He was sitting on the stoop out front, into his third beer, having sent the neighbour home an hour ago to get stuck in to his history assignment. The Jack Russell at his feet looked up and gave his recently adopted master a quizzical look.
‘Yeah, I’m worried too, killer.’ He lavished rough affection on the dog, now nuzzled into his lap, and looked up and down the long, hilly road.
The terrace. Nothing in the Valley was flash but the Resistance was in a particularly shabby neighbourhood, he thought, reminding himself it was its working-class shabbiness that attracted him to the district in the first place. Meeting up with the local photographer, Caroline Patrick, and finding they were on the same wavelength––namely, that both had an urge to open a left-wing bookshop and art gallery––had been the clincher.
Where else would you pick up a bargain like the neglected old School of Arts building Miki had found for them? Council-owned, run down and going for an acorn's rent, it had seemed like the right place for their Resistance Bookshop, and they'd been right. Their business sat well here, among the youthful backpacker population. They were never going to make their fortune out of the Resistance but they weren’t in it for the cash.
He wasn’t sure what he was in it for but with the world so fucked up, what was the use of anything if it wasn’t to try to un-fuck it? The shop was his small way of doing that, thought Rex; trying to un-fuck the fucking mess the Nixons and Johnsons had made of things.
He straightened out his good leg and rubbed the cramp that had seized him. He had been sweating in there, climbing ladders, hanging frames all afternoon. Even with the kid’s help it had been a slog. The heat got to him. He needed salt. He needed a massage, too. Do you miss your toes? she’d asked him. Not in so many words, not with words at all, but with her eyes. He thought about her, the Asian girl with the sad eyes. They made a pair, fit like a glove; a girl who’d seen and felt the horrors of foreign invasion and a cripple whose balls were shot off doing the invading.
Not much levity in their occasional union, not a whole lot of laughs. They both knew the deal. Pure commerce. They needed no names. They knew each other beyond labels. He laid his money down. She gave him what he craved, or as much as a cripple like him could physically crave. She whispered soothing words to him in her stilted English as she undressed him, massaged him and let him luxuriate in her womanliness. The soft silks and fragrances of her. The warmth and gentleness of her small hands. The feeling of her heavy hair falling against his body as she leant over him, working her magic.
In a kinder universe, she would have had babies and be living a respectable life in her rice paddy world by now, instead of giving herself day and night to men in conveyor-belt couplings for cash.
And he would still be getting sex he didn’t need to pay for and maybe thinking about settling down with the right woman. Kids of his own. He had always planned to have kids, had a hankering for a couple of kids.
But it wasn’t a kind universe. It was a fucked up universe with no end in sight, he concluded.
Suddenly he was jerked out of his reverie by the honking horn of a passing vehicle, an old painted Kombi going by, packed with a bunch of long-haired lunatics leaning out the window and waving their Peace signs at him. Every bastard knew his shop. He loved the joint. The Valley might have seen better days but never better people, thought Rex as he sat studying his street in the dying part of the day.
Fortitude Valley. It was all written down inside in a fancy monograph one of the locals from some historical society had put together. According to the amateur historian, the Valley was once an elegant Victorian district. In its heyday, a flash-as-paint Post Office, public baths and several big department stores.
He tickled the terrier's belly and looked around his neighbourhood with benevolent approval. The place had fallen on hard times, obviously, but it fit his mood. Small shop fronts between an assortment of shabby houses, Queenslanders with their wooden verandas glassed in, catering for the surge of no-talent artists, half-assed students and the rest of the disaffected and great unwashed who migrated here from the boonies because they couldn’t cop the hypocrisy of the picket fence crowd, he figured.
He dug the clapped-out feel of the joint, loved the way the Morton Bay figs, the macadamias, the big palms kept the sun out in the hottest part of the day. He approved of the neglected overgrown gardens, the raggedy palms and the disarray of their dropped fronds up and down the sidewalk. But not so great for a guy on a stick, he figured, recalling the number of times he had tripped on the fuckers. Fuck their fucking war!
With no sign of Miki’s phone call coming in, he continued to sit, looking up and down his street; at the washing on the lines that no lazy bastard ever seemed to take down; at the psychedelic Kombis parked everywhere, half used, half rotting away on rusted axels. A For Sale sign was plastered on the one next door. They drive the b’Jesus out of them, thought Rex, and then barter them for a purse of ganga and a place to crash.
He thought about the van he and his buddies pitched in to buy back in the States. They'd loaded her up with their boards and taken off, up to Big Sur for the summer. Three of them just out of school, and he a couple of years older, a college drop-out. Two years, that’ all the college he did because his mother the lush had blown his college fees on her drop-kick of a boyfriend before the pair of them shot through on him.
He and his buddies were about the same age as the kids who humped their bed rolls up the terrace when they cleared out of home. But unlike these poor buggers, he thought, he and his pals hadn’t had a draft board to worry about back then.
Thousand Oaks in 1960. Veet Nam? Where the fuck’s that, man?
Veet Nam was a nice little surprise waiting for them. Waiting to ambush their youth after the CIA fuckers terminated Kennedy, after Johnson took it up the Khyber from his armaments buddies. They’d had the cold war with Kennedy, sure, but the USSR and Washington fought that one out between themselves. It was all a long way from sunny California. Did they give a shit? Surf’s up!
He was back in Thousand Oaks, remembering the wide open spaces where guys like him and his buddies ran wild. The orchards, the zoo for Hollywood’s movie animals, up there in Thousand Oaks where the studios corralled their four-legged stars, pensioned them off or had them waiting around for their walk-on roles. And there were stars of the two-legged variety living in Thousand Oaks as well, he recalled. Walter Brennan’s ranch up in the hills. He was a twelve year old again, thinking of the old movie star’s orchard. He could taste the sweet sticky juice of those stolen oranges. What they couldn’t eat they’d flog off for pocket money, buy some weed from one of the older boys and roll the joints with his mother’s boyfriend’s tobacco. Make a nice little profit from the sale. All from old Brennan’s oranges. And if the star of the Beverly Hillbillies ever knew his orchard was being raided he never let on. They were good days, he figured.
‘Hi, Rex. Mind if I stick this up here?’
She was pretty enough. A try-hard actress who taught yoga and transcendental meditation to eke out a living. He let them stick their flyers up in his window, every left-wing, arty farty joker within buckshot. The old hall had once been the district’s School of Arts. Workers had come here for edification, to empower themselves against the bosses. For all the good it had done them. But he figured he was being true to history, sticking to the theme. His own Don’t Enlist! flyers fought for space among their hippy shit, but so what? All pissing in the same pot, weren’t they?
‘Want a sip?’ he handed the long-neck across.
She was already sitting beside him on the step, patting the dog and making herself at home. That was another thing about their bookshop. The steps of the Resistance, six long wooden planks and wide enough for comfort were the hang-out for the whole street, or so it seemed. Meet you on the steps. In front of the phone box. That’s what they said to each other along the strip. And they did. Made it easier for Inspector Ramsey Shit Face over the road to count heads, he supposed, looking across at the Holden and throwing a casual wave to the boys.
They had slunk off an hour ago––probably