Tony the Cat
...ht. There are wagons with old wheels that you’d pay a fortune for, that Tony the Cat has scrounged from gullible farmers; there is sheet metal and tin and timber and machinery and old cars that don’t run. All of them, Tony says, will come in handy some day; but the only time any of it leaves the yard is when he needs money, and sells it for some hugely inflated price that he’d never pay himself. But that’s what Tony is like. The main thing about Tony is that although he gives us all the caccati’s, he is an excellent and generous host. He has a garden – and Jesus, what a garden it is! It has herbs and flowers and olive and fruit trees of every description, and a vegetable garden that contains every type of vegetable you’ve ever heard of, and then a few more. Tony grows them all himself, and picks them and dries or cans or bottles them, and gives them to our wives and kids to show them how good at growing them he is. He pickles his own olives, and makes his own salami, and brews his own beer, and when Tony gets them all out at once, you’d better know there’s going to be a party going on and a hangover the next day the same size as one of Tony’s massive concrete lions. He even has a pizza oven that he has made himself, and Nick and Bill and myself often bring over the wives and kids for pizza and beer, which Tony the Cat supplies, all free of charge. As I said, he is an excellent host. At the end of the night, if he is drunk enough, he will dance until we all have tears in our eyes from laughing; and he will sing songs that we don’t understand the words to, although they are clear enough in their meaning. With the happy songs, Tony jumps up on the table and dances energetically, although you’d never guess he could dance like that with the bad back he keeps complaining of; and with the sad songs, he presses his hand to his heart and sings with his eyes closed, real loud and mournful with tears squeezing out from under his closed lids. But all of this doesn’t have anything to do with the reason Tony the Cat is the best man on Hunter Road. We’d all liked Tony pretty well up till then, as I said; but it was the day of the fire that cemented our friendship forever. Now where we live on Hunter Road, it is sort of hilly, and run over with rocks and wild oats and blueweed. In fact, it isn’t the kind of country where you can grow anything except sheep, which is why Tony’s garden is so admirable; the rest of us have straggly little patches of blueweed with the odd geranium struggling through between the rocks. It’s an inhospitable kind of place, Hunter Road, but we like it. We trade sheep and slaughter them for tucker, and our lambs frisk in the front paddocks right by the road. But the worse thing about Hunter Road is that if there is a bushfire, you can’t see it coming. There are big gum trees and dryandra bushes right up to the edge of the road and the cleared spaces, and the hills make it so the smoke is screened until the fire is right upon you. That’s how it came about that day at Tony the Cat’s house. Tony the Cat has his house facing the view, with the hills right behind him; the little pizza oven and his front door face right out over Hunter Road. And that’s where we are sitting, drinking a cold beer and yarning about nothing much at all when the first wisps of smoke drifts between the columns. “Mary Mother of God,” screamed Tony, and he leaps up in a panic and barrels around the house. We can’t see much, because we are running behind him, but we see him stop, and stare. When I round the corner, breathing heavy, I look up too, and Jesus! There is a huge wall of flame tearing across the hill, a red wall with sparks and crackling tinder which moans and wails like it has a life of its own. We stand there with Tony, who for once has nothing to say, and watch as it eats up the paddocks. And that’s when we move. The sheep are in the paddocks, and the fire is roaring directly towards Tony’s house. Toward Hunter Road, where we all live. Bill runs to the paddocks right away to open the gates and let the sheep out; you can see Tony’s big ram running in a frightened kind of way, and all the ewes and little lambs running behind. There’s a horse too, and even from here I can see the foam between its hind legs and the way its eyes are rolling madly toward the fire. Bill runs and runs, and Nick takes one look and runs with him. I’m still sort of stunned, but Tony is tearing open his shed door, and pulling out a big old firefighting pump which some farmer has given him years ago. “Benzina! Petrol!” he screams at me at the top of his lungs, and it takes me almost a minute to work out what he has said. I run back to my Tojo, but that runs on diesel, so I sprint to Tony’s old Jaguar and rip open the petrol cap. In a second he has a jerry can and a piece of garden hose in my hand, and before I finish spitting out the first taste of petrol, he has mounted the firefighter and its water tank onto the back of the Tojo and reversed it up to me in a cloud of dust. I tell you, I’ve never seen a middle aged Sicilian man move so quick. We go roaring down the hill, which is now burning and covered with so much smoke we can’t see the front of the Tojo, let alone where Bill and Nick are standing. I start to panic a little, and I yell at Tony, “Go back! Go back! It’s coming towards us!” but Tony snarls something in Sicilian and thrusts me toward the steering wheel. “You drive,” is all he says, and in a flash he is climbing out onto the back of the Tojo and ripping fiercely at the ripcord of the firefighter. I’m driving into the fire now, and am scared to death, and I scream at Tony, “You’ll get burned!” He screams back, “Tinemu d'occhiu u scurpiuni e u sirpenti, ma nunni vardamu du millipede!” and because I don’t know what it means, I shut up and drive with my white knuckles clasped grimly on the steering wheel and my teeth biting down so hard on my lip that I can feel blood flowing down my chin. The fence posts are burning. The sheds are burning. Through the smoke I can see flames dancing across the stubbly grass, right where we are driving. I am coughing, hard enough that my already watering eyes are streaming, but from Tony I hear nothing. All I can hear is my heart pounding in my ears, and the roar of the fire. We come to the end of the fence, and there is no sign of Bill, or Nick, and fire is all around us, and roaring louder than a jet-plane – and then I spot a crumpled dark shape at the bottom of a York gum. The tree is on fire. “Over there!” I scream through my coughing and veer over to the tree. Before I can stop, there is Tony, running through the fire on the ground in his shorts and sandals toward the tree. Jesus! I tear open the door and the fire leaps up to meet me, searing and blistering my legs and feet. I want to run away, but Tony has already thrust a body through the door of the car and is racing away for another. Bill slumps against the passenger door, but he is coughing weakly, so I figure he is alive, and I am out of the car in time to help pull an unconscious Nick up to the seat. Tony is black, blacker than his hair, but I can see his wild, white eyes rolling at me like t...