Elwood and Morton

Elwood Campbell was a decent bloke and a nice guy and all that, no harm in him, but he was on the slow side. I won’t say he was thick, because I don’t think he was, but information could take a long time to percolate through to him. He didn’t always get what was going on, as it was going on. If he had a chance to think things over, then he would get hold of the right end of the stick. But by then he may have already grasped the wrong end of the stick. And got his hand well and truly slapped.

He just turned up in Merrimba one day with a skinny kid in tow, his son, Morton, because his cousin had an old shack where they could live rent free. I don’t know what had happened to the kid’s mother. She had died of cancer, or an overdose, or had just lost concentration and shot through with someone else. She had kicked them in the guts, that’s for sure, and knocked most of the stuffing out of them. But she might as well have never existed. She was gone, she had vanished. Her name was never spoken. That’s how I got the impression she had done the dirty on them. Elwood and Morton reeked of betrayal.

Elwood settled in, and got a bit of work here and there, brickie’s labourer, did a stint at the mill, then I saw him driving a delivery truck for the feed store. And his kid settled in too. You could see young Morton hammering about on a rusty old bike with no brakes, barefoot in all weathers. No helmet. I stopped him one day and offered him an old helmet I had kicking around the garage. But he just laughed at me and swooped off. A really tough little kid. He came up to our place for a sleepover I had organised for my son’s birthday. I had got the bunk beds and mattresses on the floor sorted, and after the crowd of boys had run amok on chippies and pizza and cheerios and popcorn and smarties and fizz, I tried to get them all tucked into bed. As I settled young Morton down, I got a bit cheeky and offered him a teddy bear to cuddle, and he gave me such a look. Such a deep, yearning look. I quietly asked him if he wanted a goodnight kiss. And he nodded. So I kissed him on the peach fluff on his cheek. Boys of ten and eleven are such little men. Such heart breakers.

Anyway, I had first bumped into Elwood at under-twelves soccer practice. I had noticed him because although it was a bitter afternoon, his son was playing barefoot. At that stage I tried to be friendly to all the newcomers so I shared my thermos of tea and ham sandwiches. I think Elwood may have misunderstood my friendliness, in fact I know he did. He was an attractive man in a slow-moving, lazy-eyed, crumpled sort of way. But I am married and I skipped out of his reach quickly, and next thing I knew Cherie had taken up with him. But not for long. She always checked out the new guys in Merrimba but she never seemed to find what she was looking for.

Elwood and Morton became a fixture around the place. Just part of the landscape. Elwood may have sorted out some female companionship for himself, but I never saw him with a woman. So if he had, it was a private arrangement. I saw both of them quite a bit because Elwood became assistant coach for the under-twelve team. Then as time passed he followed Morton up an age group and became coach of the under-fourteen team. My son quite liked him. Never a word of complaint. Maybe Elwood just found women a bit of a conundrum. Couldn’t quite come up with the right thing to say to them. But when he was with the boys, it all just flowed, quick and easy. So I saw him around at matches and such. But I never shared tea and sandwiches with him again. Just a quick “Hullo Elwood. How is it going?” Then I moved away out of range before he could think of an answer.

So imagine my surprise when I saw him at the soccer presentation, looking all spruced up and happy, holding hands with a very attractive, go-getting sort of woman from the city. I could just tell she was from the city. She certainly hadn’t got that haircut around here and she wore her clothes like a city woman. She had a really firm grip on Elwood’s hand. Every so often she would straighten his tie or smooth his hair. Elwood was practically purring with pleasure. Morton looked much less hollow-cheeked and all spruced up too. So both of them were prospering with a woman around the place. Shoes shined. Shirts clean. Diet healthful and plentiful. Eyes bright.

It was all a bit of a mystery.

Not that they were prospering, but how they had managed to talk such a class act into their tumbledown old shack. And their tumbledown, improvident lives. Oh well, stranger things have happened. But I was curious.
I risked stopping to have a chat with Elwood, well, he did coach my son’s team.

“How is it going, Elwood? Okay?”
“Oh yes,” he said. Quickly. The words were right on the tip of his tongue now and he could respond as fast as anyone. “Thank you. Great. But I’m not going to coach the team next year. I’m going away. On a long cruise.”
He beamed at his new woman.
“Everything’s great. Great.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Really great.”
So everything was great.

It was Christmas Day. A helicopter was circling over Merrimba. Slowly going one way, at quite a low altitude, then heading back again the same way.

We were sitting out on the verandah because of the heat, and trying to decide what it was doing as it buzzed over and back again.

It couldn’t have been a news team in the helicopter. If anything newsworthy had happened we would have heard sirens. Or seen smoke. Martin got up on the water tank on the off chance we had missed a bushfire brewing, but nothing. In the end we decided it must have been someone taking a joy ride. But it seemed an odd joy ride, just back and forward and round and round. The helicopter seemed to be concentrating right over the top of Elwood’s place. And what was there to see? Just the shack, now with a thick coat of bright green paint slapped on top of it, and a bare acre of ground with a windbreak of straggly pines and tea-tree all around.

Just before New Year I saw an item in the local paper about how a marijuana plantation had been found in Merrimba and a man and a woman had been remanded and granted bail.

Oh, I thought. Elwood and his woman had put a crop in and were planning a long cruise on the proceeds once they had harvested. Very enterprising. But I wouldn’t have thought their place nearly secluded and private enough to be suitable. Quite a bit of traffic on their road. Quite a few houses close by. Let alone the cousin in his house on the bit of a hill above. It just seemed very … well … stupid.

But then maybe it wasn’t them. Maybe his woman had money. Divorce settlement. Voluntary redundancy. Maybe Elwood had won lotto. And the guilty pair could easily have been many other types in the village. Easily.

I saw Elwood a few weeks later waiting for a train over on the other platform. He looked like he had been dragged through a bush backwards and hadn’t slept for a fortnight. He was rocking slowly from side to side as if he could hear the beat of a giant metronome. He was shaking his head like a dancing bear chained to an ancient misery.

“Hullo Elwood,” I called out to him. “How’s it all going?”
He lifted his head and stared at me.
Yes, he was the guy with the illegal plantation. Yes indeed. Elwood had been busted. He was going away for sure, but it wasn’t on a long cruise.
He just stared at me. He said nothing. He could say nothing.
And then that look. That deep, yearning, almost bewildered look.
My train came and I got in it, heading in the opposite direction.
I don’t always read the local paper so I didn’t know what the outcome was.

Until I got talking to Susannah, whose husband is on the fringes of all the illegal business in the village, if in fact he is not at the very centre of it. But he is a sharp-eyed, light-on-his-feet sort of character, her husband Kelton is, and not likely to be just plain dumb about it.

“Haven’t seen Elwood about lately,” I said, on a fishing expedition.
“Oh,” said Susannah. “He had that court case about the stuff he was growing.”
“Oh?” I said.
“He got a suspended sentence, cleanskin, but the cousin kicked him out of the cottage and he went off up the coast somewhere.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It wasn’t his idea at all. It was that girl from the city. Everyone told him she was bad news. Kelton told him that what he should have …”
Then she broke off.
“He was really gutted.” She continued on another track.
“As soon as they were caught, she just blamed everything on him and really dumped him in it. And it’s not like he would think up a scheme like that. Too lazy for one thing.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“So she got off and he got clobbered. Big fine!”
“That’s no good,” I said. “I think he really liked her.”
“Oh he did, no doubt about it. That’s what gutted him. She supplied the seeds and everything. But he just wore it, because he’s soft. Acted the gentleman. Took the blame.”
“Maybe she was just looking for a bloke with a bit of land at his disposal in an out of the way place.”
Some people do come here and think that Merrimba is a bit more out of the way than it is. It would be an easy mistake to make.
“Dunno,” said Susannah. “Oh well,” she said. “That’s that.”
“But he had such big dreams,” I said.
“He’ll be all right,” said Susannah. “He’s used to everything going arse over tip.”

I know that Elwood and Morton are probably doing fine by their lights, wherever they are now. Mooching around, bumming a living, keeping their noses more or less clean. I hope some woman is bossing them around, making them happy. Some really nice woman who doesn’t have a hankering for sea travel. I hope she is keeping them out of trouble instead of dropping them in it.

Susannah’s husband is keeping one step ahead of trouble. But he doesn’t get greedy, doesn’t have big dreams. Just wants to get his mud brick house built and provide for his wife and kids. It’s not the life Susannah thought she would have, but it seems to suit her. As Kelton stumbles around at village parties, smiling all the time, a living advertisement for the efficacy of his wares, laughing and coming up with really quite astute aphorisms, and then falling over and laughing some more, she just keeps on smiling. The way a woman who has had a beer or two and a quiet toke would smile.

But then, I can see how having a husband who is always happy might suit some women.