Dirt Music (18 page)

Across the water dry stone ranges rose in grand disorder into the smoky distance. The country here looked like cured hide. It was wilderness of a sort that Georgie had not encountered before and the island they sheltered behind was a wilderness within a wilderness. The moment she saw it Georgie felt that she’d seen it before.

It was a great red rock skirted by rainforest, like a mesa grown up through a garden. On its white shelly beach were boabs and vines and from its cliff faces where the late sun flared yellow, pink and purple, came the looping echoes of birdsong. Georgie couldn’t understand this feeling of recognition. It was iconic Australian landscape but not even twenty years of nationalist advertising could account for this sensation. It even smelt right, as familiar as the back of her arm, like a place she came to every night in her sleep.

Before dawn they were in trouble. By eight that morning they were high and dry.

They spent two days trying to motor and then winch off the mudbank that they’d stupidly anchored over during the spring tide. Tyler and she bickered and fought, knowing they were hundreds of miles from help. They were screaming into each other’s faces. And from deep in the belly of the gulf came the unlikely sight of a boat. A fishing guide in an aluminium punt with two sunburnt clients and a barramundi flapping on the deck. You couldn’t forget the name or the face. Red Hopper. He was a pugnacious bloodnut with a droll wit and a rollup fag on his lip. The only man for an unimaginable distance and they’d come aground a few miles from his camp.

He was anxious to see them on their way; in fact he had them gone inside twelve hours, but heading out into the Timor Sea Georgie felt regret as much as relief. She couldn’t get the image of that monolithic island out of her head. The memory of it there in the milky gulf surrounded by a wilderness you couldn’t conceive of for space and distance. She marked it on the chart and in her pocketbook. She thought about it now and then. It gave her a warm, uncertain feeling.

She was still on the terrace staring out at that masthead light in the lagoon when Jim appeared with a beer beside her. She noticed that he had an old Joe Cocker album playing inside.

Nice car, he said.

Didn’t think you’d noticed it.

Nearly tripped over it, he said smiling. What’s it run on—fairy dust?

I wish, she said unable to match his tone.

She looked out across the water until the music expired.

The bubble car remained an unsettling presence in the garage. It was parked against a pile of cartons that contained the life she’d never unpacked here, the stuff she’d hauled up from the city. Each time she drove to Perth—to buy groceries or presents for Christmas—Jim and the boys seemed mildly surprised to see her back. But she did return. Passing the fruit stand on the highway gave her a few bad moments but Georgie managed to think Luther Fox back into a dim corner where he belonged. He was just another symptom of her weird attraction to suffering. He’d done her a favour. She was, she decided, the kind of person vulnerable to the sexiness of pity. A child’s hot tears against your breast, the delicious collapsing weight of a man bereft—they gave you a power that you couldn’t resist. And there you were, crashing through the overcast as hot as the sun itself, determined that you were 211 the cure. White Point considered Fox gone. Officially he already seemed not to exist—he didn’t appear to be in anyone’s database, he had no tax file number. Well, let him be the ghost of his ambitions. He could stay gone. She was over it.

On Christmas Eve Jim came in with a whopping haul but he seemed strangely subdued. A big shark had followed the boat all day, its snout visible every time they pulled or dumped a pot. Jim told the deckies it couldn’t be the same animal because the distances they covered and the speeds they steamed at between lines made it impossible. Yet Boris insisted that it was the same shark and by noon Jim had to admit that it seemed to be so. It was a tiger, a good twelve-footer and ugly as an in-law. By the middle of the afternoon Boris was all for killing it and Jim confessed that, had there been a weapon aboard he’d have consented. It gave him the creeps. Boris said it was an omen. But Jim didn’t know what to think. Did Georgie believe in omens? Not on Christmas Eve, she said, giving him a beer.

That evening, before setting out the gifts beneath the plastic tree, they drank a few toasts to the Raider’s good fortune. The air was mild and there was laughter on the beach. Tomorrow nobody would fish, no one had to get up in the dark to ram bait into baskets or pull the heads off occies or heave pots around the lurching deck, and there was a palpable sense of release in the air, an atmosphere so infectious that Georgie and Jim stayed out late to share a bottle of sparkling burgundy. When the hot desert wind sprang up they lingered undeterred, listened to music, even told a few jokes. That night Georgie left the spare room empty.

Their lovemaking was gentle, almost circumspect.

On Christmas Day the four of them took the dinghy out to the island to lie in the shade of an umbrella and snorkel about 212 the fringing reefs. All of them were wary but amicable and that day a puzzled d‚tente seemed to set in. It felt fragile, artificial even, but after recent events it came as such a relief that Georgie convinced herself that this new mood was a return to something like the life they’d had before spring.

White Point was feral at the best of times but during the Christmas holiday the place went mad. As the van parks and beach shacks filled, the population quadrupled. The pub was always full and the little shops gridlocked. There were boats and trailers, jetskis, 4;84s, trailbikes, kites, boomboxes, collisions, altercations, near-misses. The locals were obnoxious and the sun was brutal. At night the air was thick with the smoke of barbecues and the stink of scorched meat, and from Jim’s terrace when the wind got around to the east you were overwhelmed by the greasy stinking vapour of deep fryers.

In the middle of it all, on Boxing Day, no less, Beaver disappeared. He was only gone the one day but he left pandemonium in his wake. Nobody could get fuel. When he returned, amid tumult and sensation, it was as a married man. His wife Lois was a tiny dark woman with a silver incisor. She was Filipino or Taiwanese, depending on who you asked. For days Georgie tried to catch his eye across the throng at the pumps. She saw Lois through the window puzzling at the register and staring bewildered at the stamping mob and she figured that by New Year’s the worst might have subsided and she’d get her moment.

Georgie noticed the national flag go up on the white pole in the McDougalls’ yard. She’d never seen it there before.

On New Year’s Eve the traditional brawl at the pub evolved into a riot as a rave party on the beach was driven indoors by the wind.

It was, simply put, a clash of cultures. By midnight 213 youths were pulling rooftiles off the White Point tavern and throwing them into the crowded carpark as the place began to burn. Thirty minutes later, the White Point vollies (a little worse for wear themselves) had a firetruck in and were pitching young people from the roof into the very same carpark.

Jim came ashore New Year’s Day with a paper nautilus.

Boris insisted that it was a good omen.

The day Georgie finally met Beaver’s wife Lois, she discovered that she was Vietnamese. Beaver was sombre with the effort of restraining his pride. Lois, he said, had a thing for Abbott and Costello, though her English was sketchy. The way White Pointers used the language made it a challenge even to those born to it, so Lois really had her work cut out for her. The locals who knew how Beaver had found his bride were already calling her Mail Order to her face. Georgie noticed the way Lois glanced between her and Beaver as though sniffing something suspicious about their friendship. She didn’t quite know to reassure the poor, struggling woman, so she felt it wise to keep her distance. One evening as she cycled past the workshop she heard dishes breaking and the high, tiny shriek of Lois expressing some doubts. She felt like a rat but she figured she was best out of Beaver’s way.

One humid January day while the remainder of a cyclone brought low cloud and brooding air down across the central coast, Georgie rode back from the post office with a sheaf of bills for Jim and a letter addressed to her in a hand she didn’t recognize .214 At the kitchen table she glanced at the grubby envelope.

Georgiana Jutland c/o Post Office

White Point

Western Australia

She opened it with a butter knife and drew out a blank fold of notepaper. There was nothing written there. Just faint blue lines and the torn holes of the spiral binding from your bog-standard notepad. As she tilted the envelope up to make sure, a trickle of dust fell between her fingers onto the scrubbed table. It looked like dried paprika or chilli powder but when she dipped a finger in and put it to her tongue she knew it was nothing more than red earth.

The envelope with its boab tree stamp was postmarked Broome a few days before. Two thousand kilometres away by road. The far north, the edge of the tropics. She recognized the pink dirt of the pindan country; it wasn’t the sort of natural colour you forgot once you’d seen it for yourself. With the paper’s edge she scraped the dust into a little pile. There was more here than she first thought—perhaps a teaspoonful. It was no accident; it was some gesture.

She screwed up the envelope and tossed it into the kitchen bin.

Then she stared at the little mound of dirt a while until, wetting a finger, working dab by dab, she ate it.

She wiped the table clean. On the VHF Jim announced he was only ten minutes out. When Georgie rinsed her mouth at the basin it was like spitting blood. She brushed her teeth and wiped the basin down. Gone.

III

He walks the narrow blacktop in the warm dark. The sea is miles behind but he feels it at his back. Above the murky hinterland, stars hang like sparks and ash from a distant bushfire. By dawn his hamstrings are tight and his feet sore in their boots. The pack is snug enough in his back but the swag lashed across it teeters with every stride and butts the top of his head. He trudges into the rising sun until an old truck eases up beside him and an arm motions him to get in.

The man is long and thin with a shapeless hat and stringy grey hair to his shoulders. He looks tired, waits for Fox to speak and then sighs a suit-yourself sigh and just drives. Fox glances behind at the flatbed where several olive trees lie wrapped and lashed beneath a tarp.

They drone through floodplain country and into the beginnings of rich soil where late crops stand brassy in the sun.

They veer north into the midlands wheatbelt where harvesters raise clouds of chaff and dust across the rolling hills.

This is it, says the driver at New Norcia.

Thanks, says Fox.

That Darkie could play.

Fox climbs out.

Headin north?

He drags his pack and bedroll off the rusty truckbed.

Fox cinches himself in. The sun is in his face.

It was only a matter of time, the man says. You would’ve buggered off eventually.

Thanks again.

Worth it for the conversation.

Fox walks through the old Spanish monastery town with barely a glance. Town cars and farm utes roll by but he doesn’t even bother sticking his finger out. At the outskirts he shrugs his load onto the gravel shoulder and waits. Flies suck the sweat around his eyes, along his neck. In the paddock’s remnant stand of gums, cockatoos stir. Eventually a Kenworth hulks up in a gust of airbrakes. He throws his kit up and climbs in.

G’day, says the truckie.

G’day.

This man is the colour of a boiled crab. His nose is thin and ruined. His ears are crisp with lesions.

Great Northern Highway, says the driver.

That’s it, says Fox settling back into the smell of sweat and old socks and fried food.

Get yeself a hiding?

Fox grimaces. Hasn’t thought how he must still look after swimming and walking home.

Face says everything, dunnit.

Yeah.

They ride in silence the rest of the morning with the cricket trickling in like water torture from the radio. The aircon dries the perspiration then chills him. As they lurch inland, the trailers swaying behind them, the country grows dry and low and wheat gives out to sheep paddocks which seem thinner and more marginal until only squat mulga scrub remains; just olive dabs of vegetation spread over stony yellow dirt.

Wildflower country, says the truckie, failing to suppress a fart.

Should see it in September. Flowers as far as ye can look.

Fox can’t imagine it. He hasn’t expected this sudden absence of trees. He’s hardly been on the road five hours and already it’s just flat dirt out there.

So, what you pissin off from?

People, says Fox.

People in particular, or people in general?

Both.

The truckie takes the hint and contents himself with the cricket match on the radio. It’s hard to think of anything more dreary but at least it spares him music.

A steer lies with its legs in the air like an overturned table at the road’s edge. Rippling black sheet of birds.

Out of the low scrub a gum rises in the distance and as they pass Fox sees a white cross and a pair of elastic-sided boots. A scene from a Burl Ives song. Old Burl. How the old man loved him. Wrap me up in my stockwhip and blanket.

At the Paynes Find roadhouse Fox sits up in the Kenworth’s cab while the bowser pumps diesel into its enormous tanks. He looks out in search of a settlement to go with the name but there’s only scrub and stony ground. Eventually the smell of diesel drives him out. He buys a Coke and sits in the sweltering shade while his driver, having made it plain 220 he wants to eat alone, hoes into a baconburger at a table inside.

Caravans towed by Pajeros and Range Rovers pull in from the north and line up for fuel. Old people with baggy shorts and leathery tans cross the oiltamped dirt of the forecourt to the reeking bogs.

A young bloke in khaki work gear and steelcapped boots comes out of the roadhouse dragging a gust of refrigerated air and cigarette smoke with him.