One for the Road (23 page)

“Come back in ten years,” Kathy says, dropping me by the highway. “Maybe then we’ll have a museum, a son et lumiére show—the works. Then again, maybe the termites and the ghosts will win.” She gives me a loopy grin and drives back to the abandoned place she calls home.

My reentry into twentieth-century Australia is abrupt and unpleasant. Max—“Mad Max” to his fellow bikers—is just the sort of character who stalks the nightmares of every hitchhiker’s mother. His black car looks like a hearse, except that the back wheels are jacked way up, shoving the nose of the car into the bitumen. Max himself appears dressed for a funeral. He wears a black leather vest over a black T-shirt, with a black headband to match his black sunglasses, long black hair, and stringy black beard. He is even listening to Black Sabbath on a boom box set against the dashboard, just beneath a bumper sticker that reads “Screw Helmet Laws.” The only mystery about Max is why he’s in a car instead of on a bike.

“Left the Harley with me missus in Perth,” he explains, flipping the tape. “Port Hedland’s a shitty town for bikes.”

“What takes you to Hedland?”

“Work.”

“What in?”

“Don’t know. Whatever I find when I get there.”

“So why’d you pick Hedland?”

“Felt like taking a ride.”

He turns up the music. Our conversation proceeds in fitful bursts between songs.

“You from Perth originally?” I ask.

“Melbourne.”

“Do you still have family back East?”

“Yeah.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“To get away from them.”

Black Sabbath for another ten minutes. Then the cassette runs out. For some reason I resume our awkward conversation.

“What’s your missus do?”

“Looks after the kid.”

“Yeah? How old’s the kid?”

“Six weeks.”

“Really! What’s it like to be a dad?”

“It’s not mine. The old man killed himself when the baby was born. The missus and me have only been going out since then.”

I flip the tape. Max turns up the volume. And Black Sabbath serenades us through the burnt orange plains of the Pilbara.

In Port Hedland the color scheme changes from orange to rust. The iron ore town is bordered by rust-colored rail cars on one side, and rust-colored ore boats on the other. Dust from the open heaps of iron ore blow through the streets and paint the buildings in a grimy, purplish wash. Even the sky seems rusted over.

But the economy is booming. It reminds me of Mintabie in the opal fields of South Australia: a place geared around the fast buck and the fast exit. High pay, high rents, and hordes of single men searching vainly for single women. Single white women, that is.

“Any blonde sheilas back in the kitchen?” a brawny man asks an Oriental waitress at the Chinese restaurant. She manages a smile and a quick shake of the head before retreating to the kitchen. The man and his six mates return to their beer and chop suey.

“Did you see Kev’s sheila?”

“Which one?”

“The bitch with the harelip.”

“Oh my fucking godfather. I wouldn’t take that fucking sheila to the shithouse.”

“You don’t bang faces, mate. Just put a bag over her head and keep going.”

“Two bags.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“One for her, and one for you, in case hers tears open.”

Laughter. More beer. More chop suey. The men of the Pilbara, like the mines in which they labor, display all the sensitivity of a gang bang. Their rapaciousness will be equally short-lived. But unlike Cossack, Port Hedland doesn’t sit so lightly on the land. When the minerals play out and the people drift away, their ghosts will linger in the pitted earth and the rusted tangle of smokestacks.

      
F
or the twentieth consecutive morning, I awake in an unfamiliar town. Pub beds, however, are becoming depressingly familiar. My lumpy mattress is within an arm’s length of an electric jug, just like the jug I reached for in Geraldton and Fremantle and Esperance and Coober Pedy and anywhere else I’ve stayed at a pub. The complimentary biscuits are stale. I eat them anyway; my acceptance of all things free has become instinctive. I stir one packet of instant coffee into hot water, and then another, and then another. But my nervous system refuses to wake. My toes can’t find their thongs. Even my finger wants to chuck a sickie.

A cardboard sign—BROOME PLEASE!—leans against my pack, mocking me. I have taken to scrawling signs at night, like a child saying his bedtime prayers. Only once have I failed to reach the appointed destination. The props are in order. I know the way through three miles of dust-choked streets to the main highway east. All that remains is for me to get up off this lumpy bed.

I reach for a newspaper on the floor instead, and feel the same melancholic twinge as I did yesterday when I noticed the date on the front-page banner. The Jewish festival of Passover, which commemorates the biblical escape from slavery in Egypt, is about to begin. The occasion is traditionally celebrated en famille, with a drunken feast called “seder.” Passover is really more of a cultural than a religious celebration; prayer
takes a backseat to singing and eating and drinking sweet Kosher wine, at least in my family. Also, it’s about liberation, which is an okay thing to celebrate, religious or not. The thought of spending seder night over a pub meal in the Pilbara makes me feel more than a little despondent.

I reach for the Port Hedland phone book. Who am I kidding? I’ve got as much chance of locating a Jew in the Pilbara as I have of finding manna in the desert. I check the Yellow Pages. No synagogue, predictably, nor anything called church that might be a Jewish temple in disguise. Catholic, Methodist, Latter Day Saints. I flip to the white pages and start searching for Semitic names … Bernstein … Cohen … Goldberg … Goldstein … nothing. Even if I did find one, what would I do? Call them up at dawn and say, “I was just wondering if you’re Jewish”? Levy … Rosenberg … Steinberg … Weiner…. Not a thing. Not even a German-sounding surname that might actually be Jewish. Just an Anglo-Saxon litany of Browns and Harrises and Smiths.

I look out the window at the reddish-brown buildings and the reddish-brown streets. Just as well, I guess. Twelve hours in Port Hedland and already I feel the rust setting in. If I stay here another night, I’ll be as road-worthy as an abandoned car.

Half an hour later, on the street outside, a car limps past and grinds to a halt thirty yards farther on. Not for me, I assume; I’m not interested in local traffic and didn’t bother to stick out a finger. And the way this guy’s climbing out of the car suggests either mechanical trouble or a wicked hangover.

“Where ya headed?” he calls to me. Even his words seem to limp out of his vocal cords.

“Broome. How about you?”

“Broome, eventually. If you’re not in a hurry, I can get you there.”

Normally, I am suspicious of unsolicited rides. Sort of like candy from a stranger or, more typically, the preamble to a homosexual proposition. But there are no other cars on the road and I’m not exactly zapping with energy, so I climb aboard.

Dave is sluggish, even by Nor’west standards. It takes him twenty minutes to swallow the Coke he’s just purchased in Hedland. Sipping it slows him down to twenty-five miles an hour; when he’s done, we reach our
cruising speed of forty. This gives me time to take in the full breadth of Hedland’s ugliness, in slow motion. A huge salt plant with massive white dunes slides onto the surrounding plain. Railroad cars filled with iron ore stretch in a line toward the horizon, going on forever. In the opposite direction, gray-faced men in reddish-brown cars drive to another day in the industrial hive. Then we reach bare, hard scrub again, stretching ahead of us for several hundred miles.

Two hours after picking me up and still less than sixty miles out of Hedland, Dave pulls in for a sausage roll at a mining town called Goldsworthy. Twenty minutes later we are still parked in the shade while Dave munches meditatively on the crumbs. I feel as if I’m watching a Death Row inmate finish off his last supper. So I wander off to see the sights of Goldsworthy, which consist of a water tank imprisoned inside a locked cage and a sign warning that anyone who pilfers from an adjoining ice supply is subject to prosecution. Not much of an oasis.

We water instead 120 miles farther on, at a roadhouse called Sandfire. It is well named, sitting as it does in the middle of a burning semidesert. And it is well placed, like the pubs in the Northern Territory, to scoop up thirsty cars and drivers coming from either direction; as a sign near the roadhouse announces, there’s no more petrol for 170 miles.

The Sandfire Roadhouse also shares the Territory’s penchant for outback whimsy. There’s no bush bank here, just a curious repository called the Sandfire Sleazey Sleeveless Shirt Club. To join, the traveler need only pay two dollars and cut off his own shirtsleeve. The money goes to the Flying Doctors and the sleeve is pinned to the ceiling, which looks like a laundry line after a storm: shredded bits of unmatched cloth, dropping almost onto the heads of drinkers.

Shearing off a sleeve and pinning it to the rafters occupies five minutes or so; drinking a beer consumes another ten. But Dave is still only midway through his eating. So I kill another ten minutes studying the Broome phone listings. No synagogues again. No -witzes, -steins, or -bergs even. Just me. The only Jew for thousands of miles, wandering in the desert as my heathen escort munches on sausage rolls.

Dave is on an exodus of his own, which he tells me about during the hot, dull drive after Sandfire. He left a factory job in Melbourne six months ago to find some other work, some other place to settle down. “I grew up on a farm, which was hard yakka,” he says. “But you only shovelled
shit until the shit was gone, then you knocked off. In the factory, you’d spend all day doing half a day’s work. I couldn’t hack it.”

Now, after several months of travel, Dave’s money is running out. He reckons he’s only got enough for six more days of petrol and sausage rolls. “Someplace around Darwin, I’ll just pull off the road and take whatever work I can get,” he says. I push away thoughts of my own impending return to the office.

Late in the day we reach a roadhouse on the outskirts of Broome. It has taken us eleven hours to cover a distance of 360 miles. “What a car,” Dave says, puttering over for another ration of sausage roll. “If it was a woman, I’d marry it.”

I begin hiking briskly toward town. A hundred feet from the roadhouse, my pace slows from a full gallop to a canter. A hundred feet farther on, the canter becomes a trot, then a slow amble. My shirt is soaked. Somewhere beneath me, ten toes are swimming in their thongs. Even my eyes are sweating. I spy a bench across the road and stagger over to collapse on it.

The climate has switched on me again. Inland Western Australia is baked and arid, but the sea is bordered by sultry mangrove swamps. Cossack gave me a taste of humidity. Now Broome’s giving me the full show.

I hadn’t expected the tropics to surprise me this way. After all, I was raised in a city that is built on a swamp. Every summer in Washington, D.C., there’s a kind of boggy revenge, when the air doesn’t move and the heat and humidity seep up through the concrete. Even the government grinds to a halt.

But Washington’s mugginess is minor league compared to Broome’s. At least the scenery is refreshing after so many days of uninterrupted scrub. There are palm trees lining the street and black-skinned natives in bright clothes lolling past: Aborigines of course, in what looks like cast-off clothing from St. Vincent de Paul’s. But if I squint hard enough it could be a travel poster for Fiji or Jamaica.

There’s architecture to match my tropical fantasy. Across the street is a raised, one-story wooden house with a 360-degree veranda. It looks like a jerry-built parody of a plantation in Louisiana, the kind of home where you expect to see a planter in a white suit and a wide Panama hat, sipping mint juleps.

I continue in a slow shuffle down the wide, hot street. A mile farther on, there’s still no sign of a pub, but there is a sprawling house with cyclone shutters and a roof that spreads like a wide-brimmed hat, casting a cool shadow all the way around. Better still, there’s the hum of an air-conditioner in one window, and a sign that says public library. I stagger inside, drop my pack, and sprawl on the floor beside it.

A middle-aged woman smiles at me from behind a pile of filing cards. Apparently, it’s acceptable behavior in Broome to collapse in a sweaty heap at the first public building you come to. Smiling back at her, it occurs to me that I’ve never met a mean librarian.

“This is nothing,” she says cheerily. “You should have been here a month ago. Talk about hot!”

I have heard this line, or something similar, about six dozen times since leaving Sydney. It seems I’ve been trailing the worst heatwave in Australian history, by just a few days, all the way across the continent.

“Hot enough for me, thanks.”

“In the wet season,” she continues, “in the Wet, people just go troppo. Completely crazy. There’s nothing to do but wait out the rain at the pub.”