In those early days, whenever Eva was around, Sando was formal with us, even a little circumspect. Eva was often tired and only seemed to tolerate our presence for his sake. The few times I considered her for more than a moment she struck me as a brooder, an unhappy soul. I caught the faces she made at callow things we said; she could give the most neutral turn of phrase a sarcastic edge, so I did my best to avoid her. All my attention was on Sando anyway. I loved being around that huge, bearded, coiled-up presence. His body was a map of where he'd been. He had great bumps on his knees and feet from old-school surfing, his forearms were pulpy with reef-scars and years of sun had bleached his hair and beard. He was, for us, a delicious enigma. He never quite did what we might expect him to do and there wasn't a man in Sawyer or Angelus in his league.
During the last good swell of the season, on a Saturday at the Point when the Angelus crew was over and Loonie and I were out trading waves with them at the very end of the headland, taking drops so steep that our guts rose to the back of our throats, Sando turned up on the beach without a board, pulled on a pair of fins and swam out in his Speedos to bodysurf the biggest sets of the day. He never even nodded in our direction. Between waves he bobbed in the rip like a seal, as though he didn't share our DNA, let alone our language. Ten of us sat there in the noise and spray doing our best not to stare at him, because even without a board he outsurfed us all. Nobody dared paddle for a wave that Sando showed interest in. For the first time as surfers we found ourselves — man and boy — deferring to a mere swimmer. When he shot in to the beach one last time and flicked off his fins and walked up into the trees, I think most of us were disappointed to see him go.
I was pedalling alone on the coast road one day in December when I saw Sando's VW pulled up askew on the gravel shoulder. Dark smudges of rubber stretched back along the bitumen and when I arrived he was standing over a crippled roo. I saw the jack handle at his side. He looked miserable and angry. The intensity of his gaze scared me.
This is what you get, he said. This is what happens. And isn't it lovely.
He killed the animal with a couple of blows to the head, then hoisted it onto the tray of the Volkswagen and looked back up the road to where it must have leapt out. It was a western grey and not a big one. I wondered what he was doing with it. Other people just dragged a carcass off the road and out of the way; some didn't even go to that much trouble. On the varnished pine flatbed, the roo's blood was impossibly bright.
Well, said Sando. Come if you're comin.
I threw my bike up beside the roadkill and climbed in beside him. He smelled of sweat and animal. He didn't speak and I didn't dare ask questions. When we got to his place he got out and tied up the dog. He went into a shed and came back with a meat hook and a length of rope. I stood by while he strung the roo up by the tail. Then he stalked off to the house and left me there beneath the marri tree. From up at the house there was muffled shouting. Eva sounded upset but I couldn't hear what she said. The dog whined, tugged at its chain.
The roo twisted on the rope and blood dripped slower and slower from its snout to the leaf litter below. With its forepaws
outstretched, the animal looked as though it was caught in a perpetual earthward dive. I stared at it a long time. The roo aimed and aimed and never arrived. Only its blood made the journey. I thought of it at the roadside, in the heavy thicket, gathering itself to leap across the bitumen. I wondered if kangaroos had thoughts. Because if they did, then it seemed to me that this roo's intentions might have made it across the road, landing ahead of it the way its blood did even now. The idea made me a bit giddy. I'd never thought something like this before.
Sando came back with a knife and steel. He was agitated, but honing the blade seemed to calm him.
It's the least we can do, he said. Waste of life, waste of protein. Yeah, I said uncertainly. Lean meat, he said.
I didn't reply. I watched him skin the carcass and then open it up so that its entrails poured out onto the ground. I gotta go, I said.
Wait, he said. Take some home to your oldies. I stood there grimly, shrinking from him a little. He seemed to know how to butcher a beast but it was obvious that he was from the city. Otherwise he'd have known that my oldies wouldn't eat roo meat in a million years. We didn't even have a dog we could feed it to. Kangaroo was like rabbit; it was what you ate when you were poor and hopeless, and you sure as hell didn't eat roadkill of
any description.
Eventually Sando sent me on my way with two cord-like fillets in a flourbag that I hoiked into the bushes on the ride back to Sawyer.
Summer came and the holidays with it, but the sea was mostly flat. One surfless afternoon Loonie and I pushed our bikes up Sando's drive in search of something to do, but he and Eva were out. The sheds were locked and the car gone. Only the dog was there. We waited around in the hope that Sando would show up but it was clear that we'd made the long ride for nothing.
For a while we sat on the steps pinging bits of gravel at the tree where the hook and rope still hung. I didn't tell Loonie about the roo business; I didn't know how to represent the peculiarity of it to him without making Sando seem ridiculous. Loonie was a harsh judge of people and talking about the roo would have made me feel disloyal. Besides, I'd gone riding alone that day in the hope of finding Sando and having him to myself for a bit, and I didn't want Loonie to know. After we got bored throwing rocks we started prowling about in the cool shade beneath the house, looking at all the boards hanging in their racks, and it was there that we found the banana box full of surf magazines that somebody had left on top of our own boards beneath the workbench. I was annoyed to find a box dumped on our gear. I yanked it out and dropped it on the benchtop. Loonie snatched a magazine off the stack and flicked through. It was an old number from the sixties with black and white photos that featured riders with short hair and boards like planks. I rifled through the box and found others of more recent vintage that were printed in colour. They were American magazines, lavish and confident in their production, with a welter of ads and products and images of famous riders at Hawaiian breaks like Sunset Beach and Pipeline and Makaha.
Within a few minutes I began to recognize a familiar stance, a silhouette I knew very well.
Shit, I said. Look!
Loonie leant over and didn't really need to follow the caption
beneath my finger.
Billy Sanderson, styling at Rocky Point. Jesus! Look. There's more.
We strewed the contents of the box across the bench and clawed through them to find other images of Sando. There he was, in Maui in 1970, in Morocco in the winter of '68, and at the Hollister Ranch in '71. I found him in aviator shades and a Billy Jack hat in a full-page ad for Dewey Weber boards. There was even an old picture of him as a jug-eared kid in sandshoes, noseriding a longboard with his back arched and his arm and head thrown back like a matador: The urchin and the urchins — Australia's Bill Sanderson, Spiny Reef. For an hour and more Loonie and I tried to piece together a story from all these disparate captions and photos, but all we could really glean was the fact that Sando — for a time, and in places that were legendary to the likes of us — had briefly been somebody. I felt stupid for not having known, and somehow the shame of this, and the realization that Sando had kept it from us, dampened the excitement of the discovery.