A wuss … real cream-cake … don’t worry about Blocky Hoyt.
I wasn’t that worried, even if Blocky was able to look after himself. I worked out, was tall for my age, and (Mum said) had the same mean lean good looks that Grandad had had as a young man. So I dressed mean, even put on my leather jacket.
Wanna argue with me, Blocky Hoyt? Make my day.
I walked down the long main street that all these little towns had. Old stone buildings with ‘1894’ or ‘1902’ engraved above the arched entrances. Some modern buildings, pushing up like square glass mushrooms. A few small shops, a few ‘for sale’ signs. They call it ‘rural downturn.’
Saturday, but I didn’t see Josie or the others. Half-past nine, so maybe it was too early for them. Found I was hungry so I stopped at a little coffee place, had a slice of bacon-and-egg pie and coffee. The waitress looked at me as she put down my latte.
‘Sonny, you’re in old Mr Guthrie’s family — you’re the dead spit of him.’
The ‘sonny’ bit nearly got a response, but she’d disappeared into the back of the shop; returned a moment later with a photo, up for the town’s sesquicentennial celebrations. The committee had somehow bludgeoned it out of Grandad, one of the many photos displayed in the town’s shop windows.
Like the photo I found at his house, but closer up. Sitting in the cockpit of his Tempest, his leather cap on. And yes, he did look like me — rather, I looked like him.
I had really liked Grandad. But he’d stopped talking about all that wartime stuff before I was old enough to really listen. Maybe I should have asked. And he was gone now and it was too late — that made me feel bad. Angry. I sipped the too-hot latte quickly and got up to go.
‘Shame about the old boy,’ said the waitress. ‘He was alright.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
He wasn’t that alright to Mum when she had remarried. And if we didn’t call him, he never called us. Last Christmas dinner we’d scarcely got a word out of him. Should we have tried harder — should he have?
All of which was making me madder and madder with one Blocky Hoyt.
The car-yard was open, they worked Saturdays.
I walked in and looked around. It was more like a scrapyard, a car ahead of me with doors and hood — and engine — missing. Some piles of engine-parts, an untidy stack of tyres. I felt a tiny tingle of unease. ‘Wuss cream-cake’ working in a place like this?
The dull clink of a hammer stopped as I entered, and a guy came from around the car.
‘I’m looking for Blocky Hoyt,’ I said.
‘You’re looking at Blocky Hoyt.’
Thank you Josie, you evil cow. Blocky Hoyt was nearly two metres high. A strong brown scowling face and black eyebrows meeting over scowling eyes and a big nose. A low forehead ending in up-thrust spikes of black hair. A grubby white T-shirt with the sleeves missing, under denim overalls, patched and oil-stained.
A shock? Yeah. But I was big enough and mad enough. A cop station across the road, but I had no intention of retreating. This was family business, so here goes.
‘I’m Matt. Gus — Guthrie Tucker’s grandson.’
‘Yeah, saw you outside that dairy. Then Josie followed you home. Did you score?’
I remembered the black figure across the road and the growling motorbike. So he’d seen me and had plenty of time to stash the loot. So … Plan B? Appeal to his better nature?
‘Look, Grandad’s stuff is important to us and we’d like it back. No cops, just hand it over.’
Blocky Hoyt scowled under that black hedge of eyebrows, then grinned a humourless grin. His eyes were a dark cold brown, his voice cold — and unimpressed. ‘Yeah. Is that what Josie told you? Put up to it by her hoon mates.’
This conversation was going wrong. There was anger in his voice and sneering grin. His hands were bunching into fists.
‘I want answers, Hoyt. And I want them now.’
Blocky flattened one hand, the fingers closed and extended — and perfectly rigid. ‘Hey, I’m shaking.’
Maybe it was the jeering note in his voice. Maybe Grandad’s photo, his loss, that last Christmas — whatever. So I punched hard, but Blocky was waiting, tilting his head sideways. He punched back, into my ribs — it was like being slammed with a door. I staggered — not off-balance — and slammed one back, right at the jeering mouth.
We both went down and those tyres rolled over us. Another hard jab to my body, I was about to thump back when a black polished bootcap connected with Blocky’s shoulder. A hand pulled me up, and on the way I glimpsed hairy red legs encased in baggy blue shorts. Constable Dodd.
With him, another constable, thinner and younger, with a sort of sucked-in face and dark eyes. He pulled Blocky Hoyt up — more roughly — and Dodd gave a nasty grim smile.
‘Alright, Hoyt, breach of bond to keep the peace. You know what the option is.’
‘Go screw yourself,’ snapped Hoyt, his mouth set in a sullen line.
I did not like Blocky Hoyt, nor he me, and I had the aching ribs to prove it. But something was wrong here — and anyway, this was personal. So — not quite believing it — I spoke, ‘Constable, I took a swing at him first.’ Then, a wicked tone, ‘He was defending himself, just not too well.’
Hoyt scowled. Dodd gave me a cold look. Of course he’d seen me go in and — not liking Hoyt — was hoping for something like this to happen.
‘You sure?’ he snapped.
‘Quite sure. I just about had him beat.’
Dodd gave me another cold look, not believing a word. But he pressed his lips together, nodded to the other cop and they both went out, Dodd pausing at the entrance to see if I’d follow. Blocky was on his feet, we were both dusting ourselves off. A last look and Dodd left.
I noticed Dodd didn’t ask Blocky if he’d like to press charges.
Hoyt rubbed his face and his ribs. ‘I haven’t got your grandad’s stuff. He was okay to me. So piss off.’
I nearly did piss off. I would not get any more conversation out of Blocky Hoyt. And, anyway, somehow I believed him. And whatever Hoyt knew about Grandad might help. So I needed him.
‘Listen, Hoyt, can I get you a coffee at the place down the street?’
Hoyt looked at me, then his wide sullen mouth formed a grim smile. ‘Nah. I had a fight there. Better settle for one of these.’ He opened a chilly-bin and took out two cans of fruit juice, tossing me one. He sat down on a couple of still-stacked tyres and drank from the can. The sullen look was back.
‘You didn’t know the old boy at all, did you?’
I shook my head and opened my own can.
‘Blocky’ Hoyt; real name, Erland. Town bad guy and loner, in and out of foster homes since he was twelve. Mum dead, Dad somewhere. Anyway, Grandad had wandered into the yard, looking for a car-part, Blocky was rude to him and Grandad was ruder back. After that, they got on.
Blocky had admitted he really got off on that Nazi-German war gear. But Grandad had set him straight on what World War Two was all about. Blocky (being a modern kid) thought Grandad was after his body. Then he eased up, warmed to him. Grandad opened to him, said Blocky could have his medals.
Then one of the local kids had cracked on about Blocky and how much he was getting paid for each visit. It was in another café, Blocky against the three youths (who all ended up in hospital outpatients). Problem was, one of them was Dodd’s own boy.
Grandad had spoken up for Blocky in court; even said the rumours were untrue. So Blocky got one of those keep-the-peace things and Dodd had him lined up in his sights.
‘He knew I wanted to get my own bike and go riding,’ said Blocky. ‘Get out of this shit-awful place and go places, see things. Your grandpa was really into that.’
‘Motorbikes?’
‘No, escape, you jerk. Why do you think he joined the Air Force?’
Blocky’s boss appeared then, a little pot-bellied bloke — no doubt phoned by Dodd. Blocky said he’d done the morning jobs and asked if he could go early for lunch. Being Blocky, he didn’t wait for the nod but slouched off, jerking his head for me to follow.
So we went off down the road and I offered to buy him something at the first tea-rooms we came to. Blocky head-shook and smiled, showing one broken tooth.
‘Nah, that’s the place I trashed.’
So we ended up with takeaway coffee and chips in the town park. Blocky ate quickly, stuffing the chips into his mouth. Like me, he was sorry about Grandad and didn’t know how to show it. He talked about Grandad between gulps of coffee.
So he had known the old boy, done his lawns, kept his old motor running. He said they were as rude as hell to each other and both liked it that way. And Grandad opened up to him, the way he had once opened up to me. I felt something there too, that useless little ache of being too late.
And Blocky was there the night Grandad died because the local hoons had this thing about ‘dead houses’. Pay a visit and trash it. Well, when they saw Blocky sitting on the front step, they paused. And when they saw the baseball bat over his knees, they chucked a couple of tinnies and changed their mind.
But then — Blocky clenched both hands as though still holding the baseball bat — Constable Dodd turned up.
‘So they came back?’
‘Nah. Not big on attention span, that lot.’
‘So who did trash the place and pinch his stuff?’
‘Well a guy called Matt thinks I did.’
‘Sorry about that.’
Blocky grinned. It was only the second time I’d seen him grin. He finished the coffee, crumpled the cup and tossed it into a waste-bin. Then he frowned.
‘You see, if those airheads get tanked and trashed the place, they’d maybe take the medals, but not his other stuff. Logbooks, that personal stuff he was writing.’
‘Personal stuff?’
Blocky nodded, rubbing his hand through the black spikes of hair. ‘Yeah, he’d started sort-of writing stuff down. He was really into it. In school exercise-books, y’know?’
Then if it wasn’t the local hoons — who? What other kind of person would bother? Whoever it was, they must have moved bloody fast. So, something wasn’t fitting and Blocky thought that too. ‘Something’s not right, I gotta figure this out. See ya.’
He got up and went. Not a thank you for the takeaways, but I knew him better now. Grandad would not have thanked me either, and they were alike. Except Blocky did not have a war to fight.
I sat a while in the park, then went back to Grandad’s house. I knocked a meal together — it was late afternoon by then — and ate it quickly. I forget what it was. The sky was overcast, and soon the rain came hissing down against the windows like streaming wriggling snakes.
Josie. She must be laughing like hell over stiffing that money out of me. But it was worth it to meet Blocky and find out a little more about Grandad. My cellphone went — Mum asking how I was. She talked a minute or two, ending with ‘Take care Matt,’ and I was alone in the kitchen again.
Outside the rain was steady and heavier. I made myself a cup of coffee. It was a little darker inside, but I did not put the light on. The kitchen was cold, smelling un used. Grandad had lived on meals-on-wheels. I touched the hot coffee cup with my fingertips, feeling the black brooding despair of being too late to change things. I could have come to see him last school holidays.
‘Just make sure you don’t think about your mistakes for the last sixty years — like I did.’
It wasn’t my chair creaking, but another. His laboured voice seemed to make the room darker. He was sitting opposite, away from the window, his face in darkness. That dream feeling was flowing over me.
‘Blocky Hoyt?’ I asked.
‘He needs someone to kick his arse hard. I was his age in Europe — had Jingo Brook to do it.’
‘Jingo …?’
I echoed the name. Outside it was hailing like the patter of bullets, and a first rumble of thunder, like cannonfire, sounded. Everything as grey and dark as gunsmoke.
It shouldn’t be this dark. Grandad’s voice creaked louder in the house, and the thunder came louder still.