off. The plan was that they'd wheel a bike out each, and hide one for Fuzzy in the flats around the corner. It had gone perfectly until they shattered the window of the shop to make it look like a smash and grab. They knew Fuzzy's dad would sleep till the cops got there – he went to bed with Jack Daniels and nothing could wake him.
They were right. Mr Waterman didn't wake when the huge front window broke inwards and impaled his son. He didn't even wake when Cutter and Esterhase bolted from the shop, knocking over a rack of bike wheels.
Only Joss's screams had woken Fuzzy's dad from his drunken sleep. Joss had done his best to hold Fuzzy's throat together, but his best friend had drowned in his own blood right there in Joss's lap.
By the time he got downstairs carrying a baseball bat, Mr Waterman's son was dead, and Joss was gone.
15
THE CONDENSATION CAUSED by the spring rain combined with the steam of rice and soup cooking in the kitchen. Sweating, Cutter could imagine himself in the Vietnam of his grandfather's era. He rolled onto his side and reached for another tissue, coughed. The routines and rituals of the room comforted him back to his pillow. His aunt fed his cousin's baby on the floor next to him. His grandma sat in her favourite chair rolling sticky rice balls, just as she had every day of his life. He coughed again and groaned quietly, and his grandma glanced up, giving a cluck of alarm. His ma poked her head out from the doorway of the small kitchen and instructed him to drink more of the fish soup that was sitting in a bowl next to his mattress on the floor.
Cutter always came home when he was sick. He'd grown up in this humble house in Cabramatta, as had nine of his cousins and most of their children since. At times, there were up to twenty people sleeping in the house, and it had always been full of delicious smells, laughter and babies.
Because his father and grandfather had purchased the house together, young Henry was the only child to have a bedroom of his own. He would have preferred to sleep in this room with everyone else, on the mattresses that were rolled out each evening; but his grandfather had insisted that Henry occupy his own bed, telling him that he would one day inherit the home and should be aware of his place in the family.
Cutter had had great respect for his grandfather, who'd died when he was only eight, less than twelve months after Cutter's father had been hit by a car and killed instantly.
Cutter's grandfather had been a hero of the war in Vietnam, a general in the South Vietnamese army, fighting for the allies. At night, he had sat with Henry by the hour and verbally recreated epic battles, his role in fighting for the South. He'd prevented the deaths of hundreds of Australian and American troops, teaching them how to recognise and survive the perils of the steaming jungle. There were the panji pits: sticks and branches concealing a ditch studded with protruding spikes that had been poisoned with rotting meat. There were mines suspended from trees, created from discarded Western supplies, set at heights designed to pulverise half the face. He taught them to recognise signs in the bush that the enemy had passed or were waiting – bent leaves, a broken branch. He told Henry of the elaborate Cu Chi Tunnels, designed to house whole families as well as munitions, with deadly snakes kept ready to be released upon enemies brave enough to venture inside. The landmines in the hills of Long Hai; the perils of R amp;R in the streets of Saigon. Young Cutter, wide-eyed, sat on his bed with his chin on his knees, rapt, as his grandfather conjured up the tastes, smells and sounds of a country he had never visited.
Of course, the history lessons were not without pain. Henry understood that. One terrible night, betrayed by some of his own villagers, his grandfather had been captured by the Vietcong. Before he was rescued a week later when the Australians overran the camp, he had been tortured almost to death. Grandfather had watched each of his loyal troops beheaded one by one, their heads used as footballs by the enemy. When he'd closed his eyes, unable to watch, his eyelids were cut from his face. Grandpa told Henry that he knew his time would soon come when he had watched his lieutenant's manhood being cut from his loins and forced into his mouth, his lips then sewn crudely shut. He had watched his best friend's eyes pleading with him, the blood from his balls running from his mouth, before he too had been decapitated.
Grandpa told Henry that the experience had made him more than a man; he felt immortal. Death had no power over him. Pain held no fear. But the most powerful lesson, he told the boy almost every night, he had learned from the needles. It was his responsibility, he explained to his grandson, to teach him, to impart to him the same power.
Grandfather told him that the needles were inserted by his captors under the foreskin of his penis. Any sound made caused another needle to be inserted. This continued until the man made no murmur, no sound. The lesson would then be over until the next day.
Cutter learned the lesson in one night when he was four years of age. He'd had the flu and his grandfather had stayed home with him while his family was out celebrating Tet. Most nights thereafter, until his grandfather's death, Henry was instructed in his heritage by the war hero.
As a boy, Henry had loved Saturdays. Once a week on this day, he had the honour of accompanying his grandfather to the local market. There, neighbours and stallholders would pay their respects to Grandpa. Small children would stare at Henry in awe or curiosity as he led the war hero through the bakeries and vegetable stands. Grandpa's eyesight was very poor and he wore his usual huge dark glasses to protect his scarred eyes. He walked slowly; Henry knew his grandfather had terrible arthritis in multiple old injury sites on his arms and legs. Yet his bearing was regal – stallholders would crow to their neighbours with pride when he had purchased from their store.
And then the accident had happened.
It was a wet day, much like this one, Cutter thought now, as he patted at his nose, already sore from blowing it too much. It was a well-worn memory, and he leaned back against his pillow to think it through. His grandma had required medication for one of the babies, he recalled, Chinese medicine from Thanh Kha's store above Dutton Lane. Henry had led his grandfather through the marketplace and into the narrow side street. Slowly, they climbed the stairs to the apothecary's small shop – the living room of an apartment above the market.
At times, at night, the musty smells of the medicinal powders and roots still came to Cutter before he dropped into dreamless sleep.
That morning, Dr Kha's family was eating a late breakfast in the room behind the shop. Cutter remembered that on that day he had been walking as carefully as his grandfather, his groin aching deeply from an extended lesson the night before. As they were leaving, Mrs Pham came out of the gloom of the narrow stairway and greeted them with a bow.
'Please be careful,' she had warned, looking down at young Henry. 'The stairs are wet with the rain this morning.'
Cutter's grandfather had been wrong about being immortal.
You had to give it to him though – he had made no sound as Henry had shoved him hard in the back as he was shuffling down the steep stairway. In fact, the only sound Cutter heard before the stallholders came running was the dull splat when Grandpa's head had split open like a melon on the concrete below.
Cutter thought he could hear the sound now; it caused his penis to harden under the thin bedsheet and set him to coughing again. His grandma stood slowly and came to his side, bending down to feel his forehead with her soft, papery hands.
Cutter always came home when he was sick. He loved the memories.
16
JOSS CARRIED HIS old schoolbag with him when he left his mother's house. He sat directly behind the driver on the bus, shifting from time to time to adjust the position of the knife in his pocket. It seemed to prod for his attention; he couldn't stop thinking about it. He'd have to fashion some kind of holster; it wasn't as though he could just wear it in his belt as he had overseas.
