clearing and he looked around and he almost cried.

The police were not there and his parents were not there and the car was gone and the door of the cabin hung open. He dropped the money, lurched and swayed to the door, broken from the climb, Olive still on his back. It was mostly empty inside, cleared out apart from the furniture. How long had it been since he was here? Three days, he was pretty sure.

He laid Olive on the workbench, the bench that he had been standing on when he discovered the bag of money in the roof. He cried then. He didn't care what Dad would say any more. He cried so hard for his little sister and for his maybe-dead parents and for himself and for the whole state of the world. He cried because he knew that he and Olive would get out of this alive and because, from here on, life would have no certainty.

Outside, the birds heard him cry and the frogs stopped and listened and the trees stood darkly against the morning sky.

The creek flowed on.

Mangled steel. That's what he dreamed of as he lay on his side on the cold timber floor that night. The wrecking yard. Piles of mashed metal. Carnage. Other people's problems. When someone took their eye off the road for a moment to adjust the volume and got T-boned by a semitrailer or they ran a red light and mistimed it and hit a motorbike, that's where Dad came in. Other people's bad luck: he fed off it. He would race out there in the tow truck, pick up the car, come back, hack it up, sell it off, or crush it. He was a wrecker. That's what he did. He wrecked stuff. Mum helped. Cars, trucks, motorbikes, Ben's life, their family. Themselves. They wrecked themselves and they left Ben and Olive to deal with the mess.

And now where were they?

His eyes flicked open. It was dark. They had slept the entire day away. Ben hadn't had the energy to get Olive up to the main road. Not yet.

Olive lay next to him, sleeping on the torn canvas camp bed against the wall. He sat up and looked at her still, pale face and listened to her breathing.

Earlier in the day, they had eaten from a plastic bin bag in the corner of the cabin, food thrown out on that final night. Food from a bin was like a royal feast when you hadn't eaten real food in days. A third of a tin of apricots, the can of spray cream and an ancient tin of baked beans in the back of the scary cupboard at the rear of the cabin. But the cupboard wasn't scary any more. He was no longer afraid of the dark or of night noises.

He had given Olive small sips of water from a half-empty bottle he'd pulled out of the bin bag. She took it in drops. He fed her beans. She'd had two mouthfuls before falling into a deep sleep, breathing short, shallow breaths.

Ben had to think. The decisions he made were important. No more bad choices. It was black-dark and he did not know what the time was. His body ached with cold. He grabbed his backpack, stood, went to the table. Moonlight leaked from the window onto the work surface. He sat on the table, legs crossed, and pulled out his damp notebook and pencil. He wrote down what he thought might happen once they made it back to Nan's:

– Mum and Dad alive. Head out on the run again.

– Mum and Dad alive. In jail. Live with Nan or sent somewhere else.

– Mum and Dad dead. Live with Nan.

– Mum and Dad dead. Get sent somewhere else.

Ben read his list. He had never liked multiple-choice tests. His eyes circled back to the words ‘Mum and Dad dead'. He could not believe he had written them.

‘Not dead,'
he said to himself. ‘Parents don't just die.'

But parents don't just steal millions of dollars either. Only they do.

Ben needed to be careful. Needed to make a good choice. Would he become a wrecker, too? His parents were criminals, so he must be more likely to become one. Like father, like son. Did he have a choice or was it written in his DNA?

He turned to the bag of money, which was in the corner nearest the door. Broken zip, one handle snapped. Damaged and pathetic. An idea occurred to him. Something he would not write down. Could never write down or tell anyone except, one day, Olive. He would keep it locked in the vault of his own thoughts where no one could steal it. He sat there for a very long time watching the money, turning the idea over in his mind, twisting himself inside out.

Could he do it? Was it right? Did ‘right' matter any more?

Eventually he stood from the table. He walked across the room, bare feet on floorboards, to the yawning cupboard at the back. He reached into the blackness of it and he took out a shovel.

Ben held his arm out straight and stuck his thumb up the way he had seen it done in old movies. He had a feeling that people didn't use the thumb any more. Where Ben came from people did not hitchhike.

Olive lay at his feet in the sandstone gravel of the roadside, her head on his bare, blistered foot, eyes closed, saying nothing. That was the thing that worried him most: Olive not speaking.

He listened for the creek. As they had walked up the steep dirt road from the cabin he had listened for it till the last. Then the umbilical cord had been cut and the sound was gone. Just Ben and Olive. Now he thought he heard it again, like the distant sound of the ocean in a shell. But the sound was a car. It appeared around the big bend a couple of hundred metres up the road. A small yellow hatchback filled with passengers. It had ‘P' plates on the front and, as it passed, someone screamed at them from the window.

‘Have some water,' Ben said, bending down to offer Olive the dregs of the bottle he had found in the cabin.

She did not respond.

They waited a long time, maybe twenty-five minutes, for the sound of another engine. But what turned the bend was a motorbike, not a car, and it sped past them down the hill and away.

A week earlier Ben would have been beaten by this, would have been angry and frustrated and scared. He would have thought that the world was out to get him, but now he did not expect so much. Things could not rattle him so easily. Maybe not even death. He would not get carried away with things, good or bad.

After ten minutes another engine, louder, lower. A truck, Ben was sure. In his clouded, tired mind he calculated that there might only be two seats in a truck and some part of him gave up hope but he looked down at Olive and he knew that he had to stop the truck.

It rounded the bend, a semitrailer with a green cab and dozens of long logs on the back. Ben waved his arms wildly.

‘Help!' Ben called. ‘Stop!'

Olive was startled by the shouting and tried to stand but she faltered and dropped to her knees. Ben wanted to comfort her but he knew that his job was to get them home, to get them to Nan's. The truck moved past them and there was no way the driver could not have seen them. Ben watched the back of the truck recede, but still anger did not rise up in him.

He coughed heavily. His lungs ached.

Red lights and a deep groan a hundred metres further on, before the steep hill that led to the faraway bend. The truck's red brake lights. Maybe just slowing for the hill, Ben figured, but then it pulled to the side, rocks kicking up, indicator on.

‘This is us.' Even as he said the words, Ben did not believe them.

Olive didn't seem to hear him. She was lying down again so he scooped her off the ground, balancing her across his arms as he walk-ran toward the truck, which was still slowing, half-on, half-off the road. Every molecule of energy left in his starving, exhausted, bleeding body went into that run.

He reached the truck as it finally pulled up with a
sssss
and a crunch of tyres on gravel. He ran alongside the truck and the driver watched him in the dirty passenger-side mirror. The door popped open and swung over Ben's head. The driver – neatly shaven, brown shirt, sunglasses, kind of old-fashioned-looking – met them with a smile. He had good teeth, Ben noticed. He would have thought that truck drivers didn't brush their teeth very often, but this one did. 

‘Thank you,' Ben said.

The driver looked down at them, at their dirty, ragged clothes. ‘You lost?'

‘Sort of,' Ben said.