system. It’s how your mum lets her clients know their orders are ready.’
Darren smiles.
‘Order up!’ he says.
‘Different coloured fireworks for different dealers.’
‘Very good, Flathead,’ Darren says. ‘Your good man up there is running for his boss.’
‘Tytus Broz,’ I say. Tytus Broz. The Lord of Limbs.
Darren drags on his cigarette, nodding.
‘When did you work all this out?’
‘Just now.’
Darren smiles.
‘How do you feel?’
I say nothing. Darren chuckles. He hops off the trampoline, picks up his samurai sword.
‘You feel like stabbing something?’
I dwell on this curious opportunity for a moment.
‘Yes, Darren. I do.’
The car is parked two blocks from Darren’s house in Winslow Street outside a small low-set box of a home with its lights out. It’s a small jelly-bean dark green Holden Gemini.
Darren pulls a black balaclava from the back of his pants and slips it over his head.
From his pants pocket he pulls a stocking.
‘Here, put this on,’ he says, creeping low towards the car.
‘Where’d this come from?’
‘Mum’s dirty clothes basket.’
‘I’ll pass, thanks.’
‘Don’t worry, they slip on fine. She’s got fat thighs for a Vietnamese woman.’
‘This is Father Monroe’s car,’ I say.
Darren nods, hopping quietly onto the car’s bonnet. His weight makes a dent in the car’s old, rusting metal.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I ask.
‘Ssssshhh!’ Darren whispers, one arm down on Father Monroe’s windscreen to prop his weight as he crawls up and stands in the centre of the car’s roof.
‘C’mon, don’t fuck with Father Monroe’s car.’
Father Monroe. Earnest and ageing Father Monroe, softly spoken retired priest from Glasgow via Darwin and Townsville and Emerald, in Queensland’s Central Highlands. Butt of jokes, keeper of sins and frozen paper cups of orange and lime cordial that he keeps in his downstairs freezer and gives to permanently thirsty local kids like August and me.
‘What did he ever do to you?’
‘Nothing,’ Darren says. ‘He did nothing to me. It was Froggy Mills he did something to.’
‘He’s a good man, let’s just get out of here.’
‘Good man?’ Darren echoes. ‘That’s not what Froggy says. Froggy says Father Monroe pays him a tenner every Sunday after mass to show him his dick while he whacks off.’
‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Froggy doesn’t bullshit. He’s religious. Father Monroe told him it’s a sin to bullshit but it’s not a sin, of course, to show a seventy-five-year-old man your bat and balls.’
‘You won’t even get it through the metal.’
Darren taps his shoe on the car roof.
‘That’s thin metal. Half rusted out. This blade has been sharpened for six hours straight. Finest Japanese steel all the way from—’
‘The Mill Street Pawnbrokers.’
Through the holes in his balaclava, Darren closes his eyes. He raises the blade high with both fists gripping the handle, concentrating on something inside, like an old warrior about to ritually end the life of his best friend, or his favourite Australian suburban getabout motorcar. ‘Shit,’ I say, frantically pulling Bich Dang’s unwashed stocking over my head.
‘Wake up, time to die,’ Darren says.
He drives the sword down and it stabs into the Gemini with a shriek of metal on metal. The first third of the blade pierces the car roof like Excalibur in stone.
Darren’s mouth drops open.
‘Fuck, it went through.’ He beams. ‘You see that, Tink!’
A light goes on in Father Monroe’s house.
‘C’mon, let’s go,’ I bark.
Darren reefs at the sword handle but the lodged shaft doesn’t move. He tugs hard three times with both hands. ‘It won’t come.’ He bends the top end of the blade shaft back towards himself, then forward, but the bottom end won’t move.
A window opens in Father Monroe’s living room.
‘Hey, hey, what are you doing?’ Father Monroe bellows through a half-open window.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ I urge.
Father Monroe opens his front door and steams down his pathway to his gate.
‘Get off my car!’ he screams.
‘Fuck,’ Darren says, leaping off the back of the car.
Father Monroe reaches his car and sees the samurai sword twanging back and forth, its mystical shaft speared inexplicably through the top of the parked car.
Darren turns around at a safe distance, joyously waving around the Vietnamese cock he’s pulled from his pants.
‘Just ten dong for this donger, Father!’ he screams.
Still night air and two boys smoking on a gutter. Stars up there. A cane toad down here has been flattened by a car tyre on the bitumen road a metre from my right foot. Its pink tongue has exploded from its mouth so it looks like the toad was flattened halfway through eating a raspberry lolly snake.
‘Sucks, doesn’t it?’ Darren says.
‘What?’
‘Growing up thinking you were with the good guys, when all along you were running with the bad guys.’
‘I’m not running with the bad guys.’
Darren shrugs. ‘We’ll see,’ he says. ‘I remember when I first found out Mum was in the game. Cops burst through our door when we were living over in Inala. Turned the place upside down. I was seven years old and I shit my pants. I mean, I actually shit my pants.’
The cops stripped Bich Dang naked, threw her against fibro walls,
