[fiction]BlackIce.doc

Black Ice
by Cate Kennedy September 11, 2006

When I went up to check my traps, I saw that the porch lights at the lady’s place were still on, even though it was morning. “That’s an atrocious waste of power,” my dad said when I told him. His breath huffed in the air like he was smoking a cigar. The rabbit carcasses steamed when we ripped the skin off, and it came away like a glove.
Skin the rabbit—that’s what my mum used to say when she pulled off my shirt and singlet for a bath. Mr. Bailey gives me three dollars for every rabbit, to feed his dogs. I take them down to him in the wooden box with a picture of an apple on it. At the butcher’s, rabbits are only two-fifty but Mr. Bailey says he likes mine better. I’ve got fifty-eight dollars saved. I want to get a bike.
Dad thinks it’s good to save up your money. The tourists who stand around the real-estate agent’s window pointing and touching each other on the arm—he reckons they’re loonies. When the lady up the road bought that house, my dad went over after the “Sold” sign got stuck on and everybody had gone. He took one of the clapboards off the side of the house and looked under at the rotting pilings, and made a noise like he was holding back a sneeze. “That lady’s a bloody wacker,” he said. “Those pilings are bloody atrocious.”
He stood there looking at the house and rolled a cigarette. “Throwing good money after bad,” he said, and kicked the clapboard. I kicked it, too.
After she moved in I didn’t set no more snares up there on the hill. I walked in the state forest on the tracks round the lake, the tracks the rabbits make. I made myself small as a rabbit and moved through them on my soft scrabbly claws. I saw everything differently then. Saw the places where they sat and rested, the spots where they reached up with their noses and ate tiny strips of bark from the bottoms of the river willows.
You’ve got to set a trap so that it kills the rabbit straight off. On the leg is no good. All night the rabbit will cry and twist, then you’ll have to kill it in the morning with its eyes looking at you, wondering why you did it. Mr. Bailey, he said he can’t believe that I can catch them so near town. I told him that you just have to watch things and work out where to put the trap, that’s all. He nodded so small you could only just see his chin moving up and down. “You’ve got it there, Billy,” he said.
After he paid me we looked at the dogs and had a cup of tea. His dogs know me and why I come. Their eyes get different when they see me.
Lately, in the morning, everything is frozen. All up the hill are the gum trees and every time I look at them I think of that day in school when I was right and Mr. Fry was wrong. Mr. Fry showed us a picture and told us that trees lose their leaves in autumn, and the other kids started writing it down, but I felt the words come up, and I said no they don’t lose their leaves, they lose their bark. Mr. Fry said how typical it was that the one time I opened my mouth in class I’d come up with the wrong answer. Now I look at the trees standing bare in the mist and think about how I kept shaking my head when he told me to say I was wrong, and how the other kids sat smiling, staring down at their hands, waiting for after school like the dogs wait for the rabbits.
When you smell the leaves, they’re like cough lollies, and the bark goes all colors when it’s wet. One day I was looking at the leaves and my eyes went funny and I flew up high and looked down at the tops of the trees all bunched together and they were like the bumpy green material on the armchairs at my Aunty Lorna’s place. I never told no one about that, not even my dad. The trees talk loud when it’s windy and soft when it’s quiet. I don’t know what they talk about—rain, probably. When they get new gum tips, they’re so full of sap they shiver in the air. Maybe they’re excited. Or frightened.
But now that it’s winter the trees just look dark and shrunken, as if they’re hanging on by shutting off their minds, like my grandpop when he had the stroke and Dad said that his body was closing down slowly. On the track there’s ice crystals in the clay, and when you look real close you can see that the crystals are long, growing into lines, and the more mushy the clay the tighter the crystals pack in. They do it in the night, in a cold snap. You can put your foot at the edge of a puddle and just press real gently, and all these little cracks run through it, rushing outward like tiny creeks.
Sometimes there’s frost on the rabbits’ fur. I brush it off with my hand. Rabbit fur smells nice, like lichen or dry moss. My mum left behind some leather gloves with rabbit fur inside and when I put them on once I pulled my hot hands out and smelled her smell. “What are you bawling for?” my dad said. I hid the gloves under my mattress. When I touch them they feel like green leaves, soft and dry and bendy, not knowing autumn’s coming.
The morning I saw the lady’s porch lights my dad gave me a new hat for my chilblains. He made it for me from rabbit skins. He rubbed my ears hard with his sweater till my mouth ached from holding it shut, then he pulled the rabbit-fur flaps down and tied them. “See you back here with the bunnies,” he said, squeezing his hands under his arms before he stoked up the chip furnace.
One day a boy at my school who works at the feed supply told the other kids that we were so backward we didn’t even have hot and cold running water at our place. He said, “It’s like deliverance down there with you-know-who.” I asked Dad what deliverance meant and he rolled a cigarette and said why. The next time he wanted chicken pellets he asked for them to be delivered that day and then he stoked the chip furnace up so high that a spray of boiling water gushed up and hit the roof like rain and it sounded like the fancy coffee machine at the milk bar. When this boy came around with the pellets, Dad told him to empty them into the bin and then asked would he like to wash the dust off his hands in the kitchen. The boy went in. I stood looking at the hens and made myself small like them and felt the straw under my claws as I scratched around, and felt how the wheat powdered as I cracked it in my beak, and then there was a scream and the boy came running out holding his hands in front of him. They were bright pink, like plastic. As the boy ran past, my dad called, “Don’t forget to tell your friends.”
I pushed the rabbits into a hessian bag and heard music coming out of the house with the lights on. It was violin stuff. I saw the lady who bought the house come out onto her porch as I cut across the ridge. She was wearing new overalls and you could still see the fold marks in them. She had hair the color of a fox. When she saw me her face went all bright and excited even though she didn’t know me—like the lady doctor who did all those stupid tests on me at school, just saying stupid words and expecting me to make up more words and say them straightaway and not giving me any time to think it over.
She said, “Well, hello there, has the cat got your tongue?” She had lipstick on. I thought maybe she was on her way to church.
I said I didn’t have a cat and her eyebrows went up.
“You’re up very early on this wintry morning. What’s that you’ve got in your bag?” she said, like we were going to play a joke on someone. I showed her the top rabbit’s head and her mouth went funny and she said, “Oh dear, oh the poor little things. What did you want to kill them for?”
I said for Mr. Bailey. I said they died very quickly and always got the traps right around their necks. She hugged herself with her arms and shook her head and said, “Goodness me,” looking at my rabbit-skin hat. I turned my head slowly round so she could see it better.
She asked me suddenly if I lived in the house down the hill and I said yes. Then she said what a marvellous location and what a shame that it would cost an arm and a leg to put the power through, otherwise she would have made an offer, but this little place she’d picked up was such fun and a gold mine. She said all her friends from the city thought she was quite mad but she’d be the one laughing when property values went up and she’d done all the extensions. I was waiting for her to finish talking so I could go. I could feel the rabbits stiffening up inside the bag—I could smell them.
“What’s your name?” she asked me finally, and I said Billy.
“And do you go to school, Billy?”
I looked at her and said you have to. Her eyes went all crinkly and happy again.
“And is it a special school, just for special children?”
I couldn’t work her out. Maybe she didn’t understand about school. I said not really, then my mouth blurted out, “You got hair like a fox.”
She laughed like someone in a movie. “Good heavens,” she said. “You are a character, aren’t you?”
A man in a red dressing gown came out onto the veranda and the lady said, “Look, darling, some local color.”
“Love the hat,” the man said to me. I waited for them to tell me their names, but the man just complained that it was bloody freezing, and thank Christ they’d got the central heating in. The lady said yes, the whole place was shaping up well, then she looked out down the track and said, “The only problem is there’s no bloody view of the lake.” Then she said, “Billy, show Roger your bunnies, darling,” and I pulled one out and Roger said, “Good God.”
They both laughed and laughed, and Roger said, “Well, it looks like the light’s on but there’s no one home.” Which was wrong. They were both home and they’d turned the lights off by then.
When I walked down the track past the sharp turn and through the cutting, my boots cracked on the black ice. You’ve got to be careful you don’t go for a sixer on that. People say it’s invisible but it’s not really—you just have to get down real close to see where the water froze then melted a bit, then froze again, all through the night, till it’s like a piece of glass from an old bottle.
Dad had had his shower by the time I got home. The rabbits were harder to skin because so much time had passed. The skins ripped off with the sound of one of those Band-Aids they put on your knees in the school sickroom. “Get them off,” my dad said when I came home with the Band-Aids on the time someone tripped me at school and I banged my knees on the concrete. Dad was watching me, so I pulled both of them off fast and my knees bled again. “Call that first aid? That’s bloody atrocious,” my dad said. “Get some air onto them.” I looked at my knees. They felt like the hinges inside had got stiff and rusty, like the oil in them had leaked out.
Every day for the next few weeks, people drove up the hill to fix things in the lady’s house. You could hear banging and machines, and then a pointy bit of new roof pushed up over the trees. The lady’s friends, the ones who thought she was quite mad, came up a lot at first but then it got colder and they stopped. The lake froze over at the edges. One day I crept up and saw the lady on a new veranda, which was covered in pink paint, standing with her arms folded, just staring out at the trees. She didn’t look so happy now, with everything half finished and mud instead of a garden. There were big piles of rocks around, like she was waiting for someone to move them, and I saw a duck standing still as anything under a tree. I went closer and she saw me.
“Well, Billy!” she called, and I went over and saw that the duck was a pretend one.
“Look at all these bloody trees,” she said, sighing. “I’m sick of the sight of them.”
She had the overalls on again but they didn’t look so new anymore.
“What are those trees, anyway, Billy?” she said, and I said that they were gum trees, and she laughed and said she might have guessed that would be my answer, even though I hadn’t finished talking and was only sorting out what I was going to say next.
I said there was going to be another cold snap that night and more hard weather. And she asked how did I know and I started explaining but she wasn’t really listening—she was still looking down the state-forest gully toward the lake, turning her head like the ladies in the shop when they’re buying dresses and looking at themselves in the mirror, deciding.
Three weeks later I was up in the trees, just listening to them and looking for good spots for snares, when I found the first sick one. When I touched its leaves I knew it was dying. It was a big old tree and it used to have a big voice but now it was just breathing out. And it was bleeding. All around the trunk somebody had cut a circle, and sap was dripping out, which is the tree’s blood, my dad says. The person had used a little saw, then a hatchet, and I could see that whoever it was didn’t know how to use the saw properly and had scratched all up and down around the cut. There was nothing I could do for that tree. I wanted to kill it properly so that it wouldn’t just stand there looking at me, trying its hardest to stay alive.
The next week I found another tree that was the same and then it just kept on happening: seven of the biggest trees got cut. When I looked real hard I flew up in the air again and saw them from the top and the dying ones made a kind of line down to the lake all the way from the lady’s house on the hill to the shore. Then I came back down onto the ground, and I saw how it was.
“You’ve done it again, Billy,” Mr. Bailey said when I came by. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. Two big fat ones today.”
I got my money and walked up the hill toward the lady’s house and I saw her through the trees, planting something in the garden. Dad said she kept the whole nursery in business.
This time I got quite close to her and the pretend duck before she saw me, and she jumped backward.
“Jesus, kid, just give it a break, will you?” she said, all shaky. She had a scarf that had slipped a bit off her hair and you could see where the red color stopped and the hair underneath was dark brown and silver, which was funny because sometimes it’s exactly the same on a fox’s tail, striped like that.
“God, this place,” she said like a hiss, and threw down her trowel. “Isn’t the collective cold shoulder enough without you creeping around like . . .” Then she stopped and said, “Forget it, forget it.” I saw that she had a special little cushion for kneeling on and I was looking at that cushion when she said in a different voice, “Where did you get that box, Billy?”
I said, “Out of the shed.” She laughed. I looked down at the box with the picture of the apple on it.
“Out of your shed? That’s a finger-joint Colonial box, Billy. Do you know how much some of them are worth?”
Her voice was all excited.
“What about selling it to me?” she said.
I said that it was my rabbit box and she asked did I have any others in the shed. I said I would have a look. She was a loony. My dad sometimes split up the old boxes for the chip furnace. He kept nails and bolts in them.
“I know whe