Chapter 2
Since the whole dentist incident drained my money situation, I pretty much went and begged for my old job back. The guy in the newsagent’s wasn’t impressed.
He said, “Sorry, Mr. Wolfe. You’re just too much of a risk. You’re dangerous.”
Have a listen to the bloke. You’d think I was walking around with a sawn-off shotgun or something. Bloody hell, I was just a paper boy.
“C’mon, Max,” I pleaded with him. “I’m older now. More responsible.”
“How old are y’ anyway?”
“Fifteen.”
“Well …” He thought hard. He stopped — drew the line. “No.” He shook his head. “No. No.” But I had him, surely. There was too much hesitation in him. He was thinking too hard. “Fifteen’s too old now, anyway.”
Too old!
Mate, it didn’t feel too good to be a washed-up, redundant paper boy, I can tell you.
“Please?” I drooled. It was sickening. All this for a lousy paper run, while other guys my age were raking it in at Maccas and Kentucky Fried bloody Chickens. It was a disgrace. “C’mon, Max.” I had an idea. “If y’ don’t employ me again I’ll come here wearin’ these clothes I’m wearin’ right now” (I was wearing crummy tracksuit pants, old shoes, and a dirty old spray jacket) “and I’ll bring my brother and his mates along and we’ll treat the place like a library. We won’t cause trouble, mind you. We’ll just hang round. A few of ‘em might steal, but I doubt it. Maybe just one or two …”
Max stepped closer.
“Are you threatenin’ me, y’ little grot?”
“Yes, sir, I am.” I smiled. I thought things were going along fine.
I was wrong.
I was wrong because my old boss Max took me by the collar of my jacket and removed me from his property.
“And don’t come back in here again,” he ordered me. I stood.
I shook my head. At myself. A grot. A grot! It was true.
My game plan for getting the job back had backfired miserably. The pulse in my neck felt really heavy, and I felt like I could taste last night’s blood in the bottom of my throat.
“Y’ grot,” I called myself. I looked at myself in the bakery shop window next door and imagined I was wearing a brand-new light blue suit with a black tie, black shoes, nice hair. The reality, though, was that I was wearing peasants’ clothes and my hair was sticking up worse than ever. I looked at myself in that window, oblivious to all the people around me, and I stared and smiled that particular smile. You know that smile that seems to knock you and tell you how pathetic you are? That’s the smile I was smiling.
“Yeah,” I said to myself. “Yeah.”
I looked in the local paper — I had to get Rube to go in the newsagent’s and buy it for me — for another job, but nothing was going. Things were skinny. Jobs. People. Values. No one was on the lookout for anyone or anything new. It got to the point where I considered doing the unthinkable — asking my father if I could work with him on Saturdays.
“No way,” he said, when I approached him. “I’m a plumber, not a circus clown, or a zookeeper.” He was eating his dinner. He raised his knife. “Now, if I was —”
“Ah, c’mon, Dad. I can help.”
Mum put in her opinion.
“Come on, Cliff, give the boy a chance.”
He sighed, almost moaned.
A decision: “Okay,” although he waved his fork under my nose. “But all it’ll take is one screwup, one smart-mouth remark, one act of stupidity, and you’ll be out.”
“Okay.”
I smiled.
I smiled to Mum but she was eating her dinner.
I smiled to Mum and Rube and Sarah and even to Steve, but they were all eating their dinner because the matter was over and the whole thing didn’t really excite any of them. Only me.
Even at work on Saturday my father didn’t seem too enthusiastic about me being there. The first thing he made me do was stick my hand down some old lady’s toilet and pull all the blockage out. It’s true, I nearly vomited into the bowl right there and then.
“Oh, blood-y hell!” I screeched under my breath, and my father just smiled.
He said, “Welcome to the world, my boy,” and it was the last time he smiled at me all day. The rest of the time he made me do all the sap jobs like getting pipes off the roof of his panel van, digging a trench under a house, turning the mains off and on, and collecting and tidying his tools. At the end of the day he gave me twenty bucks and actually said thanks.
He said, “Thanks for your help, boy.”
It shocked me.
Happ
“Even though you are a bit slow.” He cut me down right after. “And make sure you have a shower when we get home….”
During lunch it was funny because we sat on these two buckets at Dad’s van and he made me read the paper. He took the Weekend Extra part out of the inside and threw the rest of it over to me.
“Read,” he told me. “Why?”
“Because you don’t learn anything unless you can find the patience to read. TV takes that away from you. It robs you from your mind.”
No need to say that I stuck my head in that paper and read it. I could easily have been sacked for not reading the paper when I was told to.
The most important thing was that I survived the day and I had another twenty dollars to my name.
“Next Saturday?” I asked Dad when we got back out at home.
He nodded.
The thing is, I had no idea that this working Saturdays was going to lead me to the feet of a girl who was even better than the dental nurse. It was a few weeks away yet, but when it came I felt something shift inside me.
On that first Saturday night, though, I walked in our front door feeling quite proud of myself. I went down to the basement because it’s Steve’s room and Steve always goes out on Saturday nights, and I turned up his old stereo and moved around to it a bit. I sang along like all poor saps do in their own company, and I danced like a complete klutz. You don’t care when there’s no one around to look.
Then Rube came in, without me knowing.
He looked.
“Pitiful.” His voice shocked me.
I stopped.
“Pitiful,” he repeated, shutting the door and taking slow, deliberate paces down the old, worn steps.
He was followed in by Dad saying, “I’ve got four things to say to you blokes. One, dinner’s ready. Two, have showers. Three” — and he looked directly at Rube for this one — “you — shave.” I looked briefly at Rube and saw patches of beard growing on his face. It was just becoming kind of thick and consistent. “And four, we’re watchin’ The Good, The Bad and The Ugly tonight and if either one of you wants to watch something else, tough luck — the TV’s booked.”
“We don’t care,” Rube assured him.
“Just so there’s no complaints.”
“Just so there are no complaints,” I corrected the man. Big mistake.
“Are you tryin’ to start something?” He pointed as he came farther in.
“Not at all.”
He backed away. “Well, good. Anyway, come to dinner,” and as we walked toward him, he mentioned, “Don’t forget your old man can still give you a good kick in the pants for bein’ smart.” He was laughing, though. I was glad.
At the door, I said, “Maybe I’ll save to get a stereo, like Steve’s. A better one, maybe.”
Dad nodded. “Not a bad idea.” No matter how harsh the man could be, I guess he liked it that I never just asked for things. He saw that I wanted to earn them.
I did.
I wanted nothing for free.
Nothing came for free at our place anyway.
Rube spoke.
He asked, “Why would you want a stereo for, boy? So you can dance up in our room as pitifully as that?”
Dad only stopped, looked back at him, and clipped him on the ear.
He said, “At least the boy wants to work, which is more than I can say for you.” He turned away again and said, “Now come for the dinner.”
We followed our father back up and I had to get Sarah out of her room for dinner. She was in there with the boyfriend getting it off with him against the wardrobe.
It’s a movie scene in which I have a noose around my neck, waiting to be hanged. I’m sitting on a horse. The rope is attached to a heavy tree branch. My father is on a horse in the distance, waiting with a gun.
I know that there has been a price on my head for quite some time, and my father and I have a plan going where he turns me in, collects the reward, then shoots the rope as I’m about to be hanged. Somehow I will then get away and we will continue the process in towns all over the countryside.
I’m sitting there with that rope around my neck in a whole lot of outrageous cowboy gear. The sheriff or lawman or whoever he is is reading me the death sentence and all these tobacco-chewing country folk are cheering because they know I’m about to die.
“Any last words?” they ask me, but at first, I only laugh.
Then I say, still laughing, “Good luck,” and with sarcasm, “God bless.”
The shot should come any moment now. It doesn’t. I get nervous. I twitch.
I look around, and see him.
The horse is slapped, to make it take off, and next thing, I’m hanging there, choking to death.
My hands are tied in front of me and I reach them up to keep the rope off my neck. It isn’t working. I , horribly, saying, “Come on! Come on.”
Finally.
The shot comes. Nothing.
“I’m still choking!” I hiss, but now my father is riding toward the mob. He fires again, and this time the rope is broken and I fall.
I hit the ground.
I suck.
Air.
Lovely.
Bullets fly all around me.
I reach for my father’s hand and he lifts me onto his horse on the run.
Wide shot (camera shot). New scene.
All is now calm and Dad holds about a dozen hundred-dollar notes in his hand. He gives me one. “One!”
“That’s right.”
“You know,” I reason, “I really think I should get more than just this — after all, it’s my neck hangin’ up there.”
Dad smiles and throws away a cigar, chewed. He speaks.
“Yeah, but it’s me who shoots you down.”
With desert all around me, I realize how sore my back is from falling down.
Dad is gone, and alone, I kiss the note and say, “Damn you, my friend.” I begin walking somewhere, waiting for next time, hoping that I will live that long.