Pepsi Bears and Other Stories Page 4

  And here it is again. That empty feeling. Another of life’s most beloved identities is being taken away … the fearless warrior. Another loved one dead. Because he knows he will not be able to truly believe in himself as warrior anymore, after this. Having been publicly humiliated by this fat man. Having found himself impotent while the fat man lies there with wood. How will he ever be able to wink at himself in those gym mirrors again after this? The untimely death of his warrior-self makes the muscled-up dude want to cry.

  The fat man risks another slit of vision. The dude with the dragon is still there. He closes that eye.

  The deep shame of the dude, those first fifty metres or so, as he walks away, concentrating on keeping his steps even and his face from twitching. Those watching him retreat think of a wolf that has attacked a skunk or porcupine and come away bewildered. The dude has tangled with a fat man, malodorous and cowardly, locked safe in his impenetrable indignity. He carries an unresolved anger up the beach, which will likely be used on someone who has enough dignity not to hibernate through danger.

  It is beyond dusk when the fat man opens his eyes, gazes around and finds the people gone. He is alone, hungry and thirsty. The turtle suffers for his sanctuary. But nothing two souvlakis and a couple of litres of Coke won’t alleviate. He rises and folds his chair, tucks it under his arm and walks from the beach slowly, grandly, his back straight and his chin high, like a man going to meet fates. He must suit up and write some blurbs tonight. He looks about and in the gloaming finds this a scruffy, unlovely beach. He will not return.

  House of stolen dogs.

  The shoeless German boy lost his dog at least once a week, which was fun for me. He’d wander our neighborhood calling, ‘Villi … Villi…’ Villi wasn’t a bad dog but he sniffed bitches on the breeze and was conscripted by his libido to sally forth and wage a courtship. He was a scruffy yellow terrier, as important as a duke, with an incurable ache. My Uncle Don, though a redhead, had a similar importance and ache, so I knew the type.

  I was two years older than Villi’s owner, the shoeless German boy. And I was grandly conceived, a lawyer’s son, who knew myself superior to the other people of Shepparton. As the shoeless German boy went past my front gate calling for his dog I said to him, ‘Villi is mine doch.’

  He must have known it was coming, but he always fell for it. His eyes filled with hurt. ‘No. Villi is mine doch.’

  ‘I have Villi in mine house.’ My house was the town’s largest, a double-storey fortress of brick and tile in a deep garden which Talinga Crescent wrapped around like a moat. A brooding, dark building likely to be crammed with pilfered terriers.

  ‘No. But Villi is mine doch.’ The German boy blinked at my house, bewildered at the pleasures corrupting Villi in there. With what exotic delights was that pooch being spoiled? Tinned food? A bone? A ball? The shoeless German boy’s house was a tiny effort of cement sheet and tin. In a mansion like mine Villi would quickly be ruined for the kind of life lived there. The shoeless German boy began to cry, pouting viciously at the wonderland of my garden where endless fun could be had. ‘Can I have my Villi?’

  ‘No,’ I said sadly, shaking my head. ‘Villi is mine doch now.’

  The war was only twenty years over and krauts were still on the nose, so there was no reason not to break a shoeless German boy’s heart. I would usually continue teasing him until I was called for tea or Villi came staggering home from his debauch. Then the shoeless German boy would chase Villi down into a hug and flee with him past the blacks’ camp across Quinane Parade and on into the broken wilds of the Housing Commission estate.

  It was October 1969 when Villi caused a race riot. Or anyway, what a senator from Queensland wanting to sully Victoria’s reputation so his state wouldn’t be lone exemplar of racism in the Commonwealth stood up in Federal Parliament and called a race riot, before mentioning the hospitalisation of eighteen people. At our town council’s next meeting my dad rose to his feet and said this senator’s allegation was an unwanted goddamned blot on us, and most of the hospitalisations were anyway from a house collapsing amid the confusion, and what had occurred was really just an oversized kerfuffle caused by international athletes and a dog and, naturally enough, the out-of-control good-for-nothing aboriginal youth of our town. He then proposed the purchase of a water cannon to make sure such a kerfuffle wouldn’t occur again. His proposal made the Melbourne papers and he was called a Boer by pinko-bastards. But I was proud of him. Me and my friends couldn’t wait for the arrival of this new ordnance. Water cannon. We had visions of black kids spun and flung across the streets, scrabbling at the footpaths with their fingernails, their features distorted in the deluge. To us, convening in our tree-huts and vacant blocks, there wasn’t any racial or social problem that couldn’t be cleared up by water cannon.

  We were jealous of the black kids, whose fathers were barbarous and drunk all week long, making them truant and free. Our fathers were forced by convention or expectation or women or some other constriction to confine their barbarism and drunkenness to weekends, leaving them sober five days of seven and us suffering a reign of refinement: shoes, school, household jobs, combed hair, visits to grandparents, peeling the Virginia creeper off the chimneys of the cottages of maiden aunts. We hated the black kids for every indignity heaped upon us.

  Most of our town’s blackfellas lived not far from me. Talinga Crescent ran off Quinane Parade and on the other side of Quinane Parade the land dropped away into river flats where the State Government had built a flood-prone fibro cement settlement for the traditional owners. The homes were broken now and dead cars and fridges lay in the yards where the earth was barer than the earth anywhere else.

  In most towns a yellow terrier couldn’t spark either a race riot or an oversized kerfuffle, I suppose. So I have to admit our town had some tensions. And probably Villi blundering home with a smile on his face was more or less just a flashpoint for them.

  His urges had been momentarily placated by Myrna Stuart’s pedigree black poodle Charlize, who not only shared a hairstyle with Roberta Flack but the hankering for free love that woman sang of in her hits. Villi had breached the Stuarts’ chain-link fence, Charlize’s chook-wire cage, and her counterarguments, if any. Now happily fatigued, he wandered home. I believe he was mentally waving at adoring crowds as he walked along. Or perhaps he was replaying Charlize’s conniptions, marvelling at her ways. Whatever, his distraction was deep, his reverie impervious to the pelleton.

  The pelleton. It appeared once a year, like Christmas. My father spoke of it with awe, as if it were some supernatural beast. ‘Quick. Finish your cereal; the pelleton will be here soon. It just went through Mooroopna.’

  This was the sixties and colour hadn’t come to our world yet. Shepparton was dull-toned as a Gallipoli photo. Blue jeans were thought dangerously festive, possibly linked to Melbourne. We dressed in browns and greys. Our houses were cream or fawn or tan. The only adult who ever wore a primary colour was Santa.

  But once a year this pelleton more gaudy than a flock of rosellas flew through the town and we all turned out to cheer it. Reds and golds and greens and blues. One rider was covered in purple polka-dots on a white base. Champions branded with the names of mighty and mysterious corporations: Postale, Rabobank, Peugeot, Giro, Lampre-Fondital. It was rumoured these men were so focused on victory they urinated while riding without stopping pedalling. Not even kamikaze pilots went that far.

  The Sun Tour seemed like part of the space race to us. Supreme heroes from advanced countries. The quicksilver whirr and flash of their spokes. Their shiny helmets and skin-tight nylons. You could hear them talking to each other in alien tongues as they flashed past. This was the future visiting Shepparton. A tight stampede of cosmonauts blasting through our town. None of us breathed as they rode past.

  The day of the race riot or oversized kerfuffle we bolted our breakfast and got out to Quinane Parade to wait. People lined the road as far as you could see. Ahead of the pelleton, clear
ing the way, came a Sun Tour utility with lights flashing, moving fast, a man leaning out the window with a megaphone alternating warnings to ‘Step back. Step back off the road. Here they come’ with an invitation to ‘Say hello to Miss Shepparton, Debbie Ramsay’. Miss Shepparton was standing in the back of the ute on the point of tears, waving frantically at her subjects with one hand and clinging to the roof rack with the other while her hairdo was demolished by wind.

  Then the pelleton itself. Forty gods at breakneck speed. And Villi, his senses dulled by fornication, his mind set on getting home, staggered out into their path. I don’t believe any dog was ever better loved by his owner than Villi was loved by that shoeless German boy, whose name I never bothered to ask. I owned several dogs myself and threw more sticks at them than for them. But that shoeless German boy, seeing Villi in danger … he called his name and ran to him.

  The pelleton, which I had thought bristling with individual genius, was actually a flock. When the leading rider veered left, his evasive action became a contagion and the others followed. The pelleton went west off Quinane Parade down the slope onto the river flat and into a fibro cement shack that belonged to an aboriginal elder known as Lost Billy. Most of the riders flew head-first through the fibro wall of his sitting room. It was like drumfire as they hit that shack one after another so rapid and uniform, not a shout or a squawk from their lips, just thud, thud, thud and shattering cement sheet and breaking glass as they disappeared inside.

  Lost Billy could take or leave supreme athletes, so he hadn’t bothered to come out to watch the pelleton. It was superheroes he loved. He was inside sitting cross-legged on his living-room floor watching Batman on TV with a flagon of sherry in his lap when nylon-clad cyclists began flying helmet-first through the wall. Drunk, watching Batman hoodwink evil masterminds, it naturally seemed to Lost Billy as if a phalanx of super heroes had been sooled onto him by a Chief Commissioner acting on the will of the people. In these garish athletes he recognised The Green Lantern and Captain America and The Silver Surfer and The Flash and Superman and Spiderman. Seeing the odds, he scrambled to his feet and put his hands up, shouting, ‘You got me. No need for your webs. No need for your rays. I’ll go peaceful.’ (Ever after if a cop was arresting Lost Billy he’d ask if he wanted to do it the easy way, or the hard way, ‘With webs, Lost Billy … and rays.’)

  Perhaps thirty men flew through the wall of his shack at sixty kilometres per hour. It was something to see, and I was up on my toes wide-eyed. The dwelling was severely wounded and began to list. Lost Billy stood among the pelleton in his living room, surrendering as they began to disentangle themselves from the wreckage and get to their feet, swearing in a dozen languages, shaking their broken bikes at each other, flaunting the carnage. Then the roof came down on them and the pelleton was crushed and I was slapped on the ear by the widow Long for laughing.

  Disgruntled blackfellas began to drift up from everywhere once the house caved in. To them it must have seemed as if hundreds of whitefellas had gathered to watch a black man’s domestic bliss get shattered in a new and devilish way. It must have seemed like the town council had met and decided to fix Lost Billy once and for all using a cavalry charge of gaudy runts. There were white kids laughing and hooting openly in the crowd.

  Lost Billy’s people sprang to his defence. Thirty white men had attacked one old black man. A low and cowardly intrigue. Lost Billy might have taken to drink and superheroes, but people still bore a faint memory of a faint respect they once had for him. So they began to lay about the cyclists with knuckle and stick and the pelleton scattered like wedding rice up onto Quinane Parade, where the townsfolk defended them and the altercation bred into scuffles and skirmishes of a general nature, people kicking and swinging punches and brandishing fence-pickets, old scores being settled. In the mayhem someone laid out the widow Long from behind with a sun-brittle garden hose. She had enemies.

  Seeing it had got to where widows lay in gutters, my father ran for his gun cupboard and began to loose birdshot over the melee, which didn’t slow proceedings so much as make the participants conduct their endeavours in a crouch like they were fighting in a wine cellar.

  Most of the violence this day was blackfella-versus-whitefella, and may, at a stretch, if you were visiting from Queensland, have appeared like races rioting one against another. So I was pleased to see that when the Sun Tour utility realised it had lost its pelleton and pulled over, clods and driveway gravel rattled down on Miss Shepparton in an assault that wasn’t race-based in any way. People of every colour passed judgment on her via a general bombardment. And from beneath a substantial helmet of ruined hair she shouted at them, her subjects, to go get knotted and called them a pack of dickheads. Being a boy who enjoyed stories of kings and queens walking to the guillotine in brave silence, her rantings were the low point of the day for me.

  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 pr
esent 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.