by Tony Birch
‘I like this bit, Jesse. “Guests should obey his laws and know that they must always care for the children.” That’s us. We’re gonna be taken care of.’
I looked up at the empty sky, hoping the eagle was up there somewhere, looking out for us.
As we got closer to the highway I could hear people talking. I crawled between the trees, on my guts, to get a better look. A police motorbike was blocking the road just ahead of where Limbo had been run down. Other police cars were parked further up the highway, and a line of orange cones blocked the road. Two of the coppers were writing stuff down and taking measurements with a long tape.
Rachel crawled alongside me. ‘Who is it?’
‘The police.’
‘And Ray Crow? Can you see him?’
‘Na. He’d be long gone. Wouldn’t have hung around once the police turned up.’
‘Good. We can go down there and tell them what happened. They’ll help us.’
I felt the weight of the pack on my back. ‘I’m not doing that. I don’t want them taking this money off us. We’re going to keep it. And I don’t want them separating us. That’d be the first thing they’d do, Rachel. Send you to one place and me to another.’
‘I’m tired out, Jesse. I want to stop walking.’
I rested my hand in the middle of her back. ‘You can leave if you want to, but I’m staying here. You know that house you want, with the pink room and the puppy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, we need this money if we’re gonna do that. I’m not going down there to the police and giving this money up. You stay with me and I promise I’ll get you back to Pop. We can share the money with him.’
‘What about Gwen? We could save her from Ray.’
There was no saving Gwen, but Rachel hadn’t worked it out just yet.
I crawled back to the line of trees. ‘We’ll go around them, on the track here, up to where we slid down the bank last night.’
We walked along the track, between the trees, until we were across the highway from the truck stop again.
‘We’re going to sit here for a bit.’
‘What for?’
‘I want to see who comes and goes.’
A bus driver was filling up at one of the bowsers. He went inside to pay for his petrol and drove off. I opened the backpack, took a drink and passed the bottle to Rachel. I had a good view down the highway to the roadblock. A police lady was directing the traffic around the cones. A car or a truck pulled into the truck stop every few minutes. Each time a driver went inside to pay for their petrol they left the keys in the ignition. If I’d known how to drive we’d have been gone by now.
A double-cab ute pulled in. It was beaten up and even dirtier than Mary’s old Commodore. The tray was tied down with a tarp and the bumper bar and back window were covered in stickers. I could make out a picture of a tree on one sticker and some sort of fish on the other. The driver got out and started filling up. He had long hair down his back and a beard and was wearing a red checked shirt. The passenger seat was empty. I could see someone in the back seat but couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. I waited until he’d walked into the shop to pay for his petrol.
‘Okay. This fella might be the one. Let’s go.’
‘The one for what?’
I shook her by the shoulder, not hard, just enough to be sure she was paying attention.
‘Remember what I said last night when we were walking. No more questions. Sometimes you have to think fast and act fast. Jon told me that, one time. You got to trust me, Rachel, and do what I say.’
As we crossed the highway I looked along the road to where the police were working. They were too busy to notice us. I walked towards the ute just as the bearded man came out of the shop. He looked at me and smiled, sort of friendly, opened the door of the ute, jumped in the driver’s seat and was about to close it when I called out to him, ‘Excuse me. Mister. We need help.’
The back window rolled down. A woman stuck her head out, looked at me and then at Rachel. She had long hair too, tied in plaits and decorated with beads.
‘You kids okay?’
‘Not really.’
I told them we needed to get back to Melbourne.
‘Where’s your family?’ the man asked. ‘Your mum and dad?’
‘We don’t have a dad and our mum is in Melbourne. We came up here to stay with our Pop and now he’s sick and we have to go back home.’
‘And your mother can’t come and get you?’
I wasn’t sure what to say next. I didn’t want them getting suspicious and driving off. We’d be stuck at the truck stop, and the police would find us.
‘She can’t do it. She don’t drive, and –’ I swallowed some spit – ‘and she’s got no money, anyway.’
‘I know what that’s like,’ he said, and smiled. ‘Never had much myself.’
He looked at the woman and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. We’re not exactly going to Melbourne and we shouldn’t be picking up kids. I’m sure there’s some law against it. There’s a law against just about everything these days.’
Rachel stepped in front of me and spoke to the woman. ‘Please, can you give us a ride? We need to get home. Bad. And we won’t break any laws. We promise.’
The woman nodded her head at the man. ‘Sure we can, honey. Hop in.’
He told us that he couldn’t take us all the way to Melbourne, and that he’d be making a detour.
‘Before you get in, you need to know that this is a round trip. I’ve got two deliveries left, in the back here. And then we’re heading home. We live out the back of Werribee. That’s as far as I can take you.’
I jumped in the front seat and Rachel got in the back with the woman. He pointed to the backpack.
‘Maybe you’d be more comfortable with that off your back.’
I gripped the straps of the pack. ‘I’m comfortable enough. I’ll leave it.’
‘Please yourself.’
He introduced himself as Pete and his wife as Sharon. Rachel clapped her hands together when she saw a baby strapped into a baby seat between her and the woman. The baby’s name was Indigo.
‘I like that name,’ Rachel said.
‘It’s a colour,’ Sharon told her.
‘What colour is that? I’ve got colouring pencils and I’ve never heard of it.’
‘If I told you it’s like the deepest blue in the sea, I’d only be half right. You can’t pin that colour down. That’s how beautiful it is. Just like this little girl.’
Rachel was in love with the baby. She picked up a rattle from the seat and shook it in front of her eyes. And she asked Sharon lots of questions. Like how much did the baby weigh? What foods did she like to eat? And had she spoken her first word?
I’d never heard her so chatty. She couldn’t stop talking, and as I listened I thought she sounded older all of a sudden. And, better that that, she sounded happy.
We drove away from the truck stop and headed in the opposite direction to the roadblock, which suited me fine. Pete looked in his rear-view mirror.
‘Bad accident back there. The bloke in the shop was just telling me that some poor guy was knocked down and killed last night. A hit and run. I don’t know how anyone could leave someone on the roadside to die like that.’
Sharon told him to stop talking about something so gruesome. ‘You’ll scare these poor kids.’
As we headed along the highway I looked back a few times to see if we were being followed. Pete and Sharon seemed like nice people and I didn’t want them getting tangled up with Ray. I felt a lot better when we turned off the highway. We drove by small farms with hand-painted signs out front, selling fruit and vegetables, garden plants and even ‘pure alpaca wool’ at one farm gate.
‘Wha
t’s an alpaca?’ I asked Pete.
‘Not sure myself. It’s similar to a llama, I think.’
I didn’t know what a llama was either. ‘Do you know much about llamas?’
‘Na. I’m a ferret breeder, myself. That’s what I’ve got in the back here, ferrets. I’m delivering them to my customers.’
At least I knew what a ferret was. When I’d been at school one time there was a kid who had a ferret for a pet that he brought for ‘show and tell’ one day. As soon as he took it out of the box a girl sitting in front of him started screaming. The ferret looked nervous. It wriggled out of the boy’s arms, jumped down from his desk and ran out of the classroom, and was never seen again.
‘What do they do with the ferrets, your customers?’
‘Some hunt rabbits. They’re a big problem out here. A pair of ferrets can clean out a burrow in minutes. But that’s not all they’re used for. The ferret’s a smart animal. The farmer I’m delivering to now, he runs electrical wiring through plastic piping under his chook pens. It’s for the heating, to keep the birds warm. Now and then a rat gets into the pipes, chews through a wire and blows a fuse. Cooks itself in the process, of course. Well, for that farmer to lay new wiring, he has a hell of a job. So, he sends one of my ferrets down there with the new wiring strapped to his collar. Works every time. Goes in one end of the pipe, navigates the maze and comes out the other.’
‘How do they get the rabbits from the burrows?’ Rachel asked. ‘You said they cleaned them out?’
‘They kill them,’ he laughed. ‘That’s if the rabbits don’t bolt first.’
She looked horrified and went back to playing with the baby.
‘You make a lot of money, breeding ferrets?’ I asked.
‘Enough to get by on.’
He was staring at my swollen eye. ‘What happened there? That cut looks no good. You should get to the hospital. You might need stiches.’
I touched the side of my head. ‘I fell over when we were walking last night, in the dark. I slipped in some mud. I’ll get it fixed up when we get home.’
We pulled in at a farmhouse gate. I got out with Pete and helped him take the tarp off the back of the ute. It was stacked with wire cages. They were empty except for two cages that had two ferrets in each. Pete grabbed the handle of one of the cages. The ferrets inside were long and skinny and light brown in colour, except for a ring of white fur around the nose.
‘Give us a hand, if you like.’
I followed him to the front of the house. He rang the bell and a woman came to the door. She had an apron on over the top of a purple tracksuit and was wearing a hat. I could see that her hair underneath it was cut short, like it’d been shaved and was starting to grow back. Pete introduced me as a ‘fellow traveller’. She stuck a finger through the cage. One of the ferrets bared its teeth. I thought it was going to bite her. It sniffed her finger, turned on its side and nuzzled into her.
‘They’re beauties,’ she said. ‘This one’ll be a bit of a sook, though.
She pulled a purse from the front of her apron and paid him.
‘How you feeling?’ Pete asked. ‘You look well.’
‘I’m okay. A bit tired and up and down. But I’m fine.’
When he told her that his wife and baby had come along for the ride she got excited and walked down the driveway. Rachel was sitting on the tray of the ute while Sharon brushed and plaited her hair. When she saw the woman, Sharon jumped down and wrapped her arms around her. When they finally stopped hugging I saw they both had tears in their eyes.
Sharon lifted baby Indigo out of the seat and handed her to her friend. The woman buried her face in the baby’s neck and took a deep sniff.
‘Life,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t it smell good?’
She handed the baby back to Sharon and wiped her eyes on her apron.
‘She’s a beauty. You look tireder than me, love. Why don’t you come in for a cuppa?’
‘Oh, I’m tired, all right,’ Sharon said, yawning. ‘Buggered. But I have to get the baby home and fed.’
‘You get off then. You drive safe, Pete. And don’t you two forget me when you need a babysitter.’
‘Long way to come to drop off a baby.’ Sharon laughed.
‘Good. She can stay for the weekend.’
Sharon hugged the woman again and told her to ‘take care’. ‘We’ll talk on the phone.’
Pete’s last delivery was about half an hour’s drive along the same road. He pulled in beside a locked gate.
‘I’ll do this one on my own. He’s a grumpy old bastard.’
He was back in the ute within a few minutes. As we headed for Werribee, Sharon finished Rachel’s hair and I listened to Pete’s stories about the years he’d spent on the road before he met his wife. He’d travelled all over Australia and across the world, hitchhiking from place to place, stopping whenever he felt like it, and moving on when the urge took him.
‘Why’d you travel around so much?’
‘Because I liked being on my own. Sure, I met a lot of interesting people along the way. There’d always be someone to talk to and stay with for a while. But while I was on the road, I spent most of that time alone. And that’s the way I liked it.’
I told him that I liked being on my own too, but had never had the chance to travel.
‘I’ve got to look after my sister. But when I’m older I’m gonna go off some place by myself.’
‘You can tell me to mind my own business if you want to but let me give you some advice. Don’t go travelling for too long. I think I went a little crazy by the end of my time away. When I met Sharon, she was on the road too, I wanted nothing more than to come back here and settle down. A home and family, that’s what matters most of all. You know what it’s like, I bet.’
‘Yeah,’ I answered, although I didn’t really know at all.
‘How long have you had the ferret business?’ I asked.
‘Oh, just a couple of years. When we come back from overseas we worked together for a year, running a winery for some city lawyer. We saved enough to buy ourselves a bush block out the other side of Melbourne. It was cheap. “No Power – No Water”, as they say. But it was a great spot. A creek running down the back. Plenty of trees. And birds. You never seen so many birds.’
Sharon joined in from the back seat: ‘We built our own place up there. Lived in a caravan on the block while we worked. How long was it, Pete? Four years?’
He laughed. ‘Almost five.’
‘We lived in a caravan in Adelaide,’ Rachel piped up. ‘With Gwen.’
‘Who’s Gwen?’ Sharon asked.
‘Our mum.’
‘I thought you said she was in Melbourne.’
I changed the subject before Rachel got us in a deeper trap: ‘Why’d you leave your house in the bush, if it was so nice?’ I asked Pete. ‘For the ferret business?’
Pete turned and looked at Sharon and then out the window. ‘No, it wasn’t the ferrets. A fire went through the valley we lived in. Biggest bushfire the state’s seen in fifty years. We lost everything we had.’
‘Everything?’
‘Yep. But we got out with our lives, which was more than some. We left with nothing but the clothes on our backs. But we’re still here.’
He waved his hand across the windscreen. ‘So we come out here, where the land’s even cheaper, where it’s flat as a tack, and there’s nothing much to burn.’
It was late afternoon when we pulled into their front yard. They had a wooden house, painted yellow, with flowers and fruit trees in the garden. Pete invited us to have something to eat with them. I didn’t want to be ungrateful for the help they’d given us, but didn’t want to stop either.
‘That’d be nice, but we gotta keep moving.’
I waited in the yard w
ith him while Sharon took Rachel inside to use the toilet.
‘I’ve got to unpack this truck before it gets dark, hose it out and feed the mob out the back in their pens. Ferrets get all uppity if you don’t feed them. You two could prop here tonight and I’ll take you to the train station in the morning.’
‘Na. We’ll keep moving. We’ve got family expecting us tonight.’
‘Fair enough. The highway’s a couple of clicks that way. It’s always busy. You’ll get a ride in no time.’
It wasn’t the same road we’d been on last night but I didn’t feel good about heading back to the open road with the money on my back and Ray out there.
‘Is that the only way back to Melbourne?’
He looked at me and smiled, like he knew I was holding something back. ‘Well, you don’t have to use the highway, if you don’t want to.’
‘We don’t?’
He put a hand on my shoulder and pointed along the road. ‘About halfway between here and the highway there’s an old irrigation channel. You’re lucky. It’s concreted over, and mostly dry this time of year. Even with that rain last night, it won’t be carrying too much water.’
‘I can’t see any channel.’
‘That’s because it’s below ground. It cuts through the back of the farms, across country. It’ll cut your trip in half. You can walk it –’ he looked me in the eye – ‘without being seen by anyone. In the old measurement it’s about four miles between here and where it ends, just short of the oil refineries. If you two move quick enough you’ll be there in around an hour, before dark.’
I looked across the flat and empty fields. ‘Then what do we do? When we reach the end?’
‘It runs smack bang into the train line. You can’t miss it. There’s a station for the refinery workers on shift. You can catch the train from there into the city. You got money on you? I could lend you a few dollars for the fare.’
‘We don’t need money. I got plenty of money.’
‘Plenty? You could have caught a bus from that truck stop for Melbourne. Pulls in twice a day. Jesus, I thought you must have been flat broke to ask for a ride with us.’
He looked me directly in the eye, again. ‘You in some sort of trouble?’