Pepsi Bears and Other Stories Page 5

  Villi squirmed in my arms and licked my face as we walked away, not wanting to go with me. I held him tight and whispered to him to cut it out you ignorant little bastard. When I finally reached my house and walked inside I dropped Villi on the kitchen floor and slumped beside him on the lino. I was shaking and I began to cry. I was angry at the shoeless German kid for making me do it. And I was angry at myself for doing it. I told myself I only did it because I liked Villi as a dog and I was going to keep him and teach him cool stuff and sool him onto cats and that shoeless German kid if he ever came around.

  That night there was a faint knock at our front door. The German kid was wearing old shoes that I guess he’d stolen off someone’s front veranda. He had his shirt buttoned right up to his Adam’s apple. ‘Did the cop hurt you?’ He shook his head. ‘He’s upstairs. You want to come up and get him?’ I asked. He shook his head. No kid from the housing commission had ever been upstairs anywhere. They thought me a daredevil for living in a two-storey building. I brought Villi down on a lead and handed the lead to the German kid. The dog was happy to see him, jumping and wagging and barking. Then he stopped suddenly and sniffed at the shoes the kid was wearing. ‘I am for having shoes now,’ the German kid said to us. No one was going to shoot this kid’s dog.

  A zebra in no man’s land.

  She died young, never really knowing happiness, but holding her head high all the same. And such was her dignity on her last day she was able to shame twenty-thousand men, a feat that gives her a special place in my heart. I can think of no other zebra who has shamed as many as a dozen.

  As a filly she was gifted by the Governor of the new Protectorate of Uganda in 1914 to a visiting party of exploration geologists from the state of Victoria, Australia. New Uganda and old England were hoping to become coal-rich, but, sadly, at the cost of one zebra, the Australian geologists pronounced the soils of the protectorate ‘eminently devoid’ of sub-bituminous materials. She was shipped back from Africa with the party of geologists on the liner Nyx and, upon docking in Melbourne, was presented by that party, which had no use for a zebra, to its patron, the Governor of Victoria, Sir Welsley Bolt. People gave Sir Welsley many animals and it was his habit to call them rare jewels and name them. He pronounced this zebra a rare jewel of Africa and named her Nyx.

  Today a powerful man might give his son a sports car as a symbol of his own status. For if the lad drives a red Ferrari or a black Porsche doesn’t it redound to his own glory? Imagine the pride Sir Welsley must have felt when he bestowed on his eight-year-old son Albert this exotic striped equine of Africa and watched him trot the lawns of Government House among his friends on their dun-coloured ponies and piebald Shetlands.

  Next day little Albert, in his knickerbockers and waistcoat, had Nyx saddled and rode the stripy wonder down from Government House into Richmond to his college as people waved and hurrahed him and stood agape and called their families from their houses to see. Albert patted her mane and waved back and, figuring the people would want to know, called, ‘A zebra. Denizen of the Dark Continent.’

  But the hollow-gutted dogs of Richmond, rather than smelling a denizen, smelt a zebra. In a pack they came howling and snarling and leaping at her and little Albert was carried away into Fitzroy at a gallop with his arms around her neck and his legs flapping behind.

  The shaken boy and the flighty beast were returned to Sir Welsley by the police. The zebra was clearly too dangerous to ride, so Sir Welsley released her into the Botanical Gardens to lend those concocted wilds an authentic flavour. Whereupon she lay waste the rhododendrons and agapanthus and with a bray to frighten a lion sent the Box Hill Ladies Art Group stampeding through their easels and into a bamboo thicket where they were snagged by their ankle-length dresses and puffy sleeves and wailed undiscovered for hours while their bladders swelled, until finally they wriggled from their clothes and crept through the gardens in their underthings and formed an orderly queue behind a sequoia as if it were a bluestone water-closet.

  After this disgrace Nyx was donated quietly to a travelling dramaturge. A man with snowy hair who had adopted the stage name Winslow Swiggins and owned a gaudy red wagon that housed a puppet show called The Dad and Dave Biffo Ripper. The zebra trod the dirt roads of provincial Victoria, grazing the yellow grasses, exchanging snickers with farm horses, pulling the puppet theatre behind, a sight so strange even shearers wandered out of pubs to see her.

  The puppet show itself was not complicated. It consisted of a puppet-Dad committing woody domestic violence on a puppet-Mum and a puppet-Mabel for a variety of paltry offences. The puppet-Dad hit his womenfolk hilariously with a club upwards of three hundred times during the performance, before they stole upon him in his sleep and slit his throat to the cheers of the children and the contentment of the female part of the audience who nodded their heads and pursed their lips, but who then got their comeuppance when the bed-sheet was thrown back in the last act and it was revealed that the puppet-Mum and the puppet-Mabel had killed the puppet-Dave by mistake. Which contented the male half of the audience and seemed such a profound lesson against attacking sleeping husbands they nodded their heads and called to their loved ones, ‘See, woman? See?’

  The Biffo Ripper had always gone down well in the bush and provided Winslow Swiggins with a decent living. Now, with a zebra pulling the wagon it was an even more exotic entertainment and drew larger crowds. Winslow Swiggins sold sugar cubes to the children and they placed them on their quaking palms and fed them to the zebra, squealing as her lips reached for them.

  Business was good. But there was something troubling the puppeteer. He noticed his audience had begun to drift away during the Biffo Ripper to gaze at and fondle his zebra. Sometimes half the crowd would be gathered around the beast stroking her stripes and sniffing her flanks by the time the bed-sheets were pulled back to reveal the murdered puppet-Dave. Every day Winslow worked up a lather buffeting the wooden womenfolk and here now these hayseeds were more fascinated by his zebra than his art.

  Call it professional jealousy, but the man was wounded. He had always been the star of his theatre and was not about to share top-billing with a dandified mule at the age of sixty-two. In the riverside town of Echuca he went to the hardware store and bought a gallon of Croft’s Wood Stain and a brush and took Nyx down to the river and in the shade of the redgums painted her as brown as every other wagon-pulling nag in the district. She would not upstage Winslow Swiggins again. And, who knows, the zebra may well have thought herself cursed by her exotic looks, always admired for her stripes instead of her inner beauty, and may have been pleased at her new appearance.

  If he had not made her a horse he might have kept her. Likely the war did not want zebras. But in 1916 the horses of Australia were being chewed up by the guns of France. Many had left these shores already and many remounts were needed to feed the great carnivore in Europe. A gang of Commonwealth Purchasing Officers was scouring the district at the time for horses. Leading a string of misshapen compulsory-purchase nags they overtook Nyx and Winslow and the Dad and Dave Biffo Ripper on the Echuca–Swan Hill track.

  Scratching their heads, they inspected her. She didn’t look good in brown. She was short-legged and potbellied, but seemed to have good wind, hard hooves and iron legs that could obviously pull a load. They offered Winslow twenty-five pounds, and while Winslow Swiggins counted himself a man of principle, he was hardly going to complain about an Australian Army promissory note for twenty-five pounds for a horse that came into his possession as a gratis zebra. ‘Her name is “Nyx”,’ Winslow told them. ‘She likes sugar cubes.’

  ‘She’ll get plenty sugar cubes in France,’ the Chief Purchasing Officer told Winslow before offering to have Nyx pull Winslow and his theatre to the next town. Fearing discovery, the impresario thought he’d wait alongside the road and see what turned up. As they rode away he sat on his wagon steps wondering at the durability of Croft’s Wood Stain and whether he had just committed fraud on the Commonwealth in a ti
me of war.

  Nyx was branded with the government broad arrow and the initials of the purchasing officer and an army number on one hoof and slung by rope-and-pulley with a harness beneath her belly once more into the dark hold of a liner. This time she was surrounded by many horses, all similarly doomed.

  She arrived at Ypres in Belgium three months later and was put to work carting water through the mud to the front line and exchanging it for wounded men who she carted to the rear. Her driver was a young private from Sydney who had been extracted from an orphanage with the promise of avenging an insult the Kaiser had offered his King. The orphanage had named him after a brand of cigarettes, Wild Woodbine. Private Woodbine, on the troop transport before he went to sleep at night, imagined himself duelling the portly Kaiser of the newspaper comics with a rapier, dancing around that buffoon and slicing his finery to shreds. He was disappointed in Belgium. It was not a duel with rapiers, trench warfare.

  The earth at Ypres was churned to bottomless mud by rain and bombardment, and men and horses and guns and wagons began to sink beyond sight. A horse pulling loads through this would soon be broken, lame, shot and pushed into a shell crater. Wild dreaded this. Having never had a living thing in his charge he fell in love with Nyx quickly and tried to shield her from overwork and shells and disease. He gave her wisps of mattress stuffing stolen from a billet in a village to the rear and rubbed his hands along her back and apologised for what he was making her do. But one day soon they would be going home to Sydney where there would be girls for Wild and grass for Nyx and peace from the shells and bullets.

  Nyx pulled the water to the front line and the wounded to the rear and chewed wisps of seaweed mattress stuffing. She had once been a wild zebra. Once been part of a governor’s retinue. Once been in show business. Now she was a brown horse in a World War.

  After weeks hauling the dead through the Ypres mud one of Nyx’s stripy socks began peeping from her wood stain. When he saw this Wild poured water on her leg and traced the stripes of her fetlock with his finger tips asking her, ‘What’s this, Nyxy? You aren’t about falsifying yourself, are you, girl?’

  Wild knew for certain horses were not striped. He bartered a pint of mineral turpentine from a quartermaster with a bottle of wine and took her to a sheltered churchyard a few kilometres behind the front line. Here he began to splash her with the turpentine and rub at her with a hessian sack. At first he felt a little disappointed that she hadn’t confided in him. He hadn’t kept any of his life back from her, and here she was … striped.

  He stood back from her as the patterns of her stripes appeared. The prettiest thing he had ever seen. Like undressing a woman for the first time, he was astounded and frightened. ‘Well, Nyxy. Well. Aren’t you the shy one? Letting on to be a dumpling, and all the while a princess.’ He rubbed at her as if he were Aladdin rubbing his lamp, drawing forth a genie. And when he had finished he stood back from her again and because she was so beautiful he began to cry and told her, ‘Nyxy, young Nyxy … you are a zebra.’ She would be withdrawn from service, he told himself, and he smiled. There was no place for zebras in the Australian Army.

  Wild Woodbine was sitting smoking, smiling at his revealed zebra when a German shell took the steeple off the little church they were sheltering behind. Bricks, mortar and pieces of a marble Christ rained down on them. Wild had taken Nyx’s halter off in order to clean her head and she bolted out through the gate of the churchyard.

  The path of her flight is unknown, but it ends in no man’s land at Passchendaele. She stands hock-deep in the smoking, cratered mud halfway between the Germans in their trenches to her right and the Australians in their trenches to her left. She stares along no man’s land, the shattered barbed-wire coils and the earth churned and seeded with human bodies, looking neither at one army nor the other, as otherworldly as a unicorn.

  The soldiers stop firing, feeling with this bizarre visitation a truce can be assumed. This thing, so out of place, so unexpected, an alien come from another planet, takes precedence over the slaughter. They begin to poke their heads up from the trenches to get a better look at her. Silence falls across the battlefield.

  The whole cast of manhood is here. Ranked facing each other, twenty thousand varied guns. The weasel unencumbered by ethics is here, the saint with his God, the idiot agreeing with himself, the scholar shaking his head, the coward with his heart pounding against a daguerreotype of Mother, the hero jollying his mates, the beaten man, the good man, the bad man, the ambitious, the meek, the sodomite and the rakehell, the shell-shocked and the broken-hearted … they are here. None of them fires a shot.

  Every visitor to these trenches until now has been a member of one military or another, officially involved in this war, and as such complicit in the bloodletting. But she is not. This alien is innocent of the crime being committed here and can thus bear witness to it.

  She stands watching this part of the world that men have made. Slowly sinking in the mud. It is doubtful she is disgusted or despairing at what she finds at Passchendaele. Likely she has no thoughts beyond fear and hunger. But for the men of Germany and Australia she is so exotic, so unlikely and beautiful, such a mysterious presence, they project a spiritual identity onto her. She swings her head slowly this way and that, looking at the ranks of soldiers, and it feels like she is judging them.

  The soldiers of both countries begin to justify their actions. I’m here to save hearth and home, to save my loved ones. I’m here to stop a marauding force of slavering Huns. I’m here to save little Belgium. I’m here because my country needs me. I’m here to fight evil.

  The 3rd Australian Division looks across no man’s land at the zebra, and past the zebra to the Germans who are also staring at the zebra and past the zebra back at the Australians. And, realising she is of a different consciousness, none of their justifications make them feel any better. A zebra, sunk to its belly now, casting about for a blade of grass on the churned earth of war.

  To have this alien bear witness to their barbarity is humiliating. Like having your mother suddenly visit and find, despite your upbringing and education, despite her hopes for you, despite the piano lessons you’d taken and the Latin you’d learned, you are fallen to the most ghoulish pursuit. Caught, red-handed, killing other Latin scholars and pianists. This zebra becomes the embodiment of their shame. Becomes God, mother, lover … conscience. How would you feel if an angel spied on you at butchery?

  Tears emerge on the faces of the soldiers of Germany and Australia. Battle-hardened veterans begin to cry. For themselves. And for their lost selves. Some cry openly with uncontrolled sobs, some silently with quivering chins and welling eyes. Twenty thousand men. No word spoken. Only crying, until the sun has set and the sight of her dimmed.

  Next day the zebra is gone. Sunk in the mud. In the trenches at first light men peer into periscopes and confirm, ‘Gone.’ ‘Gone.’ And everyone breathes easier. Within an hour smiles bloom and jokes are made. Shots begin to speckle the dawn as snipers take up their duties. Back to killing each other now. Out from under the merciless presence of that zebra.

  Eggs illicit.

  A man alone, an explorer, a hunter, tiny silhouette against a backdrop of wilderness, bent sideways with a palm cupped to his ear, listening, scanning the heavens. For he is matching wits with that deadliest, most ingenious bitch … Mother Nature. Matching his endurance against her vastness; his wisdom against her storms, floods and droughts; his toughness against her heat and cold; his courage against her many beasts. Mother Nature, repeatedly insulted by man, has become cantankerous and unpredictable of late. Storms from nowhere. Fires from the sky onto droughts without end. Snakes that leap at a grown man’s throat. But this frontiersman is out there, striding through the cataclysm, hunting her treasures.

  That is how the egg bandits of the red centre would have themselves portrayed. Yet before me in the Alice Springs lockup stands, of all things, a portly German. A fop with red and green streaks in his blond hair and thr
ee-quarter-length pants, asking, ‘Oh, Wildlife Ranger Smokey Bear. Yes, you bring the crème? You know, I said on phone, for my piles so … tender.’ He calls me Smokey Bear because he thought Park Ranger was a career for cartoon grizzlies and finds me hilarious in the role.

  I hand him the crème. ‘Thank you, Smokey Bear. Excuse for one moment.’ As he enters the toilet off the back of the interview room he says, ‘You must think of something else. Not Lars dabbing the crème to his … little tenderness. Whistle to yourself a tune.’ He is coquettish, flirting. I whistle ‘Year of the Cat’ while Lars whimpers and squeaks at his ministrations.

  Then, standing before me smelling faintly of tea-tree oil he tells me, ‘I was the long time partner of Wolfi. I arrange his financial side. But I am not involved regarding his activities like you suspect me.’ He shakes his head to confirm this. ‘He had the one career. I have the one other career. I design fabrics.’ He shrugs. ‘I am in sadness and am joost here to take home Wolfi’s remains. Your falcon to me is no more than a pig.’

  I reach across the table between us and slap his face. He recoils, shocked. ‘Oh … a grieving partner,’ he says. His lip has cracked and he dabs at it.

  ‘I don’t want to hear your opinion of the falcon, Lars. All right? I’ll tell you what the peregrine falcon is. It’s the endpoint of a long, complex path from microbe to miracle, you bastard. And I don’t want you calling it a pig.’