The party waited where they were. They were very tired. They watched a search plane drone above hills on the other side of the valley. It did not seem energetic. “They have contempt for us,” one of the young men decided. “They’re mocking us by not trying to find us.”
And, Aoki could have said, there is the contempt this landscape, so empty of meaning, exudes. He had nearly given up movement, but at his suggestion they did move on through the huge stones and the tall trees until they saw a farmhouse below them.
Did it offer opportunities? And for what?
“Should we go down, Senior Sergeant?” one asked.
“Staying up here means nothing,” said another with a sullenness alien to military discipline.
“We’ll go down to the fields, yes,” said Aoki, losing faith now in his own orders about ridges. “As you say, Private, nothing to be lost going down there. Our prospects might lie down there.”
He guessed that serious hunts must be occurring elsewhere. There was activity in the air of that inert day, the occasional and distant sight of a plane. But its reverberations gave him no consolation. It was hard to maintain a martial soul when the enemy refused to present himself.
34
After sleeping late on that Sunday morning, Beefy Cullen, perversely nicknamed for his extreme thinness, approached his clever son, Martin, who was doing trigonometry at the kitchen table. Mrs. Cullen was away, sitting with Mrs. Abercare in town and waiting for the coroner to release the colonel’s body. Martin and his mother had been to Mass earlier that morning, transported in Mr. Doyle’s car—the grazier whose property the Cullens lived on. Mr. Doyle had explained that he was carrying his shotgun in the trunk. He probably should have carried it inside the car, but he didn’t want any accidents with it on the bumpy road and he doubted any escaped prisoner could outrun his Buick anyhow. Mrs. Doyle asked him with gentle whimsy if he was going to run over them, or run away from them.
“The first, if possible,” said Mr. Doyle, clean-shaven and with the gloss of sanctifying grace on his cheeks.
Two Knights of the Southern Cross, however—Catholic worthies of the town—patrolled the church ground with rifles that morning to ensure the congregation was not interfered with. Mrs. Abercare arrived with Mrs. Garner, who had become a temporary churchgoer to support the widow. Dr. Delaney preached on the tragedy—the incomprehensibility of it, God’s mercy in sparing the town, and his feelings for the bereaved. He had somehow sensed by former meetings that Mrs. Abercare would not welcome a specific mention and the resultant turning of eyes to her.
Now, Mass all done with, Martin was home working on his diagrams, which were as eternal as, or even more so, than the mysteries of faith. His father interrupted him by slowly expressing a decision to shave. Then, he said, they were going rabbiting.
“Are you up to a bit of common man’s fun like that?” he challenged his son, jealous of the boy’s cleverness and coming, unimaginable chances.
His son had indeed hoped to occupy the rest of the day with his scholastic ambitions—a long Honors English essay on Julius Caesar as its climax. The exegesis of Shakespeare’s texts came naturally to him. It seemed to him that he had stumbled on them the way Keats had stumbled on Chapman’s Homer, and he had evidence that he was a once-in-a-decade delight to his English teacher, and cherished that role.
“Isn’t dusk the best time to go rabbiting?” he asked his father.
“Well, you never know what you’ll find if you go about now. Run us up some of the mutton sandwiches, will you? Don’t spare the pickles. And you can take the rifle.”
Martin got up resignedly and started working on mutton pickle sandwiches. He knew his father liked pickles and so did not skimp on them. He had always been an accommodating and obedient child, but he knew that if the sandwiches weren’t up to scratch, it would be taken by his father as a sign of Martin’s fatal bookishness, unworldliness, and awkwardness. Yet Martin was reaching an age when he’d begun to see as much of the pain as the malice behind his father’s commands. In his soured ambitions, his father sometimes declared to Martin’s mother that he was a failure in life and might as well shoot himself. This called up a pity, a tremble of love, in Martin, who wanted to enter the corrugated iron kitchen and enclose his father in his arms the way a three-year-old might dare to. Except that none of them could imagine such a gesture, and it might well make things worse.
Beefy’s cry always brought a pathetic response from his wife, who cherished him to the point where, for a second, Martin could feel jealousy as well as that awful, thwarted tenderness. At that point he was tempted to ask his mother, “Aren’t I the clever one? Haven’t I satisfied all you want?” He did not dare think of Beefy, the lover—of anything other than his mother’s endurance, and her belief in the Church’s version of marriage—as an explanation for what held her there, on Doyle’s place in a rouseabout’s cottage.
As his father finished shaving, Martin found ammunition in a drawer and fetched the rifle from the shed. It was a light, well-tooled, slim device. He kept it oiled because not to have done so would have produced the normal reaction. That’s what he hated about the excursion. It had unsure motives in most regards, but the chance of parental mockery was certainly one of them. Did his father have a fantasy about running into some of the Japs from the camp? The idea had no attraction to Martin, but he knew Beefy had been starved of moments of glory.
They walked in silence towards the hill behind Doyle’s, until his father called to him in a whimsical voice, “You’ve got the rifle loaded?”
Martin said yes.
“Well, if you see any really big rabbits, let me know.” Thus it was confirmed to Martin what this expedition was for. They were hunting prisoners. He could not think of anything more vain or alarming. His father had heard from someone that morning, possibly from one of his army mates who’d come through in a truck and who might have stopped at the gate and honked, that the escapees had no firearms. They were out in the bush without means of retaliation except for their well-established, legendary, hypnotic, and illimitable cunning.
“We’re not going to shoot them, are we?” asked Martin.
“Depends on what they do,” said his father.
“I’m not going to shoot them. I’m going home.”
“Oh yes. Be a bloody pansy as usual.”
Thus Martin was stuck with him, as if the insult had its own magnetic field. Father and son crossed over the ridge and into their neighbors the Macintoshes’ place, and sat on a log and ate sandwiches and drank the tea Martin had brought in a thermos. Martin ate his sandwich quickly, as if getting it down would speed up this silly expedition.
“You’re hungry there, tiger,” said his father.
“Why do you want to look for the Japs?” the boy asked.
A glint, the desire of warrior conspiracy, entered his father’s eye. His smile was narrow lipped. “It’d be good for both of us to get a bit of a reputation around this place. Everyone thinks I’m a boofhead and the rest think you’re a ponce. Wouldn’t you like to show them a thing or two? Take a few of the buggers in? That’d make people sit up a bit.”
Mr. Cullen assessed the trees at the end of Macintosh’s paddock, where men might be concealed. He sifted the trees with his squinting, alert vision. Meanwhile, Martin felt sick. He didn’t give a toss whether Gawell people thought he was a ponce; he did not intend to live amongst them long enough to incur their habitual contempt. He did not believe anyhow his father’s story of achieving new value.
They finished lunch and rose and went through another wire fence, at least using the normal safety arrangements—one of them holding both guns as the other parted the barbed wire and slid through.
They crossed a badly eroded gully, a groin of dust, a wound in the earth of the kind the Department of Agriculture blamed on both the farmer and the drought—which had by coincidence ended in the summer the Japanese expressed their ambitions against the British and the Americans in unarguable ways. The Cull
en men could not get round this gully and had to cross it, getting dust into their boots. Climbing out, Martin saw over the rim a burgundy-colored figure running uphill through the trees ahead. For some reason he was utterly unsurprised. Was this, he wondered, a sacrificial decoy from those hiding in the woods? His father spotted the figure too.
“Hey, look at that!” he cried out loudly, a man who was not frightened of his quarry.
The figure disappeared amongst the great rocks and tall eucalypts. Martin was riveted by the sight. It was like a permanent burn on his vision. The world was transformed now that he had seen the enemy of his people, the enemy of Keats and Shakespeare. That fleeting creature was his new objective and, to his own astonishment, he was ready to chase. He ran lithely ahead and found himself, still with reserves of oxygen, up high on the uneven ground, looking around and then downwards at his father, who seemed to be losing breath as he climbed, and losing certainty as well. A little regretfully, he waited for his father to catch up.
“We ought to be a bit more careful now,” Beefy panted. “I ought to send you back for help.”
“No,” said Martin, “I’m not going back.”
His father had seen it, too, that Martin was no longer led but had an equal part in the ambush. The flash of burgundy had altered the balance between them—Martin was in fact the leader; his father the offsider who must be persuaded along, his ambitions diminished. That figure, the Japanese one who had captivated Martin, had brought to Beefy Cullen the awareness that he was not a true hunter.
“We’ve spotted them,” said Beefy. “Now let’s go down to Macintosh’s place and call the army.”
“If we go that way,” Martin said, ignoring him and pointing out a screen of trees and rocks on the crest to their right, “we can come on them from the side.”
“You reckon?” his father asked. Mr. Cullen sounded fretful. They heard a yelp from above, designed to direct them.
“Maybe they are armed,” Beefy Cullen said.
“They aren’t moving anymore,” said Martin, ignoring him.
“They’re waiting. I think if we duck around those boulders we’ll have them.”
He heard his father gasping and wished Beefy wanted to have them as much as he did. Part of his brain asked why he hankered to find those helpless creatures up there, but chiefly his mind asserted they were not helpless. Would Julius Caesar be soft on them? Would Hamlet, who had finished off Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with such a light mind? The men up in those trees had the entire weight of a vicious empire behind them, and Caesar would have been merciless for his own sake and his people’s. Gawell High School’s English and Latin curriculum left him in no doubt.
Screened by long grass, Martin and his father came round the huge rocks, left—according to the geography teacher—by glaciers, and reached the spine of the ridge where trees and the huge boulders still shielded their quarry. A sudden wind began to blow and combed the grass through which they crept, Martin looking back to his father occasionally.
“What do you reckon now?” Beefy whispered, wanting guidance. Martin was no longer the ponce and the smartarse. There was only their common breath and the scene they were about to invade.
“One of us ought to go around the base there,” Martin told him, nodding to a huge boulder. “So I’ll go round it to the right, and you climb up it and get on top.”
Beefy asked, “Do you want the shotgun? You’ll be on the level with them.”
Martin raised his .22 rifle. “You can shoot anything up to sixty yards with this.”
He gave his father a hoist up to a crevice in the rock. As his father ascended, panting, Martin edged around the granite, almost stringing out the crazy, frightful joy of the seconds before confrontation. He had one round in the spout of his .22, but he knew it was a dominating shot.
He came on two neat groups of three, each set squatting in natural groins of rock. They had been talking quietly, but with an urgency of a peculiar kind, as if they’d been waiting to be found.
“I’m here,” he yelled for his father’s sake.
The alien men looked up. They seemed even to him to be stupefied. Escape had not left much in them. They were ready to be dominated by his small-bore rabbit-killing gun.
“Look up!” he told them, gesturing, and they clearly saw above him Beefy atop the rock, with his shotgun pointed. Martin was gratified to see that his father resembled a figure of some power.
“Get back a bit, son,” Beefy nonetheless advised. “Don’t get too close to them.”
Martin took a delight in asking, “So what now, gentlemen?” For he had become a figure from a noble play or a Saturday film, and he loved it—the chance for oration.
“And what of all the men you shot in Malaya and the Indies?” he asked. “What did you think when their blood incarnadined the oceans of Asia? Tell me!”
His rifle designed for banal bush purposes now empowered him in front of the six men, who all stood up. They had been surprised but were not cowed. One called to the others in a hacking, commanding voice. Another of them made a motion with his hands, like a man explaining a dance move.
“Watch out, Martin,” called Beefy.
The escapee who had first spoken stepped forward now, ripping the front of his tunic and his shirt and trying to tear open the woollen singlet beneath. From the top of the granite, Beefy continued to yell warnings. The Japanese advanced on Martin, screaming at him in gutturals. The huge ear-ringing blast of his father’s shotgun split the argument apart, but no pellet seemed to enter this man striding towards Martin with such a fixity. In the stunned air the man was still mouthing and growling. Mr. Cullen’s shot had torn apart the upper body of one of the others beyond the men advancing on Martin. After doing such damage Beefy would need to reload. Four ran forwards as if replacing their riddled comrade in a line of battle.
The fellow unhit by Beefy, his shirt open, his demands gusting in hot breath, carried on advancing towards Martin and, though wearing a grotesque face as if he were theatrical, could not redeem himself in the language of Shakespeare. His threats were outrageously remote from Martin’s powers of interpretation. When he was seven paces away, Martin shot him in the throat. Martin judged that to use his poor weaponry on the man’s trunk would not serve the purpose. He was awed to see the Polonius-like volumes of blood surging from the wound and over the man’s lips. It was shocking to see, but he did not repent of the act.
Above him, his father and comrade had reloaded. He, too, was ready to stand, to defend Macintosh’s stony hill against the enemies of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Two of the four men still left alive opened their jackets with more pleas to be shot, yet after a time sank on their knees to the ground as if expecting nothing. The other two began to engross themselves in disposing the limbs of the man killed by Beefy. Martin’s enemy had sunk back into the stones of the ridge. He was gone. As for the others, father and son owned them now and need not threaten them further.
“Better go down now to Macintosh’s,” called Beefy, “and get them to call the military people.”
Martin, however, was determined not to let the power revert to his father.
“No,” he said, “I’ve got them under control.”
“But I’ve got the shotgun. Give me the rifle, too, and hop along, son.”
His father, for whom Martin now pulsed with love, had indeed issued thunder to the enemy of his people, and, Martin saw, wasn’t afraid at all now it had happened. He could see no vainglory in Beefy. The four Japanese were all tearing at their jackets again and crying on the Cullen men to fire. A sudden revelation for Martin was that these fellows were not enemies in the Elizabethan play. They were enemies of themselves. At that revelation, the fever began to die in him.
“Kill,” pleaded the men, the ones with faces that had come from a different poetry.
“Shut up!” Beefy yelled at the escapees. “We’re not fucking barbarians, you know!”
Martin had begun to
shiver for some reason. He reached the rifle up to his father so that on top of the granite Beefy Cullen possessed an arsenal. The prisoners still pleaded.
“Go to buggery!” Beefy called at them. “Get on with it, Martin.” Martin looked a second at the corpse of that guttural and demanding fellow whom he’d finished and shawled in blood, and who now lay as if he had been placed there by a third party as a surprise and a parable. He lost all his vanity in an instant. He felt the map of the world he carried in his head could not be read anymore. His own self, so dominant in the version he’d possessed until now, had vanished amongst the parallels. How could he invent the remainder of his hours and years?
“Go on, Martin,” called Beefy in paternal pride and determination. “Cut along now.”
Martin consoled himself that he would never again be mocked for knowing cos and sine and the Hittite Empire or Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” He ran downhill, bounding and adhering by skill to that line between sprinting and falling. He ran for the sake of his father’s safety and to honor the savagery they had been forced to in an attempt to protect the holiness of the iambic pentameter.
As he reached the farmhouse and told Macintosh what had happened, he began weeping from this sense of being lost in his own geography. Macintosh held him by the shoulders and assured him it was all right. He sat him down with sturdy Mrs. Macintosh in the kitchen, where that good lady had a firearm of her own in the corner, and the woman comforted him, not knowing that he had paid himself over to save their rimes from the yellow horde. Macintosh himself rang the police and then set off on horseback with his own high-powered rifle, and, by some counsel of mercy, a canister of water for the prisoners. As soon as he saw Beefy dominant on top of that boulder, he cried, “Why in the bloody hell did you take your boy out today, Beefy? Of all days? You’re a total bloody idiot!”
Soon after, Macintosh and Beefy, who was chastened but refused to appear so, saw army trucks mill at the main farm gate, and the troops left the bodies behind for collection and drove the four recaptured prisoners down the slope in front of them. Beefy was anxious to see Martin, and wondered if the army might think more of him than Macintosh did.