Creative Non-Fiction: Second Star to the Right by Madeline Trice

By Madeline Trice

​I kept my eyes on the axle spinning underneath the bowed two-by-four laid across where the bottom of the cab had rusted out to avoid looking up at the trees. The bats hung above us crowding out the sky and weighing down branches like dark leathery tumors, the sum of all their little breaths and twitches making the canopy squirm. It was ten in the morning, but distant facts like nocturnal sleeping schedules don’t make a few thousand flying foxes dangling over your head any less ominous. Despite the throaty belches coming from Daniel’s roofless carcass of a Land Rover, I found myself carefully quiet hoping not to wake the sleeping beasts above me. 

​Daniel’s three children laughed and shouted with their necks craned to see. Harry was sitting in the front, and in the backseat with me the younger two were standing upright on the wooden plank and bouncing slightly as the vehicle lurched over the dirt road. Jack was still cycling out of his baby teeth; his two front ones were out and he whistled like a steam engine. Clancy, not knowing how to whistle, whooped along with his shrill little voice. Daniel had said it was okay for them to get up from their seats once we’d turned off the highway and I tried to fight the urge to clutch at the two boys and pull them back toward me onto the bench where it was safer. 
​
Daniel was shouting into a handheld radio connected to the dashboard by one of those coiled landline cords talking to the friend whose house we’d been driving to for the last couple hours. We were going shooting. 
​
“Break out the big guns—” Daniel said. He glanced over one shoulder at me in the back seat. “Actually, fuck it, get them all out. The cunt’s American.”

It was 2014 and my long history of moving violations, speeding tickets, and reckless driving charges had culminated in a jail sentence for reckless endangerment. I hadn’t yet turned nineteen back when I got pulled over, and in court the judge was not impressed with the laundry list of infractions I’d already racked up. That, combined with the fact that I had been clocked at 115 in a 55, gave the judge the impression that it would be good to make an example out of me. They didn’t exactly ship me off to the penal colony, so to speak, but in the end they may as well have.

My lawyer was able to commute my sentence down from making-an-example-out-of-me, to scaring-me-straight. He sent me to a mechanic who—for a handful of cash—was able to ascertain that my speedometer was faulty and that, according to their measurements, would have displayed a speed of 95 when traveling at 115. They also discovered that the backlight had gone out, and I wouldn’t have been able to see the speedometer, which jibed nicely with the optometrist report declaiming—in exchange for another handful of cash—that I had difficulty seeing at night.

This evidence notwithstanding, the judge insisted on jail time, which the lawyer was able talk him into suspending, pending a probational period of one year. If I received any new tickets or arrests over the course of the probational period, I’d serve the time. If not, the jail sentence would be commuted and replaced with a hundred hours of community service—I wouldn’t even have to come back to court. 
The judge had seen my full record, and it hadn’t inspired confidence. On my way out he told me “See you next year.” 

Outside the courtroom, my lawyer gave me one final piece of advice, free of charge. I wasn’t technically on probation or anything, nobody’d ordered me to stay in the area, and the court’s background checks only reached so far—I could, if I was at all concerned, simply disappear for a little while.

I found a job in Darwin, Australia working as an au pair for a couple with three kids. The parents’ names were Janine and Daniel. I’d gotten it into my head that working as an au pair was something I wouldn’t mind doing, that I was qualified for, and that, most importantly, would take me far, far away. It turns out finding a job in childcare as a man and a smoker doesn’t leave you with a lot of options, still, probably more than if I’d tried finding work as a trans woman. In the end it came between Canada and Australia and, I decided, when else was I going to make an excuse to travel down under? I try to take things in stride. 

Daniel was a troop sergeant in the Australian Army. He trained tank operators and his work took him all over. Janine had recently finished her certification and started working night shifts as an ER nurse. Neither of them were home most days, so they needed someone to help with their boys. I interviewed with them both over Skype, got the job, and got on a plane. 

One of Daniel’s army buddies had picked me up from the airport and, two weeks in, I still hadn’t seen either parent. Not a tour, not an introduction to the kids, just a house key and 400 in cash in a plastic baggie stuck to the fridge with a magnet. Daniel, I learned, was on some kind of deployment, but I wouldn’t understand what was going on with Janine until much later. She had wanted to hire a woman. She’d been adamant to Daniel that if he hired a man she’d be too afraid to ever leave her room—a promise she kept. I wondered sometimes if the night shift had been Janine’s goal all along: a way to get off this ride and pay someone else to slide into her place. 

I was nervous about meeting Daniel. I’d hoped I would be able to get a feel for him by talking to his wife, or at least ingratiate myself to her before he’d returned. I didn’t even know where he was. “Work” was the best answer I’d been able to wrangle from his children, and when I did eventually meet him, Daniel wasn’t any more forthcoming. I was sure that when we met in person for the first time Daniel would see right through me; I hadn’t exactly lied on my resume, but a big part of why they’d hired me—much to Janine’s chagrin—had been that Daniel wanted a masculine presence around the house for his sons. To be fair, legally speaking at least, I was, technically, a man—I’d shaved my head and grown out my beard for the part and everything. My passport even still read Matthew Yamamoto. I don’t think anyone would have suspected I was a trans woman, but I wasn’t sure how long I could play it straight. 
​
Daniel had latched on to the fact that my father was in the military. I’d made an effort to mention it during the interview while leaving out all the telling details to let him draw the sensible conclusions anyone would. I’d carefully, pointedly, not lied to Daniel, but I’d certainly mislead him. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that he might assume I’d had weapons training.

The city, if you can call Darwin a city, was already secluded enough, almost two thousand kilometers from anywhere with a population in the double digits, but that hadn’t been enough for Daniel’s friend, whom we were now headed toward, bouncing down this rutted, bat bedecked, kangaroo path. Upon arrival, I found out the friend was also named Daniel. They insisted on both being called by their full names, unabridged and unadulterated. “It’s about the respect,” I think they said, but I’ll spare you that confusion and call the one that lives out in the bush Other Daniel. 

If Daniel was exactly the blocky jarhead you’d expect from a soldier and a tank operator, Other Daniel was exactly the kind of man you’d picture living alone on the outskirts of an already remote city and making his own homemade ammunition in a shed he’d built himself. Daniel was a little guy, useful in a tight space, but he was also a brick and too shaped by the military mold to look anything other than clean cut. Other Daniel, by contrast, had the deep, sore-spotted tan, wiry blow-away-in-the-wind physique, and scurvy-riddled smile of man living on the edge of things. 

Other Daniel—like the Southern gentlemen of my own country—politely offered Daniel and me refreshments, listing off the things he thought the most natural for the early hour and the day of shooting ahead of us: beer, canned Jack and Coke, or maybe some whip-its if we were feeling rowdy. Once we were acquainted, ice cold cans cracked and distributed, Other Daniel pulled open the gate to his shed with some effort and led us in.

The storage building was almost as big as Other Daniel’s house, and similarly constructed of corrugated sheet metal, plywood, and other salvaged or repurposed materials. The surfaces were riddled with rust and rot. I thought the holes peeking through the sheet metal roof and spilling sunlight into the dusty air had been made by bullets, but Daniel told me it was corrosion from the bat guano. Despite Other Daniel’s dedication, patience, and many nights spent staying up doing whip-its and taking potshots at the flying rodents, the bats still crowded the trees around his home, eroding away at the rooves of his house, his carport, and his shed with their corrosive leavings. This was, as it turned out, the foundation of Daniel and Daniel’s friendship.
Tucked away inside the janky sheet metal shed, behind a few old trucks, bikes, and so many crowded shelves and workbenches, was a smaller jankier little shack that stood with a slab of armor for a roof. This was Other Daniel’s gun storage and ammunition-making laboratory. When Daniel first met Other Daniel and heard his plight the two of them acquired a few slabs of tank metal from Daniel’s work, the largest of which became the new roof for Other Daniel’s little armory to protect it from the guano. The armor hadn’t been cut to shape or anything, so it overhung the walls at irregular angles and there were several makeshift support beams welded or jammed into place to hold up the weight. 

The armory was a candy store for gun nuts. Frankly I have more of a sweet tooth than an itchy finger, but there was something magical to it all the same. The rows and rows of guns in little cubbies, walls of guns hanging on display, cases of guns, boxes of guns, literal piles of guns, and so, so, so many bullets. Other Daniel had set up a workbench in one corner with a press and containers of brass shells crowded on its surface. Inside this shed was yet another shed, a plastic prefab just bigger than a porta-potty, where he kept the gunpowder.
The guns weren’t what struck me. I think what really sold the magic of that place was how the space seemed to change the Daniels. Both men were suddenly softer than they had been a moment ago, giddy with excitement, giggling and skipping about their work like the three young boys craning their necks to see in from outside. This was their treehouse, their backwoods basecamp. Here, away from everything, these two grown men who absolutely knew better could run around imagining they were pirates, and that this was their pirate ship. I kept looking around to see if they’d pull out a blunderbuss.

Other Daniel pulled his beat-up Ford Ranger around and Daniel told me to keep the kids busy out front while the two of them started loading it up. Little Clancy, only six and a little small for his age, was feeling tired and lay down in a patch of dirt in the shade of the carport. I sat down with him, watching the two older boys. Harry was eleven years old and already a budding psychopath with a scar across his chin from one of his many battles with the neighborhood cats. Jack (middle name Daniel) was eight and wanted to be just like his father. He’d lost those two front teeth in a fistfight with his classmate. The two of them took turns kicking the base of an acacia tree in hopes of waking up the bats hanging from its branches. 

Daniel and Other Daniel walked back and forth from the armory to the truck, dropping bundles, boxes, and crates full of various guns and ammo down on the hardpack next to the truck while I got everything loaded up in the bed. I’m not a gun person, but judging by the bullets, they had weapons chambered in everything between a .22 and a .50—which you don’t need to know anything about anything to look at and say “Fuck, that’s a huge goddamn bullet.”

Once the guns were loaded up, the Daniels got into the truck’s cab and I got situated in the bed with the children and munitions. Daniel assured me everything was unloaded and it was ok to let the boys play with them, but that if they started flagging each other to take the guns away. “The kids know better.” Later I looked it up: flagging is when you point a gun at someone you don’t intend to shoot. Even if the weapon is unloaded (though technically you should always consider a gun to be loaded), it’s still dangerous and either way the person getting flagged has no way of knowing your intention—to understate, it’s kind of a dick move. I didn’t know at the time, though, and I kept quiet when Harry held a shotgun trained at my stomach for what seemed like an eternity. It made my hair stand up on end like someone was staring at the back of my head or holding up their hands in twitching claws and saying, “I’m going to tickle you!” I held a hand across my belly in a meaningless protective gesture as if I’d already been wounded and felt my guts churning under the thin layers of fabric and tender flesh.

We were winding our way down a slope when a troop of kangaroos sprang into motion about a dozen or so meters off to our right and loped through the trees parallel to the path we followed. They were about four feet tall, bouncing on those ridiculous tails and holding their little fists up in a boxer’s stance. I stared, taken aback at the sight of so many large mammals out in the wild, while Daniel opened the sliding glass window at the back of the cab and started squirming through into the truck bed. He always seemed smaller than he looked. He handed me a box of ammo with a few empty magazines nestled inside and asked me to load them for him while he rooted around for something chambered in 5.56 and told his kids to lay flat. He pulled something out, scoffed that it didn’t have a scope, and took the first clip from me with a brief look of disappointment as he noted I’d only managed to get three bullets into it. He took his shots, missed each of them, and the troop took off at an angle that left us alone to laugh at the American’s slow hands and the tanker’s bad aim. 

Daniel didn’t try to squeeze back into the cab and by the time we got to the range he’d managed to offer me the first explanation of where we were going. Some time ago, the government started digging in new oil pipes out to Darwin and they’d left a mountain of unearthed soil in the bush with a laneway leading up to it that’d been clear cut and leveled for about five hundred meters out and fifty across. Standing in the laneway, shooting toward the dirt mound, it would have been hard for a stray bullet to end up anywhere unsafe—I’d say impossible, but the slabs of tank metal propped up against the bluff and painted like targets could feasibly throw a ricochet, though at five hundred meters it was unlikely to make it back to us.

Once we got there Daniel handed me a rifle and told me to take care of the children. Next, he handed Harry a target and the boy schlepped it out, half-dragging it behind him to where a piece of rebar jammed into the ground some time ago marked out a hundred meters. I watched Daniel watching him and when he caught my eye there was something cold in that stare.

I didn’t know what to make of the contraption Harry had just set up, or how to manage three young children with a live firearm, but the boys knew what to do. I was still paralyzed, feeling the weight of Daniel’s gaze boring into my back, when Jack took the rifle from my hand brandishing his abbreviated smile and little Clancy tucked under my other arm to grab the ammo and diligently start loading clips at a pace that put me to shame. 

Harry came back, the downward curve of his exaggerated scowl hanging over his scarred chin giving him a severity altogether absurd on an eleven-year-old. He wrestled the gun from Jack and I’d barely separated the two of them before little Clancy was at Harry’s side already offering him a loaded magazine. Harry snatched it and with a wave his younger brothers both took a few short steps back. I stood there stupidly watching as he began to shoot.

Five shots. Plink. Plink. Plink. Plink. Plink. All of them on target. The kid rose from the crouch he’d taken to aim and pushed the rifle into my hands, the barrel pointed carefully at the sky. “Your turn.” He told me. 
Once the rifle was in my hands, I felt Daniel’s gaze drop from my back. At first, I’d thought Daniel was watching me to see how I did with the boys and with the gun. I was sure he’d noticed my incompetence and when he looked away I thought it was just because the Daniels had finished setting up and begun to shoot. But later, when it was Harry’s turn with the rifle again and I felt that pressure on my back return, I realized it had never been me he was eyeing at all. Harry wasn’t exactly a troublemaker—that was more Jack’s territory. But on my third day in Darwin, I’d caught the older boy in the back yard with a dead cat. He’d wanted me to find him, I’d thought, it’d been a threat display. But of everything I’d seen so far, I think what worried me the most about Harry was that Daniel was worried about Harry.

The kids burned through the .22’s in maybe thirty minutes and we re-joined the grown-ups. The Daniels had worked together to set up a folding table and lay out blankets, on which they’d arranged rifles in neat rows. There were more across the open bed of the truck. They shot one caliber at a time, picking a different gun from the line-up each time one ran dry. I watched Daniel walk down a row of guns with his finger outstretched, unsure of which to choose, the conflicting hesitancy and eagerness playing out on his face like a kid trying to pick an ice cream flavor.

Much to Harry’s delight, I hadn’t had any luck with the children’s target. The little discs were too small for me, but, even at five times the distance, the broad slabs of armor set up against the bluff were easier to hit. I played the Daniels’ game, walked down the row of firearms and picked my flavor. They had a little cowboy number, a lever action revolving rifle that, other than the much too modern looking scope attached to it, would have appeared right at home on the set of some B movie western getting spun around by a bandit every time they loaded their next bullet.

I’d gone shooting before, but not like this. I can see why people might spend their whole lives chasing the next bigger, louder, punchier gun. Coming from a .22, pulling the trigger on the revolving rifle’s .45s felt like I had thunder in between my fingers, but that’s not even what really attracted me. It was the tank metal. The meaty, unyielding plunk resonating back at us from five hundred meters like you’d just reached out across half a klick and beat your fist against a drum. That’d make anyone want to play percussion. 

The sun started to set, and the heat backed down to more livable temperatures, bringing out the snakes. The kids were the first to spot one. I wondered if it’d been attracted to the noise, or the peanut butter and Vegemite sandwiches the boys were eating. Once we’d corralled the kids into the truck, Other Daniel distributed handguns with a yellowed smile that was missing more teeth than Jack’s and the three of us gathered in a wide V around the snake, the car to our backs. Other Daniel took the first shot. He said we should take turns, five points for whoever gets it. He seemed the kind of man who could make a game out of anything. Daniel jumped right into it with something of the playful malevolence of youth in his eye and the hungry gleam of his teeth cut ear to ear. In his exuberance he saved me from having to take my turn. We left the dead reptile behind in the dust, carrion for the scavengers.

I don’t like the term regression—I think it naturalizes progress and supports the idea of “correct” kinds of growth—so I won’t say these men had regressed, but I might say they’d digressed. They’d looked at the place I would have once called the “real” world and then they’d looked around again and decided to do something else. I was starting to get more comfortable with the Daniels at that point. It was too easy to judge them by their roughness and see them as brigands, but while there was certainly something wild and lawless about them, I would argue that you could say the same about your average house cat. 

The biggest gun we shot that day was the fifty caliber. There were only a few bullets for it, homemade of course. Daniel called them brontosaurus rounds. Long after we’d left the range, Other Daniel pulled them out while we sat around on his porch working through a pallet of Jack and Coke from the gas station, passing around smokes, and watching the bats wake up.

Other Daniel set up a table and a muzzle rest and told us the goal was to shoot a branch near its base to see if you could blow it off entirely. Most of the trees out there had bats in them and even if there wasn’t any on the branch you shot, you’d send them scattering all around. My first thought was to wonder if the god-awful sound of the damn thing shooting would be disorienting or enlightening for something that echolocates. My second thought was that this is what happens when lost boys grow up. 

There’d been something surreal about the Daniels to me and it wasn’t until I was very nearly blacked out in the woods with a grotesquely large weapon pointed at the sky that I realized what it was. At first, I’d felt like I’d run from the law and found lawlessness, exiled myself in a land of bandits and brigands, but that wasn’t quite right. It finally clicked for me when Other Daniel explained that the bats didn’t echolocate, they were herbivores not predators and they didn’t hunt by sound. While they looked like a host of sleeping vampires ready to eviscerate the gathering of red-blooded humans below, they didn’t really care about us and they wouldn’t attack. Still, they weren’t supposed to be here. They’d wandered off from where they were meant to be and stuck around for the easy living. Just like the Daniels—just like me if I stayed here. The bats didn’t mean any harm, but Darwin wasn’t built with them in mind and the caustic misting of their piss and shit constantly raining down from the trees above gave them the aspect of destruction all the same. 

In Peter Pan the pirates were all just lost boys who grew up. The ones who wandered off the beaten path and stuck around to never grow up. They didn’t mean any harm, they just played a little rougher. The Daniels weren’t ne’er-do-wells or villains, they’d just never left Neverland. I wondered what that made me, having run away across half the world. I’d been so close to almost killing someone, so close to being put behind bars, I’d gone so far, but I still felt like I was on the precipice of something and looking over. 
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I was seeing Darwin then as if for the first time, looking up at a swirling cauldron of bats taking flight above the trees and trying to find an open patch of sky to aim for. I pulled the trigger. The rifle jumped on the table and nearly knocked me backward. I slumped back into my chair and listened with closed eyes and crossed fingers to the trailing echo of the projectile screaming out through the night. By the sound of it, the shot was still flying when a dead bat hit the hardpack just a few meters from where Clancy sat by the campfire. Second star on the right and straight on till morning, I thought to myself with a sigh, or at least until the bullet comes back down.