Worry Warts (6 page)

Col appeared and handed Keith a piece of plywood.

‘There you go,' he said, ‘you can do it on that.' He went and stood next to the truck. ‘Is this a good place for me to stand?'

Suddenly Keith understood.

Col didn't want him to paint the truck, he wanted him to paint a picture of the truck.

Mick brought a wooden crate for Keith to sit on, which was just as well because Keith's knees had suddenly gone a bit wobbly.

It wasn't that Keith didn't like painting pictures, he did.

But every time he painted one something seemed to go wrong.

At school Mr Gerlach had kittens.

At home Mum and Dad got tense and unhappy just because a couple of times Keith had left tubes of paint on the settee with the tops off and Dad had sat on them.

OK, said Keith to himself, stop being a worry wart. Mr Gerlach isn't here. Mum and Dad aren't here. There's just me and Mick in the office and Col standing over there sticking his chest out.

‘Behind the wheel might be better,' Keith told Col.

Col climbed up into the cab.

Keith picked up a stub of a pencil and started sketching the truck onto the plywood.

He'd be OK as long as it didn't end up looking like a cane toad.

‘Finished yet?' called Col. ‘My arms have gone numb.'

‘Nearly,' said Keith, ‘Hang on.'

Just a few more dabs of Burnt Ochre on Col's cowboy hat and . . .

‘OK,' said Keith, ‘finished.'

Col climbed stiffly down from the cab, rubbing his arms, and looked at the painting.

Keith crossed his fingers and hoped Col's mum and dad had taken him to lots of art galleries when he was a kid.

If he likes the colour of the truck, thought Keith, I'm probably OK.

It had been a big risk, changing the colour of the truck to purple, but off-white wouldn't have shown up as well against the gold and silver sunrise. He'd thought at first of making the truck orange, but that would have clashed with the blue snake wrapped around the black bulldozer.

If he likes the snake, thought Keith, I'm probably OK.

He peeped up at Col's face.

Col was frowning.

‘It's flying,' he said. ‘The truck's flying.'

‘That's right,' said Keith. ‘I've painted it from the point of view of a truck inspector as you roar out of the sunrise over his head.'

‘What are those things flying around the truck?' asked Col.

‘Vampire bats,' said Keith.

‘What's that gleam coming from Col's mouth?' asked Mick, who'd come over from the office.

‘An opal tooth,' said Keith.

Col slowly broke into a grin.

‘It's a beauty,' he said to Keith. ‘Let's go.'

He gave Keith a leg up into the cab, said hooroo to Mick, gunned the motor and they were off.

While they bounced along the dusty road Keith told Col about South London and how big trucks from Europe used to get wedged under the pub overhang coming round the corner from Pontefract Road.

Col told Keith about the Birdsville Track and how once he'd hit a pothole so big he'd lost three hundred fan heaters and the can of drink he was holding at the time.

Then the vibrations from the road started to make Keith feel drowsy and he closed his eyes and thought about the opal fields and wondered if they really were fields or if they were just called that because the glittering opals were in rows like strawberries.

Keith snapped awake.

Col was leaning across him, pushing open the door of the cab.

‘Is this the opal fields?' croaked Keith, squinting through the dusty windscreen.

‘Yep,' said Col.

All Keith could see was dust.

The only things glinting were Col's eyes as he looked up at Keith's painting, which he'd stuck to the roof of the cab with muffler tape.

‘She's a ripper,' he said. ‘Blokes at the depot'll chuck their guts when they see it.'

‘Thanks,' said Keith.

He grabbed his school bag and jumped down from the cab.

The heat hit him in the face like Mr Gerlach's breath after a curry lunch.

‘Don't forget,' said Col, ‘if the cops pick you up, leave me out of it.'

‘OK,' said Keith.

Col gunned the motor and the truck started to move off.

‘And give your folks a ring,' he yelled.

‘I'm going to,' shouted Keith, waving.

And I am, he thought as he watched the truck disappear down the dirt road, just as soon as I've got the opals.

He looked at the ground around him.

It certainly wasn't a field. More a piece of desert with tyre tracks and a few wispy bits of dry grass.

And no opals to be seen.

They must be in the dust.

He dropped to his knees, opened his school bag, and felt around in the thick orange powder.

Nothing.

Just dust.

Then he touched something small and round and hard.

He picked it up and blew the dust off it.

It sparkled.

Heart pounding, he rubbed it on his jeans.

This one opal, he thought, could pay for the plumbing in our new house, or a month's holiday for Mum and Dad in a balloon, or a fishing boat so we can catch our own fish, or a Rolls Royce with speed stripes, or a . . .

The opal had stopped sparkling.

Keith saw why.

It had been wrapped in silver paper, which Keith had shredded with his rubbing.

And it wasn't an opal at all, it was a piece of old bubblegum.

Keith tossed it away.

OK, he said to himself, be sensible. You're not going to find opals lying here by the side of the road. Any opals here would have been picked up years ago by people driving to the shops who remembered they'd left their money at home and needed a couple of precious stones to pay for the groceries.

Keith stood up and looked around.

Now the dust from the truck had settled, he could see he was in the middle of a vast, flat plain with hardly anything sprouting out of it.

Anything green, that is.

There were other things, brown things, most of them taller than Keith, dotted over the landscape for as far as he could see.

Piles of dirt.

Keith had a horrible suspicion he knew what they were.

Keith decided to check out the town first and buy some cans of drink because he'd seen a movie once where some prospectors had run out of water in the desert and had got dehydrated and started seeing piles of gold that were really donkeys.

All he could see were two buildings and a caravan park.

‘Excuse me,' he said to a man climbing into a four-wheel drive, ‘where's the town?'

The man grinned and knocked some dust out of his beard with his hat.

‘You're standing in it,' he said.

Keith looked at the buildings.

One was a pub with cement brick walls and a corrugated-iron roof and a wooden verandah and a huge dirt carpark.

The other was a shop with fibro walls and a corrugated-iron roof and a wooden verandah and a huge dirt carpark.

Over the shop door was a sign saying
Curly's Store.

I hope Curly sells cold drinks, thought Keith as he went in.

When his eyes got used to the gloom, he saw that Curly sold everything. Food, hardware, clothes, make-up, camping gear, kitchen utensils, dog-care products, and that was just on the first shelf Keith looked at.

Curly also sold newspapers.

Keith held his breath while he checked to see if any of the headlines said
NATIONWIDE SEARCH FOR BRAVE OPAL BOY.

They didn't.

Keith felt relieved, but with a twinge of disappointment. Then he saw that the papers were three days old.

‘Can I help you?' said a gruff voice.

Standing behind the counter was an elderly man wearing an off-white T-shirt with
Curly
printed on it. He was completely bald.

That's a bit rough, thought Keith, giving a person a nickname just cause he's got hairy arms.

Keith bought three cans of drink and a meatloaf sandwich. Once the sandwich was in his mouth he realised how ravenous he was and bought two more.

Then he got down to business.

‘Those piles of dirt,' asked Keith, ‘are they . . .?'

‘Mullock dumps,' said Curly, slapping a piece of meatloaf onto a piece of bread, ‘from the diggings.'

‘How long does it take to dig an opal mine?' asked Keith, dreading the answer.

‘If you've got a diesel drill and some gelignite,' said Curly, ‘you can get a decent shaft down in a day. By hand it takes weeks.'

Keith felt a lump in his stomach that wasn't meatloaf.

‘You don't happen to know of any spare mines around here, do you?' he asked. ‘Ones where the owners have struck it rich and gone to Disneyland.'

Curly gave Keith a look that made him think Curly must have once had a bad experience at Disneyland.

‘We've got a rule out here,' said Curly. ‘You never touch another bloke's mine. Never.'

‘What happens if you do?' asked Keith in a small voice, hoping he sounded like he was doing this for a school project.

Curly reached under the counter.

Keith wondered if he was going to produce a school-project kit.

But it wasn't a cardboard folder that Curly thumped down onto the counter.

It was a big, black, double-barrelled shotgun.

Keith stood on the store verandah, swallowed his last bit of meatloaf sandwich, and looked around for a good place to fossick.

When Curly had first mentioned the word fossick, Keith had feared it was a technical term meaning to dig up opals with a bulldozer and a dump truck.

Then Curly had explained that it simply meant picking up opals by hand on the surface rather than digging down for them, and that just as many opals were found by fossickers as by the crazies who sank shafts halfway to Belgium.

Keith spotted a good place to fossick.

Keith looked at his watch and sighed.

Ten forty-three.

He'd been on his hands and knees in the pub carpark for twenty-five minutes in the scorching sun and all he'd found, apart from a few thousand stones and rocks and a few hundred cigarette butts and beer bottle tops, was a bleached bone from a small animal or lizard.

He sighed again.

When opal miners got drunk and spun their tyres, they obviously jumped out of the car afterwards to check for opals.

He looked at his watch again.

Ten forty-four.

He'd planned to find all the opals he needed by twelve-thirty so he could organise a charter plane to get him back to Orchid Cove in time for dinner.

He looked at the bleached bone again.

Maybe it wasn't part of a lizard.

Maybe it was part of a BBQ chicken.

Or a fossicker.

Keith decided to try somewhere else.

Keith looked at his watch and sighed.

Eleven twenty-seven.

He'd been on his hands and knees in the caravan park for thirty-eight minutes in the scorching sun and all he'd found was a shoelace and a plastic hose nozzle.

It wasn't much of a caravan park, just a square of dust with a dozen or so battered caravans, but he'd hoped the van wheels might have stirred up the odd gem or two.

Nothing.

A voice broke into his thoughts.

‘Scuse me.'

It belonged to a middle-aged woman in a fluffy dressing gown.

Keith thought she must be melting. He was wearing a T-shirt and he felt like a chip in oil.

‘While you're down there, love,' she said, ‘could you do me a favour? Keep an eye out for a filling. Merv threw up on his way back from the pub last night and lost one.'

Keith said that normally he'd be happy to, but he'd just decided to try somewhere else.

Keith looked at his watch.

He didn't have the energy to sigh.

Nineteen minutes past twelve.

He'd been on his hands and knees by the petrol pumps at the side of Curly's store for nearly an hour in the scorching sun and all he'd found was a tyre valve and three pieces of old bubblegum.

So much for his theory that when truck drivers stopped for diesel and jumped down from their cabs, the heels of their cowboy boots would gouge out opals.

Keith pulled the knotted T-shirt off his head and wiped the dust and sweat off his face.

This is hopeless, he thought.

Not just this spot, the whole trip.

Coming all this way had been a stupid waste of time, thirty-two hours of worry and discomfort and knots in the guts, all for nothing.

The only good bit had been painting Col's truck.

Keith looked round for a phone box so he could ring Mum and Dad and tell them he was coming home as soon as a truck came past that would swap him a lift for a painting.

He had a vision of Mum and Dad's faces glowing with relief at his safe return.

Then he saw the disappointment gradually furrowing Mum's forehead and drooping Dad's mouth as they realised he hadn't brought any opals.

Disappointment closely followed by migraines and upset tummies and crosswords and solitary bushwalks and arguments and . . .

Keith stood up and went into the store.

‘Noodling,' said Curly, slapping a piece of meatloaf onto a piece of bread.

Keith lowered his lemonade and stared at him.

Noodling?

What did spaghetti have to do with finding opals?

‘Sifting through the mullock dumps,' said Curly. ‘Picking up bits of colour the shafties have missed. Best way to fossick.'

Of course, thought Keith, his body suddenly tingling and not just from the lemonade or the sunburn. That's where I've been going wrong. No noodling.

‘One important thing to remember when you choose a dump,' said Curly, handing him the sandwich. ‘If there's someone working the shaft, make sure you ask their permission. And even if a shaft looks deserted, don't go down it.'

‘Don't worry,' said Keith through a mouthful of meatloaf, ‘I won't.'