doubt. He says nothing.
*
The howl singing gets stronger as we step onto the front porch. OOOOoooowwwwwwwwwooooooooooo. The pain in it. The melodrama.
Some strange incoherent warbling along to a song about the night and fate and death.
August leads us through a thick wooden front door roughly painted a deep brown.
The floors in the living room are dark brown wood, unpolished. By the entry there’s a cream-coloured cabinet from the 1960s that’s mostly empty but for six or seven old mugs, a brown bowl holding a wooden banana, apple and orange, and a novelty metal faux bumper sticker: DISLEXICS ARE TEOPLE POO. The fibro walls of the living room are painted a peach colour and there are small and large holes and dents on every wall and these random holes and dents are interspersed with blotches of white paint where other holes have been puttied up. There’s a framed print on the wall of a beautiful woman in a white dress sitting in a boat on a pond with her arms out, a look of despair on her face.
My father doesn’t see us enter the house. He’s somewhere in the corner haze of tobacco smoke and 1960s peyote rock music. He’s kneeling on the floor half a metre from a television that has its volume down with white noise static fuzz filling the screen. My father rests an elbow unsteadily on a square white coffee table scratched in parts to reveal historical layers of multicoloured paint coatings, like the inside of a jawbreaker lolly. Beside his bare right foot is a yellow plastic cup like the ones I used to glug cordial from in primary school. Next to the cup is a silver wine cask bladder wrung to death like an old chamois.
Robert Bell’s howl singing is an attempt to sing along with The Doors, coming through a stereo at full volume beside the television.
My father howls again, his voice cracking on the high notes and drowning in spit and drink on the lows. And my father can’t follow the words of Jim Morrison so he puts his head back and howls and his pack of post-midnight wolves should be arriving soon. He’s thin and bony with a beer belly and a salt and pepper crew cut. If Lyle is John Lennon then this man is George Harrison, gaunt and dark and haunting. A white singlet and blue Stubbies shorts. I guess he must be forty by now. Looks fifty. Tattoos look sixty, old homemade jobs like Lyle’s. A python wrapped around a crucifix on his right forearm. An image of a giant ship, Titanic maybe, sailing across his right calf beneath the letters S.O.S.
A monster singing in that ghost-smoke corner of the living room, curled up and kneeling like that, howling like that. The monster looks like he belongs in some basement with Igor and his friends, Lobster Boy and Camel Girl. And my father’s bloodshot right eyeball moves inside its socket beneath the tan chewing gum spread of his old and worn-in face and finds me.
‘Hi, Dad,’ I say.
His face wobbles as he looks at me, then his right hand fumbles for something beneath the coffee table. He finds an axe handle, a shapely hard brown wooden club without the chopping blade at the top. He grips this weapon and staggers to his feet. ‘Whoooooooo . . .’ he snarls. ‘Whhaaaa . . .’ His shorts are soiled with his own piss. He grits his teeth, spit coming from his mouth. Trying to say something. Trying so hard to form words. He sways as he stares at me and he finds his balance. ‘UUUUUuuuuuuuu . . .’ he spits. He wets his lips and says it again. ‘UUUUuuuuuuuuuuuu.’ Then he goes again. ‘Cuuuuuuuuuunt,’ he spits, breathless, struggling to find the word. Then, quicker than I can comprehend it, he pads straight for me, raising the axe handle high, ready to swing it.
‘Cuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnt,’ he screams.
I stand in place, my brain not presenting me with a better defence than my forearms covering my skull.
But Sir August the Mute, Sir August the Brave, stands in front of me. In one perfect motion, August’s clenched right fist hooks into my father’s left temple, bringing the man with the axe handle down low enough for August to grip the back of his singlet with both hands and build on his forward momentum with a heaving throw that drives his drunk head into the peach-coloured wall behind us. My father’s skull puts a hole in the