The Choke Page 11

  ‘Fuck. You there when they do it?’

  ‘You ask me the same questions every time,’ said Aunty Rita. ‘I was wondering how long it would take you. Yeah, I am there. It’s over pretty fast. They feel better. A lot of them want more. They come back for it. It’s their choice.’

  ‘Not all of them have a choice,’ said Dad. ‘You zap ’em anyway, right?’

  ‘You know, shock therapy would be good for you, Ray,’ said Aunty Rita. ‘Take the edge off.’

  ‘You two…’ Pop warned.

  Ray said, ‘Where are you living, Rita?’

  ‘You know where I’m living, same place.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Dad. ‘But you’re not living there by yourself anymore, are you?’

  The crackle from the fire seemed to spread across the Three. Pop said, ‘Get us a beer from the esky, will you, Ray?’

  ‘Some already here,’ said Dad, leaning over and picking up a beer from beside his chair. He passed it to Pop. ‘Who are you living with, Rita?’ Dad asked again. ‘What was her name? Wasn’t it Naomi? She moved in, didn’t she?’

  Pop’s Three felt loaded; the crickets in the grass and the possums asleep in the trees and the hens pecking at our feet could be blasted into the air and cover us in feathers and blood and chicken eye.

  Aunty Rita said, ‘Yeah, that’s her name. Naomi. It was Naomi who told me I should come. She said to sort things out.’

  Pop breathed out hard, got up and walked to the fence. He stood looking at the other side.

  Aunty Rita said, ‘What are you trying to start, Ray?’

  ‘Not trying to start anything. Just asking. It’s polite to ask.’

  Pop came back. He sat down. ‘Better get on to that pipe by the shed, Ray. Better fix the bloody leak.’

  Dad wasn’t listening. He said, ‘She’s pretty, that Naomi, from the picture you showed me last night, Rita. Real pretty.’ He nodded. ‘I’d ask her out.’ My dad was the biggest at the fire. His muscles told the story of his strength; strung around him, under his skin, tying him together. The Worlley brothers and Kirk and Steve did what he said. Everybody did. He could say what he liked. It was only Aunty Rita who couldn’t see how strong he was.

  She said, ‘She is really pretty, Ray. And she’s all mine, so don’t you ever look at her or I’ll rip your fucken head off.’ Aunty Rita was the only one in the whole world who wasn’t scared of my dad. She was older than him; she had come first and seen more and knew more. Aunty Rita and Ray’s eyes were the same colour, but Aunty Rita’s sparkled with volts. She knew the supply and it was Ray who was scared of Rita.

  Pop stood again. ‘That’s enough,’ he said.

  ‘What’s enough?’ said Aunty Rita, turning sharply to Pop.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘No, Dad, what is it you are talking about?’

  ‘I thought that business was finished.’

  ‘What business?’

  ‘That bloody business. I thought it was done.’

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  ‘I thought that’s why you came.’

  Aunty Rita’s mouth dropped open. ‘You thought that’s why I came? Because I’m straight now?’

  ‘Don’t…’ said Pop.

  Ray leaned back in his chair like he was watching a show.

  ‘Don’t what, Dad?’ Her face was turning red.

  ‘Don’t push me, Rita.’

  ‘Or what? Or what, Dad? You going to punch me?’ She stood. My heart was racing.

  ‘Get out of my house!’

  ‘Or what? Or what, Dad?’ she shouted. ‘What are you going to do to me, Dad? What you did to my mother?’ Her voice filled the yard, rose up over the river. It reached the crowns of the trees, it travelled the passages and up into the sky. ‘Why can’t you say it? Why can’t you say it, you gutless fuck!’

  I was afraid for Pop’s Three.

  ‘So why’d you come all the bloody way here? No one asked you. I didn’t ask you. Better for us all if you stay there.’

  Aunty Rita walked away from the fire towards the house.

  I ran after her. ‘Aunty Rita!’ I called. She swung around and breathed in like she’d been stabbed.

  ‘Oh, Justine.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ I said.

  ‘Come back here, Justine!’ said Pop. ‘Leave your Aunty Rita alone. Now!’

  I looked at my Aunty Rita. Her eyes were red and there were red patches on her cheeks. She looked back at me and swallowed. She said, ‘Justine, I’m sorry.’

  My eyes stung and prickled. ‘Aunty Rita…’

  ‘Justine!’ Pop called. ‘Get back here, now.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Aunty Rita. ‘You better do what he says.’

  ‘I want to go with you,’ I said. ‘Can I go with you?’

  Aunty Rita shook her head ‘Oh, Justine…’

  Dad came to us and he said, ‘You better leave, Rita.’

  ‘Fuck off, Ray,’ said Aunty Rita. ‘You’re a bastard, you know that? I always think there might be more…’ I heard tears in her voice. ‘But no, there isn’t.’ She turned away from us both and went to the back door. I tried to follow her but Dad put his hand down hard on my shoulder.

  Dad kept me by the fire while she packed.

  ‘Can I say goodbye to her?’ I asked. I felt as if a weight was pressing on my chest. ‘Dad?’

  ‘Christ,’ said Dad. ‘If it will stop you whingeing.’

  I ran through the house into the spare room. Aunty Rita was writing something on a piece of paper. She said, ‘Justine,’ and put her arms around me.

  ‘Aunty Rita.’ My words were muffled in her shirt, against her neck.

  Aunty Rita held me tight. ‘Justine, I’m sorry. Your dad and me…Don’t worry about it. We always fight, okay? Ever since we were kids. He’s still my brother.’ She touched my cheek. ‘I wish I could see you more.’ Her voice went thick. She sniffed, pulling back tears. ‘Justine, I have to go home, but I’m going to give you a phone number, okay? Two phone numbers—one is for where I work, at the Gladesville Hospital.’

  ‘Tarban Creek?’

  ‘That’s right. And the other one is home. You don’t need to tell anyone. I’m just going to give them to you. I want you to keep the numbers and use them if you need to, okay?’ She took my hand and pressed the piece of paper into it. ‘It shouldn’t be this way, Justine. It’s…not right.’

  She held me to her. I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t have words.

  Aunty Rita looked into my eyes. ‘I will write to you, okay? I’ll ring you too. You’re going to be okay, aren’t you?’

  I didn’t want her to leave.

  ‘I’m sorry, Justine.’

  Aunty Rita stood. I held the paper with her numbers. She went out through the front door.

  From my window I watched Aunty Rita’s car drive away from Pop’s down the Henley Trail. I kept watching until she crossed the bridge and then I couldn’t see her anymore. I sat on my bed. There wasn’t one thing to do. I sat for a long time. My room was still; it was only the sunroom in the morning—in the afternoon the room was in shadow. What was there to do? There wasn’t one thing.

  19.

  I lay on the bed holding Aunty Rita’s numbers. I didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t know the order of the numbers. I looked up at the fan hanging from the ceiling. The fan had never worked; it had been still so long there were cobwebs slung between the blades. I stood on the bed, reached up and put Aunty Rita’s piece of paper on top of one of the blades. When I sat back down on the bed I could still see a corner. I lay on my bed looking at the corner of paper for a long time and then I fell asleep. In my dream Aunty Rita and Naomi were riding a horse down a road—Aunty Rita was in front, Naomi was behind. Naomi held a baby wrapped in a red blanket. I waved and called to them, but they didn’t hear or notice. They kept riding. The road was made of muddy water.

  When I woke it was dark. I got up and went into the hall. The only light came from Pop’s
door. I pushed it open and saw Pop lying on his bed. ‘What the hell for? Give me one reason…one good reason.’

  I said, ‘Pop?’

  ‘Ah! Christ!’ he said. ‘Christ!’

  ‘Are you alright, Pop?’

  ‘Get me a beer.’

  ‘Do you want something to eat?’

  ‘I want a beer.’

  I went to the laundry, switched on the light and took a beer from the esky. Then I went back to his room. I smelled something sour.

  ‘Bloody kids,’ he said. ‘Where’s the trust? What was it for? Answer me that, goddamn you! Whole damn lot of you! One good reason!’

  ‘There you go, Pop,’ I said, putting the can of beer on the table beside his bed. He rolled over and I saw the tracks that he laid in Burma in his face. I saw the river of blood and the good boys and the Japs. They charged down the grooves in Pop’s cheeks and chin and forehead.

  I went into the yard. Dad’s truck wasn’t parked down the side and there was no light coming from the back-house. I stirred the coals of the fire—orange under the grey. I sat on Pop’s camp chair. Mosquitoes flew around my face.

  I got up and crossed to the chook run. The gate creaked as I pulled it open. I took a breath and smelled the chooks inside, sweet and soft. I breathed them in—shit and straw and feathers. I went closer to the bar where they roosted. I could see the outline of Cockyboy in the dark. He clucked and shuffled. ‘It’s okay, Cockyboy,’ I whispered. ‘It’s only me, Justine.’ Cockyboy was quiet. I sat down close to the boxes where three of the Isa Browns were sleeping. I leaned in. I could see Pop’s Missy. I put my hands on her—at first she jumped, so I smoothed my hands over her wings the way Pop did. ‘Sssshhh, Missy, it’s only me, your friend Justine, shhhhh.’ I picked her up. She didn’t try to escape, staying calm in my hands as I slid to the ground. I put the hen in my lap. I could feel the bones of Missy Isa Brown’s chest through her feathers, and the heart beating behind the bones.

  On Saturday Kirk and Steve and me were out the front of Pop’s Three. Kirk stood on the top beam of Pop’s fence, arms outstretched. ‘Aunty Rita’s a lesbian,’ he said.

  I tried to pull myself up. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A slut,’ he said, kicking at my hand.

  I looked up at him, shielding my eyes from the glare. ‘Is that what Pop said, that she’s a slut?’

  ‘Yeah, he did. He said it when he was at the pub with Sandy, and Stan heard and told Mum. He said Rita was a lesbian.’

  ‘But what’s a lesbian?’ I asked.

  ‘I dunno,’ he said, jumping down from the rail. ‘A dog.’

  20.

  The next morning I was in the yard eating Rice Bubbles when the back-house door opened. Dad stepped out wearing only shorts. He came down the steps and sat on his camp chair under the window. He took his leather pouch from his pocket and rolled a White Ox. I could feel him watching me.

  ‘Come over here,’ he said.

  I put my bowl down and walked across the yard.

  Dad pulled back on his cigarette. ‘Want to do something today, just you and me?’ He blew a stream of smoke into the sky.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Dad took another drag and blew a smoke ring into the air. ‘You used to love these, Justine,’ he said, blowing more rings. ‘You tried to put your finger through ’em before they disappeared. Remember?’ He put his finger through one of the rings. ‘Get your shoes on and get in the truck.’ He stood and went inside the back-house.

  I was on the step doing the laces of my shoes when Pop came into the kitchen. He rubbed his eyes and pulled his dressing-gown around him. ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘Going out with Dad,’ I said.

  Pop frowned. ‘Since when?’

  Dad came up to the kitchen wearing his jeans and shirt.

  ‘Where are you taking Justine?’ Pop asked.

  ‘For a drive.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Nowhere, Pop. Just a drive.’

  ‘When are you back?’

  ‘Won’t be long,’ said Dad. ‘We’ll stop by the bakery and pick up something for lunch.’

  Pop frowned again. Was I meant to do what Pop wanted or what Ray wanted? When Dad was home nobody was sure. ‘Aren’t you low on fuel, son?’

  ‘Plenty of fuel.’

  Dad drove the truck down the Henley Trail then out onto the highway. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked him. He didn’t answer. Soon he drove off the highway and along another dirt road. I held on to the door as the truck bumped on the stones and potholes. We drove deeper into the bush, shrubs and thin trees pressing in on the truck. There were rocks on the ground between the bushes. The truck bumped and creaked. Dad drove off the dirt road into a clearing. He stopped the truck and pulled on the handbrake, then he opened his door and got out. I did the same. I didn’t know why we were here or what we were doing.

  Dad went around to the tray of his pickup and pulled out a big box of bottles and cans. I followed him deeper into the bush. Dad stopped beside some rocks. He said, ‘Stay here.’ He went ahead about the same distance as Pop’s yard, before he turned around to face me. ‘This is your target line,’ he called out. ‘Get a feel for the distance.’ He put the box down and took out paint cans and bottles. He lined all the bottles beside each other along one rock, then he lined up the paint cans along another. ‘Come here,’ he called to me and I went down to him. ‘When you practise you dig your targets into the ground, see.’ He pushed a bottle deeper into the dirt. ‘Put ’em in an inch or two, you got it? If you don’t dig ’em in, even a missed shot’ll knock ’em over.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked Dad.

  ‘You’re going to learn how to shoot,’ he said.

  It was Kirk who wanted to learn how to shoot. If you gave Kirk anything—a pencil, a spoon, a ruler—he’d turn it into a gun. Danny’s uncle promised he would teach them. He said he was going to come to Victoria when the shearing season was over in Gympie, but Danny didn’t know when that was.

  I followed Dad back to the truck. ‘What about Kirk and Steve?’

  ‘This is where I learned to shoot when I was a kid.’ It was as if he couldn’t hear me. Nothing I did or said changed anything. ‘The old man showed me. Never told Mum about it, of course.’ Whenever Dad talked about his mother he spoke softly, as if he was praying. Lizzy died before he was ready. Before then, Pop told the chooks, Ray was no trouble at all. What a kid. But he left the hospital and that was it, a part of that boy was buried with his mother. And it was the best part, let me tell you, chook chook chook. The best part of Ray went into the grave that day.

  Dad opened the passenger door and took something from the glove box. He said, ‘Come here.’ I went over to him and he unwrapped a piece of sacking. There was a gun in his hands. Dad held it up and turned it slowly in the air, as if it was an old friend who he liked and missed. ‘Meet the Smith,’ he said. He wasn’t saying it to me, but at the same time he was.

  ‘What about Kirk?’ I said.

  Dad said, ‘Hold out your hands.’

  He put the Smith in my open hands. They dropped down with the weight.

  ‘Heavier than you think, hey?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Feel the barrel.’

  I touched the gun.

  ‘Not the cylinder. The barrel. Here.’ He put my fingers on the barrel. It was smooth and cold. ‘Pull the trigger,’ he said. ‘Feel how much it takes.’

  I pulled the trigger. It was hard to pull back. The Smith was smaller than Pop’s pistols, and thicker. Kirk and Steve would like to meet the Smith. Kirk would ask questions about where it came from and what did Dad shoot and how did you load it and when did you get it and what sort of bullets did it take. Dad mightn’t answer but Kirk would keep asking until Dad gave him something, just one thing, even if it was small, he’d keep asking, Kirk wouldn’t give up. Steve would stand behind Kirk and wait for what
ever might be left over.

  ‘Turn it round and take a look at it from the other end, Justine,’ said Dad.

  I turned the Smith around so that I was looking down the barrel.

  ‘How does it feel?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘You don’t ever want to find yourself looking into a gun from the wrong end.’ Dad took the gun from my hand. ‘Chances are it’ll be the last thing you see.’ He pulled at a small lever at the top of the gun. ‘That’s your hammer,’ he said. ‘That’s what lights her up. Once you know your gun it’s pretty simple: you point her at the target and pull the trigger. With the Smith you’ll need both hands. The gun kicks back, just to let you know she’s done what you asked her.’ Dad gave me the gun again.

  He went to the truck and came back with a small box. ‘Bullets,’ he said. He took the Smith from me and opened the cylinder. ‘Bullets go in here,’ he said, and stuck a bullet into each hole of the cylinder. ‘As long as you can count up to six you’ll be alright. You can do that, can’t you?’

  There was nobody here in the bush with my dad but me, and still it was as if I wasn’t there. My dad could have been talking to himself, or an audience of a thousand—but it wasn’t to me. He closed the cylinder and locked it into place. Then he held up the gun, lifted the hammer and aimed. He said, ‘Once she’s loaded, only point the barrel at something you want to kill.’

  I saw him up on Silver’s back, galloping along the Henley Trail, his Smith held high, like John Wayne when he was Rooster Cogburn. Only point it at something you want to kill, he shouted as he galloped past the audience.

  He took me by the shoulders, stood beside me, and turned me to face the bottles and cans. ‘You think the sound’ll knock your head off, but it won’t, trust me. Bottles first. Watch.’

  He held the gun up and out with his arm long and straight, and looked down the barrel towards the bottles and cans. His eyes narrowed.

  Then he pulled the trigger. The sound was so loud it felt like it burst my head. I heard glass break. I stepped away from him, holding my hands over my ears as Dad shot five more times. Bang bang bang bang bang. The sound of breaking glass filled the bush. My head pounded.