The Wing Walkers

   Not when she pulled up outside our house in a fourteen-foot Cadillac, blasting out a brassy melody on the car’s air-horn, an air-horn that could wake the dead. Monique had stolen the air-horn, so rumour had it, from a locomotive in the town’s marshalling yard when she was a kid. 
   Perhaps she had: Monique wasn’t your run of the mill social worker.
   Monique’s car was painted midnight blue and had yards of silver chrome and fins at the rear like a rocketship's. Its insides smelt of vinyl, leatherette, French cigarettes and of Monique’s perfume. Monique’s father had been a soldier in the Maori Battalion during World War II and he had returned from the fighting with a Frenchwoman who later become his wife. The marriage had been a happy one and the whole family had come to love all things French.
   Which is why Monique had a French name.
   Monique couldn’t sing, but she looked like a film star anyway, when she strode up our path and walked into our house without knocking. 
   “Hi darlings!” she called, puffing on an aromatic cigarette and hugging my mother, then planting a kiss on my forehead. “Hi Bill!” she said to my father, who laughed.
   “Thanks for looking after Greg,” said my mother. “We haven’t managed to place him in a local school yet.”
   “That’s alright,” she said. “I’m off to see a few of the people on my books. I’ll begin with Aunt Bettie in Rochester Place and drop Gregory off with his grandparents afterwards.”
   Monique placed her slender thumb and fingers on my neck and guided me out the front door. A tingle of delight sparkled between the top of my spine to my feet as her fingertips continued to tickle my neck. She released her grip when we reached the pavement and gave me a gentle push towards the car.
   “You wanna drive?” she joked.
   “You bet!” I said.
   “Later, kid” she laughed, lighting a cigarette and starting the engine.
   “Tomorrow?” I asked.
   “For sure” she said, giving with a blast on the air-horn.
   “Did you really steal this air-horn?” I asked.
   “Sure” she confessed, “but that was before I found God!”
   “Were you a bad girl?” I asked. 
   “The baddest!” she insisted, turning the wheel and setting off down the road. “Before I became a social worker anyway.”
   I sat back and breathed in the smell of plastic, chrome and Monique’s perfume.
   “Who’s Aunt Bettie?” I asked.
   “Someone I work for,” she said. “She and her old man’ve just moved to the big smoke from the back-blocks. We’ll have morning tea there.”
   I leaned back, letting the air rush past me, enjoying the sensation of speed. I waved to people on the pavement because I felt good about being seen in the Cadillac and even better about being seen with Monique, because she was a beauty. And a saint. If I’d been a church-goer, I’m sure she’d have been the sort of person you worship.
   But she wasn’t a saint, not quite. Saints didn’t wear a hint of makeup or blue eye shadow.  Nor did saints wear their fingernails cut short across the tips like a man’s so they could do their own car repairs the way Monique did and she had neat ankles too, with small feet which I tried not to stare at, small feet which tapped along with her fingers, fingers she snapped in time to the pop music she loved. She turned up the volume on the radio and began singing along with Tony Bennett. 
   “Come on Greg, sing along!” she urged, giving rhythmic blasts on the car’s air-horn.
   I tried, knowing I didn’t sound very good. But neither did Monique, who had a thin, harsh voice as she sang “Blue Moon” in the wrong key. Luckily, her voice was drowned out by the car’s V8 engine but her voice always surprised me ? I thought all Maoris could sing.

   We pulled up outside the house Auntie Bettie lived in. Monique made sure she had her flax carryall and a pen, then got out of the car. Rochester Street was depressing and so was the house we walked towards. It was a state house with cardboard in the windows where the glass had been broken and the front yard was bare of any grass, just dusty soil where a couple of morose dogs lolled in the midmorning sun. I went to pat the smallest dog, but it crept off, giving me a sulky look from hooded eyes. Monique knocked on the door and we waited on the step.
   After a bit, Aunt Bettie shuffled to the door and opened it.
   “Kia ora Monique,” she said. “Come in dear.”
   We stepped into the house. The floorboards were lacking any carpet or varnish and the walls were unpainted. And the house smelt bad. It had a thin, mean sort of smell.  I couldn’t put my finger on where it was coming from and so I breathed in and out as lightly as I could, while holding my mouth open. 
   “House is a bit of a mess,” mumbled Aunt Bettie. “We had a party here last night.”
   `Mess’ wasn’t quite the right word. There wasn’t anything much to make a mess of as there weren’t many furnishings. A battered table, attended by a couple of rickety chairs, stood in the centre of the room. The remaining seats were upended beer crates. Dozens of empty beer bottles had been shoved into a corner of the room and a guitar with a broken fret lay in front of the fireplace. 
   Monique removed her sunglasses, and pocketed them. She sat down at the table, placing her social worker’s papers in front of her. Now, she looked stern and her eyes had stopped sparkling.
   “Where’s Albie?” she asked. “Is he at work?”
   “No,” confessed aunt Bettie. “He’s in bed. Felt sick after last night, eh?”
   “Drinking?” asked Monique.
   “Yeh,” said Aunt Bettie, giggling, shy smile showing toothless gums.
   “Not at work, eh?” said Monique, more to herself than anyone else as she made a note in the folder.
   “No,” said aunt Bettie, slapping her man sized hands on ample knees. “Really hit the booze last night, eh?”
   I looked around the room. There were some photographs thumb-tacked to the wall. Kids, family, the marae.
   “Those boys, they’re my kids eh,” said Aunt Bettie.
   I wandered over to the photographs. Two were of boys, one my own age and the other slightly older. The older boy wore a soldier’s uniform. And below him there was a photograph of a Lancaster bomber. I adored aircraft; I walked closer to the photograph and gazed at it closely. It was one of those photos where the ground crew and airmen were photographed standing like wing-walkers along the wings of the airplane. Some of the men were holding onto the propellers. All the men were European, Pakehas, except for one man with a brown face topped by wavy black hair.
   “Is this your husband?” I asked, pointing him out.
   “Yes, he is” said Aunt Bettie, a broad smile seemingly splitting her face in half, “before I met him.” She giggled again. “He wasn’t so fat then, eh?”
   I continued gazing at the photograph. It had been taken during World War II at a base somewhere in England. The name of the squadron had been obscured but I could just make out the date. 1943. I counted on my fingers and did some mental arithmetic. 1943 plus twenty-six came to today’s date, 1969. The men looked too handsome to believe their caps at jaunty angles on their heads. A little white terrier, the squadron’s mascot, lay between the wheels of the plane. 
   Abruptly, the sound of someone being very sick, bought me back to earth with a thump. 
   “That’ll be Albie now,” said Aunt Bettie, bustling away to minister to her vomiting husband. Monique ignored me as she filled the kettle and plugged it in. Then she went to a cupboard and took out a packet of animal biscuits, the sort shaped like bears, goats, cats, dogs, with icing on one side. She put them on the table without bothering with a plate. 
   Aunt Bettie and Albie came into kitchen, which doubled up as a living room. Albie was vastly overweight, with grey hair. He wore a torn pair of house slippers, corduroy trousers and a white singlet. I glanced at his photograph again; he’d changed out of sight in twenty-odd years.
   “This is Greg,” said Monique, “my best friend’s kid.”
   Albie held out his hand and said,
   “Kia ora.”
   I still didn’t know what kia ora meant.
   “Good morning sir” I said, shaking his hand, which was clammy and running with sweat.
   We sat down, the women sitting on real chairs; Albie and I each took a beer crate and sat on those. They drank tea while I sipped warm fruit juice and nibbled nervously on a biscuit. Monique took notes and puffed on a cigarette while Aunt Bettie and Albie rolled their own smokes and sucked on them. 
   “Sick?” she asked Albie.
   He nodded.
   “I’ll phone the factory and let them know you’ll be in tomorrow.”
   He nodded, smiling. 
   “And save the drinking for Friday nights in future, all right?” 
   “Yeh, sure” he said gratefully.
   “Where’s Tohu?”
   “At Linton Camp,” said Albie. 
   “Vietnam?” asked Monique.
   “Yeah,” said aunt Bettie softly.
   “He’ll be alright,” said Monique, patting Aunt Bettie’s hand.
   “Hope so,” said Aunt Bettie.
   “Can I talk to Benny?” asked Monique.
   “He’s at school now,” said Albie. “He’s doing good.”
   “That’s a relief,” said Monique, gathering up her things. “I’ll call by next week. God bless.”
    We left the house and the thin, mean smell behind us. 
   “Where to now?” I asked, disappointed with the meagre morning tea.
   “Let’s just go for a drive,” she said, pulling away from the curb.

   We didn’t drive far. Just around the block and past the local shopping centre and the recreation ground. Which is where we found a group of boys, Maori and Pakeha, smoking in the shelter of the trees down by the riverbank. Monique drove over; she wouldn’t walk a foot if she could help it. We pulled up alongside the boys. Winding down the window, she called out:
   “Bennie! Over here mate!”
   Bennie shambled over. I recognised him from the photograph.
   “How come you aren’t at school?” she asked him.
   “Dunno,” he shrugged.
   “If you show up at school this afternoon, I won’t mention it to your parents or the department,” she said. 
   “Alright,” he said, still grinning bashfully.
   “Gonna see your brother off?” she asked, now removing the grease from beneath her fingernails with a nail file.
   “You betcha!” he said. “We call him the Lone Ranger around our place!”
   We drove away.
   “Where to now?” I asked.
    “Downtown. Your grandparents’ll take care of you.”
   She twirled the knob on the radio. We found a rock and roll station. She jiggled merrily, going “Cha-cha-cha-cha, char,char,char!”
   We reached the centre of town. 
   “Can’t I come with you?” I asked urgently, as we pulled up outside the town’s largest department store. I was trying not to look at my grandparents who were waiting outside, my grandmother like a fat hen in her furs and my grandfather, heavy and squat with a fedora jammed on his head.
    “No, you go with your whanau, you know, family,” she said, giving me a brief kiss on the forehead.
   I hopped out. Monique gave me a wave and  I watched her depart, air-horn blaring happily.

   My grandparents greeted me and then led me further into the store. A young woman wearing a starched cap and white apron met us at the door to the tearoom and showed us to our window seats. The woman bobbed and curtsied. She knew my grandparents. 
   The tearoom smelt of rich coffee, tea, sandwiches, cakes of all kinds. The staff called everyone “ma’am” or “sir” and I was “master”.
   “I had morning tea with some Maoris” I said.
    “That’s nice dear” said my grandmother, looking around to see if there was anyone she knew in the store.
   “And there weren’t any chairs so I had to sit on a beer crate in their kitchen.” 
   This got no response, and so I said,
   “The husband said kia ora. That means `hullo’.” 
   “We’re not on a marae now,” said my grandfather firmly, pouring tea from a silver tea service, his surgeon’s hands rock steady.
   “Or in a pa” added my grandmother, wetting her fingers and brushing my unruly hair back into place, before accepting her tea and choosing a small, perfectly shaped sandwich.
   “Uncle Albie was a wingwalker once,” I said. 
   “Maoris are very clever performers,” said my grandfather, “and they’re talented singers.”
   I thought of Monique’s off-key voice, Tohu, slogging through the mud in Southeast Asia and I thought of Benny too, struggling with incomprehensible sums at school.
   “Aunt Bettie laughed a lot,” I said.
   “They’re a happy people,” said my grandmother, “especially when they’re working with their hands.”
   Perhaps they are, I thought, taking the first sip of my milkshake.
   Tohu as the Lone Ranger, the Masked Man tearing along on his faithful horse Silver, blasting away with his six-shooters and doing all the work while poor Tonto, a horse’s length behind him in every episode, struggled manfully to keep up.  Then I remembered the grinning Aunt Bettie and her smiling husband.
   Maybe the Maori were a happy people. 
   But, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t figure out what it was that Aunt Bettie and her family had to laugh about.