The Mary Smokes Boys by Patrick Holland

and likely ever would be. He thought how someone could drive a man off the road here in the middle of the night and be at the far north coast or the desert the next day. He put the paper down and looked toward the invisible highway. He wondered why the man in the newspaper story was killed. Drugs. A gambling debt. Perhaps he was a police informer. And perhaps he was killed for nothing–idiocy and boredom. You could not know. You could not assume anything had a meaning anymore. And those perhaps-murderers
had fled into oblivion and impunity on the highway that even now might be concealing them at unmemorable stops, amidst people in transit who did not recognize that anyone belonged to any place, and so could not tell fugitives apart.
    He was near asleep in his chair when Angela came in to the counter. He checked the clock on the wall that showed three empty revolutions must be made before midnight. Angela’s hair was out of the careful place she always set it. Her eyes were bloodshot and weepy with tiredness.
    “I thought you were at the restaurant,” Grey said.
    “No. It’s just old Minh and his wife tonight. I’ve been to Toogoolawah, to the bridge club.”
    No money ever changed hands and no serious cards were played at the house party called the bridge club. Instead it gave occasion for a number of the district’s bored wives to get distractedly drunk.
    Angela put an orange juice on the counter.
    “Also a packet of menthols.”
    Then Grey remembered Irene. He had forgotten to collect her from school. No doubt she had waited.
    He took the cigarettes from the stand behind him. Angela handed him a ten-dollar note and leant on her elbows on the counter.
    “Are you all right?’ He put her change down in front of her.
    She stayed leaning on the counter, now with her head on her forearms. She was drunker than even her eyes had told.
    “How did you get home?”
    “The bus. I took the bus.”
    There was a late-night bus that passed through Toogoolawah, but Grey was sure it made its last trip an hour ago. The road from there to here was completely unlit. She must have walked, else fallen asleep at the Mary Smokes bus shelter and only now woken up.
    “Sit down for a bit.”

    He took a chair from the back room and set it down beside her.
    “How are your bridge friends?”
    “Tolerable. Barely.”
    He could imagine. He had met a few of them.
    Angela picked up a women’s magazine and began leafing through it. She stopped at a picture of a European prince having his boots shined on a cluttered street, perhaps in the Americas, while his heavily made-up princess looked on smiling.
    Angela sighed. “I’d polish boots forever if just for one day someone would polish mine. Just once to feel important.”
    Grey could think of no response to such a strange remark.
    She collected her cigarettes and juice from the counter and stood up.
    “I’m all messed up tonight, Grey. Don’t take any notice of me.”
    “Why don’t you rest here a while?”
    “Can I smoke?”
    “Sure.”
    She sat down again and lit a cigarette.
    “Thank you. You’re very kind. I’ve told you that before. You have a kind face, you know?”
    He forced a smile. Angela dragged heavily on her cigarette.
    “Can I say something serious to you?”
    “Of course.”
    “I’m not well suited to family life, Grey. That’s why I chose badly the first time around–a husband, I mean. I didn’t choose a proper man but a criminal. You know, he couldn’t sleep in the moonlight,” she laughed. “He was crazy. He’d sit alone at the saleyards where he worked, all night long in a two-metre square dogbox and watch the empty road and drink. I couldn’t have chosen worse. It sort of ruined me for everything that came after. I hope you understand.” She sighed. “Do you have an ashtray? And I was pretty enough when I was younger. Plenty of men would’ve had me.” She stared out the window. “I’m not much of
a mother to Irene. I don’t need to tell you