The Far-Back Country

by Kate Lyons

  ‘Ray? Pull over. I’m crook in the guts.’

  Ray didn’t need to be told. The air in the cabin was foul.

  ‘I can’t stop now. Might not get her started again.’ Place was atomic with heat now, bare of anything except the odd termite mound. Maybe they’d gone over the third bridge already, or was it only the second? There’d been lots of little bridges. This road kept crossing the same dry creek.

  ‘Stick your head out the window. You’ll be right.’

  Mick answered by spewing all over his own lap. The stink was unbearable, chunks on the dashboard and halfway up Ray’s leg. He pulled over in a flurry of swearing and dust.

  While Mick lay on the ground, too far gone to even kneel, Ray tried to clean up with a rag and some radiator water when what he really needed was a hose. The dog whined, flies buzzed, the kid moaned like a stuck cow. Ray felt a wave gathering in his own stomach, but he couldn’t let it break, not yet.

  He changed his trousers, cranked all the windows, gave the dog some water and a rare rough pat.

  Mick was dry-retching now, just bile. Ray considered for the first time that he might really be sick. Boy knew nothing about cleaning or cooking, was always leaving chicken to defrost without a cover or even a plate. Sam only took him on in the first place because his dad was a cousin or something. Mick knew next to nothing about sheep, couldn’t ride a motorbike, and horses brought him out in hives.

  ‘Jesus, what have you been drinking? More you lean over, more you’ll keep going. Try and sit up.’

  Half-carrying him to the ute, Ray propped him in his seat. Wiped his lips with a wet hankie, too afraid to give him a proper drink. Dry toast and Vegemite, that’s what Urs used to recommend. But that was later. When it was this bad, you just had to grit your teeth and ride it out.

  Trouble was, Mick had no grit to him. Mick Jones sounded like a tough nut, like one of those boys Ray had gone to school with, rough boys who’d grown into rough men of hard fists and few words. The sort of men he’d known in pubs and sheds and down the mines. Didn’t suit this piece of ginger ectoplasm, his head juddering bonelessly against the window as Ray started up, third time lucky. No answer to Ray’s request for directions but Sam had said Mick’s dad owned a small acreage this side of town. Ray knew most of the big ones around here. Not that track to the right, that was part of another station, and the last side track he’d seen was an hour ago and that led in the wrong direction, north toward the border he’d hoped to cross this morning. No chance now. Not today.

  Taking a punt, he took the next left. Hoping his petrol lasted, that by some miracle this might also be the turn-off Charlie had talked about, that the little dirt furrow actually led somewhere, wasn’t just a rabbit run. Grinding his teeth in lieu of a cigarette, he scoured the distance for a glint of sun on roof, something resembling a driveway, a mailbox perhaps. Crossing a cattle grid over a dry culvert, they passed a tin sign propped against the stock guard. In dripping red paint, in the hand of a psychotic preschooler, Privet, No Trespassing. Thieving Abo Skum will be Shot. Nice. The gun under his seat rattled as they bumped across. What sort of bloke was this Mr Jones? He glanced over to ask but the boy was lost to his own misery, hiccupping with every hole in the road.

  The fuel light had settled to a steady yellow glare. No turn-offs for the next thirty ks. No more signs, no trees even, just ribbed sand and rusted car shells, the empty bellows shape of a rotted roo. The ute hit a mound of dust. A warning cough from the engine as he tried to rev through it, his back wheels floating, hitting, skittering wildly across gravel, crunching through the dip and gouge of yet another nameless creek. No bridge though, no pile of white rocks. Knowing Charlie, that drop-off could be a hundred ks either direction from the spot he’d marked on his little map. Probably off some other road entirely, in some other State or decade. Some other life.

  Just as he was about to give up, turn around, Ray spotted two faint wheel marks climbing steeply toward an eroded ridge. Sun twinging off metal up there. A fence in the distance. A squat thing that might have been a mailbox, up a track where no postie in his right mind would ever go.

  ‘Oi. Wake up. This it?’

  The kid might have nodded or his head might have just knocked against the seat. Sighing, Ray started crawling along the soft shoulder, sticking his head out the window, negotiating deep corrugations, chunks of rock larger than his head. Reaching behind his ear for his last cigarette, the one he’d been saving for when he was alone, he lit it one-handed, but Mick started retching again, so he put it out.

  At the point where the track petered to a slew of dust and gibber, he found an old milk can propped drunkenly on a pile of bricks. More rust than metal, the letters J and O scrawled in that same dull red paint used on the previous sign. The rest indecipherable. Didn’t bode well. Where Ray came from, your mailbox said something about you. No matter what was happening, and even if it was just something your dad had knocked up from old bits of tin, looking like a smaller version of the house it belonged to, even down to a tiny verandah to stop the rain that never arrived from getting in, you made sure your mailbox was in good nick. Keeping up with the Joneses, Mam used to call it. From the look of it, these Joneses were on their last legs.

  The kid had his whole head out the window now, panting like a dog. The driveway so peppered with boulders, Ray feared the chassis would be ripped from the wheels. God knows how they got up it in the wet. Then again, with that topsoil blowing in steady curtains across the windscreen, every fence in tatters and the only dam he’d seen bone dry, it hadn’t rained round here in quite a while.

  By the time they got to the house, he knew what was what. He’d seen places like this before. In bad times, in good times, when bad people were in charge. A slow cancer had crept in from that yellow stubble, consuming everything worth growing or tending, rotting car innards, scouring weatherboards, eating every bit of metal to a lace of rust.

  He pulled up beside a shed housing a disembowelled tractor. No sign of a working truck or car. The shed itself was just two walls and a roof propped at a stray angle to the earth. And everywhere, the dust, rising, swirling, advancing in a low hum from bare paddocks, forming knee-deep mounds around the verandah posts. He thought of Urs, after a dust storm, sweeping the front verandah. Women took dust so personally, were always in battle with it, armed only with their cranky determination and their twiggy little brooms. It was the earliest sound he could remember, the scrape of yellow straw over old wood.

  ‘You called, right? Let ’em know?’

  The kid picked at a hole his jeans. Ray forced his voice to go softer, like he was talking to a skittish horse.

  ‘Listen. Don’t need to say what happened, with Sam. Just tell ’em you were crook.’

  No answer. No footsteps sounding inside as he mounted the front steps and knocked. Just the silence of air long undisturbed. He peered through the only window not strung with sheets, but the dust was so thick, all he could see was himself. A brick red colour growing at his neck. Just the heat. The sun was dipping lower, but according to an old thermometer nailed to the verandah post, still forty in the shade.

  He walked round the side. A bedroom window had been smashed. The back door was boarded up, layer upon layer of fence palings, nailed at furious, overlapping angles. Something wrong. Some frantic fear entombed behind those criss-crossed boards. As he came full circuit and climbed the verandah steps again, he felt the world tipping sideways and he wondered if he was coming down with whatever bug Mick had before he realised it was the verandah itself. The foundations were so leached of moisture, the whole thing was lurching away from the house at a horrified lean.

  He knocked again on the front door, harder this time. Knowing it was useless. Then he just stood there, flies feasting on his hat. The wind got up again, the screen door banged. A big dent where it met the boards, like it had been doing that for years. Wouldn’t have taken five minutes to fix it. All it needed was a screwdriver. Broken spring, that was all.

&
nbsp; It wasn’t the bad road, the falling-down verandah, the ravaged paddocks, the poor excuse for a shed, but that final tiny dereliction that sent him in a sudden burst of fury toward the ute.

  Mick, seeing the look on Ray’s face, wound his window up. Ray kept tapping until he wound it down again.

  ‘It’s no good. No one here.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see that.’ Ray heard his voice go all clipped and reasonable, the way it did when he was just holding on. ‘You’ve got a key though.’

  Mick shook his head.

  ‘Forgot it. Lost it. I left it at the shed.’

  ‘Which is it?’

  Another shrug.

  ‘Your dad then. He in town? Shopping or something. What’s his number? Let’s give him a ring.’

  But when he walked round to the driver’s side and got his phone off the dash, he saw it was out of juice. And when he found his charger, it was on the floor, and he’d trodden on it while driving and the business end was clogged with dust and spew. Couldn’t risk starting the ute up just to charge the phone, even if he could get the engine going again. And Mick wasn’t volunteering any information. He was just sitting there, picking at his jeans.

  Ray took his time walking back round to the passenger side. Hoping the slow lope through heat might calm him down. When he got there, he stuck his head through Mick’s window, taking the full force of the puke smell in the face.

  ‘Right. What’s the story?’

  At least this time Mick had the sense not to shrug.

  ‘Spit it out. Or I’ll leave you here to rot.’

  The boy started crying. Ray couldn’t believe it. Not just snivelling, really crying, in great wet gulps, like a toddler. Not even trying to cover it up. Just sitting there, leaking like a jellyfish, waiting for some stray bit of life to pick him up and smash him on a rock. The wave in Ray’s blood finally crested and broke.

  When he wrenched the door open, Mick, leaning on it and taken by surprise, fell out. Just lay there, in the dirt, T-shirt all rucked up. The skin of his stomach white as milk. Milk belly, fish belly. No hair, no balls. No spine. Ray had never been a jellyfish, not at Mick’s age, not since. He’d learned early that weakness like that made the hum in other men’s bloodstreams thicken and roar. Made retribution fast, smooth, unthinking and unquestioned, deft as primed muscle. Everything correct, due, accounted for. The boot, the belt, the fist.

  ‘Get up.’

  The kid just gaped at him, like his brain had fallen out of his mouth along with the spew.

  ‘I said, get up.’ He heard himself pleading. Get up, before I do something I’ll regret.

  Instead of grabbing him by his long red hair as he longed to do, Ray got a handful of shirt. The fabric tore, he kept pulling, Mick squeaking in fear. When he had him upright, it all came out, in tearful gulps and snotty bursts. By then, Ray didn’t need to hear it. It was an old story, a country story, the syllables engraved here long ago, in dry dams and starving animals and makeshift curtains, in dust and rust. A story of bad luck and bad faith, of giving up and giving in. So old, it had told itself to silence, was already weathering away. The sort of story which might have been Ray’s to inherit, if he hadn’t left home when he did.

  ‘Your mum. She’s in hospital, you said. Or are you lying about that as well?’

  Mick shook his head, then nodded, his head going in circles while he wiped his nose on his arm.

  ‘And your dad?’

  ‘Queensland. Went for work, ages ago.’

  ‘What about family? There’s got to be someone. An aunty or something.’

  ‘There’s Cheryl. Dad’s sister. But she hates my guts.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s going around.’

  Ray turned to look at the house. The windows stared back, blind with sun.

  ‘She’s got to have a phone number, your aunty. And you’ve got to have a phone.’

  ‘Nuh. I lost it. I told ya. Someone nicked it. It wasn’t my fault.’

  Ray played with the dog’s ears, whistling tuneless country and western. Trying to drown out the throb in his head.

  ‘In the house, dickhead. There’s a window broken round the side. I’ll knock the glass out, you climb in, ring Aunty Whatserface. OK?’

  Predictably, the kid was shaking his head again.

  ‘The phone’s cut off. We couldn’t pay the bill. And anyway, I can’t. She’ll tell Dad about Sam. Dad’ll kill me.’

  Not if Ray got there first.

  ‘Did you let Sam know about all this before he sent you home?’

  But Mick was staring at his feet again.

  Ray turned away. Sat down on a tree stump, staring out at the horizon, smoking the rest of his last cigarette. It was getting late, the sun low, even by daylight-saving time. Earth with that warning purple hum to it, light gone soft and sly. Roos would be swarming soon, looking for feed beside the road. If it was up to him, if the kid wasn’t sick and homeless and clueless and apparently parentless, he’d have risked it, dusk, wildlife, lack of sleep.

  He remembered the petrol and groaned. Looked around, but it was hopeless. No other sheds, just the one with the tractor, and that didn’t even have an engine, let alone a tank. No use going back to find Charlie’s stash. If it was anywhere near where Charlie had said it might be, it was probably about the same distance to town by now.

  He heard a trickling sound, startling in all that dryness. When he looked round, he saw Mick, with acres of drought to choose from, pissing up against the ute. Swivelling his hips, trying to write his initials on Ray’s dusty duco, leaving wet scrawls all over the tyres.

  Ray stared down at his own patch of dust. Letting it saturate all his layers. Blood colour, rage colour, drying, hardening, until his pulse slowed down.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mick chose that moment to pipe up. ‘Hey Ray. I forgot. Saw that mate of yours last night. That old bloke. The priest.’

  It took Ray a moment to twig. Then he remembered the worn black coat he’d given Charlie last winter, when the old man just couldn’t seem to get warm. The black stovepipe trousers of Sam’s that Freda had offered to go with it, sixties slim, laughably small for Sam with his beer belly but short enough in the leg to fit Charlie, almost. They formed a sort of mismatched suit which Charlie wore religiously, teaming it with a new white shirt Ray had bought him, the cardboard stiffener from the collar worn around the top button, blacked out except for a square at the throat. Father O’Reilly, in faded priest black, self-ordained. Hand raised in benediction outside the pub and the TAB. Absolving sinners, splitters, drinkers, gamblers. Forgiving everyone but himself.

  ‘Charlie?’

  ‘Yeah. He was in the pub. He gave me something. To give ya, if I saw ya. Just a sec.’

  Mick started rifling through his pockets, retrieving a yo-yo, a packet of Tally-Hos, a suspiciously thick wad of notes. Retrieving something small and white, he held it up, flapping it at Ray.

  ‘Charlie was in the pub?’

  ‘Yeah. He was looking for you. Kept going on about something he saw in the paper, and when you weren’t there, he wanted to ring ya and he asked to use my phone but I didn’t have one, because I lost it. I mean, it got nicked. And so he tried to use the one behind the bar and that fat chick, the one with the hair? She got the shits. Something bad.’

  Even making allowances for Mick’s tall tales, Ray could believe it. Barb behind the bar, ropeable because she’d been left in charge of both pub and bistro, while Pete was at his Saturday night drinks, at the only other pub in town. Then old Charlie coming in, upsetting people with his talk of God. Waving his bits of paper announcing the death of strangers, someone he imagined was his sister or his cousin or his long-lost father. The dates on them circled, because they bore a secret coded message from his wife. After thirty years, giving Charlie permission to come home.

  ‘I took care of him, don’t worry. She gave us free beers because I got him away from the bar. We had a bet on the trots.’

  Looking proud of himself, Mi
ck walked over, handed Ray a beer coaster from Pete’s pub. The back was covered in numbers. Ray squinted against the glare, couldn’t make head nor tail.

  ‘Charlie was drinking?’

  ‘Yeah. So? He was in a pub.’

  Ray could see that too. Barb giving schooners to an arch alcoholic and a stoned fourteen-year-old boy. Charlie, trembling, rheumy, staring at the beer like it was the holy grail. Mick leading him toward the betting tables, right off the edge of the abyss. The smell of beer and the gabble of race calls stripping years of rectitude away. Poor Charlie trying to raise his wall of numbers against it, his frantic voodoo of Scripture notations, saints’ birthdays, papal Roman numerals, funeral dates, engraved here on this coaster in what looked like the eyeliner Barb kept in her pocket for quick repairs.

  Ray tried to drop the coaster but it clung to his fingers. It was sticky with beer.

  ‘He kept going on about this message I had to give ya. Something about a phone number and a funeral, in the paper. I promised to do it. If I saw ya.’ Mick had picked up the coaster, was frowning over it, like it was one of those newspaper puzzles he was always doing instead of washing up.

  ‘Whose funeral?’

  ‘I dunno. Made no sense. He just said to say your mam was dead and to ring your mum. Mad, eh.’

  Mick was still smiling, still talking. Setting his yo-yo going now, trying to walk the dog. To Ray, he was frozen, voiceless, a blank cut-out against the sun. No sound at all except the steady pounding of his own blood.

  He walked over, snatched the coaster, headed for the ute. It seemed to start by the fury of his will alone. Mick only just managed to scramble in as he floored it, passenger door flapping, careering back along the driveway and down the track.