Young Writers Society

“…victim’s family have lobbied the community and the police to continue the search. Ange Carter has been missing since early March and despite extensive searching no body has been…”

He turned the radio down as he approached the farm. He had purchased a rifle and had started hunting. The country’s media were clogging up the roads in the village as the trial reached its apex; in the country he could breathe and relax. Although his back was feeling better he decided to stay off work until the insurance payments had elapsed and he would have to go back.

Rick Te Huna who had a part share in the aluminium smelt, had a farm half an hour out of the village. Rick Te Huna let him shoot rabbits out the back and his wife had taken to stewing the rabbits and freezing the left overs.

He crossed the fence from the road so he didn’t have to pass Rick Te Huna’s home. He slung the .22 calibre rifle over his shoulder and tucked his track pants into his gumboots. He had his spots out there on the farm. He took up post on the edge of a hill overlooking one entrance to a rabbit hole. He lay there with the butt of the rifle against his shoulder and his hand in his coat pocket rolling a live round between thumb and fore finger.

After some time, when two ears poked out, he adjusted the rifle, put his hand around the stock and pushed the safety off. The hare made a quick jerking movement with its head and one eye and its ears could be seen through the jungle of grass. He dropped his aim into the grass, neck height.

The rabbit carted over and again. Down the hill. Resting finally on sheep run. Its front legs were facing one way and its back legs were facing another. He lifted himself, yoked the rifle and moved to collect the rabbit.

It was quiet out there in the country. Where he stood, not even the sound of the logging trucks that tolled by on state highway one beyond the pine trees could reach him. At the road the shot would have been a faint flat pop. In that part of the country few people heard anything and even the things they heard they misplaced, it was probably just a branch snapping of one of them pines, that’s what I reckon has happened they would say of the shot. He sniffed the air and looked about. No rain, no sound. Then movement. In a paddock, two shapes. Boys, he guessed, were running, hurtling fences. One throwing a terror-filled glance over his shoulder before disappearing down the other side of a hill. When he was a boy hunting and particularly hunters were cause for celebration not trepidation. But the boys, they may have been after rabbits themselves, he thought, but they had soon found themselves running.

Since the beginning of his marriage, he could count on one hand the number of times they had fought about having children, over fifteen years of marriage and just a few fights. Her reason had not changed. A hitchhiker had been picked up, taken along a quiet country road in the bush, and then hacked to death.

The results of the investigation un-winded like the conveyor belt at an abattoir, the victim’s dismembered penis found, eyes gouged out. Months later the rest of the body, rotting and discoloured.

That was when she decided not to have children. When they argued she talked about cyber-bullying, about wars and global warming, she talked about food and cancer. She wore those lines between her eyes like war paint. But that was it, “Some god damn psychopaths kill a tourist twenty years ago and that’s why she won’t give me a son,” he once said to his mother.

It was his final weekend before returning to work. The payments would soon stop and he would work, steal or starve beyond that. He decided to spend it at the bar made famous by the trial of Jonnie Casey, the last place Jonnie Casey was seen before his girlfriend went missing.

He sat with some guys he had known once. The types of guys who you only see at bars and who don’t age or change, they just dip their heads over the beers and make comment about the weather and about sport and he liked the idea of visiting them in the same way he liked to take a different route home sometimes when he was driving home from work.

“You know why he did it, don’t you?” one asked of the others at the bar.

“Yeah, she was screwing around,” another said.

“No no no, you’ve got that wrong, she had broken up with that bastard before that, the newspaper was wrong.”

“He did it because he was crazy, that’s all there is to it, you try and look inside the head of a mad man you’ll only get mad yourself,” another one contributed.

“No he was smart, he wasn’t mad, did good in school and everything.”

“I went to school with him,” he finally intervened, “and he wasn’t smart or mad, he was just another guy.”

That deflated much of the speculation and they all seemed to take time to consider their drinks and take sips. One stood and moved to the bathroom. The barman had moved closer, the old barman had been replaced as he was getting too much attention, after testifying in the trial.

“You know his mother,” the shortest man began, leaning his cheek against his fist and wagging a finger at the ceiling, “she’s had her car vandalised, someone smashed the windows of her home.”

“My wife saw someone spit in her face outside the post office. She was carrying a parcel close to her chest and had her hand bag over her shoulder as old ladies do and someone walked up to her cussed her and spat in her face. Judy reckons she would have offered her a tissue, as much for the old lady’s tears as for the spit but she was scared of how other people would take it so she just watched with the kids coming out of school and the others getting things done in the village. She just watched the old lady cross the car park get in her car and with that look that some people get when they’re crying or trying not to cry, you know with the hanging cheeks, she just drove off, like that. Judy still doesn’t feel good about it.”

“She’s had to move, you know? No one knows where but she’s left town,” said another.

The shortest man began again, he had been nodding whilst the other man spoke as if juggling his words in his head.

“You know what, I remember his mother, bit older than me but I remember his Dad too, died of a heart attack some time ago now. After hearing what the Jonnie Casey did to that poor girl, I don’t mind what happened to her car or what people done to her cat, did you hear about that? Course you did. But you know what I would do if I had the chance, and I mean only if there was no way of me getting in trouble for it?” he asked, pausing to search the other men’s faces. “I’d do to that Jonnie Casey what he did to that girl just for her family. I wouldn’t mind seeing that sort of thing happen to the old lady, you know, she’s half the blame, tried to protect him as well.”

He sat there and no one responded. Others may have nodded in agreement but he didn’t notice. One of the men moved the conversation forward, making his enmity towards a politician clear and another asserted that all politicians were lying thieving pigs and that’s the reason why the country has gone to shit. But he paid them no attention. He was watching the mirror behind the bar and beneath the spirits. A strip of glass and within it he watched a man sitting and the man looked as though he was worried for a moment, then he looked as though he were relieved and in seeing himself relieved he found that he was, he would never have children and that was okay and he found that his marriage was okay too.