The Furphy Literary Award: Dips O’Donnell’s short-listed story ‘The Dam’

 

 

 

 

The Furphy Literary Award was expanded in 2020 to become a national competition. In 2024 it attracted about 640 entries, including one from Dips O’Donnell. The judges have no idea who the authors are as they get stuck into the process.

Dips’s story, ‘The Dam’, made into the long-list of 80 stories and then the short-list of 30 stories and just missed the cut to get into The Furphy Anthology 2024 (which, by the way, will be launched at the All Nations Hotel in Richmond on November 21, from 6pm. All welcome. Details and RSVP HERE)

Here’s his story:

 

In the darkness the water gurgles almost silently, as if choking on a grape, and twirls around a felled gum which has left its muddy roots and gently bowed into the river. There is a splash as something pursues something else in a life and death battle beneath the syrupy brown surface of the Murray. A turtle lurching at a moth? A Murray Cod gulping an insect? Who won? Who lost? I lie on my back in the cool grass and peer up into the Milky Way and wonder if there is a word big enough to describe its breadth and grandeur or if there is a word small enough to define our place in it. And my thoughts of Joey travel with me like they travel with me everywhere. My tormentor and hero.

 

********

 

I had never run so fast. Hurdling logs, darting around trees, grasping at their trunks as I spun past, trying to avoid running in a straight line, feeling the sting of the saw-edged grass lashing my ankles.

 

I could hear him behind me. Close now. Very close. I could feel his anger.

 

“Come here ya little pervert!”

 

He was reaching for my shirt. Fingers grabbed but failed to grasp. I’ll head for the dam I thought, and I’ll jump in and there’s no way Joey would follow me in there. No way! Nothing scared Joey except the dark waters of the dam. Which was fair enough. He’d been dragged out of it as a four-year old by his father, spluttering and spitting water, red faced and purple lipped. He was lucky.

 

Local legend told of the car wrecks and human carcasses that rested in the dam’s turbid waters. Cars stolen for fun then driven into it after midnight. Nothing good happens after midnight. Local kids swore black and blue that they regularly heard the splash as another Datsun or Kingswood took the plunge and not long after the blue police lights would sparkle in the darkness and coppers would talk and flash torches into the shadowy scrub looking for the thieves who were long gone. Two-way radios crackled, police divvy van doors slammed, and the area would return to the silence of the night. There must be hundreds of wrecks there. We wondered how deep the water might be.

 

And tales were told in the school shelter shed at lunchtime delivered in whispers by kids who’d been told by their older brothers who heard it from another kid who knew someone who witnessed the whole thing: the dead kids tossed into the dam. We didn’t know anyone who’d gone missing, so we supposed these kids were from out of town, perhaps visiting grandparents. But we hoped they were Borough boys who’d strayed into our hood and been picked off by the Kaminski brothers. There was no love lost for the Borough boys. If all the stories were true, there must be dozens of them in the dam. They haunted it and their long, boney fingers grabbed at the legs of anyone who fell in, aiming to drag them into their lifeless world. The thought chilled me. Adrian Lamerson, whose parents were really rich because they owned the local carpet shop, said he’d pay anyone five bucks if they camped next to the dam for one night. Five bucks! No one accepted the bet.

 

They would have grabbed these hapless kids outside Ramsdale’s milk bar for sure, the perfect ambush location. The milk bar was located on Grand Boulevard which was halfway between the school and no man’s land. Gum trees hovered over its roof and kept it dark and grimy even on a good day. The Kaminskis were well drilled. They’d wait outside amongst the banksias, smoking Marlboro cigarette butts picked up off the footpath, and pounce as some poor sucker exited the shop unwrapping his five cents worth of mixed lollies in broad daylight. We weren’t sure how they killed the kids. Probably frightened them to death.

 

But we knew better. Vigilance was paramount. We’d exit the milk bar, turn left and sprint straight through Bartlett’s paddock despite the risk of being shot because we knew old man Bartlett sat on his front verandah with a 22-rifle looking to shoot trespassers. We never looked back, and only opened our lollies when we reached Olympic Avenue; a steep dirt track marked by twisted ruts formed by the slashing Spring rains and summer wind. It had nothing “avenue” about it. It should have been named the Olympic Dust Bowl. But there were houses there and people, which meant safety.

 

Only the toughest kids rode their bikes down the Avenue. I’d seen plenty of brave souls propelled over their handlebars and into hospital with split heads and broken wrists after their front wheel got rutted and stopped on a two-bob bit and their bodies were flung through the air. These flung kids spun so beautifully and rhythmically, like a parachutist tumbling out of a plane, but the landing was always ugly and bloody.

 

And when the kids got flung off their bikes they went into a sort of hall of fame, and we signed their thick white plaster casts when they returned to school and almost wished we had a broken wrist too. Or we marveled at the sixteen stitches in their swollen forehead and asked them if it hurt much.

 

I’d seen the Kaminski brothers riding their bikes down the Avenue, cackling like cockies, dust clouding behind them as if chased by a bush fire. They’d hit the brakes, slide sideways in a spray of gravel and dirt, correct the back wheel, and hurtle onwards. Brainless but magnificent. I was envious of their fearlessness. And they had girlfriends. Real girls with cut-off jeans and shirts with shape. The girls gathered at the bottom of the hill like they were waiting for the Beatles to appear, as the boys defied death. Joey normally won and his girlfriend always gave him a hug at the end. She hugged him with everything she had. He was the oldest Kaminski and the local hero. Our Joey, the benevolent dictator.

 

I sat next to Joey’s little brother Toni at school. Toni was short for Antoni but no one made fun of his girl’s name. Toni was a good kid but was also a Kaminski so delight and dread were in the same sandwich. One day he farted in class, but I got the blame because I laughed the loudest whilst Toni sat stoney faced and innocent. I received a solid dose of the cuts at school and a second dose at home. Toni thought that was hilarious.

 

Toni had a girlfriend in grade four. I thought that was a promising idea, so I quizzed him as to how he did it. He shrugged and said,

 

“I asked her.”

 

So, I asked Bernadette Cummins if she would be my girlfriend. She just squealed and ran off to her friends who laughed and pointed at me and reduced me to rubble.

 

The Kaminskis were Polish. Toni’s parents came out to Australia in the late nineteen forties. Toni wasn’t sure why but was told by his father that things went bad for them after the Three Times Yes Referendum in 1946.

 

“What was that about?”

 

“Dunno” said Toni, “but they pissed off pretty quick after it.”

 

His father told the young Kaminskis stories of hardship and toil, like how the front room of their home in Warsaw only had three walls after a Nazi hand grenade blew off the façade during their invasion in 1939. They ate their evening meal open to the street if they were lucky enough to get an evening meal. After the Nazis were routed and peace threatened, they gathered up the bricks into a pile to rebuild the wall, but then the Russians arrived and nicked them all to construct barricades in case the Nazis returned. So, in winter they ate their meals standing up in the kitchen. The front room was too cold.

 

No one really knew how many Kaminskis there were. Some said thirteen and others said fourteen, but they never stood still long enough to be counted. Mrs. Kaminski called everyone “sweetheart” and Mr Kaminski called everyone “tiger” so we couldn’t even add up all the names.

 

I used to go to Toni’s house sometimes to play. Toni would walk past our house and yell out over the fence,

 

“Hey idiot, wanna come up the hill?”

 

So, I did.

 

It seemed to me that the house was kept upright by noise if not by structure. The walls were decorated with framed pictures of old men in suits and women in heavy black dresses and posters with the word Solidarnosc plastered across them. As the family grew (and grew) they built a second house behind the first, connected by a covered path. The second house was fashioned together by Mr Kaminski and a few of his mates who seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time sitting under the trees speaking loudly in Polish and drinking bottles of what looked like water that had a very singular effect on them. They never quite got around to finishing the structure and never quite got to the local Council office to advise them of its existence. One wall was clad with black plastic because they ran out of weatherboards.

 

“We only had three walls in our house growing up” Mr Kaminski told his children, “It won’t hurt ya.”

 

I never saw the roof as it was buried under an umbrella of foliage, but roof tiles would suddenly appear in the Kaminski front yard and the police would come and talk with Mr Kaminski about where he got them from. Nothing ever happened. How can you tell if a roof tile was stolen or not? I was told that their roof looked like the rainbow mountains in Peru.

 

So that’s where five or six of the oldest Kaminski boys lived. They’d come to the main house for dinner and return to their den at night, fueled up with food and bubbling with mischief. I was at dinner a few times, more by misadventure than anything. We’d be playing a game when suddenly, a tsunami of movement swept towards the kitchen from all parts of the yard and house. It was an irresistible force of nature, like flood waters emptying into Lake Eyre. A bell would ring, kids would fall out of trees, scramble from under beds, topple off the roof, or sprint into the house from beyond the horizon, and someone would grab your arm and before you could say “No thanks I’m going home” Mrs. Kaminski would have a plate of lamb shanks and vegetables in front of you.

 

“There you are sweetheart.”

 

She probably thought I was one of hers.

 

But Joey just sauntered in, slouching and smoldering. His athletic body looked too old for his face and his legs too big for his boots. He’d glare at you like you were a bit of furniture, and his siblings were slightly anxious as to what seat he would choose tonight. Mrs. Kaminski would ruffle his hair and say, “sit down Joey before it gets cold” and Mr Kaminski would look up warily over his glass of claret. The old bull and the young bull.

 

After dinner as darkness fell and the sound of crickets hit a crescendo the girlfriends were smuggled into the rear house and the games of pool and poker began. Led Zepplin and Deep Purple records pumped their guitar riffs into the evening. Cigarette smoke billowed through the holes in the plastic wall and Toni told me the boys drank long neck bottles of beer. Oh, how I longed to see what was going on in there!

 

In summer, the local pool was the only place to cool down. Mum would drop us off at the back gate at about 11am and say, “I’ll pick you up out the front at 5!”, and we’d dash across the burning bitumen and around the side to pay our fifty cents at the swinging iron entry gates.

 

We had another fifty cents and a vegemite sandwich to get through the day. In between swims we’d lie under the flowering gums on our towels and listen to the bees pollinating the blossoms above us. The hum of the bees and the cacophony of shrieking children in water were the sounds of summer. At about 1pm we’d buy a Sunny Boy and hope that inside was the rare “free” stamp entitling the holder to a complimentary one. It was like winning lotto. And as the sun got higher, we’d start building our pile of dead flies picked off our legs or arms with the lightning reflexes and keen eyes of youth. Whoever had the biggest pile of dead flies on his towel at the end of the day was the winner.

 

The Kaminskis were always at the pool. They were our boys. Our protectors and our tyrants. Joey would shove you aside in the queue for the kiosk or steal your sandwiches or throw your towel into the water for a laugh, but we never protested. We had to take the bad with the good because if the Borough boys arrived from across the river and tried to impose their will on our turf the Kaminskis would see them off.

 

I remember the afternoon was scorching hot and a wind came in hard from the north. The trees bent and tiny grit lashed the eyes. I was making my way to the toilets, head down and guard down, and found myself being followed by two Borough boys. Haphazardly I lingered near the toilet entrance hoping they’d lose interest in me, but they dragged me inside and pinned me against the cool Besser brick wall.

 

“Give us ya money!”

 

I didn’t have any. I told them that. But a punch landed just below my left eye and sent me sprawling.

 

“Give us ya money!!”

 

I staggered sideways, with a hand up to my face feeling for the welt that a Borough fist had just created, and I hoped the end would be quick. Then I saw Joey Kaminski enter. The sun was behind him. He was silhouetted like Jesus himself at the door to the Temples and he unleashed a ferocious growl worthy of a superhero.

 

“Leave him alone.”

 

But the Borough boys were confident now. They had me done and only saw one kid to beat. The fight was something to behold. I’d never witnessed such fierceness and violence. Joey took plenty but gave plenty back. Fists crunched into jaws and noses and stomachs and the grunts of pain and wind leaving bodies was chaotic and savage. Eventually the Borough boys fled, and Joey stood triumphant with a bloody nose and a black eye as big as an Aberdeen Angus bull. By this stage there was quite an audience and they gasped and nervously cheered hoping for the end but mesmerized by the brutality. How could anyone beat a Kaminski whose parents had survived the Nazis and the Russians? No one could.

 

Joey looked at me and I thought he might reach down and grasp my hand and pull me up with a hug and we’d hold each other like brothers-in-arms, having tackled the Borough boys and survived to tell the tale. But he was high on adrenaline and whilst spitting the blood of the triumphant onto the concrete, he clarified my place in his world.

 

“I know you. Get up and piss off.”

 

The weight of those crushing words was enormous. Moments earlier I had one foot in the Pantheon of greats who’d fought alongside Joey Kaminski. Now I was discarded like rancid fish bait. I scuttled off into irrelevance and Joey got banned from the pool for a month.

 

It was at the pool that I first laid eyes on Leanne Malakumi. She was attached to Joey when I saw her. Attached by the lips. I was thirteen and beginning to notice things. Leanne put these things in plain sight. Her mission brown bikini was flawless, and Joey was investigating how it might come off as they sprawled on their towels. But Leanne was shrewd and gently removed his hand before prancing to the edge of the pool and balletically dropping in so delicately that the water apologized for getting in her way. I swallowed a fly as this all happened.

 

But Joey never went in.

 

“Nah” he’d say, “I’m not hot enough” and remain in the shadows, watching and brooding.

 

I saw Toni killing flies with a few other kids and he called out to me,

 

“Hey idiot, wanna come to my joint and play after this?”

 

So, I did.

 

Don’t ask me how Mum knew where I was. She probably didn’t. Toni and I went down to the dam and threw dirt rocks into the shadowy water but made no mention of the dead kids in there. We threw the rocks from a safe distance and the dam peered back at us menacingly, eminently patient, and thoroughly evil.

 

A bell rang. Toni turned and darted off.

 

“Come on!”

 

Dinner started and ended in cyclonic fashion. Mr Kaminski sat at the end of the table telling heroic stories of his youth, of fighting Nazis bare-handed, and being the lookout for his father and his mates when they attended clandestine meetings of the PSL which the Russians regarded as the enemy of the state. He told of PSL members who were killed in the fight for Polish freedom. Toni didn’t really know what the PSL was but marveled at his Dad’s bravery. I could tell. I wished my family had such momentous tales to tell. Then Mr Kaminski retreated into the loungeroom and took up his reading of serious books and magazines and lit up a Willem 11 and Joey pushed his chair back muttering “what a load of bullshit” or words to that affect and left with a heavy air.

 

“Let’s go” Toni said.

 

We went outside and crawled behind the hydrangeas just outside the boys’ rear house. The older brothers entered. There was noise and banging inside, like furniture being rearranged. Outside the crickets commenced their nightly racket. Darkness had begun its descent, but it would be summer-slow in taking over. Through the rear gate we heard giggling and the sound of thongs flipping on the gravel path. The girls had arrived.

 

“Wanna see inside?” asked Toni. “There!” he was pointing to a tiny hole in the plastic made by a rusty nail that had retired from duty.

 

I crept towards the hole and wondered what kaleidoscope of colour and movement and flesh I might encounter, and my thumping heart danced in my chest like Torvill and Dean skating the Bolero. At the same time, I was watching my feet, making sure I didn’t tread on dead gum leaves or a twig that would give me away because the music hadn’t started yet. My hands rested on either side of the hole, and I slowly bent my head inwards, eye first.

 

“Don’t lean in too far” Toni hissed. “If they hear us, we’re dead.”

 

Gently I put my eye to the tiny opening in the plastic. Inside was dusky and gloomy. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust. I saw a tortured brown couch and a black coffee table. On the table were ash trays with old butts and cigarette packet foil in them. An empty bottle of beer had rolled onto the timber floor. The smell was that of teenage spirit. A door opened. Footsteps made their way to the couch. A leg appeared. A female leg. Then another leg which folded across the first. She leaned forward to pick up a smoke. It was Leanne Malakumi. I thought I might explode.

 

She was dressed in denim shorts and a loose white blouse that did a poor job at hiding her lithe torso and feminine curves. As she leaned forward, I thought I saw it……pink and delicate. Exquisite. Perched at the tip of the most gorgeous and forbidden gathering of white flesh, it quivered and shook slightly as Leanne lent back again. Awkwardly I shifted my position to see more but it caused the black plastic to collapse inward and make a loud crackling sound. Leanne glanced up giggling. The jig was up.

 

“Someone’s at the wall!” she said, sniggering in delight.

 

A fist came out of the dim light within, directed at the very spot my eye was capturing the contents of Leanne’s shirt. I saw it coming. Just. It smashed against the plastic popping it loose from the galvanized nails that kept it anchored.

 

“I’m gonna kill ya!” a voice growled.

 

“Run!” said Toni.

 

Toni was in front of me. As we scrambled through the back gate, he went right so I went left. Divide and conquer. As luck would have it Joey went after me.

 

So, there I was, dashing through the bush in semi-darkness, Joey on my heels looking for blood. As I saw it, I only had one option: the dam.

 

“I know you!” Joey roared. “Come here ya little pervert.!” His hand grabbed the back of my t-shirt just as I long jumped off the rock ledge at full pace and into the dam. He followed.

 

We hit the inky water in a tangle. The splash might have sounded like another stolen car going into the drink as we sank into the gloomy pit. I felt the boney hands of dead Borough boys grabbing at my legs and arms and even pulling my head down. I kicked them away, but they came back. Frantic. Panicked. They were surprisingly strong. Fingers clutched at the water in a helpless search for something solid, bubbles spewed out, a gargled squeal thundered in my ear. I saw a white arm, a leg kicking at the blackness, then a petrified face pale like a vampire: eyes protruding, mouth gaping in a ghastly scream. It was taking in water. And now the slimy arms were reaching up and up whilst the body sank down and down. And the mouth sucked in more water and the eyes glazed in surrender. Floating now. Peaceful. Still sinking, swallowed by the terrible monster.

 

I recall the lights flashing and ambulance sirens. Hysterical people with torches. I remember adults splashing around in the dam and screams of “Joey!!” and “WHERE IS HE?” I remember Mrs. Kaminski standing on the rock ledge, handkerchief to her mouth, weeping yet stoic, believing Mr Kaminski would bring Joey up again, just like he did when Joey was a tot. But this time the water was unforgiving. Adult eyes were on me as I sat wrapped in a blanket, shivering and small. I was a curiosity, an extra in a senseless tragedy.

 

I remember Toni there too. Staring into the water. Bewildered. He would gaze across at me every minute or so, but his expression was empty, the glow in his eyes had gone out, and the ambulance’s flickering red light flashed incessantly across his face. I wanted him to ask me how it was that I was here, and Joey was down there? How?

 

******

 

Yesterday I was home, visiting my old town, and catching up on the local news. It was all light and airy fluff about the neighbour’s extraordinary tomatoes or old Mrs. so-and-so’s passing. I get asked, when will I settle down and get a job and find someone nice and get my own home. Things that make up a good life. We stay away from past traumas and unbearable wounds.

 

Before leaving I went up to the dam, drawn to it like a gangster drawn to crime and I stood on the rock ledge and gazed into the black hole that was once full of water. It was emptied out after they retrieved Joey from the muddy bottom and all I see now is a dry, pathetic cavity in the granite. There were no cars in there or Borough boys or evil spirits.

 

I don’t think Toni hated me. It was much worse than that. He shriveled up and took his grief indoors. I became invisible. He didn’t yell out over the fence or put his towel down near mine at the pool and we didn’t kill flies together or jump off the big diving board in unison. We didn’t do anything. Neither did he ask me anything. Ever. And I wonder if he knew what torture that was? So, the cut never healed and the great unsaid remained unsaid.

 

The Kaminski house still stands, though the rear one is gone. The family left a long time back. The last I heard of Toni he was heading north as if things would be better up there, and the rest of the clan bought a small farm and relocated to nurture their sadness. The old house has hollowed out and shrunk and its personality and soul have vacated leaving a freshly painted façade that stares blankly at the street. The roof tiles are all the same colour and the trees have been hacked back to let the light in and the tears out. A little kid leaned against the fence next to the letterbox and peered at me quizzically as I strolled past, then turned and dashed inside.

 

I got in my car to escape the wretched place and drove until I hit the Murray River and found a place to camp. Even from three hours’ drive and twenty years away the dam anchors me so hard to the ground that both staying and leaving are excruciating. And now I lie on my back next to the water and contemplate the universe and the notion that if I transport myself out into space in a straight line, I might go on forever. Or might I hit a cosmic wall and bounce back?