Hapi by Cari Waites
The rain didn’t stop.Jayden lay on his bed, eating peanut butter and wondering where he would be right now if his car hadn’t died. Cairns, probably, but would he be in a hostel, or a caravan park like this, or a house? The last idea snagged like static electricity when he thought of it, and he pushed it away. Wanting it too much would only hurt more when it didn’t happen. That was a lesson Jayden had to keep learning over and over again, it seemed. He always had been a little slow on the uptake.
He stared at the old water damage on the ceiling panels of his cabin and thought of that thing where your brain saw faces in shapes. He could almost imagine eyes looking down at him—dark eyes, like Happy’s.
Jayden shoved his spoon back into the jar of peanut butter before setting it on the floor. He squinted at the dark eyes staring back at him, and slid his fingers across his abdomen. A faint thrill of anticipation ran through him and his dick twitched in his boardshorts, but he was too tired and too bored to bother. He took a breath, let the anticipation fade away, and reached for his jar of peanut butter again. Something about the rain made him lazy. He just wanted to sleep.
He wondered what a place like this might have looked like in its heyday, if it’d ever had one. He wondered if families had ever sat at that picnic table on the riverbed, and if kids had ever used the swings and the slide. Despite the ache of imaging the cosy scene, it seemed safer somehow than thinking of the decrepit playground now and the way he’d stood on the picnic table to stare as Happy had driven his boat down the river.
The shiver that ran through Jayden at the thought of Happy was anticipation of a colder sort. He didn’t understand his own reaction to Happy. The attraction he got, maybe, because Happy was hot as hell, but what about the way that desire twined so tightly with a chilling sense of dread? Every warning signal in Jayden’s brain lit up when Happy looked at him, and yet he froze. And, worse than freezing, he had the dizzying feeling that if Happy crooked a finger at him, Jayden would stumble closer toward him. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t want to, because it scared him.
Unease prickled his skin, and Jayden climbed off the bed to check that the cabin door was locked. Stupid, because of course it was, but once he got the idea in his head that maybe it wasn’t latched, he had to check.
Jayden had never been nervous like this before. Maybe it was the unending rain, or the isolation, or being in a new place. Maybe it was all of those things combining and playing mind games on him. Because it couldn’t be a man causing this unease, not even one with as unlikely a name as Happy.
Jesus.
Jayden snorted out a laugh and ran his hands through his damp hair.
He was going fucking crazy. Stir crazy or just plain old crazy, it was all the same.
He grabbed his phone, checked if he’d missed any calls from the employment agency, and scowled at the lack of notifications. He needed something to do, something to focus on besides his own weird nascent obsession with a scary guy.
He poured some Coke into a chipped coffee mug. Then, he crossed the floor to the cabin’s entrance. He unlocked the bolt, and opened the door.
The day was dark. The rain still pelted down, and tide marks, made by palm nuts and scattered debris, lay in snaking lines along the cracked concrete square at the bottom of the cabin steps. Jayden sat on the top step, rested his mug on his knee, and stared out into the curtain of rain.
Movement other than the swaying of palm fronds caught his eye. An ibis, feathers bedraggled by the rain, stalked out from around the side of the cabin. Creepy fucking things. They’d always reminded Jayden of vultures. They had that same bald head that vultures did, like some dead thing was pushing its way out of a feathered body, with a leathery black head, black eyes, and a long curved beak.
“Fuck off, bin chicken,” Jayden said and waved his hand at the bird.
It stared at him, unmoving for a moment, and then ruffled its feathers and stalked back around the side of the cabin.
Jayden sat on the steps for a moment longer before he went back inside.
He locked the door again.
* * *
On Friday,though it was hard to keep track of the days when every one of them looked the same, Jayden splashed up to Barry’s office to hand over the last of his cash in exchange for next week’s rent. He really needed his Centrelink payment to come through in the next few days or he’d be out of food. Another lift into Innisfail would be good, too, the next time Barry was going, but Jayden wasn’t sure how to ask. He would have to start hanging out at the front of the park more and catch Barry when he was leaving. It was all academic until his next payment came through, however. At the moment, he didn’t have any money left for groceries.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been skint. Hell, he’d spent most of his life being skint, and while the Centrelink payments weren’t exactly generous by any stretch of the imagination, they were at least regular. Back when his mum had been alive, she’d had a habit of spending her payments the day she got them and leaving them with nothing for the rest of the fortnight. At least he wasn’t relying on anyone else to look after him anymore because he’d never been his mum’s first priority. The details of his story had differed from some of the other kids in the share home, but that was the one thing they all invariably had in common: someone who should have put them first hadn’t. Some of those kids had been bitter about it, but most hadn’t. Most, like Jayden, knew that was just the way it was.
“Staying around for another week, huh?” Barry asked as he painstakingly counted out the notes Jayden slid across the counter.
“Yeah,” Jayden said, “at least. Maybe a bit longer if a job comes through.”
“That’s right,” Barry said. “I remember now. Not much keeping a young bloke like you around here, though.”
“Yeah.” Jayden agreed because he didn’t know what else to say.
“Weren’t you heading up to Cairns?” Barry asked, his hairy eyebrows pulling together in a frown.
“Yeah,” Jayden said, “but if I can get a job here first, then I can save up a bit.”
He was living week to week at the moment, and accommodation in Cairns wouldn’t be as cheap as in Innisfail because it was a tourist city. Jayden liked the idea of working for a season here, picking bananas and having some cash in his pocket to fall back on when he finally got to Cairns. Maybe even have enough savings to pay a security deposit on a rental place. Or, if he hated the place, to put toward a car that would actually stay on the road long enough to get him back down south.
“Huh.” Barry opened an old-fashioned receipt book and began to write one out. “Well, be careful, okay?”
“With what?”
“With this place,” Barry said. His cheek twitched. “With Happy Horace.”
“I don’t have anything to do with him,” Jayden said, heart pounding a little faster.
Barry chewed on his pen for a moment. He looked unhappy. “Yeah, just watch your back. Mad as cut snakes, the whole bloody bunch of them.”
Jayden felt a strange rush of relief that he wasn’t imagining it. There was something not right about Happy, and if the rest of his family was like that, too, then Jayden never wanted to cross paths with them. He tried not to remember the last time he’d been in the office, when Happy had frozen him with a stare.
Were the Horace boys were growing a crop or something across the river? That wouldn’t be unusual for up around these parts, he’d heard. Maybe that’s why Happy was so intense and had a glare like murder, and maybe that’s why Barry was telling him to keep away from him and his brothers.
Barry handed over his receipt at last, and Jayden thanked him and left.
He visited the under-cover area of the amenities block. There was no sign of any people around, so he took a seat on one of the cracked vinyl lounges and stared out into the rain. Palm leaves draped low under the weight of the rain, water streaming off the ends of the pointed fronds. It was strangely relaxing to watch.
Even over the smell of the rain the under-cover area stank of cigarette butts, but Jayden had never hated the smell. He’d never smoked, but he’d never hated the smell. It reminded him of the places he’d lived in as a little kid, and there had been times he’d been happy. His mum hadn’t been a bad mum, not always. She’d never flogged him or anything like that. Most times she’d barely noticed him, but sometimes, when she’d been trying to get clean, she’d been good. She could never stay clean, though. Jayden had cried about that a few times as a little kid. He knew his mum loved him because sometimes she told him that. She just didn’t love him enough to stop using, he’d thought.
He was older now. He understood her addiction had nothing to do with him. It had nothing to do with how good he’d been as a kid or how bad. Her using had about as much to do with him as the weather, and he had about as much control over it. That knowledge had never made the ache entirely fade, though.
A flash of movement caught his eye, and for a moment Jayden thought it would be another ibis, but instead a skinny cat slunk out of the rain and joined him under the shelter. It sat at the very edge of the concrete, keeping its distance and pretending it wasn’t watching him warily through slitted yellow eyes. It was a grey-and-brown tabby with a torn ear and a kink in its tail.
Jayden clicked his fingers at the cat, and its ears twitched, but it didn’t make any other sign that it had heard him.
Jayden wondered if it was owned by anyone in the caravan park or if it was a stray. He felt a certain kinship with it, although it clearly didn’t feel the same, because both of them lived on the fringes of other people’s lives and kept a careful distance.
Jayden shifted slightly on the couch, and the small movement was enough to send the cat slinking back out into the rain. Jayden sat for a while waiting to see if it would reappear, but then he gave up and headed to his cabin.
The receipt Barry had written out was damp and unreadable by the time he got back. Jayden balled the paper up and tossed it in the kitchen sink.
If he was sticking around Innisfail, he should probably get an umbrella at some point.
He spent the day like he’d spent most of the last week: lying on his bed and reading a book. The rain was constant background noise, a steady roar that blocked out all other sound and was almost soothing. The gloomy day slowly darkened into night.
Jayden made a cup of noodles for dinner, with a handful of vegetables to mix through them. The sweet chilli sauce that had seemed like a luxury a few days ago felt less like one now, but he used it anyway because he’d always hated the flavour packets that came with noodle cups. He wished he still had his car, though. With his car and ten bucks, he’d be hitting up the closest McDonald’s drive through for a cheeseburger and a sundae. His stomach growled at the thought of fast food, and he made a face as his disappointing noodles.
He sat on the couch to eat. He was halfway through the noodles when there was a distant crashing sound drowned out by the rain and the lights went out.
Shit.
Jayden set his noodles aside and went to open the cabin door. He squinted out into the gloom, but he couldn’t see anything wrong. That wasn’t saying much. He couldn’t see anything more than a few metres away from the cabin, either.
He shovelled down the rest of his noodles while he looked around for his shoes. He slipped his feet into his shoes when he found them, wincing because they were still wet from his earlier trek up to Barry’s office, and then pulled the door of the cabin shut as he struck out into the rain.
He splashed up the gravel path toward the front of the caravan park. He rounded a curve and discovered exactly what the crashing sound had been. Sure enough, a palm tree, one of those ones with multiple trunks radiating out from its centre, had come down in a tangle of fronds. Somewhere underneath the wreckage, Jayden guessed, was the power line that had connected his cabin with the rest of the park’s supply.
Jayden wasn’t dumb enough to try to crawl over a downed tree with a potential live wire twisted through it. The park was built on a circuit, he knew from his previous explorations, which meant he just had to backtrack and go the long way around. It wasn’t like he could get any wetter at this point. Water sluiced down the back of his shirt as he followed the path past his cabin and toward the river.
It was dark—Jayden realised he had no idea of what time it was—but the crunch of wet gravel under his shoes told him he was still following the path. Right up until suddenly, without warning, the ground dropped away from underneath him and he stumbled, landing on his knees in the mud. He grappled for a handhold, grasping uselessly at a clump of grass that ripped wetly out of the mud as he continued to slide.
And then water.
Jayden kicked out, losing a shoe in the process as his foot caught in sucking mud. He opened his mouth and tasted muddy water.
What the hell was going on? Was he in the fucking river?
His blood turned to ice.
Crocs.
He reached out to where he thought the riverbank was, still trying to get his feet under him. His heart raced. God, was there a croc coming for him now? Would he feel it? Fear lit a fire under him, but he still scrabbled uselessly. He finally caught a root and tried to use it to pull himself out of the water. The root came out of the riverbank like a loose thread in a knitted jumper.
From somewhere close by, Jayden heard a splashing sound.
Maybe a fish.
Maybe debris tumbling into the water.
Maybe a fucking croc. What the fuck did Jayden know?
Using the last of his strength, Jayden dug his fingers into the muddy riverbank and then hauled himself half out of the water. He caught the roots of something bigger this time. For a moment, he thought he’d succeeded, before a cracking sound directly above him warned him that the tree was breaking.
A branch caught him a glancing blow on the side of the head, and he fell back into the river, dizzy and dazed. His mouth filled with muddy water, his vision went black, and then he couldn’t feel the riverbank underneath him at all. He struck out with his limbs, both afraid to move in case of crocodiles, and afraid not to, but he was suddenly heavy and uncoordinated. He tried to call out, but he didn’t know if he even made a sound.
The rain still pounded down, and something tangled around his legs, and over the roar in his skull Jayden thought he imagined the sound of a motor. He struggled, churning the river as water closed over his head.
He panicked and tried to pull free of whatever had caught him. He pushed toward the surface, mouth open to suck in a desperate breath—except somehow it wasn’t the surface he found, just more dark water that poured down his throat and filled his lungs.
His vision went black.