I go to Rasa’s room to share with him the little that I know about the law related to assault, born of my own miserable experience.
If anyone asks, my position is that I have never assaulted anyone, having only acted in defence of self, mates and one cowering mongrel bitch. But that’s not how everyone sees it.
I’d dropped out of uni and had been back about two months, living with Mum at home, just the two of us, Oli having taken a scholarship to the Uni of Melbourne to study commerce. I was making a bit of cash from fruit picking, no rush, no stress, thinking about what I wanted to do with life. It was good to be back in Manji. To see Mum, familiar places, mates from school. Four or five of the old crew were still living around town, so we’d get together every weekend to drink and blow shit up and break stuff.
I was at Michael’s place — he’d been a mate forever, since kindy — and we were drinking beers and watching footy, combining the two into a sculling game where you pick a player and drink every time they get a possession. I was attempting to go soft. I’d even driven over in Mum’s car, and planned on driving home that night. Unfortunately, the tubby old feller I chose who’d just come out of retirement to play for Hawthorn happened to have one of the best games of his career (the only better game of his I remember was that year’s grand final, when he pretty much singlehandedly won Hawthorn the cup). By the final siren he’d racked up twenty-five possessions, which left me in a state somewhere between staggering and drunk.
After the game we were talking the usual shit. Leroy was there. He’s one of Esther’s sons, my cousin, a few years younger than me. It’s a near miracle that he turned out decent, if a bit wild. Leroy knows all the Harris bullshit and legends and feuds, and somehow it got around to the old McCulloch.
Leroy told me that he no longer believed Clem had taken it, because he knew a bloke who worked at a chainsaw mechanics in Bunbury, and that bloke knew Beau, Filthy’s son. Apparently Beau was calling around trying to get hold of a second-hand clutch for an old McCulloch chainsaw, a necessity if you’ve got a McCulloch and it breaks down, as McCulloch don’t make parts for the old beasts — which isn’t unreasonable, I am talking about chainsaws built in the 60s, and a company that went bankrupt in the 90s. McCulloch parts can only be sourced by buying and cannibalising other chainsaws, or by hunting a part down through the various chainsaw mechanics. It’s a huge pain in the arse, and a sensible person would just buy a new chainsaw. But the old McCullochs can make a man do strange things.
I stewed on what Leroy said for a while, then I got up as if I was going to the pisser, walked out the house, got in Mum’s car and left without anybody noticing. I drove across the other side of town to where Beau was renting some shitbox of a place a few streets away from where he grew up. I parked the car and sat there for a moment. I was drunk, but I felt calm, only I wasn’t sure how to go about it. I could straight up call him out on the act of theft — confront him. Or I could sneak into the backyard, find the chainsaw and just take it. Or I could find him and bash the prick.
In the end, I didn’t decide on anything. Things just happened.
The house was an old weatherboard worker’s cottage, not looked after, the sort of place waiting for demolition and replacement by a McMansion. It had a big lawn out the back, and two tall corrugated tin gates along the sides of the house to stop the dog getting out. I heard that dog barking when I pulled up. It kept barking while I sat in the car, and it kept barking when Beau started screaming at it from inside the house to shut up. It was barking when I heard the back door fling open. When the barking finally stopped it was replaced by the sounds of sharp blows echoed through the hollow drum of a rib cage, Beau swearing and the dog yelping. I flew out of the car and hurdled the broken pickets of the fence, jogged across the uncut lawn, then drove a boot into the tin gate, behind which I could hear Beau still kicking that poor mongrel bitch.
“Oi! Leave the dog alone, you fucking coward! Why don’t you try that shit with me?”
Next thing I knew I saw Beau’s head, the ugliness inherited from his father, poking above the top of the fence, wide-eyed that some angry dude was in his front yard, wider-eyed as he realised it was his cousin Nick, then still wider-eyed when the adrenaline started flowing and he decided he wanted to take up my offer. I kicked the fence again and it whipped back into his face. I heard him yelp, much like the bitch he’d been kicking.
“You enjoy that, fuckhead?”
I guess that made Beau angry, because that gate swung open real fast and Beau came at me. Thing is, Beau is a year older than me, and he’s a big boy, and last he knew of me I was a seventeen-year-old kid who he could have beat up any day of the week and twice on Saturdays. But three-odd years later I was properly grown, plus I’d learned a little boxing at uni.
Beau didn’t say a word. He just barrelled straight for me, head down, intending to tackle me to the ground then pummel me to a tender pulp. But that’s dumb fighting. I stepped to the side and swung for his face, but I was too drunk to hit sweet. My fist glanced across the back of his neck. Beau stumbled, righted himself, then came at me again. He threw a big and heavy right that would have crumpled my face. I stepped into it, put my left arm out to catch the force, then cut hard and high with my right. I caught him on the chest and then the chin, and that threw him off balance. I took the lead and started whaling, jabbing left and right, left and right, till he was on the ground, then I was on top of him and he’d stopped already, he was fucked. I had him down and done, but I kept going, short sharp jabs to his chin and his temple and his cheek, then the dog was on me.
It got me by the forearm and I was confused for a second, but then I understood it was the same whimpering dog Beau had been mercilessly kicking a moment before. She wasn’t a big dog, sort of squat and low to the ground, but her head was big and her teeth were latched on. I stood up, hoping she would let go, but she didn’t. She snarled and shook her head, ripping into my flesh. I punched her with my left fist, then again, again, but the bitch wouldn’t let go — she knew how to take a thrashing. By that point I was worried about tendons and ligaments in my arm, and what the dog might do to my face if she let go and attacked again, so I used my other arm to help lift and I swung through my shoulder all the way up, the dog still attached and now high and horizontal, then I catapulted my arm, sending the dog into the ground with all the force I could.
She landed on a piece of junk half-hidden in the grass — one of the old ceramic bell-shaped insulators from a power line. I felt her jaw relax the moment her back connected. I scrambled to my feet, blood pouring out of a series of gashes in my forearm. I looked across and saw Beau scrambling behind the tin fence, trying to push the gate shut. I looked back at the dog. She was whimpering, then snarling, then whimpering, then snarling. I knew straight away that I’d broken her back. The fight and the anger left me, and I felt nothing but pity for the animal.
“Beau!” I called, but he didn’t answer. “Beau! Your fucking dog needs to be put down. Beau!”
Beau didn’t answer and didn’t come out. I would have just driven away, but I couldn’t leave the poor thing, not an animal that’s suffering. I looked around. It was one of those yards that tells you everything you need to know about the people who live inside: littered with trash, wood and scrap iron tangled in weeds, random shit everywhere. I saw a lump of four-by-two and grabbed it. I stood next to the dog, her teeth still bared, blood and foamy saliva coming from her mouth. Her eyes were clouded over and I think she was dying, but still she snarled between whimpers, still she wanted to protect her master. I took the four-by-two in both hands, gripped, realised how much my right arm hurt, then swung.
The four-by-two bounced, so I swung again and it bounced. I had to stop and roll the dog over so I was hitting straight down on top of the skull. I whipped the four-by-two as hard as I could and I think that did it, but I couldn’t be certain, so I kept bashing till her entire head was sunk into the grass and dirt beneath. Then I got in Mum’s car and drove home.
I staggered inside, covered in crap, torn shirt, blood dripping from a dozen wounds in my arm, and Mum said, “What have you done?” just like she used to say to Dad, and I said, “They can keep the fucking chainsaw. We’re even,” and I thought Mum would somehow be happy when I told her I’d sorted Filthy’s son, Filthy’s piece-of-shit son, but she wasn’t. Mum doesn’t often cry, not ever that I remember since Dad being gone, but she cried when I said that. She cried for me. After her tears dried, and I’d sobered up some, I remember what Mum said.
“Nick, your father thought the world was at war with him. Everyone. And he was at war back. With his brothers, with the drinking, us, everyone. But that’s not you, sweetheart. It doesn’t have to be. All those fights, they’re not your fights. That’s what killed him. It wasn’t that godawful saw. For a long time before the accident, that anger had been killing him.
“You don’t know what he was like. Back when we met. When he took me away from all that … stuff in Albany. And when you boys were just babies. He was a different man. He still thought everything was ahead of him and he was excited about life and about me, and especially you boys.
“I see a lot of him in you. Mostly the good parts, but some of the things that ate at him. You’re so much like your dad, and you don’t even know. But you’re not him, sweetheart. His anger is in the ground, and it should stay there. You’ve got to forgive him, Nick. Forgive him and live your life.”
I listened to it all, yet all I really heard were those last words. Forgive him.
“Why did you stay with him, Mum? He treated you like shit. He treated us like shit. Every day it was something and something and something and you could have left a million times, but no matter what he did, you stayed. And we stayed. Because you always forgave him, like you owed him something. Well I don’t fucking forgive him. And I don’t even love him. You still love him but he was a piece of shit and he doesn’t deserve it.”
I’d never spoken to Mum like that before.
She sat there, nodding, or perhaps it was shaking, then said, “Well …” but that’s all she said. I could see the colour in her eyes and knew she couldn’t hold back more tears. I didn’t want to see that or deal with that, so I got up and walked away. But I knew she was right about one thing. If I didn’t stop myself going down whatever path I was on, I’d just end up another spite-filled Harris carrying on the feuds and hatreds of other men.
The next morning, I loaded up my motorbike and explained that I’d decided to head down the coast for a bit. I said goodbye and Mum told me she loved me, and I left. It wasn’t my intention never to return, but that was five years ago. Five long years of hiding from all that shit.