The Butt (25 page)

The Entreati lad laughed bitterly. ‘Them? They’re corpses, mate, big bloody mobs of corpses.’

‘Corpses? Have they been there long, I mean, shouldn’t you . . .’

‘Some of ’em’, the lad said philosophically, ‘must be bloody historic – they’ve been out there all my life. See, here’s how it is,’ he went on, becoming animated. ‘When a bloke gets karked up in the Tontines, they dump his body in a wadi. Come the rains, they get washed down here, yeah. But the water in the lake – well, you can see what it’s like. It doesn’t matter if the bodies are rotting when they’re chucked in, yeah, when they get to Mulgrene they’re pickled for-bloody-ever.

‘Weird thing is’ – the young man poked meditatively at the crusted salt with the barrel of his gun – ‘the way they cluster together like that into those rafts. There’s no current out there, but they still do it. Bloody big bunk-ups – it’s like they’re keeping each other company, yeah.’

When they returned to camp the auraca had been buried in the ground and the fire raked over it, then built up.

‘It’s a traditional earth oven,’ Prentice told him.

‘Where do they get the fuel?’ Tom asked.

‘There’s mulga scrub south of here, apparently. Devilish stuff when it’s living – burns like billy-o once it’s dead.’

There was a bustling purposiveness about Prentice as he unloaded the SUV, taking three fat canvas bundles down from the roof-rack. Tom rubbed his sore eyes – he hadn’t noticed them before.

‘Got these in the Tontines, together with the other gear,’ the newly Swift One said, unrolling one of these. ‘Swags – you can’t sleep out in the desert without one.’

He left off his preparations and took a sheaf of receipts and bills from his jeans pocket. ‘The swags, a water bag, emergency flares, medical kit, gifts for the native mobs – it’s all here. I’ve added it up, old chap, and here’s the balance of what I owe you in cash.’ He gave Tom an affable smile and passed the money and papers over. ‘Thanks for the loans; we should be even now.’

Tom spyed another difference in Prentice as the other man readied the swags. He looked leaner and more ascetic – altogether less ridiculous. Then it struck Tom what it was: ‘Prentice – Brian. You’ve – you’ve . . .’ he tailed off, stupidly embarrassed.

‘It’s my thatch, isn’t it, old chap?’ Prentice patted his bare forehead. ‘Ye-es, I shaved that daft fringe off – dunno why I hung on to it for so long.’ He laughed. ‘Nostalgia, I suppose. Better to face up to the fact that I’m going bald. It’s most peculiar . . .’ He tilted his face up and his clear complexion glowed in the firelight. ‘I don’t think I could’ve, y’know, accepted that, without coming out here and being with the bing . . . with these people.’

He stopped, clearly feeling that he had said rather too much, and busied himself with setting up their little subcamp for the night.

The following day Tom was even weaker. They set off from the Entreati camp at dawn, and until mid afternoon were still in the tribal lands, stopping at checkpoints approximately every fifty kilometres, so the the rabia debate could be rejoined.

Then, at the point when Tom felt he could stand the constant lurching over the impacted sand no more, and the newspaper head was, once again, assuming a slack-mouthed, garrulous appearance, they came to an enormous billboard erected on the side of a dune. It showed a muscle-bound man wrestling with a giant cigarette butt. The caption to this bizarre cartoon was: ‘Wrestle that filthy addiction to the ground and swim away from it!’

‘Swim where?’ Tom muttered to himself. ‘Lake Mulgrene?’

A few yards on a second sign appeared: YOU ARE ENTERING THE TRANGADEN REGIONAL ADMINISTRATIVE ZONE. ALL TOBACCO AND ENGWEGGE CONSUMPTION IS ILLEGAL. DEPOSIT ANY SUCH MATERIALS IN BIN PROVIDED BEFORE PROCEEDING. POSSESSION IS A FELONY. MINIMUM PENALTY: 3 MONTHS’ HARD LABOUR AT EYRE’S PIT AND $5,000 FINE.

‘Y’know,’ Gloria said wistfully. ‘it’s funny, but whenever I see that sign it’s almost like I’m coming home, yeah?’

Prentice pulled over and began fussing around. He tipped up the seat, rootled in the glove compartments, the side pockets of the doors and the trunk, pulling out cigarette packs, disposable lighters – even turning clothes pockets inside out so that the tobacco residue could be scattered by the sirocco. The transformation from the tough character who had been driving the SUV with dash and competence was immediate and complete. Furtive, old-maidish, lubricious Prentice had returned. Prentice the kiddie-fiddler, Prentice who was in search of a ‘little company’ – preferably black – and who now, to Tom, seemed to be rehearsing just such an outrage, as he nervously fed his paper tubes into the slot of the bin provided. What made the sight absurd was that Prentice was standing in a slag heap of discarded cigarettes, cigars, pipes, loose tobacco and engwegge quids.

Tom found he was laughing: deep guffaws that expanded his ribcage, so that he sucked in gouts of healthy, arid, desert air.

Gloria ignored him: ‘I did my social work training in Trangaden, yeah?’

Yeah, Tom thought. Like fuck you did.

‘It’s a backward kinduv place, and the people are total bloody wowsers, but I still have a great affection for it, right?’

Tom thought: whatever.

Prentice’s gait was crabbed as he returned to the car; with his new olfactory powers Tom smelled fear and sweat and need. Prentice put one chicken wing on the steering wheel, while with the other he groped out a blisterpack of nicotine gum. As he tucked one in his ugly mouth, Tom snidely observed: ‘Isn’t that a tobacco product?’

‘Strictly speaking, old chap.’ Prentice put the SUV in gear, and they drove away. ‘It is, but so long as it’s on prescription you’re allowed it in the TRAZ.’

‘And yours is?’

‘Absolutely. I fixed it up before we left the Tontines – you have to look ahead.’

But when he said this Prentice hadn’t been looking ahead: there was an auraca on the highway – the first live one they had seen since the badlands before the Tontines. He had to swerve violently at the last second to avoid hitting it. The car stopped on the very edge of the road, teetering. Prentice was draped over the steering wheel, shaking, his jaw working his nicotine gum; a jaw that bore the unmistakable marks – pink, lumpy, scaly – of fast-returning psoriasis.

‘Lissen, Prentice, you goddamn nearly got us all killed!’ Tom said. ‘You know the auraca bars on this heap are as flimsy as fucking paperclips! We better swap over. I’ll drive for a while – you can concentrate on your dumb addiction.’

They changed places. As soon as Tom was holding the wheel, he felt a surge of energy coming through it: the transmission directly connected to his nervous system.

The linked chains of mighty dunes that had marched away to either side of Route 1 slowly collapsed in on themselves, dumping out into a dull and featureless bled. A road-train came barrelling towards them, and Tom expertly took evasive action. It thundered past: four semi-trailers, their double sets of wheels throwing out cannonades of grit and pebbles.

A gas station loomed up out of the rumpled atmosphere, the first they had seen for 2,000 kilometres. Parked cars were ranged on its pristine blacktop apron. Leaning on the open doors, fiddling with the sound systems that blasted out rap music, were Anglo teenagers. They were drinking sodas as the wind riffled their T-shirts and sweatpants.

‘Y’know,’ Tom observed to Gloria, ‘I’m not completely ignorant, I did absorb some of what the Von Sassers wrote.’ He reeled off a few of the prosaic field notes he had internalized: the Tayswengo’s traditional range was between Ralladayo and the foothills of the Great Divide; they subsisted on hunting moai and digging succulent tubers called effel; their kinship system was matrilineal, with children raised by their maternal uncles; they believed that the desert – which was their entire world – rested on a massive flipper lizard, which they called Engeddii, meaning ‘Back of the World’.

Gloria kept nodding her head to all of this, although when she voiced her ‘yeahs’ and ‘rights’ they remained questions rather than affirmations. They drove over a wide, empty watercourse on a long box girder bridge. The SUV’s tyres thwacked the concrete. Finally she interrupted him: ‘Thing is, yeah? All that has some truth in it, but what stands out about the Intwennyfortee is that, unlike most other Tayswengo mobs, they have a remarkable . . . Well, I wouldn’t exactly call him a leader, yeah? Such a status would be incompatible with their profound democratizing spirit, yeah?’

Profound democratizing spirit? Tom withered internally, recalling the flyblown Entreati ‘settlement’ that Gloria had hymned the praises of. ‘Who is this guy?’ he said aloud. ‘And how does it affect me?’

‘Well, you’ll see,’ Gloria said enigmatically. ‘I felt you oughta know, right?’

Trangaden shimmered towards them, the chlorophyl city at the end of the yellow sand road. Then they were in it, driving down a wide boulevard lined with tall palm trees. There were beautifully maintained flower beds along the dividing strip. Behind pillowy verges stood neat suburban villas, each with its own strip of emerald lawn constantly being strewn with watery diamonds.

They came to a checkpoint manned by Anglo cops – the first time Tom had seen any so employed. They barely glanced at his and Prentice’s laissez-passers, being more concerned with establishing that the latter had a prescription for his nicotine gum. Then one of the cops asked them all very politely to get out, and he searched the car thoroughly. In the ashtray he discovered a desiccated butt that must have been there when Tom rented the car, because Prentice always flipped his out the window.

‘Ordinarily,’ the sergeant said, holding up the evidence bag that contained the butt, ‘this would be a misdemeanour, right. But as you folks are new in town I’m gonna let you go with a caution.’

Prentice was fawningly grateful – Tom knew why. Presumably, with Prentice’s charges even a misdemeanour could get his bail revoked. Prentice, in the slammer with Anglo truckers coming down off crystal meth’ and ravenous for ass. Prentice, stuck in a cell with a haunted Entreati tribesman, too weak to stop it, and forced to watch as the man, crazed by his confinement, cracked open a disposable razor, then drew the thin blade across his throat.

Tom smirked, and pulled the SUV into the hotel parking lot.

At reception they checked in, and Tom handed over the two Galil rifles for the hotel armoury. Prentice came struggling through the doors, his shoulder holster slung round his thin neck, a single box of ribaviarin in his scrawny arms. His psoriasis was definitely back; the receptionist noticed it and a wrinkle of disgust bent her lipstick bow.

‘I – I say, Tom – Brodzinski, I’m awfully fagged out.’ Prentice slumped, wheezing, against the desk. ‘You couldn’t help me out with the rest of my clobber, could you?’

The second message was from Martha and the kids, who had put the home phone on conference. Tom could picture them, standing in the living room. The kids were apple-cheeked, snow was falling outside, a too-tall Christmas tree bowed over the mantelpiece and logs crackled in the grate below.

‘Hi, Dad!’ the kids chorused, while Martha’s voice simply stated: ‘Tom.’ The kids all cried, ‘Merry Christmas!’ Then Dixie added, ‘We’re gonna sing you a carol.’ They launched into ‘Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer’. The twins’ voices were reedy and off-key, Tommy Junior grunted the words, and Dixie led them by example on to the next line. Martha wasn’t singing at all.

Tom unstuck the cellphone from his ear and deleted the message. It would be time to wrap himself in the cosy swag of familial love later on, when the job was done. He picked up his digital camera, then set it down again. The images were consorting in their aluminium cell. Clad in a glittery mail of pixels, Prentice was sidling up on Tom’s twins, wheedling them for their little company. While Tommy Junior – who ought to protect them – remained idiotically oblivious: a bulgy teddy bear, the size of a full-grown – yet sexless – man.

Tom could scarcely believe that once upon a time he had cuddled that body; held that hydrocephalic head to his chest and breathed in the warm hay of boy hair, while tenderly exploring the raised scar and wondering what misery had inflicted it. To cuddle Tommy Junior now – what would that be like? He would feel as alien as . . . a Tugganarong cop . . . Football head . . . Flat face . . . Bronze skin . . . Gollyfollyfolly . . .