Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 38

The others were bully boys to be sure, all leaning towards one another for support, thick-necked, broad-armed followers of orders, and my game made them edgy and uncertain. John Oliver O'Dowd was a good ten years older than his "bhoys" and it was to him that I addressed my remarks. I informed him of the numbers of men who waited on the track and said they only wished lawful work in the orchards, that they would be using carriages intended for animals already slaughtered or still in the fields, that they would be causing no financial loss to state or individual enterprise and that, if John Oliver O'Dowd should turn his official back, then these presently useless men might get on with producing wealth for the benefit of the state.

I spoke to him nicely. I could have sold him a Ford or a cannon. I did not permit him easily to hate me. I stroked the b.a.s.t.a.r.d like a trout until my demands made him turn, reluctantly, from me.

"All very decent, Mr Badgery," O'Dowd said at last (carefully, carefully). He pulled a hair from his nose and gazed at it a second. "I dare say. But we are policemen and we have our orders and intend to obey them."

His zombies dragged their heels through gravel, intent on underlining their boss's remarks.

"If you obey your orders, Mr O'Dowd, I will drill these men for half a day and then I shall march up here and we will go through you lot like a hot knife," I smiled, "through a block of lard." I made myself like like him as I spoke to him. And liking him, of course, was more than half of it, to understand why this miserable O'Dowd with his short arms and thick wrists should be the animal he was, to imagine his miserable cot, his nights beneath hessian bags sewed into quilts, his early frosty mornings, his loveless dusks, his unbending father, his withered disappointed mother. You cannot fake this affection, and O'Dowd knew, in the very moment I threatened him, that I also him as I spoke to him. And liking him, of course, was more than half of it, to understand why this miserable O'Dowd with his short arms and thick wrists should be the animal he was, to imagine his miserable cot, his nights beneath hessian bags sewed into quilts, his early frosty mornings, his loveless dusks, his unbending father, his withered disappointed mother. You cannot fake this affection, and O'Dowd knew, in the very moment I threatened him, that I also liked liked him. It weakened him horribly. him. It weakened him horribly.

"That's as may be," he said, smiling himself.

"As will be."

"Come, Mr Badgery, those b.u.g.g.e.rs is all commos."

"Have you not heard of me?" I inquired, spitting out my tea-leaves daintily at his feet. He shifted a boot sideways just in time.

"Can't say I have."

"You would be familiar with the International Workers of the World?" Oh, what pleasure it was to counterfeit this belief, this membership, to see his small eyes blink at my lovely, shiny lie.

"You're not a Wobbly?"

"I'm a human being, sir, and you won't be permitted to treat these men as animals." I drew myself up taller. I gave a beautiful account of my career with the Wobblies. In a brief circuit I visited Chicago and Perth. "Write it down if you must," I told the fair-haired galoot who was making earnest notes of my confession. "Do a fair draft and I will sign it."

O'Dowd s.n.a.t.c.hed away the notebook before his man made a fool of himself.

"All right?" I asked O'Dowd. He did not answer. "I'm giving you mugs half an hour to make up your mind. If you haven't given us reason to change our minds, we'll come down here and do you."

"Youse was going to do drill," sneered the man who had lost his notebook.

"That was before I looked you in the eye, son."

And then I walked back along the line to report my progress to the men. I swung my cane. The magpie, a lovely bird, gave such a clear happy cry, like an angel gargling in a crystal vase.

50.

Of the fifty men gathered at the siding, only three had no inclination for a fight, and one of these was an old fellow known as "Doc" who shouldered his bluey and whistled up his lame fox-terrier before formally wishing them all well. He made a small speech with many cla.s.sical allusions. The other two made off without a word to anyone, walking slowly up the road past the railway johns who were still lounging against the siding platform. O'Dowd called out to them. They slowed, then stopped. The big stooped one took off his swag and gave it to his mate. Then he walked across and was surrounded by the bullies for a good three minutes. Finally he departed with his mate.

O'Dowd knew the bagmen were solid. I looked at my watch and sipped my tea.

Leah had the commie over to one side by some black forty-four-gallon drums. She listened to him with a bowed head and then, lifting her dark eyes, asked quiet, intent questions. The bagmen, I saw, were starved for the softness of children's skin and the agitation of small squirming bodies and you could see it in the eyes of those who did not even acknowledge Charles and Sonia that they, too, "'ad one just like 'im". The homesickness was palpable.

A big bushman called Clout was at work with a tomahawk making batons. When he had trimmed a bit of ironbark to size, or knocked the worst splinters of a split fence post, he would swing it around his head a few times before crashing it down on the rails. Yet in spite of Clout's displays of violence, it was a very quiet, pleasant, sunny day, only spoiled by the excess of blowflies which gathered on the bushman's sweat-dark back and hung in clouds around the mouths of those inclined to yarning.

At twenty past the hour we heard a train. It was not the one we wanted. It came around the river flat below at enormous speed, getting up chuff for the slow crawl up the hill on whose crest we sat. This spot, fifteen miles from Bendigo, was known to bagmen all through the country as "Walkers' Hill" because you could-from either side of this crest-jump the rattler at a leisurely walking pace.

O'Dowd now stood and began to stroll towards us and Clout, reckoning the hour had come, began to distribute his batons, the ends of which he had lewdly sharpened "for playin' quoits". O'Dowd came walking carefully, showing great regard for the welfare of his boots at which he stared with great attention. When, at last, he showed his face, I saw what he'd been hiding-a smirk I could not understand.

"All right, Mr Badgery," he said to me. "You've won."

The men cheered. Someone clapped O'Dowd on the back.

"There's a train coming now," O'Dowd shouted. "Youse can all get on it."

"That's the Ballarat train," the communist said, pushing through. "These men want to go to Shepparton. It's going the wrong way."

O'Dowd could not help himself. He split himself with a grin. "Tough," he said. He could already feel the uncertainty amongst the men as they hovered, lifted a bag or put one down, whispered to a mate or cursed or spat. Their acceptance or rejection of the train was showing in their dusty irritated eyes.

"It's this train or no train," O'Dowd said. He was a clever b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He knew they didn't want to go to Ballarat, but he gave them a small victory which was enough to make them go soft and lose their fight. He smiled at me just like I had smiled at him. He was making making them do the exact opposite of what they wanted. them do the exact opposite of what they wanted.

"There's no work in Ballarat," I said.

The smile swallowed itself in the cold slit of his mouth. "There's work," he said, "everywhere, for them that want it."

The train engine was in sight now at the bottom of the hill. The men started to check their swags, to arrange a billy, tighten a strap, hoist a bundle, kick a fire apart. They came around and shook my hand. They lifted Sonia and kissed her cheek and hugged her till she grunted. They ruffled Charles's head and we were all, in spite of our defeat, warm-we had won the most important battle, so we thought.

The train drew beside us and we stood in full sight of the driver and the fireman.

There were sheep wagons, not clean, but empty. The men waited for the protection of closed boxcars, rolling back their doors in good leisurely style. It was then, as they boarded the train, I saw Leah. She was running towards me carrying the snake bag in one hand, pulling bawling Charles towards me with the other.

"Come on," she screamed. "Get on the train."

I laughed.

"Get on," she said. "For G.o.d's sake, I beg you."

O'Dowd, I found, right behind my shoulder. "Better get on the train, Mr Badgery," he said.

"Hurry," Leah said. She did not wait but helped my son aboard, and then my daughter. She was climbing on, and I was stumbling along the track, tripping on abandoned sleepers, O'Dowd at my side. By the road I saw O'Dowd's bully boys setting to work on the Dodge. They had, at that stage, only slashed the tyres. The brush hook they used was razor sharp. They drew it round the walls "like a hot knife," O'Dowd said, "through lard."

He started laughing. He could not stop. He was hysterical. Tears rolled down his face and he could not speak for a good minute, by which time he was standing still, we were pulling away, and Charles was bawling about his lost rosellas. The train wheels obliterated his last crow of triumph.

And that was how I lost my only a.s.set, for lose it I did, good and proper. When I finally got back there two weeks later I saw the sort of mess the "bhoys" had made of it. They were not so stupid as to steal it. They simply destroyed it. They had been at the body with an axe. They had used no spanners or wrenches on the engine, just the sledge-hammer.

Everything stank of dead rosellas.

51.

There is no doubt about it-I have a salesman's sense of history. I do not mean about the course of it, or the import of it, but rather its scale of time, its pulse, its intervals, its peaks, troughs, crests, waves. I was not born in some Marxist planet out near Saturn where the days last a year and the inevitabilities of history take a century to show. I am from Venus, from Mars, and my days are short and busy and the intervals on my whirling clock are dictated by the time it takes to make a deal, and that that is the basic unit of my time. And even if I have boasted about how I was a patient man when I sold Fords to c.o.c.kies, shuffled cards, told a yarn, taught a spinster aunt to drive, I was not talking about anything more than a day or two of my life, and is the basic unit of my time. And even if I have boasted about how I was a patient man when I sold Fords to c.o.c.kies, shuffled cards, told a yarn, taught a spinster aunt to drive, I was not talking about anything more than a day or two of my life, and then then off down the road with the order in my pocket. off down the road with the order in my pocket.

I was not some Izzie with a twenty-year clock in his daggy pockets.

It is true that I was the one who took on the infamous John Oliver O'Dowd and organized the bagman against him, but when the battle was lost, I could not, as Leah begged me to (with tears in her big eyes), return to the struggle. For Christ's sake, I had lost my car car. But in the boxcar that day, Leah was beyond such trivial things as cars or making money. She did not have a stomach, did not need food, drink or even air. All she could think was that we should take on the enemy again.

She was the saint with shining eyes. I was the shark, the lounge lizard. I took the family to the saloon bar at Craig's Hotel and performed the snake trick for money.

Leah submitted, glowering-she drew a line between cheating and entertainment that I never saw as clearly.

The trick was one we had performed many times before when we were desperate. Everybody had a part: it was up to reluctant Leah to release the snake into the bar. It was up to me to find it and identify it as venomous. Then Sonia, drinking her lemon squash, would declare she knew a boy who would catch it. She fetched Charles. Charles then caught the snake for a fee (and, inevitably, much admiration).

The trick did have its dangers. In Rockhampton a drunk policeman splattered our best black snake with the publican's pistol. In Gympie a bank clerk got one with a billiard cue.

We had many a.s.sets to replace in Ballarat and we could not content ourselves with one pub, but moved from Battery Hill all the way through the east and up into the smarter pubs around Lydiard Street. We moved fast, keeping ahead of any grapevine, as voracious as an army of ants. The cheeks of the Badgerys were flushed but Leah betrayed her emotions with a nasty rash along her slender neck.

My pocket contained a damp bird's nest of crumpled currency from which drifted the unmistakable odours of Ballarat Bitter. I clicked my cane, tap, tap, a light filigree of sound woven around the military beat of Charles's great clod-hopping boots which he stamped heel first, into the ringing pavements of Sturt Street. Behind him came Sonia, her white socks betraying the lack of garters and behind her was Leah whose bulging black handbag contained a dangerously compressed snake whose welfare was much on her mind. Leah wore what she had escaped in, a light floral dress with an unflattering stain she had collected on a boxcar floor, and a wide-brimmed straw hat whose generous shade did not manage to hide the fury dancing in her big grey eyes and, it must be said, the dancer was limping. I am tempted to suggest that the blisters she habitually collected were caused, not by shoes, but by the same thing that caused the rash to rise from beneath the neat collar of her summer dress.

While Charles dropped back to lean against the wall, the rest of us entered Craig's Hotel in style, through the revolving gla.s.s doors, a quick inquiry at the desk and then through to the saloon bar with me no more than three inches behind Leah so that I might hide the stain that marked her backside.

It was that quiet sleepy time in the afternoon when the people who inhabit saloon bars do so quietly, where the work of the barmaid is betrayed by small quiet sounds, and no wolf-pack laughter or hen-party screech offends the ear of the sensitive visitor who may peruse the photographs of famous racehorses at his leisure while the other drinkers whisper quietly to each other, or read their copies of the Courier Mail Courier Mail, turning the pages quietly in respect of the hour of day.

The snake, of course, disrupted this calm a little, but Charles was soon found playing in the street and introduced to the ashen barmaid and then the dour licensee. And while those drinkers who remained found themselves huddled together in a suddenly talkative group, the snake (a Children's Python) worked its way across the slippery linoleum towards an extraordinary-looking man in a yellow-checked suit. He had a bald head, a little goatee beard, an ascetic high-boned face, and gold-framed spectacles over sunken thoughtful eyes. While Charles, blushing red as usual, conducted his stubborn negotiation, this other fellow carried on his own silent conversation with himself, resting a gold-ringed finger on his pale lower lip. He rolled his eyes like a fellow trying to multiply 23 by 48 without using a pencil.

It was easy to see the licensee was not an easy man with a quid. It was not that he haggled, but that he did not move. He regarded Charles with sleepy-eyed suspicion. I expressed the view that the snake was venomous, and relied upon the fact that pythons are not native to Ballarat. The snake paused, lifted its head from the linoleum, and flicked its tongue at the smoky air.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n," said the man in the yellow-checked suit. He spoke in the purest American.

The licensee blinked his lizard-lidded eyes; the snake lay flat as a fallen stick. A green pound note was pa.s.sed, at last, into my son's custody.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n. You're Lee-anne. The snake-dancer. I saw your show." He picked up his hat, stepped over the snake, and took two gliding steps across the floor, his hand extended to my blushing lover who was huddled back against the photographs of racehorses, pretending snake-fear. "Nathan Schick," he said, smiling crookedly but charmingly to reveal a gold-filled mouth, "I saw your act in Nambour, Queensland."

I did not see Charles leave, but a scream from Sturt Street told me he was accompanied by the python.

Nathan Schick seemed quite unaffected. He fussed around the table and forced Leah to sit down. He shoved out his pale hand and gave me that charming, weary, gold-speckled smile.

"Badgery," I said, trying to keep the publican in view.

"I know, I know," said the splendid American, patting a small round stomach which looked like a tiny cushion shoved down his trousers. "You, sir, are a funny man. A very funny man." I could not listen to him. I watched the cardiganed licensee approach. I kept my eye on the door and smiled at Nathan Schick. "Yes, sir, I saw your show. You should see her," he told the dour-faced publican who had come to block my exit. "You should see this young lady work with snakes."

The licensee had the fine red veins and slow poached eyes of his caste. "I just have, Mr Schick."

Nathan Schick blinked and made his mouth into an "O". What a ham he was. I am nine-tenths convinced he betrayed us to the licensee and then rescued us to that we would feel ourselves in his debt.

He gave the licensee a crisp new pound note, ordered a round of drinks, sent Sonia to fetch her brother, and told the barmaid she was lucky to have such talented performers patronizing her bar. Schick could talk a line of bulls.h.i.t like I never heard before, and in this he had the distinct advantage of being American and therefore never hesitant about expressing an opinion. Australians, in comparison, lack confidence, and it is this, not steel mills or oilwells, that is the difference between the two nations.

Schick also had that peculiar deafness that Americans adopt towards Australians (not dissimilar to the deafness city people adopt when listening to country people). It comes from not understanding the rhythms of their speech and a.s.suming they would not live where they did if they were more resourceful.

So Nathan Schick, while regarding us benevolently, misunderstood our ironies and took them for firmly held beliefs, contradicted them, dropped names around the bar, criticized the act he had recently praised, suggested "improvements" without a beg-your-pardon, asked us to join his troupe which would soon play the Tivoli in Melbourne, then thought better of it and asked us to audition.

This, for people who had lost ten rosellas and a Dodge utility, was very heady stuff. When Nathan ordered straight gin, so did we. The angry blotches left Leah's neck and rearranged themselves into a rosy aura. She toasted me silently across the gin-wet tabletop, and even the line of her Victorian shoulders suggested relief.

Nathan Schick had ideas to take our act to America, or so he claimed. He caught me pulling a funny face at Leah, and hamming up his hurt feelings, produced a little gold-embossed notebook in which he had written: "Lee-anne, snakes". We had left Nambour, he said, before he could talk to us. He was full of ideas. Most of them-he freely admitted it-were lousy.

It was after five o'clock now and the bar started to fill. In pubs all over Ballarat thirsty men had only one hour's heavy drinking before they were expelled into the street at closing time.

"h.e.l.l, Lee-anne," shouted Nathan Schick, now hemmed in by a forest of trousered drinkers, "h.e.l.l, I know know, I'm not an artist. I'm just making a suggestion. Look, an example only. If you want to play, say, Dallas, Texas, you need a hook. You're Australian. You got to have an Australian hook. Something in your act, not a snake-all snakes look the same. Not your ostrich. Something Australian."

"It's an emu."

"Who cares? This is an American audience. Do you say to them, Ladies and Gentlemen, this is an emu even though you think it's an ostrich? Does Herbie make a comedy routine from this?" He raised his pale eyebrows from behind his gold-rimmed gla.s.ses. He considered the idea of my comedy routine, flicking his wide eyes from one face to the next. I wondered how it was that, no matter how I hated Henry Ford, I always loved Americans. "Nah," Nathan smashed the idea flat with his ringed hand. "Nah, you need something Australian in your act."

"A kangaroo," said Charles, and momentarily stopped kicking the table.

"Yes," said Nathan Schick nodding his head at my blushing son. "But no. I took a herd of boxing kangaroos out through the Middle West at the end of the Great War and no one was too interested. They are a vicious animal, Herbie, did you know that? Yes, they are. They ripped each other's guts out-excuse me, Lee-anne-but it's true. You can't have that sort of thing in family entertainment, as I'm sure you know," he said, obviously believing we knew no such thing. "Now you two kids should not be sc.r.a.ping around Ballarat pulling bad tricks in second-rate hotels. Neither should I. If Jack Benny could see me here, he'd say, what the h.e.l.l is Nathan doing in Bell-A-Rat. My answer is: Jack, I am making a living. His answer to me: Nathan, it is not a living, it is a death. My reply: don't I know it. We are getting too old for all this. What I want is an Aussie act for the States. This is a great country, but it hasn't even started to be exploited. You people don't realize what it is you have to sell."

"Wombats," said Charles, "and koalas."

"There are problems with the wombat," Nathan Schick said. "I was interested in wombats in '29. I went up to your zoo in Sydney and looked at the wombat. The fellow said you could train them but G.o.d, Herbie, no offence ... Lee-Anne ... but the wombat is not star quality. They would laugh at you in Pittsburgh. You know what I mean, uh? Pittsburgh?"

We didn't.

"They would laugh at you and your wombat. And the koala-sure, it's cute, but they pa.s.s wind and they're intoxicated all day. You can't work with those sort of people. The koala is not a commercial property. You need something very original. Maybe you should have some abos in your act. They do a war dance? Tie you up? Herbie rescues you? No, it's not enough. It's the wildlife that I like, and that's where I think you two are on to something."

And what did puritanical Leah think of Nathan Schick? Leah Goldstein, who put Izzie Kaletsky on a pedestal and then worried about the ethics of skin, this same Leah Goldstein sat in her chair with her gin and water, and beamed at him. She loved Nathan Schick's vulgar suit and ringed hands. She liked the garrulous checks, like leftover material from a Silly Friends party. Even as he had walked across the saloon bar, stepping over the snake so carelessly, even as he opened his gold-filled mouth to expose her for fraud, she liked him.

Leah became light-headed more quickly than mere gin could explain.

She laughed, that great wild snort of a laugh that was her trademark, and gave not a d.a.m.n that heads in that noisy bar turned to look at her. She was talkative, almost (for her) garrulous. She told a story about Rosa, one about a snake; she held my hand and patted me on the head. When we stumbled out into the gin-bright street she liked Nathan enough to kiss him, first on one cheek and then the other. She made his sunken eyes gleam like diamonds and she glowed herself, realizing the importance of her gift.

Nathan had a soft spot for us too. He was to tell us so, continually. He exploited us in his crummy show in Ballarat and had us work at starvation rates, but still he liked us. He was lonely, divorced three times with all his children either in hospital or gaol, but he was an optimist. He quickly became Dear Nathan, b.l.o.o.d.y Nathan, Poor Nathan, Nathan-won't-shut-up, Nathan-won't-go-home.

I grew to love the bony-faced b.a.s.t.a.r.d and his schemes, and I thought that Leah did too. She worked hard, laughed more often, told her awkward jokes, but the letters from Ballarat show the true condition of her soul: they lack joy. It does not matter that she had a real job in a big city, three shows a day, write-ups in the Courier Mail Courier Mail, a new act with a Distinctive Australian Flavour. All this, it seems, was froth.

She wrote to Rosa: "The lesson I have learned is that what you say will happen, will will happen. I declared myself a dancer when I had no right to. I had no skill, no experience, nothing. And yet, today, here I am writing to you from Ballarat and telling you about our show, and that I have spangles on my t.i.ts and a regular Yank to tell me when I am out of time. How pathetic I have been. I am like someone G.o.d has given three wishes to and all I have asked for is ice-cream. I have been wasting time trying to get deep satisfaction from something that cannot provide it. Ho-hum!" happen. I declared myself a dancer when I had no right to. I had no skill, no experience, nothing. And yet, today, here I am writing to you from Ballarat and telling you about our show, and that I have spangles on my t.i.ts and a regular Yank to tell me when I am out of time. How pathetic I have been. I am like someone G.o.d has given three wishes to and all I have asked for is ice-cream. I have been wasting time trying to get deep satisfaction from something that cannot provide it. Ho-hum!"

In the light of this one could be cynical and say that the telegram telling her of Izzie's accident was a gift from G.o.d.

52.

Leah felt the jerk of the train physically rip her out of Ballarat. She saw dry-eyed Herbert Badgery standing waving, hiding his emotions in the shadow of his Akubra hat, grey, formal, unsmiling. Beside him Nathan Schick showed his gold teeth in crooked-faced regret. Mr Schick was bare-headed of course, because he had given his Panama hat to Leah ("A lady cannot travel without a hat") and had replaced its band with a burgundy ribbon he "just happened" to have in his pocket. Dear Mr Schick, she reflected. Dear Mr Schick was a good man although, paradoxically, quite dishonest. He had them working for less than a stagehand, had lied to them about his Tivoli show, but had come to the station, given away a fine hat and stood there now with his eyes gleaming with tears in his ascetic bony skull. Sonia held a handkerchief to her mouth. Was she pretending to cry? Leah did not care for Sonia who had been, she thought (and said), spoiled by her prettiness, and her father's loneliness for female company. She was a product of Skin, stroked too much, fondled, indulged and should have had her knuckles rapped and her backside paddled instead of being permitted to display all these parodies of female fine feeling of which her gooey-eyed religion was only one example. She had been permitted to say a prayer in the carriage. Dear G.o.d let Leah travel safely to Sydney and may Izzie be better soon. Amen.