A few weeks later we were at Crackpot Pete’s old place up from Crayfish Rock at Stark Bay, searching through the rubbish scattered about. Years before, Crackpot Pete had built a shack from flattened forty-four gallon drums and driftwood and anything else he could scavenge. It leaked like a sieve, and stood brown and deserted as it rusted away in a small hollow in the sandhills.
We prised open the door but didn’t dare go inside. The shed was dark and creepy. There was an old iron bed, and a small table and an upturned chair in the opposite corner. Rags and other rubbish lay strewn across the dirt floor.
Crackpot Pete had lived here by himself for years until one fine, still day late last summer when he’d sailed out to check his craypots and never returned. No-one knew what had happened to him. His boat was never found, not even any wreckage. Not a scrap. No body, nothing. He’d just disappeared into thin air. The men had searched for him for days but he’d completely disappeared. Since we’d found the gun and the helmet, people had been saying it was the Japs on a scouting party who’d got Crackpot Pete.
‘Reckon this place is haunted?’ asked Banjo. He wasn’t keen on meeting any ghosts.
I wasn’t that keen on meeting them either. ‘It’s ten in the morning,’ I said. ‘Ghosts don’t come out in the mornings.’ I was trying to convince myself. It was bad enough to have to keep looking over our shoulders for Japs without ghosts to worry about as well.
‘Hey, look at these.’ Banjo had lifted a sheet of rusty tin and uncovered about a dozen ship’s pulleys. Large wooden blocks with four-inch brass wheels fixed inside them lay scattered about. Termites had made a good feast of the wooden parts. ‘We’ll break ’em open and take out the wheels,’ he said excitedly. ‘We can make hill trolleys.’
This was the best idea Banjo had had in ages. All thoughts of ghosts and spooky unknown dangers suddenly disappeared as we imagined ourselves racing down hills on the brass wheels.
‘Can we go to your house?’ I asked Banjo. ‘My dad gets really mad when I use his tools. He reckons he can never find any of them afterwards. Besides, your dad has hundreds of tools.’
‘My dad gets mad whether I use his tools or not, so I suppose so,’ Banjo said with a resigned shrug.
‘And we’ll need some fruit boxes,’ I said. ‘For seats. There’s usually some outside the shop.’
‘All right, then. You go to the front of the shop and carry on like an idiot as a decoy while I sneak out the back. That should be pretty easy for you—carrying on like an idiot.’
But Mrs O’Keeffe had run out of things to sell and had closed the shop early and gone home for the day. We took two fruit boxes without being noticed. Then we hung round down by the ferry, watching Little Eric, Red Eric’s son, wash out the deck of the ferry.
‘Bugger off,’ he called when he got tired of us staring at him.
‘We need some rope, Eric. For steering reins for our hill trolleys,’ I said. ‘Give us some rope and we’ll let you have a ride.’
‘I’ll give you a length of rope,’ he called back, flicking us with dirty water from his mop. ‘Bugger off, I said.’
‘Aw, come on, Eric. We only need a few feet,’ said Banjo.
Little Eric pulled out his clasp knife from the leather pouch on his belt and I thought for a moment he was going to kill us, but instead he cut off a length of white rope from a coil near his feet. ‘Here. Go hang yourselves. Now bugger off.’ By the afternoon we’d built the two best hill trolleys the world had ever seen. They each had a fruit box with the front cut out for a seat, a wooden T-shape for steering, and a brass wheel in each corner.
‘I reckon we should paint them,’ said Banjo.
‘Why? Don’t you want to be known as Chin’s Fruit and Vegetable Market Garden, South Perth?’ I said.
Banjo looked at the sign stencilled on the side of his new seat and just grunted.