Where the Road Bends

by David Rawlings

  Eliza scoffed. “So you’re saying I should help others? Finally make the trip to Africa and dig wells or hug orphans?”

  Grace winced and Eliza blushed, surprised at the depth of emotion that had exploded in response to a simple question.

  “It’s far deeper than that. It’s choosing a different reference point. One that’s bigger than you. One that’s longer lasting than you. One that allows you to explore these side journeys that might bring your fulfilment. Or fun. Or—and this is the important one—making a difference in your world in the time you’ve been given. Maybe you only need to see the difference. If you do want to stay with yourself in control . . .”

  The paper again shuddered and the words in front of her pulsed on the page. CEO. Virgo. Fashion. They thickened as all other lines on the map disappeared except one. The thick line right up its middle.

  Grace waved her hand. “There are other alternatives.” The three words again shimmered but this time evaporated. The face on the compass faded away as the map sprung to life. Branches jutted from the solid line of the main road. Forks painted into her journey that led to short tracks and long highways. Intersections and roads less traveled. Eliza’s finger traced them as they filled in, and the map became an elegant masterpiece of options.

  “What are these roads?”

  “I don’t know. It depends on whose face appears as your reference point.”

  “It’s a big decision, isn’t it?”

  Grace nodded. “For some people it’s the biggest. Taking themselves out of the driver’s seat and placing someone else at the wheel. I didn’t say it was easy, but the best decisions rarely are.”

  Eliza stared at the chaotic riot of new lines now covering the map. She wondered, along with her wandering fingers, where these roads could take her. What she could see. Who she could become. She wondered where these roads led and, for the first time in a long time, that wonder came without fear. Fear that was deeper than making the right decision, but instead fear of making the wrong one. Fear of being seen heading in the right direction rather than knowing she was doing it. But with that fear came excitement, not nerves but genuine anticipation.

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  The glowing thumbprint in the sky kissed the horizon and caught the glint of the tears that rolled down Grace’s cheeks. “I know I’ve said pride can be a bad thing, but I’m so proud of you.”

  Tears stung Eliza’s eyes as the pressure of the past five years—even longer—was released. And with the relief came a sense of exhaustion—not from five hours hiking in the outback, but from life. Plowing ahead, head down. Ticking off one box after another. “So what do I do? How do I know who to use as my reference point?”

  “The eternal question.” She tapped the work schedule rubber banded to her sun visor. “As for me, I trust those above me.”

  The road train shuddered as Grace worked her way down through the gears. “You might find it hard to believe, but once you hand over control, you can still end up at the right place. Look.”

  Eliza followed Grace’s pointed finger out the windscreen and down the road. In the fading light the truck’s light flashed yellow as they caught a sign. A crossroads, like one she had confronted before this encounter with this strange, kind, young woman driving several tons of metal. A ticking filled the cabin, as Grace snapped her turn signal into service. The engine roared and lurched as she geared down.

  “Someone else is in the driver’s seat, and that’s okay. You still made it.”

  Twenty-Eight

  A desperate claustrophobia clawed at Andy as the angry, murmuring crowd moved in with menace. A wave of jostling sweat washed over him.

  The barman’s face carried a sneering grin. “Sounds like the story of your life, mate. Looks like you’ve got a debt, and I like to collect on my debts.”

  Andy’s eyes surveyed the pub for an escape. The door behind the crowd buzzed with activity as flies zigzagged behind the dirty screen. “I’ll be happy to work here for the day or the week.”

  The crowd edged closer, their animosity boxing him in. Folded arms over checked shirts, narrow-eyed glares, and twitching sneers.

  Andy’s desperation poured out of him. “I can do anything for you—”

  The barman slapped his hand on the counter. “I’m not interested in you working for me, Yank. I am only interested in collecting what is owed to me.”

  Andy’s breath quickened. “But you never outlined what the consequences would be.”

  “I think you knew, Andy. You always do.”

  “Once I get back to the campsite, I’ll be able to get my credit cards—”

  Smithy stepped forward, shoulder to shoulder with Andy. “I would be willing to pay his debt so we can get on with getting him back on track.”

  The barman rolled his eyes. “How many times are you going to offer to do that?”

  “As many times as I need to.”

  Andy snapped a look at Smithy. How many times?

  The barman jerked his head toward Andy. “Well, as always, it’s his call.”

  The familiar noose of impending failure tightened around Andy’s neck. He was trapped, and he was going to end up owing someone. Again.

  Smithy turned to Andy, a kindness in his eyes. “I am prepared to pay your debt. In fact, that’s all I’ve got left.”

  “But you only had twenty dollars left—”

  The barman dropped his meaty forearm on the bar, a sneer framing his gap-toothed grin. “You’ll end up owing him and you’ve got no idea what he’ll do with you.”

  Andy’s finger twitched as the crowd edged in, pushing him back against the cold wooden lip of the bar.

  Smithy placed a hand on Andy’s shoulder. “Please?”

  The barman leaned harder on the bar, his words carried by a hint of mint and cigarette smoke. “I tell you what, Andy. How about I offer you double or nothing? Take your chances, like you always do. Your luck has to change, doesn’t it?”

  Smithy placed a hand next to the barman’s arm, his smooth complexion showing up the publican’s red, blotchy skin. “This choice is not just about now. This can all end, if you allow me to take care of this for you.”

  Another heavenly waft of tomato and onions drifted from the kitchen and the barman sniggered. “How about I throw in a free pizza for having a go?”

  The last straw of Andy’s resistance broke in the same way it always did. He kicked the can of responsibility a little farther down life’s road and nodded at the barman. He snapped his fingers as a cheer rose from the crowd. Smithy fixed his eyes on Andy, eyes clouded with concern. “I won’t be far away.”

  The man in the brown hat stepped through the crowd, offering a wooden paddle to Andy. He gripped it with trembling hands. The coins wobbled as they were placed on the wood and Brown Hat leaned into Andy as he delivered his usual words. But the excited shout was gone; instead the words oozed out with a menacing whisper. “Come in spinner!”

  “Come. In. Spinner. Come. In. Spinner.” The crowd chanted with the man in the brown hat, their voices rising as Andy stared at the pennies on the paddle. One head, one tail. He had to play the odds, but the gambler in him reminded him he’d already been burned. He had to try something different. He looked up to ask Smithy for advice, but the space where he had once stood had been absorbed by the chanting crowd. He surveyed the faces around him. Manic stares and chanting lips. “Come. In. Spinner.”

  “Two tails.” Andy flung them into the air as the crowd roared. The pennies spun and arced in the air, glinting in the lowering sun that streamed through the pub’s windows. They fell back to earth as the crowd fell back, and the pennies landed together, on their faces, with a sharp crack.

  Andy leaned over them, one eye closed against possible bad news. One head. He staggered back against the bar. The other penny landed, its fate irrelevant.

  A rumbling riffled across the crowd as they stepped forward. Andy frantically scanned them for Smithy, his only friend. The now-grinning barma
n wiped his hands on the tea towel hanging over his shoulder and lifted the counter to walk out from behind the bar.

  The panic in Andy reached the lip of his resolve and spilled over. With one final glance at the faces in the crowd surrounding him, he did what he’d always done.

  He ran.

  Andy pushed through the crowd and threw open the pub’s screen door, which slammed shut behind him as the heat assaulted him in a wave. The rise to his right. Open plain to his left. The Outback Tours four-wheel drive had headed in that direction. He would have to keep going down that road until he found them. Or Smithy.

  Andy stumbled off the verandah, his shoes squeaking in the dirt. And he ran, expecting a pub full of patrons to follow.

  * * *

  The glowing thumbprint in the sky blinked as Bree closed her eyes. Whoever had placed those berries had made it out, so she could as well. Bree had already kicked fear to the curb twice, and it no longer reached even halfway to its old high watermark.

  Six feet to sunlight. She breathed deep, control flooding back and washing away the panic as she evaluated her options. While the rock walls were too tight for her hips, there was another way to do this. Bree took a half step back toward the cave and lowered her body two inches. The pincer grip of rock now reached for the soft flesh of her belly rather than the hard bone of her hip. She breathed as the rock kneaded her flesh and stood tall as the gap in the rock opened out.

  Her ankles turned on pebbles as she stepped into a small chasm of rock ten feet high: a mini version of the ravine. But unlike the ravine she had escaped, this one was open. A gust of wind blew dust and swirling debris past the entrance. Bree covered her eyes as the wind picked up, roaring and whistling beyond her safe place in the rock, and then as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone.

  Bree staggered out from between the rocks. “I made it.” There was no sign of the four-wheel drive, not so much as tire tracks in the red dust.

  Bree threw her arms skyward—an involuntary stretch in wide-open space as she sucked in lungs full of clean, warm air. The sun leaned toward the horizon. She had an hour, if that, and had to find her way back to the campsite. A night in the Australian bush in the wide-open spaces was not on her itinerary. The cool entrance of the chasm enticed her, but she wouldn’t sleep with a snake for company. The sun glinted off metal, a sign at knee height.

  Curdimurka Rock Carvings and Paintings

  Please no photographs—take only memories and the story of the artist with you.

  She wiped the sweat from her brow as she surveyed the terrain. Five hundred yards away, next to where the ground dipped away, a familiar landmark rose into the air. A tall, knobby skyscraper of dirt, home to ants.

  Bree headed toward it, a spring in her step—a spring that hadn’t been there for some time, powered by her unexplainable escape. Her feet caught in the low grass and she stumbled her way back to the crater, stepping over fresh tire tracks in the dirt. How could she approach the people who had left her stuck in a ravine with only herself to get out?

  She caught herself smiling—her voice would be strong, not the tiny voice at the foot of the ravine wall.

  The sun warmed her back as she stood at the crater’s lip.

  Bree broke down in relief. “Lize! Lincoln!” She stumbled down the soft sand wall of the crater and threw open the lid to the supply box. She gulped some tepid water and ripped open protein bars, which sat heavy and salty in her mouth as she surveyed the campsite. There were gaps in the campsite—three swags were gone, missing spokes in a broken wheel. And she heard the crunch of footsteps coming from beyond the crater.

  “Lize? I made it back.”

  Sloaney threw his head back at the sight of her. “Oh thank goodness.” He surfed down the sandy wall and rushed to her. He held her shoulders in a tight grip as he inspected her for damage. “Are you okay? Where have you been?”

  She started with a deep breath. “I woke up in a ravine about five hundred yards that way, and there were snakes and some cave paintings.” She looked back into Sloaney’s incredulous face.

  “We’ve been coming to this campsite for years, and I know every bump on the landscape around here. There is no ravine within fifty kilometers of here.”

  “But the riverbed was—”

  Sloaney shook his head. “No rivers around here—that’s one reason we picked it for a campsite.”

  Bree scanned the campsite. “Where is everyone?”

  “You all disappeared the morning after the sandstorm. When the sun rose, you all were gone—all four of you and your swags.”

  Bree looked over her shoulder. “Three swags are missing.”

  Sloaney scratched his head as he pushed his hat up from his greasy blond locks. “I could have sworn four were missing . . . So where were you all day?”

  “Where was I? I told you—I was in a ravine. I thought you guys did it as some kind of journey of discovery or whatever you called it.” She looked up into Sloaney’s slack-jawed stare.

  Sloaney shook his head. “But there’s nothing out there!”

  “But I climbed out of the ravine and walked over a half mile to get back—”

  Sloaney again gripped her shoulders and spoke slowly into her face. “There is nothing around here for kilometers.”

  Bree frowned. “But there was a sign for the Curdimurka Rock Carvings.”

  Sloaney’s grip relaxed. “Curdimurka is eighty k’s away.”

  Bree’s head swam again as she held up her finger to show him the wound. “But I climbed up to the cave, and the music played, and there were berries that you left behind for me—”

  Sloaney folded his arms, tight-lipped, as his eyes narrowed. “We didn’t leave anything of the sort for you. If you found anything out there, it wasn’t from us.”

  Twenty-Nine

  Lincoln pushed through the dust as it drifted to the floorboards of the stationmaster’s office. “Alinta!” He burst through the front door and was washed in the twilight.

  The platform was empty.

  Beyond the tracks the railway signal lit green. Lincoln leaped from the platform, his ankles sinking into the soft red powder between the tracks as he scanned the railway line for her. Nothing but wavy steel reaching into the dark in each direction. But the buffer stop blocking the line was now gone.

  Lincoln blinked hard into the thickening dusk as a setting sliver of gold brushed the faint gray sky into purple. The world was silent, save the dueling calls of the shift change of the Australian outback—birdlife retiring for the evening and saying farewell to those working the night shift.

  The silence was all but absolute, and Lincoln absorbed the moment. Alinta. A forgotten ring. And a sense of difference, a lightness almost. The silence cracked open with a distant noise. Lincoln threw back his head as a roar grew, and it didn’t sound like the wind. He peered under the platform and saw a thick dust cloud.

  A vehicle.

  Lincoln clambered back onto the platform and rushed through the railway station, leaping from the platform onto the dirt road, waving his arms in a frantic attempt for attention.

  The headlights on the vehicle flashed, and Lincoln dropped to his knees. His breath rushed from his throat in rasps as the black four-wheel drive grew in his vision. Alinta had come back for him, and he would see her again. He was saved, and he was about to go back.

  Go back.

  Back to his friends—their last conversation had not gone well—and beyond that a return home to a looming conversation that could cost him half of everything he owned, perhaps more. But the dread he expected wasn’t there. The feeling was not one of acceptance but readiness to deal with things in a new light. To start this new part of his journey from a different place. To veer around this bend in life’s road and take on a new horizon. He closed his eyes as he took it all in, and breathed in something new. A sense of responsibility. Of making things right. Of being better.

  He got to his feet in the growing spotlights of the Outback Tours four-wheel dr
ive, which skidded to a halt in front of him. Lincoln smiled as the door flung open and Eddie jumped out, exasperated relief etched into his face. “Where on earth have you been, mate?” He threw him a canteen. “And how on earth did you end up this far away from the campsite?”

  Lincoln unscrewed the canteen lid with trembling fingers and emptied it, the cold water cascading down his face as much as his throat. “What do you mean this far away from the campsite?”

  “Curdimurka is eighty k’s away from our camp.”

  Lincoln reeled. “So? Isn’t this where you dropped me off?”

  Eddie shook his head furiously. “Nah, mate. After the sandstorm broke on first light, we went to check on you to make sure you were okay, but you were gone. We thought you’d tried to find shelter in the four-wheel drive, but there was no sign of you at all. Any of you. Even your swags had gone.”

  “What? I woke up here. You had to have dropped me into that railway station to start this survivor thing you had us do.”

  Eddie breathed hard, as if reining in rising fury. “I’ve said all along that we’re not doing anything like that. If we were, we certainly wouldn’t drop you this far away and leave you to it.”

  Something about his anger portrayed an honesty. But it was an honesty that answered no questions. Lincoln looked past Eddie into the four-wheel drive, expecting to see Alinta’s shy smile lighting up the passenger seat. But the car was empty. “I woke up here and met this woman—”

  Eddie eyed him with suspicion as he reached for his satellite phone. “I’ve found one . . . No, Curdimurka . . . I don’t know either. He says he woke up here . . . No, really . . . I’ll bring him back . . . Any sign of the others?”

  Others? “Isn’t everyone else back at the camp?”

  Eddie charged back to the four-wheel drive. “No. Get in.”

  Lincoln reeled. “But I’ve spent all day with Alinta—”

  “Who?”

  “She said she was a guide. I presumed she was part of this adventure you put me on.”