by Ron Elliott
‘Okay,’ she said.
‘All right!’
‘I’ll get the invoice. That’s the whole...’ She finished the sentence with a shrug and went back inside the house.
I put the stuff in the boot and we drove out of town.
Robin didn’t say anything until we stopped at some traffic lights in Midland. It is surprisingly hard to talk when the wind is ripping around you. She lit a cigarette and let the smoke trail out and put it in my mouth and said, ‘Badlands or Thelma & Louise?’
‘Badlands? I never thought of Badlands. That’s good. I was thinking Something Wild.’
Robin smiled, but then looked doubtful. She said, ‘Am I the boring guy in need of the makeover or the psycho jealous ex-husband?’
Before I could answer, a Lancer pulled up next to us with three or four revheads leering out at my wheels. The driver gunned his motor.
I took my foot off the brake and touched the accelerator and eased off slowly through the red light, leaving them frozen at the line.
‘Fresh air. Unobstructed view. The wind in our hair. An open road ahead,’ I said. ‘God, I love this country.’
‘Which country?’ she said, taking the cigarette out of my mouth. Then she looked forward and yelled into the night, ‘We’re on a mission from God.’
‘Which god?’ I yelled back.
It was hard to hear Bo, even with the volume cranked up. I like the end of this one where he gets the crowd to yell back ‘Have mercy’ and ‘Amen’ while the guitar and drums go slower and slower, like it is late and couples are swaying on the dance floor without moving their feet in the 1950s or dancing in the church, maybe, and the band is going to keep playing.
***
It was a long drive. Longer in the night. Longer when your old car won’t do more than eighty. I drove along with the silver pipeline that takes the water from Perth to Kalgoorlie. Sometimes it was on the left, then on the right. Sometimes it was way off on top of a paddock, then gone, then right up next to the car. Robin slept, curled up like a kitten on the seat out of the wind. I had a joint. At Southern Cross, the farms suddenly ran out and became scrub. I drank some wine. The pipeline crossed under the road. The petrol was getting low. The air was freezing as it scrambled around my throat.
The sky finally started to get lighter ahead as we came near Coolgardie, thirty K short of Kalgoorlie. Robin woke as both our mobiles chimed into range. She tapped me on the shoulder and pointed off to the side of the highway to the cemetery.
The earth was red. Red sand on red gravel on red rock with the occasional wink of white quartz. The scrubby gum trees were white like the stone of the graves. Plastic flowers. Ants. It looked like an abandoned cemetery, like it was halfway through being blown away.
The Valiant was the only car in the parking area and we were the only people in the cemetery.
The headstone said: Rest in Eternal Peace. Wife of Bill. Loved mother of Robin, Elizabeth, Gail.
Robin had the invoice out. She waved it at the grave. ‘Well, old Jack does have a point,’ she said brightly. ‘One gravestone, delivered as ordered. No wriggling out of that. You pay your money, you can say what you want. Kind of difficult for old Jack to repossess the thing if we don’t sort this out, mind you.’
There were real flowers, two limp bunches.
Robin must have seen me look at them because she said, ‘The flowers would be Gail and Liz. Drive down from Kal to do the right thing. Busy, busy, busy. Two perfect girls.’
When I looked at her, she looked away. I said, ‘You had an exam on and no money. How could you have got up? Remember, we...’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘What I mean is that if you were feeling–’
‘Feeling what? What “should” I have been feeling?’
I didn’t have an answer.
She said, ‘I was thinking about my mother and how she was sick and she died.’
‘I didn’t mean...’
‘Is that all right with you? If I was thinking what I was thinking, and not what you want me to be thinking?’
‘I was just trying ... to make you feel better, I guess.’
She turned and walked back towards the car. Strode. She strode away.
***
We kept driving towards Kalgoorlie, in silence for a while. Then I said, ‘Want to tell me?’
‘What?’
‘Anything ... about anything that you want.’
She pointed at the fuel gauge and then at a petrol station up ahead. ‘We need petrol.’
The night she heard her mother had died, she was quiet. We drank a bottle of vodka and we fucked. With gusto. I’m pretty sure that was the last time.
The petrol station looked closed. One petrol pump; a large corrugated iron workshop; a wooden office, that doubled as a shop if the old metal Coke sign was still true.
The petrol pump had levers.
‘I’ll do that, mate.’
His skin was red and his big belly pushed out under his dirty t-shirt. The top half of his overalls hung down behind like a spare pair of monkey arms.
I said, ‘I’ve seen these. I think it was in The Postman Always Rings Twice.’
‘It’s not new but it works.’ Then he looked over at the car. He bent and looked at my rough cuts, his eyes narrowing like a wine snob. ‘Up from Perth?’
‘Sydney,’ I said.
‘Sydney!’ he said, frozen in amazement with the nozzle halfway to the car.
‘Yep. Drove from Sydney. Going back.’
I’d pushed it too far. He looked from Robin who wasn’t being part of it and then to the car, weighing it all up for the bullshit it was.
That’s when I said, ‘Hawaii.’
‘Huh?’
‘Drove from Hawaii before that.’
‘How much?’ he asked.
‘Fill ’er up thanks,’ I said, with the biggest smile, then turned and went to the shop. I hate customers like me.
The shop was amazing. Old pie signs and basketball singlets mixed with car deodorant trees and bad hats. There were car parts including a muffler suspended from the ceiling. There were maps and prospecting pans. A sign said You are in the Golden Mile. Another said Coolgardie Since 1892.
I tried on some of the bad hats. I liked the canvas one with the big orange star pattern and the little mirrors in the middle of each star. Then I found the flowers. Maybe they weren’t flowers. It could have been a feather duster. But it looked like a bunch of multicoloured flowers made out of feathers.
I was about to take them out to her, when I patted my back pocket for my wallet.
The petrol guy was hanging up the petrol nozzle. I watched him as he walked slowly from the pump and into the shop. It looked like he had a bad back. He said, ‘Sixty-seven dollars forty-three cents. It’s as full as it can be.’
I didn’t doubt it.
‘Anything else, sir,’ he said in a way I do when I’m dealing with an arsehole.
‘Yep. A packet of – not the Longbeach. B&H. And two Snickers. How much are these flowers, dude?’
‘Twelve.’
‘Yes.’
‘Ninety-four dollars. Do you want the hat?’
‘Oh. Um, but of course. I’ll, um, get my wallet from the car.’ Big smile. I went out of the door slowly, but not so slowly it wasn’t casual.
Robin looked up at me and I pushed the hat forward over my eyes and said in my practised bad Mexican accent, ‘Eese that you, Cisco?’
‘Bad hat,’ she said, not meaning it.
I lifted my sunglasses so she could see my eyes and pulled out the flowers from behind my back. ‘And for the señorita.’
That got her. She looked at them and smiled and then I thought she was going to cry. ‘Gracias, señor.’ And I thought I was going to cry. Then she flicked her eyes over my shoulder.
I turned to see him standing outside the shop, two of his four arms folded. I waved. Turned back.
She saw something about it all and looked doubtful
. Just a flash.
It was enough. I would do this. What a laugh. I readjusted my sunnies and went to the boot and kicked it in the spot. Up it came to reveal the rifle sitting on top of our stuff. I looked up and he was still waiting. I smiled again. Then reached in like it might be my wallet.
That’s when the Ford Territory drove in. Mum, Dad and two kids. Holiday gear up to the roof.
The petrol guy went to them smiling, but it was as if he had two independent eyes, like an ant’s antennas. He was watching me with his left eyeball.
One of the kids was watching me too. A chubby girl with big round glasses, straight out of Little Miss Sunshine.
I closed the boot before anyone could see and went to Robin. ‘How much money you got?’
She looked at me. She knew.
I tried to make a smile but couldn’t get it going.
She opened her purse, flicked past her savings card which I knew was empty and went into the money. A ten-dollar note. And coins. ‘Ten. Um sixteen ... seventeen and about sixty cents. I didn’t know we were doing this Zac, or I would have brought some.’
I looked up to where he was giving directions while he watched me.
‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’
I went into the back, pushing broken glass off the seat. I pulled it up. I said, ‘Check in the glove box.’
There were coins under the seat. More two-dollar coins. Four dollars.
‘How much do we need?’ she asked, not looking at me.
‘A hundred.’
She shook her head going through the glove box.
I checked in my jeans pockets. Bingo. Cash. Lots of it in my left pocket. Fives. Four scrunched up five-dollar notes. ‘Fuck, fuck, shit.’
The Territory drove off.
I went round to the driver’s side, feeling in my back pocket. More money. A lovely orange twenty.
‘A dollar fifty,’ said Robin holding it out to me.
‘When I go inside, start the car,’ I whispered.
‘What?’
‘Start the car.’
I turned and he was standing behind me, waiting.
‘Ah, my man,’ I said and stepped past him to go to the boot again. I shoved the money in my pocket. Robin didn’t slide across the seat. She didn’t start the car. She sat with her back to us, holding the feather flowers.
The petrol guy came a few more steps after me.
I tried to smile.
He smiled too. He smiled a bad smile that said you are so fucked, Zac. He came back to the boot letting his smile lick the air all around us.
I thought that I could still do it. Kick the boot and he thinks what the hell as it starts to come open and I dive in and bring up the rifle and say, cool and calm, ‘So who’s smiling now, monkey man?’
But he put his hand on the boot.
‘All we’ve got’s about sixty dollars.’ I reached back into my pocket and brought out the twenty and ten and the fives and the coins. ‘Sixty-two, something.’
‘Is that right?’
I took off the hat and held it out to him.
He took it and said, ‘Well what we gunna do then, mate?’
I grabbed the Snickers from the dash and pulled the cigarettes out of my pocket.
He took them but shook his head.
Robin was holding out the flowers. She still wasn’t looking at me.
‘Sorry Rob.’ I grabbed them and held them out to him.
‘For me? You shouldn’t have. It’s still not enough, is it?’
‘Um, we could maybe siphon out some petrol.’
He shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t buy used petrol.’
‘Comic books! You like comic books?’
‘No, I’m a grown-up. I like your sunglasses.’
‘They’re Wayfarers!’
‘Where’d you get them? Hawaii?’
‘They’re Wayfarers! They’re worth over two hundred bucks.’
‘No. I’d say they’re worth about five dollars forty.’
‘Excuse me. Do you know Bill Mays?’ said Robin to the guy.
He turned and looked at her but still not friendly. ‘Yeah, I know him.’
‘He’s my father.’
‘So?’
‘So I’m sure he’d be glad to hear he owes you five dollars forty.’
‘Your father already owes everybody round here something or other.’
Robin’s jaw tightened a moment, but she went on as tough as before. ‘Then five dollars forty isn’t going to make much difference, is it?’
The guy seemed like he was about to keep arguing, but then thought of something. He nodded to her and squeezed my shoulder. ‘You’re one lucky Hawaiian. Having someone big and strong to look after you.’
I shrugged off his hand and pushed past him to get in the driver’s seat.
He said, ‘Your mother was a good lady. I was sorry to hear about ... Sorry for your loss.’
Robin nodded. ‘Yeah.’ Then she said, ‘Let’s go, Zac.’
I took off but couldn’t get any traction. There was no spray of gravel and no burning rubber.
***
I didn’t say anything. I drove into the modern outskirts of Kalgoorlie, which resembled the outskirts of Midland leading out of Perth. It was a sprawl that lasted for only six long blocks. Then we were in the wide streets of the city centre. There was a Dome and Asian takeaway in amongst the big hundred-year-old hotels with Skimpy Barmaid signs. Lots of Thrifty hire utes were driven by men in orange or yellow shirts. And then we were out the other side where there was a hill of grey rock going off to the right and a small hill where the pipeline ended. Past that were giant metal poppet heads – the things that haul gold miners and their gold in and out of the ground.
‘Down here,’ said Robin, pointing to the left of the edge of town, where fibro houses sat on flat dusty blocks. ‘That one.’ She pointed at a red wooden house with red tin roof and red tin fence. I pulled up in front and turned off the engine and started to open my door.
‘I’ll be an hour,’ she said as she got out.
‘Is this about the petrol station?’
She looked at the house.
‘The other car came. If it hadn’t, I would have...’
‘I’ll give them the invoice, and say hello. You should look around town. It’s very historic.’ She spoke like a computer. ‘It has the largest open pit in the world, right on the edge of town. Three and a half kilometres long and one and a half kilometres wide. When I left school it was six hundred and fifty metres deep.’ Her back was to me. ‘There’s a museum. The whole history of the gold rush and the continuing resources boom.’ She started walking away.
A girl in her late teens and a floral dress opened the door and looked at Robin and then over her shoulder at me coming up the path behind.
Robin said, ‘Liz.’
‘Robin. What are you doing here?’ It wasn’t exactly a welcome. Then she looked at me and said, ‘Hi.’
‘How ya doing?’ I smiled at Liz and ignored Robin.
‘Come in,’ said Liz, when Robin didn’t make any introductions. ‘You must have left early.’
‘Last night,’ I said.
She led us up the passageway to the lounge room where another teenage girl sat on the floor with two toddlers and two babies and piles of nappies in front of the TV.
‘Robin,’ said the other girl, excited. ‘Oh,’ she said seeing me. Then, ‘You must have left early.’
‘Last night,’ said Robin, beating me to it.
‘Hi everyone. My name is Zac. And I’m really, really glad to meet Robin’s sisters.’
Robin dumped herself down on the lounge.
‘I’m Gail,’ said Gail.
‘Liz,’ said Liz.
‘Zac again,’ I said and they both smiled while all of us waited for Robin to jump in. An American evangelical talked on the TV. You couldn’t quite hear the words but you could see the urging.
Gail said, ‘Jade, say hello to Aunty Robin.’
One of the
toddlers looked up at both of us and said, ‘Hello Aunty Robin.’
I gave a secret wave to Jade and she waved back.
Robin was fishing in her bag.
Gail and Liz looked at each other, wary.
‘I brought the invoice. That’s why I came.’
‘Oh,’ said Gail, disappointed.
‘It seemed important in your phone call.’
Liz turned suddenly to look at Gail who wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Liz created a smile and said, ‘You could have posted it.’
Robin said, ‘I don’t actually see why you need it. Couldn’t Jack just show you a copy? I mean the stone’s there.’
‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Liz. ‘I don’t know why Gail bothered you.’
Gail said, ‘You’ve been?’
Robin said, ‘I went this morning.’ She brought out the invoice. ‘So he sent it to the wrong place. How he got my address I’ll never know, but it’s hardly...’
Gail sat next to Robin, and said, ‘She wasn’t thinking. In the end, she...’
Liz said, ‘It’s because you’re the oldest. That’s all. We’ll take care of it, Robin.’ There was an edge to it under the tight smile.
Liz and Gail didn’t look or act younger than Robin. They seemed like mums – like my mum and my mother’s friends. They were competent and kind of wise and not very interesting. They kept sharing looks with each other that said there was stuff being unsaid.
I sat on another chair. The walls were painted green. There is possibly no good green colour you can paint a wall. I had a bad case of the munchies.
Gail rescued us all again. ‘Jack was saying round town that we hadn’t paid him. And Doug and Terry ... Well, they want him to take it back. Admit that we didn’t know. We can prove it was sent to the wrong place.’
Robin nodded. ‘That you pay your bills.’
Gail said, ‘We pay as we go.’
Liz saw me watching and I could see her getting ready to be mad with me because I was seeing things I had no right to.
‘A cup of tea!’ I said, standing. ‘These damn Mayses girls don’t even offer a man a cup of tea even though he’s sawed the top off his car and driven the other Mayses all night to come here.’
Liz laughed.