The Legend of Winstone Blackhat

By Tanya Moir

A powerfully realised novel that weaves the past with the present and the real with the imaginary.

In Winstone’s imagination, the Kid and his partner ride through the Wild West on the trail of their quarry. In Winstone’s actual life, he’s had to abandon his 'partner' and is hiding out in the tough landscape of Central Otago. What has this boy run from, and how will the resilient and engaging twelve-year-old survive?

This moving, inventive and hard-hitting novel will remain with you long after you have finished the last page.


'Her talent with prose is far reaching; her ability to pluck a clever phrase from a seemingly inexhaustible well of fluid imagination quite stunning.' - Michael Larsen, Weekend Herald

Longlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Book Awards: 'An unusually subtle treatment of crime . . . Brilliantly paced and plotted, very seriously discomforting reading. A psychological thriller . . . a ripper.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
• Release date: Mar 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781775537762

Book preview

WEST

THE SKY WAS a hell of a thing. Blue brighter than Technicolor, wider than Panavision. It was universal. Paramount. It was everything and nothing.

Cooper and the Kid rode up into it, all the way from the line of the river below, crawling up the edge of the sky into the eye of judgement. It took most of the day. Time lapsed. The sun shifted. A hawk-eagle-buzzard screamed, a scrape across the stretched skin of the lonely, just to show how deep it was, how far the silence ran.

Cooper and the Kid were dust, shadows in the film grain. Then insects, lumpy and six-legged. They kept coming. There was no road, just the long yellow grass swaying in the sun, and eventually there they were, their horses stepping through it large as life, right up in the face of the sky, rolling in the saddle. Cooper’s horse bright silver as a cloud. The Kid’s palomino a length behind, scorched gold like the grass over which its white mane was rising.

The Kid and Cooper rode on. They rode until the sky was behind them. They rode until they took up the whole frame, until Cooper’s face was all there was in the world, a canyon wall, and the blue was only a glint in his shadowed eyes, and then they passed through and were gone. Their business was their own, and they felt no need to speak a word about it.

Winstone opened his eyes. The sky remained. In the wake of the riders’ passing it was sun-spotted and empty and celluloid sharp and the breeze wound through it and caught on the rocks and tailed away through the yellow grass. He lay on his back, sliced and spliced until only what mattered remained, and below his shoulders the world rolled on and all mistakes and misdeeds and needless scenes were sweepings down on the valley floor. He lay looking up at the blue and the sun behind the blue shone through him and he was light and light alone cast large in every colour of the range.

Winstone Blackhat is riding the canyons. That would be his status now. Posted from my iPhone.

Winstone didn’t have an iPhone. He didn’t have any kind of phone. Or a horse.

Winstone Blackhat is telling lies.

The valley below him was groggy and glazed with the summer sun. An Indian summer, they’d started to call it around the huts as they lit their Friday night barbecues under yet more clear and violet skies, and hearing them Winstone looked down over the purpling plains and saw the flash of tomahawks in the setting sun and the muscular flanks of painted ponies. But between the sun and the valley the top of the range was cool. Up here the heat ran around the breeze and shifted and slipped and was gone before he could close his hand.

Winstone wasn’t surprised. He’d expected it to be colder up in the hills. But it came to him then that he didn’t know why. Why it didn’t get hotter the closer you got to the sun. It was a new thought and it felt strange in his head and he thought it for a while. Maybe it was because of the air. Air got thinner the higher you climbed. Thinner and thinner until it couldn’t keep anything in or out, not heat not the blue not the emptiness or your thoughts or gravity, and then the sun cooled and the blue grew thick and other stars sucked at your blood.

The day was starting to fade. Blue to black. White to lemon then gold and orange and red and the shadows closing. Winstone watched it through his eyelids and the afternoon moved across his face and the night came up cold through his back. It was time to go home. He sat up and wrapped his arms around his knees and watched the west go up in flames.

UP HIGH somewhere a coyote-wolf-dog howled. Sometimes it happened that way, the sound coming before the picture changed, pointing to where you were going next, guiding you into the red and gold heart of a low campfire in darkness. Soft brush embers. Dry wood crackling. Flicker. Snap. Then a fat yellow moon sailing up behind the range to light the ridges and valleys and planes of Cooper’s ten-gallon hat.

A doe-rabbit grazed the blue night grass outside the circle of firelight and she had her ears pressed close to her head and her fur was up against the cold. The coyote lifted his silver throat to the moon. The doe froze and her eye was wide and a glint of the fire showed in it. Her nose twitched. The Kid shifted in his sleep.

Cooper didn’t stir. He didn’t even tip up the brim of his hat, which was resting over his eyes. He might have been sleeping or he might not. It didn’t really matter. If Coop was awake the Kid had nothing to worry about. And Cooper wasn’t a man to drift off if he wasn’t sure they’d passed beyond the reach of any danger.

There was a rifle under Cooper’s right hand but the doe-rabbit likewise had nothing to fear. The Kid and Cooper were full of bacon and beans and drowsy as milk and the coyote was miles away, singing up at the wheeling sky from his pillar of rock on the sharp black edge of the horizon. There was no one and nothing else. All around for as far as a man could ride the night was empty.

The moon cleared the pillars and piers of the Rough Ridge Range and paled and shrank and drew away. Winstone went on sleeping. He lay as he almost always lay, on his side with his knees drawn up and his face to the leaning wall of schist and the scabby knuckles of his left fist pressed to his mouth and his other hand down his Warehouse tracksuit pants where it gently cupped his testicles for security and comfort. A habit. Every morning he woke surprised to find his hand there and every morning there it was.

Get your hand off your dick, his old man used to yell as he whipped the covers back, you dirty little bugger.

Winstone twitched and woke. He stayed still in the dark and felt around him the wide stretch of rock and grass and stars until he had reassured himself of its emptiness and then he took his fist from his mouth and pulled the sleeping bag closer to his chin. He told himself what he already knew. There was nobody there. And anyway, you couldn’t be surprised in a sleeping bag, not if you slept with the zip underneath. You’d always feel them coming.

Inside the sleeping bag his right hand reclosed the circle of his warm self and kneaded like a cat bedding down in the soft and soothing silk of his centre. Beneath the shelter of his palm and of goose-down and plastic and stone and sky Winstone lay complete and he slept again and he knew as he slept that nothing would come to wake him but the sun.

It did so kindly. The morning came into the cave like a patient dog and stood warm and waiting over his head until he was ready to open his eyes. When Winstone felt its breath on his forehead he rolled over onto his back and looked up at it and stretched and removed his hand from his tracksuit pants and then he sat up and listened. He listened for voices. Then he listened for cars and after that for spotter planes and choppers and tracker dogs and next for farm dogs and quad bikes and sheep. He heard nothing. Not even the wind was up yet. The ridge was a kind of quiet that wasn’t just an absence of noise but a silence observed in its memory and even the outlet stream seemed to call for hush as it passed among the rocks below the dam.

Winstone crawled to the entrance of the cave and stuck his head out into the morning. The opposite side of the gully was still in shadow. Below him the line of its lip was a slow blue wave seeping back through the grass and in its wake the slope glinted keen and fresh and gold and further back and above and behind and all around the reef of the Rough Ridge Range spread under the sky with the brown grass mounting the rocks like a furious tide and the sun that shone on the range was not tame but a thing to tread around carefully, a stalking thing fierce and yellow and thin that might, if it chose, rip out your throat and pick your bones.

The Rough Ridge had ends but from here, the valleys to north and south and east and west and the higher ranges behind the valleys were over the sloping shoulders of the world and out of sight. Up here on the range you could always sense the curve of the earth and the sky.

At the base of the gully a small flat overhung the creek and on it he could see three rabbits grazing low and grey and indistinct in the shadowed grass. A fourth rabbit stood sentry above and as Winstone watched it sat back and began to scratch its ear. The coast was clear. Winstone held the top of his sleeping bag up to his chest and made his way outside.

The sleeping bag was a very good one and after the continued existence of his balls it was the thing for which Winstone felt most grateful every morning. It tapered like a mummy’s case and was waterproof and had a hood and a special pillow inside the hood for his neck and it must have cost a fortune. Of all the useful things he’d found in the Danish couple’s campervan the bag was the best by far. Before that all he’d managed to find to sleep in were a couple of scratchy grey blankets that blotted up damp from the driest of ground so that he woke up smelling like a wet dog. No one left their sleeping bags in the huts because of the rats and mice and because a sleeping bag was a valuable thing and you never knew who might come along and nick it.

The Danish couple didn’t even miss theirs. Winstone watched them through a hole in a rock tor up on top of the ridge and when they’d finished skinny-dipping in the dam and taking photographs of themselves they just got in their van and drove away. They didn’t even look in the back. So you could tell they didn’t really need it.

Winstone Blackhat steals stuff.

He could have taken a lot more than he did. He could have taken their passports. He liked the passports – they had lions wearing crowns on the front and interesting stamps inside and there was a whole page that said UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in big Wild West letters, red and blue. But he just took the batteries out of the Danish couple’s torch and a camp stove and matches and some clean clothes and most of the food in the fridge and a Leatherman tool and a camouflage Zippo lighter. Winstone didn’t need a passport.

The Danish couple’s bread turned out to be brown and their little pats of butter were white and their cheese was mouldy. But they did have bacon and salami and ham and some fruit from the orchards back along the main road and he ate the bread and butter anyway because with enough salami and ham in between you didn’t really notice the taste and it had been a month since his last sandwich. He could usually eat pretty well off the tins and dry food people left in their huts but hardly anyone had a fridge and if they did it was on generator power so they always took away the fresh stuff. Winstone tried to cut the mould off the cheese but it went all the way through and the whole thing stank so badly he ended up burying it on the other side of the dam in case the tracker dogs came and found it.

As Winstone and his sleeping bag emerged from the rocks the grazing rabbits fled. They always did. They ran as if he was the meanest thing in the world even though he’d never once done them any harm. He watched until the last white tail disappeared and then he unzipped the sleeping bag and took his trainers out from under their rock and checked them for spiders and wetas and rattlesnakes and put them on and went off to choose a thing in this wide world to piss on.

When he came back he was cold so he took his shoes off and hid them again and climbed back into the sleeping bag which was still warm and then he was hungry. Like a grub he shuffled back through the gap in the mass of weathered schist and into the cave. There was a space about the size of a two-man tent inside but the entrance was lower and narrow. Winstone was pretty sure an adult or maybe even a high school kid couldn’t crawl in there and he was nearly certain they wouldn’t try.

The cave had been dry when he found it. Sheep had been in there, but not for a while. He swept most of the shit out with a dead speargrass stem and he stole a knife from the huts and cut dry tussock grass and laid that over the rest and then he put his blankets on top of the grass and lay looking up through the chinks in the rock at the stars. For two nights he was very happy. On the third night he woke to rain on his face. He tried stuffing the cracks with dry grass but that didn’t work so the next day he stole a tarpaulin. He was sure no one would notice. Things blew away from the huts all the time. And by the time they’d finished drinking and fishing and drinking some more half the hut-owners wouldn’t remember what they had or where they’d put it anyway.

He chose a black tarp so the spotter planes couldn’t see it. He rigged it up inside the rocks like a fly-tent and scraped little gutters for the drips and since then the cave had been as snug as the brown grass beetles he so frequently found in his bed.

Winstone was small for a boy of twelve. (Hey runt, Bodun used to say, go get us some of the old man’s smoke. He’ll never see you.) So there was plenty of room inside the cave for him and his supplies. He had space to cook in if he wanted to and there were days when he did but today he just picked up a can of baked beans and a spoon and took them outside.

It would have been easy enough to heat the beans up but Winstone was saving his gas for crucial things like Cup-a-Soup and instant noodles. He didn’t know when the next campervan would make it up to the range.

He didn’t dare light a fire in the gully. Choppers and planes flew over all the time. During the day they might see the smoke and at night they’d see the flame. A fire up here could bring anyone. Like the fire brigade for instance. Apart from a horse, a campfire was the one thing missing from Winstone’s new life. It was hard to live like a real outlaw inside a TOTAL FIRE BAN.

Sometimes when he was very sure all the huts were empty he’d light a fire up there. In the chimney of a ruined dam workers’ hut that hadn’t been resurrected by fishermen, or even outside, close by somebody’s legal hut so the cops would think it was somebody’s barbecue and the hut-owners when they saw the ash would just think bloody campers. Those were the best nights. The fire felt so right with the wood smoke dusting the dusk like a sprinkle of salt on hot chips and bringing up the stars. You could stare into it till you forgot you had no TV and nothing to do and when you had forgotten the night leaned in and wrapped you up and you relaxed and forgot to be nervous.

But it was never safe. Not with nobody watching your back and a posse of angry townsfolk trying to run you down.

Winstone sat in the warming sun and held the tin up under his chin and spooned beans into his mouth and watched the wind whip up the clouds and drive them across the range and their distant black shadows stream like buffalo herds through the long dry grass. When he’d finished he got out of the sleeping bag and put his shoes back on, and after he’d given the bag a bit of a shake and stowed it away and found his old hoodie with the hole in the sleeve and pulled that on over his pyjama top, he picked his way down to the creek.

It was the sort of wide open slope that invited a whooping headlong run. But Winstone wasn’t the sort of boy who whooped. And he’d learned that between the rabbit holes and the trainer-piercing speargrass spines this was no country for a gallop. Although a horse, of course, with its four hard hooves would be okay. Winstone had a lot of faith in horses. If he was Charlie Sheen at the head of the Regulators he’d fly down the hill and across the creek and straight up the other side and all the angry townsfolk and men in black would see would be his dust.

As it was he sat down on the bank of the creek and took off his shoes and his hoodie and hid them and rolled up his tracksuit pants. A metre or so of fine gravelly sand cut in under the bank between the brown rocks and he let himself down onto this and squatted and scoured his spoon and the empty beans tin with sand and rinsed them out and sat them to dry. Then he wet his finger and rubbed it over his teeth and spat and splashed water over his face and under his arms and ran his wet hands through his hair and looked slightly worse than when he had started.

With the tin in one hand he waded upstream through the rocks and the water until he reached the base of the first little falls, where he stopped and began to turn over the rocks.

When he was clean, Winstone was pale, his thick hair white-blond and his skin the cream of cartridge paper. As it was – and mostly had been, all his life – he was the smutty grey of a limestone facade on a busy corner. The long warty fingers now searching the creekbed for freshwater crayfish were knobble-jointed and splayed and the scrawny knees sticking out of his tracksuit pants were scratched and stained with old grazes and bruises and ringworm scars and his eyes were too big and round for his little triangular face and not one of his classmates in the valley below would have been in the least surprised to hear he was living under a stone.

In the shelter of the gully the rising sun pooled and grew hot. Winstone caught five small crawlies and that was too many for the tin and by the time he got back to the beach he’d lost two of them over the side. He sat on the powdery silt with his legs stretched out in the sun until they were dry and made a mental note to steal a bucket. Then he dusted the sand off his legs and levered himself back up the bank and wiped his feet on the short green rabbit-cropped grass and found his clothes and put on his shoes and scrambled back up to the cave, by which time he was thirsty.

On the way the crawlies kept climbing out of the tin and he had to keep stopping and picking them up and one of them caught the skin of his finger in its pincers and drew blood. It had been a fair fight but grilling them one by one on a flat rock under the Zippo flame Winstone still felt a bit sorry.

When they were nice and pink he pulled off the tails and peeled the shells and sprinkled them with little campervan sachets of pepper and salt and dipped them in Danish butter. They weren’t exactly KFC Crispy Strips but they tasted pretty good.

He put the heads back in the tin for trout-bait and covered the tin to keep off the flies and carried it off aways and left it in the deep shade at the base of another rock tor. Then he went back down to the creek and washed his hands and had a drink and after that there wasn’t much left to do except steal a bucket. By his calculation it was Monday, which wasn’t a good day for going up to the huts. So Winstone lay back with his head in the shade of the