‘Why you!’ Kelvin began dancing on his toes and raised one fist in the air as if to swing it. Sarah Jones let out yet another feeble cry, calling her husband’s name.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ Constable Gilbert soothed, holding off on his intervention for as long as possible to maximise the entertainment he was gaining from the scene. ‘You will soon make this a police matter if you don’t tone it down.’ He stepped between the men and flexed his chest out, hoicking up his heavy gun belt.
Eighteen
Elsie stomped out of the truck-stop door and made her way in the shimmer-heat to Tara, who was slumped at a picnic table, her head resting on her folded arms, blowing flies off her skin.
‘I just spent every bloody cent on diesel.’
‘What?’ Tara exclaimed, sitting bolt upright and laying her palms flat on the tabletop.
‘I had to! The next big town is way up in whoop whoop. The lady said we wouldn’t make it with half a tank. Now my guts are rumbling. We have a dollar seventy-five, which won’t even buy us each a dim-sim.’
‘Oh, well,’ shrugged Tara, ‘it’s not like I’m going to fade away in a hurry. You get a dimmie. I’ll sniff it and then I can watch you eat it.’ To combat the heat she had rolled up her tracksuit bottom legs and the grimy sleeves of her lank Elmo T-shirt. Elsie looked at her with a frown. Tara’s legs were good, but she really had to do something about her clothes. They made her look bigger than she was. And if they were going to travel together, Elsie wasn’t sure if she could put up with looking at her like that much longer. Not to mention the smell of her. Being that big in a hot climate, no matter how hygienic Tara was, was not easy. At first Elsie felt she was being judgemental like her mother in thinking those things about Tara, but then it occurred to her the ever-cheerful Tara had actually been depressed since long before her mother had died. She needed help.
Tara wrinkled her nose as Elsie moved closer and punched her.
‘Ow! What was that for?’ Tara frowned, cupping her upper arm. ‘Do you really think hitting me is helping me?’
‘It’s cognitive reprogramming therapy,’ Elsie said.
‘Give me Elvis’s rubber band any day then,’ Tara said, pouting.
‘You don’t even notice you do it, do you?’ Elsie pushed.
‘Notice what?’
‘The way you put yourself down like that about your weight.’
‘Thanks, Miss Psychoanalyst and Thump Therapist,’ Tara said grumpily. ‘I wouldn’t delve into my internal narrative, if I were you. It feels like I’ve been alone with my head, for like, ever. I read something about it once. About negative thought patterns on loop. So, yes, I probably have a few habits of the sort in my mindset. Thanks for the coaching.’ Tara sat rubbing her arm, a scowl on her face, looking out to the vast saltbush plains beyond the roadhouse.
‘I’m truly just trying to help,’ Elsie offered glumly.
‘I know you are,’ Tara said, her voice far away.
A convoy of road trains had begun rumbling into the expansive gravel parking area. It was a roadhouse plonked in the middle of a vastness too expansive to comprehend. The whitewashed stones ringing the car park seemed pathetic against the flat never-ending landscape.
‘Where are they all coming from?’ Tara asked, watching the trucks roll to a stop, air brakes shushing loudly, hot motors ticking with heat. The smell of near-cooked rubber rose from black enormous tyres. The pungent scent of sheep and cattle dung oozed from between the rails of giant boxy stock trailers. Other huge trailers remained sealed up, their goods safely insulated from the intense heat of the day and the desert cool of the night.
‘Must be peak hour,’ Elsie said as she watched the assorted truckies unfolding themselves from their driver’s seats. Men of all shapes and sizes leaped down from their cabs for showers, meals, snoozes and ablutions before they again took to the roads and the roos and the monotony. What would the men think about on their drives? Tara wondered. Of home? Football? Women, or engines, or the Sky Racing, like Dwaine? Or would they be thinking of nothing much at all? She didn’t like the look of them.
‘I reckon it’s time for us to leave,’ Tara said. ‘Too many menfolk here for me. Next town’s six hours away. We could drive all night . . . or we could camp in the back of the ute. What do ya reckon?’
‘Camp! On the side of the road? Are you serious?’ Elsie asked. ‘With what? We don’t have swags.’
‘Do we need ’em? We could use Marbles as a stinky pillow,’ Tara said, looking at the ute parked in front of them. Marbles sat in the passenger seat looking like a little old blonde woman waiting for her husband to drive her home from the shops.
‘Remember I’m only on my L-plates, even if they are hidden in the glovebox,’ Elsie said. ‘I’ve driven to Culvert and back once! It wouldn’t be safe for us to drive at night.’
‘Oh, come on, Thelma! No guts, no glory.’
‘Guts is what we’ll get if we drive now. Roo guts! I’m not going.’
‘Well, we can’t stay here in the ute cab all night,’ Tara said, glancing about.
‘Maybe one of the truckies will let us use his cab for a snooze?’
‘Yeah? And we get raped or murdered? Taken away as sex slaves?’
‘Don’t be stupid. They’re good guys. Workers.’
Tara flashed her a look. ‘Yeah? And how do you know?’
The image of Dwaine jumped to Elsie’s mind and she fell silent.
Both girls let out an exhausted sigh at the same time as they looked at the battered old farm ute.
‘Fuck, Tara. We have no money. We have no clothes. We have no phone.’
‘And we ain’t got no virginity no more,’ Tara said with a snigger and both girls laughed, leaning their heads against each other.
‘We sure as hell ain’t got that. We can’t get it back. We ain’t got nothin’,’ Elsie said in a Yankee accent. ‘We’re up the crick, with an old smelly dawg.’
Tara sat looking at her holey sandshoes, thinking. ‘We are not necessarily without a paddle, though,’ she said, lifting her index finger, her face lighting with excitement. ‘Your guitar!’
‘Huh?’
‘Get your guitar, Else. Just get it. Go!’
Before Elsie knew it, she was standing outside the truck-stop doorway in the glow of the outback sun, singing Cold Chisel’s ‘Flame Trees’ with the hauntingly beautiful soul-sound of her voice calling across a desert sea to the trucker sailors. Zac and Amos’s home-brew and very little sleep the night before had roughed up her throat so there was a huskiness to her voice that made it sound more mature, more weathered. Or was it the becoming of a woman that deepened her sound?
Memories, flashes of moments with Zac, skin to skin, dashed in and out of her mind. The images helped her find the full bloom of her song in this unlikely place. She felt sure-footed in her rough-hearted cowgirl boots, making her feel planted not just on the earth but within it. The guitar and amp too were alive with adventure, plugged into a shared socket with a drinks machine. The instrument conjured Elsie into a woman who looked older than her girlhood years, standing in the shorty-short remains of her now-cut-off denim jeans. The truckies paused, then stopped, drawn in by music that sounded so much more enveloping, more comforting and whole than a CD in a truck stereo. The long legs of the pretty kid making the music didn’t hurt either.
Elsie mustered as much Jimmy Barnes music as she could recall and looked to the carved wristband as she strummed. The remnants of Jasper’s memory captured in the leather gave her confidence, so she took command, with a gift that came to her as naturally as breath. Soon the staff and all the long-haul drivers were gathered at the picnic table and had dragged over more plastic chairs, enjoying the mini concert. At Elsie’s feet lay Marbles, sleeping, curled around the guitar case. Also propped against the case base was an old cardboard carton on which Tara had written with an ear-tagging pen she’d found in the glovebox: Our almost dead dog is hungry. Please help us feed him. Beside Elsie, Tara moved her
body with an in-built mystic rhythm as she sounded out a beat, tapping her cleaning bucket with the plastic handle of her pink feather duster and tinging her Mr Sheen can.
The long-haul men watched the blow-in country girls with fascination: the stunning blonde in the ragged cut-off jeans and the curvy one like an ancient beauty from another era with her red hair . . . and her bucket and duster. They were rare ones, that was for sure. It was nothing for the men to drop ten- and twenty-dollar notes into the guitar case and stand enthralled and in awe of this unlikely treat in the middle of nowhere on a regular hot-as-hell day. More and more coins spilled from pockets like rain, Elsie nodding and smiling, Tara mouthing ‘thank you’.
As Elsie strummed the final chord on Alan Jackson’s ‘Little Bitty’ and the men and women whistled and clapped, one listener called out, ‘Who are youse?’
Tara and Elsie looked at each other in a moment of panic. Tara glanced over to the ute — their getaway vehicle — and thought of the cleanskin bottles stashed within. We’re fugitives, she thought. We’re underage drinkers. We’re underage drivers. We’re runaways. She knew Elsie’s parents would be on their trail, and there was no way Tara wanted to go back now. So, no real names. She had to think quick. She looked down from her duster to Elsie’s boots.
‘We’re the . . . the . . . ah . . . Cleanskin, er . . . Cowgirl Boots,’ Tara said.
‘The who?’ the woman asked again, her Ocker voice veering sideways, like a band saw cutting through wood.
‘Er. The Cleanskin Cowgirls,’ Tara said.
Elsie gave Tara a big grin. ‘Yeah, we’re the Cleanskin Cowgirls!’ she called out, and with her guitar strumming she rolled like a road train, singing Paul Kelly’s ‘To Her Door’, a smile as big as the sky above.
Nineteen
Gwinnie heard the café shop bell ring just as she was finishing making up the sandwiches for the day. She tore off her disposable gloves and rummaged her fingertips through her hair, breathing deeply three times to calm herself before going out to greet the customer. The previous day’s confrontation with the Joneses and the still-missing girls were very much on her mind. No matter how many times she tried to steer her thoughts to a place of calm gratitude, she just couldn’t stop anger rumbling through her over the way Elsie’s parents behaved towards her sons. And the way they seemed not at all concerned for poor Tara Green. All they seemed to care about was saving face and getting Elsie back where they thought she belonged. As she pushed her way through the swing doors, she only just stopped herself swearing out loud when she saw Councillor-Mayor Jones standing in her café.
As if things could get any worse! she thought. She pasted on a smile and looked at Kelvin and the posse of shiny-bum men with him, none of whom she’d ever seen in Culvert before. They were carrying folders and laptops and an air of ‘stand aside, this is important men’s business’. She gestured to the best table by the window that looked out over the roadhouse farm pasture.
‘What can I get you, gentlemen?’
Councillor-Mayor Jones barely glanced at her. ‘Sylvia’s was closed,’ he almost grunted at her.
‘Any word from Elsie and Tara?’ she asked gently.
He cast her a glance as if to kill, then his eyes darted to the men in his presence. Gwinnie’s eyes narrowed. Of course, she thought, as if he would let his business associates know his personal troubles. He’d be pretending there was nothing amiss in his life.
‘Shall I start by getting you some coffees then?’ Gwinnie asked with forced brightness.
Kelvin Jones simply grunted a yes and the men gave their orders.
After taking care to make the coffees just right, Gwinnie set down the cups slowly, peering at the diagrams before the men. They barely noticed her presence — they were used to being served. Gwinnie quickly gleaned that their topic of discussion was the waste-treatment plant. She stood beside them, notebook in hand as if waiting for an order, but for the time being, they failed to acknowledge her. She had even more time to analyse just who these men were.
They looked citified, with grey faces, hollow eyes, sloppy bottoms that seemed to spread over the chairs, pot guts, and arms and hands infrequently used for any kind of physical work. Their glasses spoke of seriousness and their stooped postures told Gwinnie computers, mobiles and sitting on commuter trains or in gridlocked traffic consumed most of their lives. Like a giant walrus, Councillor-Mayor Jones sat at the round table with them, scratching his balding head and frowning. For the umpteenth time, Gwinnie wondered how on earth he had fathered such a beauty as Elsie.
‘So are you saying that our townspeople produce thirty-six per cent less sewage than the national average?’ he asked. ‘How can that be? Do they literally . . . you know . . . evacuate less?’
The men glanced at each other. One cleared his throat. ‘At this point, we can’t accurately answer that question.’
The slightly thinner man pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. ‘Does Culvert have a particular cultural group within the wider community that consumes a certain type of unusual diet that may explain this anomaly?’
Kelvin Jones glanced over to the Smiths’ selection of fried foods and stands of chips and lollies set up for the locals. He shook his head. ‘Not as far as I’m aware.’
Gwinnie was filled with dread. If these men were here to investigate what she thought, she and her family could be in big trouble with what they were doing over in the shed. She needed more information to pass on to Elvis. She thought about the money they’d already spent on the pipeline, the tanks and now the engineering equipment needed for the modification of the tractor engines. The last thing they needed was for these men to be peering through the high mesh fence of the sewage plant, connecting the dots between it and the far-flung farm shed and what the boys and Elvis were doing there.
‘It’s a mystery,’ said one of the sewage experts, looking at the output stats and scratching his head.
Gwinnie cleared her throat. ‘Anything to eat, gents? I have a fresh sticky date.’
The men turned to look at her as if she had just arrived in a space ship. Gwinnie looked at Kelvin as if he too was an alien form. Did the man not care at all that his daughter was missing?
Twenty
At dawn the girls got away early, fresh, confident, restored, breathing in the crisp coldness of the clear outback air. On the horizon the rising sun caused the sky to glow blue-gold, and momentarily Tara’s and Elsie’s gazes were drawn away from the dark road north and taken in by the eastern beauty of a new day. Both had been trying to watch keenly for kangaroos in the early-morning dimness on the side of the single-lane strip of bitumen. The roos seemed even bigger than the ones in Culvert. Barrel-chested skippies looking fit and savage, like they were heading to a boxing title fight. The wonky steel bullbar of the rust-bucket ute would be no match for one of those, thought Elsie as she nudged the old ute up to sixty kilometres per hour. She didn’t dare go any faster until the sun was fully up and the roos had headed for shade in the saltbush and gidgee scrub.
Last night the girls had made enough money to hire a donga out the back of the roadhouse and share a double bed with clean sheets and AC. They had taken their meals of schnitzels, chips and gravy to their room, making up a bullshit story to the roadhouse staff about getting an early night because they were heading north for a gig and had to meet their fly-in band manager in Bourke. It was a roadhouse, after all, the girls reasoned, and the roadhouse folk there might well know the roadhouse folk — the Smiths — back in Culvert.
With hired scratchy towels hung over their shoulders, the girls had headed for the shower block, beetles crunching under their feet, moths fluttering in their hair under fluorescent lights. Ripe stenchy bore water reddened their tired sunburned skin as they stood beneath spluttering jets and soaped themselves clean with small circular freebie soaps that smelled like toilet cleaner. They rinsed their knickers and hung them in their room, and giggled for most of the process.
Now, silent in the p
addock-basher ute, Elsie kept her foot on the accelerator and her hands clasped firmly on the big steering wheel. She adjusted the cap the roadhouse staff had given her to ‘wear on tour’. Visions of her mother flashed into her head. Her mother in bed, distraught with a migraine. Not because Elsie was missing, but mostly because she would be worrying about what people would think. Tara too saw the movie of her life rolling in her mind. The awful home, the rottenness of Dwaine, the way she hated and loved her mother, and missed her but was so utterly glad she was no longer here. Guilt surged in and out like waves for both girls. In their silence, they grappled to find peace with the choice they had just made to run away. Sometimes it felt childish. Stupid. Other times, scary. To be so young and alone in this vastness.
As the day grew hotter, the girls tired. The miles wore them down. Marbles too shuffled and panted and sighed. It was as if the road was too long, the destination too unknown. It all seemed too hard, but neither Elsie nor Tara would voice it. Emus dotted the landscape in clusters like a collection of sculptures in a bizarre madman’s garden. Feral goats wandered in herds far off on hillocks, their ears cast forwards in search of tucker. The girls’ enthusiasm dwindled and died. Silently they passed bottled water back and forth. The radio didn’t work. Nor did the air conditioning. And the ute rattled its metal bones as if in death throes. Tara drove for a while, as she’d learned a bit on the Smiths’ farm, but her nerves got to her and Elsie had to take over again.
Just when Elsie was about to start to cry, Tara found an old cassette tape that had fallen down between the seats.
‘Charity and Colorado Buck! It’s our lucky day!’ She jammed it into the dusty tape deck and out came the powerful, heart-throb voice of Colorado Buck. ‘It’s a sign!’ she said gleefully, clapping her hands. With the music cranked to full volume they sang every word to the first song, ‘Building Fences’, and then when the duet came on with Colorado’s wife, Charity, Tara squealed.
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