Coach said, "But today, you get a rest." He smiled curtly and closed his fist around the whistle, shaking it like dice. Jamie's dad stood up and thanked him. He was wearing work clothes, his jeans smeared with oil and sawdust. Then he turned and thanked Leyland.
"Well," said Leyland, rising to his feet, "our students, our business."
Coach left the room. Jamie didn't say anything. He was thinking of Dory, the rest of them, waiting for him on the oval. What they must be thinking. He felt airy in his own body. What they must be saying. He remembered Lester's words in the corridor.
"It's not your business," his mum said quietly, but Leyland didn't hear.
His dad moved to stand behind her chair. "Come on, Jamie."
"It's between the boys. It's not their business."
"Maggie," his dad said under his breath, "we talked about this already."
Jamie couldn't bring himself to look at them. He sensed that to witness a drama between his parents here, now, might wreck him completely.
"Jamie," said Leyland. His voice took on added weight: "I've talked to Dory. He understands — there's to be no trouble whatsoever."
His dad pushed the wheelchair out of the room.
"Alright?" Leyland asked. "It's over."
***
Even from the car he could see Dory. Even at that distance. Tallest in a line of green guernseys, the one moving slower, as though to a separate beat, while the others jogged in place, ran between the orange witches' hats between whistle bursts. Sprint exercises. All the way home Jamie said nothing.
When they pulled up, he got out and unfolded the wheelchair.
His dad said, "Help your mother into the house."
"Bob, I'm okay."
His dad looked at Jamie and then at the house. "I said help your mother."
The front door opened and Michael came out. He stopped — transfixed and tense — as soon as he saw Jamie, staring at him without any of his usual bashfulness. Something like concern, deeper than concern, all through his expression. Then he went over to their mum and took hold of the wheelchair handles.
"I'm going down the jetty," Jamie told his dad.
His mum turned to him with a strange, clear-eyed face. "You're allowed. You're allowed to go. You can go."
***
HE WALKED, ALONE, down to the jetty. It was clogged with tourist families who'd arrived over the weekend. All along the walkway were canvas chairs, Eskies, straight-backed rods thick as spear grass. A mob of fluoro jigs hopping on the water. He found a spot and sat. Someone had a portable radio and music streamed into the air in clean, bright colors. The bay a basin of light.
Could that really be the end of it? Leyland talking to Dory? What would he have said to him? That the school needed Jamie fit for the final? That Jamie's dad had begged Dory to spare his gutless son? That his mum, in that wheelchair, was dying? He sat in the midst of the jetty's hurly-burly, watching and listening. He felt the need of explanation. Here's what he could say to Dory — no, he could say anything, all the right things, and it still wouldn't be enough. Maybe things could be normal again. He'd finish school, run onto the field on Saturday and run off two hours later. He'd take up the job at the fish plant, or, better yet, he'd talk to John Thompson. His dad would take the sheets in. Stop. They'd pot the ashes under the waratahs; leave a handful for the bluff, throw it up and the wind would probably shift and putter it into their faces. She'd like that. No — you didn't think of that.
He got up and started walking. He'd sat there long enough — training would be done by now. He walked down the main street and past the wharf. At the tidal flats he took off his shoes and kept going. He had an idea where he was going but nothing beyond that. Sand spits sank into ankle-deep shoals. The night had been cold and the water chilled his feet. The sky flat and blue with mineral streaks. He passed the rock pier and started picking his way through the sedgeland — sharp, rushlike plants grazing his legs. At every step he dared himself to turn around, but he didn't. He followed a rough trail marked with half-submerged beer bottles, clearings where blackened tins from bonfire rockets were set into the dirt like sentinels.
And Alison. How would he have any chance with her otherwise? He stepped on solid-looking ground and sank to his knees.
The bile rose up in him. Roundabout here was where they'd found the poacher's body. Half stuck, half floating in the marshy suck. No-nothing was worth that. And in that moment he realized, deep as any realization went, that that wasn't what he was afraid of at all. He had to see it through.
He came to the shack in the middle of a muddy clearing. A man sat out front on a steel trap doing ropework. He was surrounded by other traps and old nets, dried and sun-stiffened in the shapes of their failure. It must have been Dory's uncle. He didn't look up.
"Dory," he called out. "One of your little friends is here to see you."
Jamie moved closer. The sides of slatted wooden crates were laid end to end over the mud — a makeshift path — and he stepped onto them. He saw the man's hands, shot with swollen veins and spidery capillaries. The waistband of his shorts cutting deep under his beer gut.
"Dory!"
"I'll come back," said Jamie.
The screen door opened and there was Dory, his body blocking almost the whole space, eyes narrowed in the sun. Hair over his eyes. He was wearing trackies and a stained singlet. He rubbed the bristles on his chin and cheek. Then he came partway down the crate-board path.
"You're here," he said. He sounded surprised.
"Offer him a drink," said his uncle. "And get me one while you're at it."
"We're out," said Dory.
His uncle looked up and chortled, his face orange and unevenly tanned like an old copper coin. Then Jamie heard a whoop from inside the hut. He saw movement behind the boarded-up windows where the wood had rotted off.
"The fuck you doing here?" said Dory in a low voice.
Jamie stared dumbly at him. "The fight," he managed to say.
Dory surveyed the entire clearing behind Jamie. "It's off."
"Why?"
A disgusted look came over Dory's adult face. "Why?" He glanced, almost involuntarily, over his shoulder, then came a step closer to Jamie and said, "You dunno what the fuck you're doing, do you?"
Lester appeared at the door. "This fucker," he shouted, his face splitting into a grin.
"Jamie?"
Alison-that was Alison's voice. She emerged from the hut in her school uniform like some sort of proof. Even here — deep down in this plot of filth — her dress was clean. The mud didn't touch her. She looked at Jamie with an expression of dark intensity.
"I thought.." He tried to make his voice firm. "There's squid now, down the jetty," he said.
She hesitated, then walked toward him, then stopped beside Dory. Her face still amok. Then she put her mouth to Dory's ear and after a moment he laughed, a deep, throttled hack of a laugh.
"See," said Dory's uncle. He lowered the greased rope onto his lap. "Here's what I don't get."
"Alison," Jamie went on. He spoke only to her. But his voice faltered, undercutting what he wanted-what he was trying to say.
"Don't you boys go to school together? Why come all the way out here?"
"Can't hide behind his retard mum here, that's why," said Lester.
Dory gave out another guttural laugh. Then, turning his back, he said, "Just fuck off, Jamie. Okay?"
It wasn't as though he'd planned anything. He hadn't known exactly what to expect. But this — Alison, her shoulders neatly narrowed as though pinned back, spinning Dory around and hissing into his ear, the old man leering on a crab trap in a crater of mud — this wasn't part of it. He stepped up to Dory.