‘Not like now. What you see round you here’s cooperation. That woman is someone special,’ said Davo, angling his head towards Barbara. ‘Give her a break, fella. That’s all I’m asking.’
Wade shrugged, grunted, burped, wiped his whiskers, shuffled away and sank down against a clean bale, and fed sandwich crusts to Davo’s lame dog.
‘I seen that,’ said Bertram Junior to Davo at the end of smoko, ‘What you done with him. Better you than me, brother. My patience is run out on him.’
‘Leave him to me,’ nodded Davo.
Bertram Junior pursed his lips, hitched his trousers up, looked around the shed and gave his disintegrating team of troublemakers the eye.
‘A bloke would have to be insane to do this for a livin.’
SPARKY
Behind Sparky’s back they called him a slave. There always had to be one as far as Bertram Junior was concerned. It took the pressure off. Made life more interesting. Now Sparky was it.
Before Sparky there had been Willie-boy, who had left and joined another team, making his way to another district, slipping the bonds of Clean Team Alastair and constant long-distance travelling, saying he was married to no contractor and would please himself what he did. As a slave, anyway, he’d been more a mate — started as a mate, finished as a mate. They all came from the same town in the North Island. The slave part just got mixed up in that: it was more like longtime affection, family feeling, a way Bertram Junior had of making a person feel good. He could do it with lots of people. (He did it with you, Cookie, remember?) It didn’t worry Willie-boy, that kind of thing. Nothing much worried Willie-boy back then — he was practising disengagement, doing some reading, rethinking a few points where his life could do with rearrangement. Now, a year later, Willie-boy was back in the district and angry for no clear reason. He was on the grog. His face was puffy, his eyes were dulled, his glance guarded, whip-shy. When Willie-boy came visiting from the shed where he worked for an opposing contractor he glanced at Sparky contemptuously.
‘Tell you what, Cookie. He’d have to be crazy.’
Sparky was an Australian. He had a pile of silver-white hair, and a blotched, pink complexion. He moved with a slight stoop and a limp, giving him a wounded, hipsore gyration, and seemed only ever to have one change of clothing, a yellow striped T-shirt, and a pair of yellow-stained moleskins, and thongs or just bare feet even when there were burrs. It was hard to tell how old he was. Maybe twenty.
‘Where’s Sparky?’
‘Get Sparky.’
‘Ay, Sparky, get on over here. Run.’
Sparky must have thought, Why not? Why the fuck not? Why shouldn’t I do the washing, drive the car, dismantle the press-bench, load the luggage, carry the grinders, put em down, pick em up, do the lot?
Being told what to do saved thinking about what to do next — a problem Sparky never had. It gave more people the shits not knowing: they had arguments and fights deciding, best mates like Harold and Lenny going dark on each other over who would get which shed, where, how far, which sheep — the big open clean shearing ones, or the dirty packed-tight woolly ones that took more time, that had to be travelled to, that were hard on the gear, murder on vehicles, so a man lost money just by making it.
That sort of life wasn’t Sparky’s worry. Wouldn’t ever be.
It was not a bad life at all, the one he led, saying anything that came into his head: ‘Give us fucking twenty bucks, willya?’ Sure. Right. Why not. Or relating to a cook they had, that everyone said was plain ugly: ‘I’ll take her as long as she sucks dick’.
‘She’d have to have a big mouth, brother, to fit around your head,’ the guys growled.
Driving cross-country at weekends, with all the visiting of the mates that went on, trailing a loose tailpipe for a thousand k’s there and back, Sparky was never introduced to anyone. They were all brotherly towards each other while Sparky had no one. Sometimes he just caught a side comment, ‘Get an eyeful of the Sparky there’. Sometimes he was able to stretch out in the back seat of the car, smoke a joint and read muscle magazines while the sun moved overhead. Or stare into space. Or sleep in a wool bin. Some days, nobody asked him to do anything for hours. The call never came. He was the invisible man at those times. Same thing at cut-out, when the rest got their cheques, sucked piss, clapped each other on the back, took photos, played tapes, partied, swapped addresses, spoke bullshit to the grower and the station hands. Then Sparky ran a shuttle down to the pub no matter how far it was. Saturdays, he hit the laundromat. Sundays, he vacuumed Bertram Junior’s car, washed it, chipped dried mud from underneath, or whatever. He even went to church, for Chrissakes, because someone took him by the ear, said get in, you might learn something. Whatever it was.
When they stayed in a motel he slept under a tarp with the pups if there wasn’t space in the rooms. Or if they didn’t want him — if they were into their Kiwi thing, their Maori thing, whatever it was. Then even old Lenny got locked out, kicking the door without result. It was where Bertram Junior, Louella, Calvin, and Rosie were holed up not saying anything in there, pretending they weren’t home. Big eyes at the curtain slits, though.
‘My mother was married to a Kiwi once, a real dick-head,’ Sparky told Louella one day.
Louella moved her lips. ‘Was he a pake?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Thet explains et,’ said Louella.
When Sparky told Lenny what she said, Lenny said, ‘I am going to have to have a little talk to our Louella, I am.’
Sparky never had a regular job on the team, wasn’t a rousie, a presser, or a cook, he just went along and did everything when called upon. He could even shear a sheep. And he could cook, they said. What he needed was what he got: a feeling he would never own up to, that he’d never had anywhere, and couldn’t say what it was anyway. Just sometimes it filled him so full of something that he gathered speed and no one could hold him back. He revved up, gave out, donated totally. The sheds put him into that mood. They took him in there, into the home he never had. Someone held him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes, blue-flecked gingery pinpoints, and expressed wonder to him:
‘You’re getting famous for this, boy.’
At Saltmarsh Station Harold was sitting at the mess-table doing his books, muttering to himself as he punched the calculator, entering sheep numbers onto a sheet, constantly checking and rechecking numbers shorn against the names of shearers, men who came into the mess-room wearing clean blue singlets and sun-dried jeans, hair still wet from the shower and clutching stubbies and cans, flip-flopping across the floor in thongs, showing their callused feet and wide splayed toes, and disputing with Harold every last tally listed.
‘I did fifty-eight that run.’
‘I done forty-one.’
Harold looked up from his work and silenced them with a raised hand. Sparky moved past the window with an armload of kindling that he took into the kitchen and piled quickly beside the stove. Then he went past again to the wood-block. The axe-head flashed, making clean cuts. And back Sparky came again. He seemed to be going faster each time, and surely the kitchen was overflowing with wood by now. ‘What’s driving the Sparky?’ said Harold.
‘He’s on something.’
Sparky went past with scrap bins, carrying them down to the station hands’ pigs, wild suckers from the lignum swamps raised in a dusty pen of galvanised iron down the track a bit, his arms wrapped around a forty-four gallon drum, staggering, swaying with the weight of it. What was he on about?
Next Sparky was doing a wash-up. Then he was streaking down the linoleum-topped mess table with a Chux Superwipe borrowed from the cook and a bottle of Spray ‘N’ Wipe, his arm rotating wildly. People came out of their rooms and watched. The cook caught Harold’s eye: ‘Don’t knock it’. Now Sparky reparked someone’s car, getting it away from the meat-house door, and now he entered the meat house, was framed in a cube of gauze, was chopping and sawing away there, chops spinning up like miniature juggling clubs, the r
ibs twanging as he ran the knife-point down them, bones parting from their meat and clattering into the bone bucket.
Later Sparky stood with the flats of his hands against the wall of the huts, and breathed heavily like a runner at the end of a race. Sweat ran down him in dirty runnels. Animal blood stained his clothes. It was almost time for the tea gong. People were sitting out on the steps, waiting, sucking their cans of piss, smoking, feeling hungry and tired and clean. Sparky turned his head around and smiled at them almost shyly, his mouth hanging open, his jaw slack. How’d I do?
One weekend Sparky was left behind. These things happened — a hundred kilometres down the track and someone lifted the tarp and peered underneath. ‘Sparky ain’t here’.
‘Fuck im.’
They had a woman cook next, Hazel. She watched Sparky keeping busy from the open door of her room, from the kitchen window where she baked biscuits and slices all weekend, getting ready for the week ahead, pickling legs, making soup stock, tidying the stores. First Sparky took a shower. Then he shaved. Then he moved along the clothesline taking in the washing: the stiff shearing denims that looked as if they had skeletons inside them, the Jim Beam and Harley T-shirts, the football jumpers, the basketball shorts, the white socks, the girls’ coloured undies, and their white, lace-necked blouses that Sparky washed for them in Lux flakes and a change of warm water, and would have ironed if there had been an iron.
Hazel had a problem with Sparky. He was a member of what she called the breakfast club, workers who suffered from insomnia and got up when she did, at five in the morning or earlier. She heard the wire of their beds creak through the plyboard walls of the quarters, heard them pissing on the dirt outside, clearing their throats, lighting up a smoke, climbing up the three steps, and then shuffling in to where she worked in the dim light of a pressure lamp. They couldn’t break the wake-early habit from prison or wherever, from men’s homes, reform schools, from getting to work on the early shift in a factory somewhere — their eyeballs starey-wide at four-thirty, waiting for a light to switch on, waiting for a threat to be expressed, a screw or a mother telling them how to lead their lives, sort of welcome, that voice, sort of not. Knowing it was important to them, that was for sure: a voice to explode away from, into the rest of their lives. They didn’t know what they wanted from women like Hazel. They couldn’t connect it up. Whatever they couldn’t connect up they would act on. There was a demand they were going to make of her sooner or later. Blinking, shrugging, smelling cheesy from their bedding, getting out of her way as she moved from fridge to table, to frying pan, to stove, they seemed confused about where they were, who they were, what age they were as they scratched their balls and wondered. They were grown kids. So their confusion focused on Hazel: she wasn’t their mother, she wasn’t their woman, she wasn’t their eyeball-feast either, not if she could help it, though she knew what they looked for when she tied her ponytail back out of the way, and rolled her sleeves up to get on with the job, baring her fine, smooth arms, then bending down to take a tray from the oven, feeling her jeans stretch and tighten and a totally absorbed silence reflect back from the two or three sets of watching eyes. She could hear the roughness of the breaths. Hazel counted herself lucky that she had a boyfriend, Packard. They were still together. Just. It would have been a constant battle otherwise. She wouldn’t have survived in this work otherwise. The day she met Sparky he said to her, ‘What do you do for sex, Hazel?’ It was instead of hello. When he saw Packard getting out of the Jeep he grunted, his eyes filmed over, and he wiped his mouth, lurched away.
This long lazy Saturday in the shearing camp Sparky emerged from a bedroom wearing different clothes. He was in motion, shadow-boxing in the sunlight and dust. On his feet were Bertram Junior’s best basketball boots, three or four hundred dollars worth of exaggerated rubber soles, coloured straps and piping, and a curlicue of brand name hanging from a tag at the back, with miniaturised pom-pom basketballs for all-around inflation. The trousers he wore belonged to Bradshaw. They were black silk track pants with golden leopard spots. They were a champion weightlifter’s or a boxer’s concept of relaxation sportswear; in the case of Bradshaw, a champion shearer’s concept that he wore, when he chose, to reflect his lightest and most in-charge-of-himself moods, as if he were made of sunlight and shadow. Bradshaw was an ethereal being worthy of imitation. But it was just crazy to see Sparky like this, dragging himself around with his limp, his lurch, his glower. Draped around his shoulders was a leather jacket belonging to Arnie. The jacket was kept supple with leather dressing, it glinted with silver studs, and had an Indian head on the back. Under the jacket was a clean white T-shirt. On his head Sparky wore a red baseball cap. It sat up on his curls. He went dancing, swaying, clomp-stepping over the sandy clearing away from the sheds, through swathes of bindii into the black mulga past the wool classer’s panel van, out across the open, shining claypan where the heat of the early afternoon rose in shuddery waves.
Out there in the day Sparky joined the mirage: he elevated on his toes and broke from the ground like a blob of quicksilver.
A DOOR SHUTS
Hazel was born in limestone country, where everything expected was reversed, creeks below instead of above the ground, soil rich instead of poor, a proper springtime each year with bunching clovers, briar roses, sweet-smelling grasses. People lived close to each other under the benign slopes of extinct volcanoes. It was away to the south. They grew lucerne, potatoes, onions, and radiata pines. It was better than saltbush, said Hazel, and rusty-red rocks, dust storms and long-distance travelling all the time. Haymaking, harvest festivals, new potatoes before Christmas, and home-bottled fruit created images of regulation and order that Hazel fixed in her mind early in life, and took everywhere with her afterwards, forming a standard for dissatisfaction with the rest of the country.
Home for Hazel was the most perfect place in the world except when the breeze came from the south and she was cooking at the home shed, The Vulcan, in vicinity of the abattoirs — death and panic-stricken cattle calls then, the stink of steam cookery and viscous odours of glue over everything, turning whatever she cooked and however well she cooked it into a stomach-twisting insult.
That was from her angle: the men never noticed. Men never noticed anything except what got on their own particular goats. They tried to keep her under their thumb. Once when she wanted to have some time off at the weekend because only two shearers were left, one of the guys said, ‘I’m going to leave my photo here for you’.
‘What for?’
‘So you can get up and cook for it.’ (This was because she knocked him back.)
It became a thing, with Hazel, as a regular cook, after several years of tolerating the stench of Vulcan Meats, that some other cook could work the home shed in future, she’d go elsewhere. By preference she would not even work at all during the home run — just go and sit in the Cave Gardens during the heat of the day, listening to water tinkle down among the tumbling roses under her feet, down into the spiral limestone sink-hole opposite Jens Hotel.
At the end of this cycle in Hazel’s year there came a predictable event — another shed coming up on the horizon, miles from where she was born, a low, wide roof of galvanised iron the only landmark in a million square miles of flatness and glare. This was her life, but despite everything it wasn’t ordinary life. Beyond the dust and the loneliness and the haven of a man’s arms she pictured herself passing the last shed, and arriving at a better kind of shelter.
At Break-O-Day Station in the north of the State the men sat on bench seats at mulgawood tables, in rows facing each other, chewing on roasts and spooning up custards while Hazel went outside and spewed. It was a lonely business, never being able to keep anything down. The work was always difficult for her and still was. Its demands were endless. She was a fine-boned, small-framed, highly strung woman — a perfectionist in all she did. She was lucky to have had children — three of them, all boys, fifteen to twenty-two. They worked in the sheds too, spr
ead far and wide: you wouldn’t pick them as different from boys anywhere, but they were, because when Hazel cooked for them as she sometimes did, they caused a change in the atmosphere. They won respect for her. Those were her happiest sheds, as were the ones she worked in with Packard, the Kiwi she had travelled with for the past two years. But Packard hadn’t come with her this time. He was working on a building site for better money than shearing. Not having Packard with her made her edgy at Break-O-Day. She accepted that they were finished with each other, she had brought it on herself, but not having Packard around reduced Hazel to a worse nerve case than ever. She needed someone.
She and Packard had met at Jens Hotel. He’d been fast asleep in the lounge, a glass of beer in his hand, his soft snores edging the drink over until it was about to fall, when Hazel, who was walking past, grabbed it. Packard came wide awake and snapped, ‘That’s my beer’. Their eyes locked. He smiled, looked up at her again shyly, and said she was beautiful.
Men on the team talked about Hazel behind her back. They said what they always said when there was a woman cook on her own — that the shearers’ cook was the shearers’ root. They made side bets, she knew, on who was going to get into her first, wagering cartons on the chance. It was all old hat to Hazel, but it wore her out, she hated it, what was the use.
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