Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  Harper turns her back on them all and starts walking toward home.

  Cracker runs to catch up with her. “Those guys don’t mean nothing by it. Half of ’em’s gonna be taking Base contracts themselves.”

  She keeps walking.

  “Wanna ride?”

  “Nope.”

  “You really gonna hoof it all the way?”

  She nods. Walking gives her time to think. Time to run through all the reasons she’s not going back to the Base. Not tonight—or any other night. Not even with Cracker, who she trusts more than she’s ever trusted anyone aside from Lachie.

  Eventually, the salty crunch gives way to russet dirt. Her boots disturb the road’s powdery dust. No salt here, just brown on brown. Crooked fence posts, barbed wire curling in the sun.

  Not everything is dead or dying. She admires the millet, still holding its own, but the sorghum fields have seen far better days. There used to be rice, but rice needs irrigation, and for irrigation, you need rain. No decent rainfall three years running, which is how come council got desperate enough to call in a priest-of-the-air. Prayer vigils week in, week out have altered nothing.

  Apparently, a flying priest worked miracles in Trundle, scoring them forty millimeters three days in a row. Not just hearsay; plenty of Terina locals were present when the heavens opened. Plastic buckets clutched against their chests, praising Jesus and the man in the yellow Cessna.

  When the downpour ceased, a flock of black-and-white banded birds descended. Whole sky was thick with them. Stilts, reportedly confused, as if they had been expecting something other than Trundle mud at the end of their epic journey.

  A year on now and prayer vigils have all dried up. Terina passed the hat around, everybody kicking in what they can scrounge.

  Harper’s toes are blistered and her shirt is soaked with sweat. Things come in threes—or so folks say. Three days of rain for Trundle in a row. Three nights was how long Lachie managed to tie a bit of ribbon to the fence. Low so the Hellfighter spotlights wouldn’t catch it. Nothing fancy. No messages attached. But from the fourth night onwards, there was no ribbon. Nothing.

  Lachie is as close to family as she has. Dad’s long gone; there’s only her and Mum. Mum was all for him taking that contract job.

  Dusk is falling by time she makes it back. Still hot but tempered by gentle breaths of wind. A warm glow pulsing from the big revival tent. She knows her mother will be in there alongside all the other mothers. She knows she ought to go inside and grab a bite to eat if nothing else.

  * * * *

  Beyond the fraying canvas flap lies a warm enveloping glow; a mix of lantern light and tallow candle. Town still has plenty of functioning generators but they made a lot of smoke and noise.

  The overpowering tang of sweat mixed in with cloying, cheap perfume. Still hot long after the sun’s gone down, women fanning their necks with outdated mail order catalogues. Out of their farming duds and all frocked up, like Sunday church, not plain old Thursday evening. Scones and sticky Anzac biscuits piled high on trestle tables. Offerings. Harper’s stomach grumbles at the sight.

  Reg Clayton has the microphone. He’s telling some story she’s sure she’s heard before about nitrogen and ploughing rotted legumes.

  Her mother claps and cheers from second row. Dry dirt has got inside her head. Made her barking mad as all the others. Farmers with their fallow stony fields, rusted-up tractors, and heat-split butyl tires. All for praying for the rains to come. They really believe that praying makes a difference.

  The big tent puts some hope back in the air—Harper gives it that much credit even if she doesn’t buy their Jesus bullshit. Jesus isn’t coming and he isn’t bringing rain. Jesus and his pantheon of angels have snubbed their town before moving on to bigger, better things.

  She lets the tent flap fall again before anyone catches sight of her. Not everyone in the tent is old, but most of them are. Old enough to believe in miracles. To believe that flying in some Jesus freak from Parkes might make it rain.

  When the singing starts, it’s sudden as a thunderclap.

  When peace like a river,

  attendeth my way,

  When sorrows like sea billows roll . . .

  Three years have passed since any of them clapped eyes on the dirty trickle that was once the proud Killara river. Sea billows—whatever the hell they are, seem more than a million miles from Terina Flat.

  Harper jumps when a firm hand presses upon her shoulder. It’s only Cracker and he jumps back in response.

  “Didn’t mean to startle ya. Coming out to Base with me or what?”

  She shies away from the tent flap, away from the candied light. He lopes after her like a giant puppy.

  “Not going back out there again,” she stops and says at last. “What would be the point of it? There’s nothing to see but wire and towers—and what if we get caught? You know what they say happens to trespassers. Those two guys from Griffith that—”

  “Those two bastards buggered off to Sydney.”

  “Cracker, nobody knows what happened to those guys.”

  The swell of hymns gets louder, the voices enunciating clearly.

  He sends the snow in winter,

  The warmth to swell the grain,

  The breezes and the sunshine,

  And soft, refreshing rain.

  Cracker grunts at the mention of snow. “Not bloody lately, he doesn’t.”

  Harper almost smiles.

  The two of them bolt when the tent flap flies open, taking cover behind the shadowy row of trucks and cars that reek of sour corn pulp and rancid vegetable oil. Cracker barely spares the cars a glance. He has no interest in vehicles whose sole purpose is to ferry occupants from A to B.

  “Yer mum in with that lot?” he asks.

  “Yup.”

  “Mine too.”

  She nods. All the mums and dads are in the tent, banging tambourines and clapping hands. All the folks who yell at the younger ones for frittering their time and cash on hot rods.

  They wait until the coast is clear, then climb the tufty knob of ground that offers a clear view across the dried-up river. All the way to the American Base. Harper can’t see that riverbed without picturing Lachie, boasting about the time he and his brother dug a rust-red 1936 Ford Model 48 up out of the silt. How they had to scrape out twenty-six inches of dirt from firewall to tailpan.

  The Base has a glow to it, a greeny-ochre luminescence. The kind of colour mostly seen in long-exposure borealis photos.

  Behind that wire and the machine gun–guarded towers lies a big rectangular grid: A forty-eight-element high-frequency antenna array. Beyond it stands a power generation building, imaging riometer, and a flat-roofed operations centre built of cinder blocks. They all know this; it’s no kind of secret. Base PR admits to investigating the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance. It supports a cluster of ELF wave transmitters slamming 3.6 million watts up at the ionosphere. There have been whispers of other things such as successful moon-bounce experiments—whatever that means. New kinds of weapons for new kinds of war, still in experimental phases. What weapons and what war are never specified.

  The tent hymns fade, absorbed by other forms of background noise. Cracker stuffs his hands into his pockets, closes his eyes, feels the warm breeze on his face. When he opens them, Harper’s staring at the Base and pointing.

  Above it, the sky has shifted burgundy, like dried blood. Lightning bolts, ramrod straight—not jagged, strike the ground, then thicken, changing colour, and slowly fade.

  “What the . . .”

  “Did you just see that?”

  She’s fidgeting, running her thumb along the friendship bracelet knotted on her right wrist. Three blue ribbons tightly braided. Three wishes for bringing her Lachie safe back home.

  * * * *

  The plane appears like a lonesome dove, winging its way to Terina Flat bringing with it salvation in the form of a prie
st decked out like Elvis Presley. Elvises aren’t unusual in these parts, what with Terina being so close to Parkes and its famous Elvis festival. Back in January, fifty thousand tourists flooded in to celebrate the King’s hundredth birthday.

  Harper has never seen one of them up close. The Elvis who lands on the blistered tarmac is dusty and kind of faded. Paunchy, but not in the proper Elvis way. A golden cross hangs around his neck. A knife tucked into his boot if he’s smart. A pistol hooked through his belt if he’s even smarter.

  Town folks skip right past the rhinestones and move straight to calling him Father. Press around him like bleating sheep. Harper doesn’t plan on making contact. She cringes as the shrivelled biddies primp and fuss and preen. Flirting with the sly old dog, promising him pumpkin scones and carrot cake—all chokos with artificial flavour added, if truth be known, although you won’t catch any of them admitting such a thing. Lamingtons run soft and gooey from the broiling sun. Local piss-weak beer to wash it down with.

  The Elvis plane, though, that’s something else. An ancient Beech A60 Duke, knocked up and turbocharged—Cracker was mouthing off about that plane before the sunlight hit its yellow sides, planes being the one thing capable of distracting him from Dodges.

  Harper waits until the fuss dies down. Elvis shoos his flock away from the landing strip towards the revival tent. Promises to be joining them just as soon as he’s checked his luggage. Once the parents and grandparents have moved off, small children run to place their grubby palms on the fuselage.

  “Piss off, you little buggers,” spits Darryl Quiggen, charged with checking the battered old bird over, hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his pinched white lips. Used to be some kind of expert once. The tang of avgas hangs in the air—the good stuff, not the crap distilled from corn.

  Quiggen pays Harper no attention. He’s never had much luck with women, finds it preferable to pretend they don’t exist. She makes sure she’s out of his line of sight, inching as close as she can get away with to examine the peculiar assortment of religious symbols painted across the plane’s canary yellow casing.

  Jesus—rendered clear as day, hands pressed together in prayer. Surrounding his head, a thick halo of icons: an egg with a cross, a flaming heart with barbed wire wrapped across its middle. A snake and an anchor. Some poorly rendered birds. A hand with an eye set into its palm. A star made of two triangles. A crescent moon and a tiny little star. Some writing that looks like it might be Hindu—not that she’d know a Hindu from a Sikh.

  There’s something strange underneath the wings. Bulging clusters of attachments reminiscent of wasp nests. She steps up closer but she isn’t game to touch. Up closer still, she can see the welds and other bodged repairs beneath paint blisters. Paint costs a fortune. There must be something well worth hiding under there.

  She peers in through the grimy windows until Quiggen shoos her off. The rear cabin’s stuffed with all kinds of junk. Looks like maybe Elvis sleeps in it.

  The plane serves well as a distraction. She’s trying not to think about the Base’s empty wire, the thick red lightning, and the sickly green light rippling over everything the night before. The Base is locked down, nothing unauthorised in or out—not even bits of ribbon tied to wire. “Earn good money” was what they said, money they were all in need of. They were desperate or curious, all the ones that took up contract offers. Three months on. No worries. She’ll be right. But how often three months extended to six or twelve. How often at the end of it, they climbed into one of those Blackhawks and disappeared.

  She’s sheltering beneath the concrete shade of what remains of a Shell service station. Hard to believe people used to drive right up and pump petrol into their tanks.

  Dusty Elvis saunters over, his jaw working over a wad of gum. “Like the look of my equipment, now, do ya? Give you a private tour if you come back later.” He winks.

  Harper straightens up and inches back. “You oughta be ashamed of yourself,” she says. “These people don’t have much to spare. Drought’s taken everything the wheat rust missed the first time through.”

  “Mind your own goddamned business,” he spits, forcing her back with the bulk of his rhinestoned, jumpsuited bulk, fiddling with a bunch of keys attached to his belt. Reaches into his pocket for mirror shades, the kind with wire frames. He somehow looks bigger—meaner—with them on. He leans his shoulder against the crumbling concrete wall, looks her up and down until she itches. Tugs a packet of cigarettes from another pocket. Tailor-mades—they cost a bloody fortune. Sticks one on his lower lip, lights it with a scratched and battered Zippo.

  “Girl like you oughta be thinking of her future,” he says. Rhinestones sparkle in the stark midmorning light. The scent of tobacco curls inside her nose. “I was you, I’d be fucking my way up and out of this dustbowl shithouse.” He jams the cigarette between fat lips and smiles.

  “Lucky you’re not me, then,” she says drily. Waiting. Not wanting to give him the satisfaction. He keeps on smoking, smiling, leering, his BO permeating the plumes of tobacco smoke. She turns on her heel and walks away, angry but keeping it bottled up like she’s learned to do with guys who stare at her like hungry dogs.

  “Don’t wait too long,” he calls after her. “Yer not that far off yer use-by date, you know.”

  Harper avoids the revival tent and its excited, anticipatory believers. She heads for the crowd amassing in Whitlam Park, which still boasts two functioning wooden picnic tables not too warped and cracked from years of exposure. Young people cluster around a battered laptop, taking turns to log on through the Base’s web page portal.

  Janny looks up when she sees Harper coming. “There’s one for you,” she calls across their heads.

  Harper almost doesn’t want to read it. She already fears what it isn’t going to say. Four simple words: pet Cooper for me. There isn’t any dog called Cooper. Lachie created the imaginary pooch when he filled in his application form. Cooper is their private code meaning everything’s okay. No mention of Cooper means everything isn’t.

  The message on screen supposedly from Lachie is bland and cold. Words that could have been written from anybody to anybody.

  “They still eating like kings in there?” calls someone from behind.

  She nods in silence and hits the delete key.

  * * * *

  By sundown, everyone is drunk. Rain is the only topic of conversation. Anecdotes stretching from Lightning Ridge all the way down to the Eden coast.

  Outside the tent, it’s hard to tell at what point prayer vigil descends into full-bore hootenanny. Night wears on and the music gets louder. Clapping and shouting and stomping for rain, fuelled by Ray Clayton’s palm-heart toddy, what they drink when they’re out of everything else. Songs for Jesus, dancing for him too, work boots and sun-cracked plastic sandals thumping hard on the warped and weathered dance boards.

  With a blast of laughter, a couple of Country Women’s Association stalwarts burst their way out through the tent flaps. “Just as hot out here as ’tis inside,” says one, fanning her bright pink face—frowning when she notices Harper, a look that screams, Girl, you oughta be throwing your lot in with the righteous.

  Because everyone who’s anyone in Terina Flat is stomping and shrieking and hollering, both inside and outside the revival tent—social niceties be damned. Priest-Elvis has prepared his song list well: “Kentucky Rain” for openers, following on with “How Great Thou Art.” Short-verse speeches in between, paving the way to “I Shall Not Be Moved.”

  In the pauses between numbers, conversational buzz drones like the chittering of cicadas. A few stray blasts of it swim towards Harper through the heat. Nothing she doesn’t already know: that entrance to the revival tent is by gold-coin donation; that the way-past-their-bedtimes children scampering underfoot have been encouraged to write to God on precious scraps of multicoloured paper (the remaining dregs of the school’s once-vibrant art department). At the crack of dawn tomorrow, smoke-lipped Elvis is going to hit the skie
s. Fly up high as close as he dares to deliver God their messages, extra personal.

  Yeah, right.

  As “It’s Now or Never” starts up, Harper’s surprised to catch old Doc Chilby slipping out through the tent flap. The women exchange suspicious glances. Doc Chilby nods, so Harper returns the favour. Doc Chilby delivered her into this world. She deserves respect even if she’s thrown her lot in with the Bible-thumpers.

  Up on the knoll, the racers admire the Base lit up like Christmas squared, same as every other night, but this night, there’s something extra in the air. The town itself emits barely a glow. Night skies dark enough to drown the Milky Way in all its glory.

  There’s talk of cars and trade in missing parts. Who needs what and what they’re going to barter for it. How the camel guy is late again. How someone’s cousin’s investigating other sources.

  Janny Christofides saunters over, sipping on a can of something warm and flat. “Saw you checking out that Jesus plane. A cloud-seeder for sure.”

  “Didya get a look at it up close?” says Harper.

  Janny shakes her head. “Didn’t have to.”

  Harper continues. “It’s got these bulges under the wings like wasp nests.”

  Janny nods, enthusiasm causing her to spill a couple of splashes from her can. “Dispensers holding fifty-two units apiece. Flares built into the wings themselves. Avoids resistance. As little drag as possible.” Her eyes are shining.

  “How’d ya know all this?”

  “Old man used to do crop-dusting, don’t forget.”

  “But dusting’s different. Seeding’s illegal—”

  “Dusting’s illegal—there’s nothing left to dust. Everything’s illegal, unless you’re frackers or big foreign money or those massive fuckoff land barges dumping toxic shit deep into cracks.”

  “We oughta report him,” Harper says bitterly, remembering Elvis grinding his cigarette butt into Terina dirt.

  “Like anybody’s gonna give two shits.” Janny cocks her head back in the direction of the revival tent. The singing has long since become incoherent. Songs mashing into one another, Presley numbers indistinguishable from hymns. “How much you reckon we’re paying that—”