Star Struck

by Ryn Shell

  “Gosh, Dad.” Carl’s hands stroked the rod and the reel handle. “She’s a beauty. Thanks. Can I really have this?”

  “Unless you’d rather have a new one.”

  “No, yours will be just great.”

  “Your mum and I are wondering…”

  “What?” Carl cocked his head to one side and studied his parents’ grinning faces. “Okay, what’s the catch?”

  10

  Carl was delighted when his father had asked him how he would feel about having a baby brother or sister when the boy had been gifted the adult-size fishing rod. He was present and keenly interested when his mum opened the mail and received confirmation of her pregnancy from the Royal Women’s Hospital. Together, mother and son raced to the paddock where Linton worked.

  Rose grabbed and swung Carl’s arm enthusiastically. Linton saw them leaping between blueberry bushes, and brought the tractor to a halt.

  “It is—” The eager ten-year-old waved his arms and yelled, “Dad, we’re getting a baby.”

  Linton wound down the window of the cabin. “What did you say?”

  “A kid brother or sister for me.” Carl leapt in excitement.

  “I’m sure it’ll be a girl this time.” Grinning, Rose touched her tummy. “I’m carrying differently…”

  She never finished. Linton, the tall hunk of a man she loved, leapt from the tractor cabin and swept his ten-year-old son and her into his arms.

  

  The brothers planned and organised for one last long-distance truck haul job together, happy that the process for Trevor and Rose’s divorce could begin as soon as the Australian government changed The Commonwealth Family Law Act to make it easier to get a divorce. There was talk that they planned to remove the concept of fault and the long delay before a couple could apply for divorce.

  Once the new laws came into place, there only had to be a twelve-month period of separation, with Rose and Linton living in a separate establishment from Trevor and Alvin for a year, and they would qualify for a speedy divorce. With a boost from this well-paying contract for the transport of hazardous goods, Linton and Rose planned to build a family home on Rose’s section of land, and Trevor and Alvin would renovate the older dwelling on Trevor’s land.

  Rose, Carl and Alvin would run the plant nurseries until they returned. They stood beside Linton’s loaded truck, Rose was just beginning to show her pregnancy.

  Linton hugged her close. “I promise this will be my last journey away from you.”

  Alvin and Trevor hugged goodbye and made a promise to not be separated for more than a day, after this one well-paying job.

  Grasping Carl’s hand, Rose drew him away from the truck. “Best keep upwind of it.” She shuddered in revulsion. “Stay away—it stinks.”

  Carl shook her hand away, and Rose let him be. He followed his dad as Linton inspected the rigging over his load and adjusted the Hazardous Chemical sign.

  As the brothers prepared to drive off, Rose, Carl and Alvin stood at the farm gate waving. Then holding her breath, Rose ran and kissed Linton once more before hurrying back to the side of the road to fill her lungs away from the acrid air.

  “I’ll miss you,” she called.

  Linton yelled, “You’ll be right beside me all the way.”

  Super sensitive due to pregnancy, Rose turned to walk home, her legs threatening to collapse. Alvin and Carl each grabbed one of Rose’s arms and helped her back to the farmhouse.

  Rose laughed to reassure Carl. “I’m going to be sick for a bit, but I’ll be all right soon.” She touched her belly. “I’ll just sit quietly.” She stayed inside and sat by the two-way radio once she’d recovered from the worst bout of morning sickness she’d ever experienced. The moment the radio crackled with Linton’s incoming call, Rose snatched up the receiver.

  

  Trevor and Linton shared the two-day-long, non-stop haul across the Nullarbor Plain, and they were on the return route with Trevor driving, heading home, when Rose took their radio call-in.

  “There’s this crazy stream of sparks in the sky.” Linton held the radio microphone near his mouth.

  “Shooting stars?” Rose drew the newspaper near her. Ignoring the front page headlines about Skylab’s latest predicted re-entry path she thumbed the paper to the midsection to check planetary stargazing charts. “Maybe it’s a meteor shower. You get magical-sky vistas on a clear night so far out from the city.”

  “No—” Linton’s sentence broke off. The radio stuttered with static electricity. “More like massive fireworks out over the Bass Strait, heading for the coast near Esperance—behind us—some in front too—coming down over the Nullarbor, around Balladonia, maybe as far as Kalgoorlie.”

  “It’ll be a meteorite,” Trevor said.

  “How’s the cargo travelling?” Rose closed the paper. “Everything stable?”

  “Yes, the load is fine.” Linton let his fingers fold around the mike. “It isn’t the load I’d like to be talking to you about.”

  Her voice softened. “I miss you too.”

  “Right. That made me smile.” Linton paused. “This bright flickering object approached us across the desert before we saw the sky light up. I tell you, it’s eerie out here tonight.”

  “Something like the Min Min lights?” Rose asked. “I’ve seen them in the channel country where I grew up.”

  “Min Min lights?” Trevor’s voice spoke through the radio speaker into the kitchen, where Rose sat cradling her microphone with her head angled to the square speaker box.

  A Min Min light seemed to wave at him. Trevor turned his head square on to the road, trying to ignore them. “Don’t usually get Min Min here.”

  “Hi, Trevor.” Rose’s voice sounded cheerful. “How are you finding your first crossing of the continent?”

  “We shouldn’t see Min Min lights here.” Trevor fumbled on the dashboard for a sweet. “Something’s out there tonight.”

  “Sorry, I forgot...” Linton laughed. “Trevor’s been hoping to see the Nullarbor Nymph.”

  Trevor chuckled. “Especially if the blond looks like Robert Redford.”

  “Listen here, Trevor,” Rose warned, “when you’re driving, take that load you’re carrying seriously. Stargazing and joking is fine, as long as whoever’s driving has his eyes on that road and isn’t searching for nymphs prancing around with a mob of kangaroos. That’s valuable cargo I’ve trusted you with—my Linton.”

  Linton’s voice crackled with laughter through the speaker. “Trevor’s disappointed. No naked blondes are streaking across the highway tonight. He doesn’t want to believe it’s just a hoax they made up at the pub back there. Seen a few wild camels, though.”

  Trevor chipped into Linton’s conversation, “Those weren’t the humps Linton hoped to see.”

  Linton spoke, “Not so easy to concentrate on the road when you get unexplained lights heading towards you across the plain.”

  “I guess you didn’t believe in fairies.” Trevor chuckled.

  “No,” Rose laughed. “I was a funless square until I met my Linton.”

  “I’ve got to focus here. You need to as well, Trevor.” Linton glanced at the extended side mirrors. “That was a flash of light behind us. Rose, my eyes are being distracted from the road. Mustn’t let our minds drift too.”

  Rose mimicked her mother’s accent. “Do you want the Irish explanation that my dad gave for seeing lights?”

  “What’s that?” Trevor leaned forward in his seat and peered upward. “Gosh, you should see this sky.”

  “Watch the road, not the bloody sky, if you’re the driver,” Rose yelled. After a pause, she spoke in a calmer voice. “My folks said these lights represent an old fellow too bad to get into heaven and too good to go to hell.”

  Sharing these experiences with other drivers and Rose helped. Linton made an effort and laughed into the radio’s microphone. “So, the devil took pity on that old man and gave him a bit of hellfire to light his way as his spirit roa
med the earth.”

  “That’s right.” Rose laughed.

  “Shame I’ve only seen lights this trip,” Trevor said. “I did have my heart set on an encounter with the Nullarbor Nymph.”

  “I reckon it’s the drivers who tank themselves up at the Eucla Hotel who see her. We have more sense.” Linton grimaced, thinking of the cargo. “One of us should get some shut-eye. You don’t want to muck about with the load we’re carrying. I want a wide-awake driver at the controls.”

  “Roadhouse coming up.” Trevor flexed his fingertips while resting the palms on the steering wheel. “We’ll rest here.”

  “Light coming closer!” Linton checked the rear-view mirrors.

  The static over the radio became intense, and Linton leaned forward, his head part turned, his left ear directed to the radio’s speaker. A light flickered in the right-side corner of his eye. He blinked. Startled that he’d seen the light through his closed eyelid, he shut his right eyelid tight to test if it was his imagination. Flashes of light shot from the corner of his eye.

  Trevor yelled, “Pulling over. I want to take a look.”

  Listening at home over the radio, Rose was beside herself with fear. “Stay on the highway,” she ordered.

  “Stopping to take a look.” Trevor fumbled in his lap and crushed a takeaway chip mug, chucking it in a waste bag attached to his side door. “It’s just out there.”

  “No, don’t stop.” Linton glanced across at the Min Min light that was also just out there. “We will not stop until we reach the Balladonia Roadhouse.”

  “Thank you.” Rose breathed a sigh of relief. “Take a long rest there; the next part of the trip is dangerous.”

  “Pregnancy has turned you into a worrywart,” Trevor snorted. “It’s going to be fabulous travelling. Ninety-one kilometres of dead-straight road.”

  Rose’s voice came back through the speaker, husky and hard to understand, “Dead straight and boring; that’s why it’s so bloody dangerous.”

  Linton spoke slow and clearly. “I’m on my way home to you, love.”

  The radio spluttered. “That Min Min type light is more distracting than usual.” In the farmhouse kitchen, Rose could not tell which of the men was speaking for the static was breaking up the communication.

  “Have the two of you been popping pills?” Rose’s alarmed voice crackled into the truck’s cabin. “Shit!” The tone of her voice rose. “Who supplied you?”

  “Only thing I’m high on is you, love,” Linton answered calmly.

  Trevor tried to reassure her. “No stimulants stronger than caffeine lollies.”

  “Is it the lights that are behaving differently?” Rose winced at a sharp stab of indigestion. “Or are you men on pills? Who supplied them—I’ll kill them.”

  “Calm down, love. You should know me better than that.” Linton spoke clearly into the radio mic. “Sure, some long haul truck drivers take stimulants. All I’ve touched has been Trevor’s caffeine sweets. I wouldn’t do methamphetamine or speed.”

  “Hell!” Rose raged. “Damn you, Trevor! Where did you get the sweets? Don’t you know dealers contaminate soft drugs with heavier stuff to get users hooked?”

  Trevor took the microphone out of Linton’s hand. “You can buy these over the counter, Rose. We do not see things because we are doped. The lights are real.”

  Linton took the radio handset back to talk to Rose. “I just need to get out and walk, have a coffee. Get my focus back. The light’s coming closer! Thank God. This time, the light is the roadhouse up ahead. Never been so welcome a sight. Pulling in now. I’m going to do a full rig check before leaving. Something doesn’t feel right—nothing feels right. Take a rest. You need one same as us.” He clicked the radio off.

  Linton changed the gears. His truck came to a halt at the back of the service station yard with a loud gushing sound as the air brakes released pressure.

  11

  While Linton paid for the fuel, Trevor thumbed through the recent copy of Time magazine. He scanned an article that caught his eye.

  Trevor read: “With varying degrees of fear, anger and fascination, but mostly with a detached kind of bemusement, the world this week awaits an unprecedented event: the fiery fall of the largest machine man has ever hurled into space. The American Skylab vehicle, multi-storeys tall and weighing one-hundred tons, is expected to slip into the Earth’s upper atmosphere, and then disintegrate into a celestial shower of flaming metal as spectacular as any of last week’s 4th of July fireworks displays. Somewhere, probably at sea, twelve fragments, each weighing 1,200 pounds or more, will crash to Earth at speeds of up to two hundred and seventy miles per hour with the force of a dying meteor.”

  Another truck driver peered over Trevor’s shoulder. “Skylab’s descent aligns it to cross the continent of Australia along a near-deserted cliff face.”

  Trevor shut the magazine. “Aside from some grey nomad travellers asleep in their caravans and a few truck drivers sharing the two-day non-stop haul of cargo across the Nullarbor Plain, there are few people to witness the spacecraft’s debris crash on land,” Trevor said.

  He was eager to get back to the truck, take his turn at the wheel and have an opportunity to outsmart Rose with his knowledge of what the lights in the sky were, when she came on the radio. He’d tell her that Skylab could cross the Australian Bight and land where they were.

  As they turned out of the roadhouse’s drive and on to Highway One, he saw the lights. “Did you see that?” Trevor gazed out the side window of the truck.

  “What?” Linton chuckled. “The Nullarbor Nymph?”

  “I wish.” Trevor pointed skyward and traced the falling star through the sky with his finger.

  “You need to watch out for camels, cattle or ’roos,” Linton said.

  “This truck is carrying fifty tons,” Trevor said. “It will put a dent in a camel before it puts a dent in us.”

  Linton peered as far as the high-beamed headlights had illuminated the straight road and surrounding plain. He didn’t plan to be taken by surprise by a kangaroo, a camel or, worse, a traveller half asleep at the wheel or a foreigner who had drifted to the right side, which was the wrong side of the road. There had not been a Nullarbor Plains crossing in which he hadn’t struck all four of those.

  “There’s another!” Trevor crouched lower in his seat, so he had a higher view of the sky through the window. He scanned the southern sky. “It will be cool if we got to see Skylab crash. Do you reckon that’s space junk burning up or just regular shooting stars?”

  “I’m not taking my eyes off the road,” Linton said. “What’s this about Skylab, anyway? Didn’t they abandon that thing?”

  “The headlines in the newspaper at the last roadhouse said that Skylab’s going to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. It could end up anywhere.”

  “Will you be watching the road or the sky if we swap over at the next truck stop? I’d like to sleep in the bunk. Not going to do it if you go on stargazing.”

  “I don’t need a break,” Trevor said. “But, the Nullarbor is nullarbor-ing if you don’t chat.”

  “It won’t be nulla-boring if we hit a camel,” Linton said.

  “I tell you—it’s happening.” Trevor’s voice rose in excitement. “Wow! Look at that light.”

  What appeared to be meteors lit up the moonless sky over the Bass Strait. Some hurtled forward on a trajectory over Esperance, on the southeast coast of Western Australia, aligned to strike the ground in the southern wheat fields.

  Linton and Trevor watched the massive, illuminated space junk projectiles.

  The brothers stared sideways through the truck’s window as light from above illuminated the desert.

  “Blimey, mate, let me drive,” Linton said. “You don’t want to muck about with the load we’re carrying.”

  “Next servo,” Trevor said. “Change driver at the next roadhouse. Get some rest.”

  Linton flinched. “Light coming closer!”

  “That’s ju
st the roadhouse light,” Trevor said.

  “It’s not!” Linton gritted his teeth. His hands flew forward to grip the dashboard.

  “What the…” Trevor dragged the wheel, hand over hand; he turned to avoid the blinding light coming straight into the truck’s cabin.

  “What the h…” Linton tensed as the vehicle skewed, convulsed with a sickening noise, emitted the smell of burning rubber, then rolled. Suddenly he felt pain, excruciating pain—then nothing.

  

  Bottles rattled on the shelves in the truck stop. The ground shook. Plates of food, waiting to be picked up by the waitresses, toppled over amidst the cries and swearing of the frightened cook. The fryer was knocked over, dumping hot cooking oil all over the floor.

  “What in hell’s name is going on?” The cook scrambled for the dining area, trying to avoid getting burned as dishes, food, pots, and utensils fell everywhere.

  “I don’t know.” A waitress dropped a pot of hot coffee and grabbed the counter, trying to steady herself.

  An old lady and her husband crawled under their table. “It’s the nuclear bomb—the end of the world,” the woman cried.

  The manager clung to whatever was handy as he crossed the diner to shut off the emergency fuel switch. “It’s gonna be the end of us if I don’t kill the fuel. This damn place is gonna blow sky high.”

  Tyres screeched, the stifling smell of burning rubber and diesel and gas fumes overpowered the usual mouth-watering scents of fresh coffee, breakfast foods, and pies and pastries.

  Shouts from truck drivers reverberated through the diner—along with the screech of tyres, smell of rubber. There was a crash and sickening skid.

  As suddenly as the noise had erupted, silence fell. For a split second, truck drivers, a couple of tourists, the waitress and cashier froze. Then they sprang into life with an adrenaline rush, racing to the door—pushing—shoving to get through. Eyes focused on the brightly lit dust cloud hanging over the overturned vehicle—racing feet all charging forward with one purpose.