Trucksong

by Andrew Macrae

  This little machine had the letters HERMES on it and I often wondered what it meaned as I sat in the flickering firelight pondering what to write. Who was that HERMES and what was her game? It were a strange name for a machine, like if I was going to name it, I’d call it Clackerplay or Writerman, something with some meaning. Instead, it was a bunch of letters with different meanings. HERMES, that’s like /her/, yeah? It was a woman’s /me/ only there were more than one. It’s her me/s, her different forms and shapes. The different changes she made, how sometimes I could look at the light falling on Isa’s face and see one thing, then when darkness came down another light might take up in her eyes. She was always shifting and changing, we all were, all the time. Writing was one way to stop the changes. When something is lettered, it’s fixed on the page. You can change your story or the way you think on it, but you can’t change them words. Once they’ve been wrote down, that’s it. They’re yours and you’ve gotta deal with it.

  That was the meaning I took from it anyway. I wondered about the magic of that name, the mystery of it. There was power in the HERMES. Power everywhere you looked. There was power in the trees, in the sun, in the wind. There was power in the rolling of the wheels on the road. All you needed was an alternator and a cell to store the juice.

  After I found the HERMES and Smoov taught me some lettering, it came to me in a dream a few weeks after. In the dream, I cranked words into that wording machine and it all were making sense. It wasn’t quite the same machine as the one I found, this one had the same keys but it also had a power chord that I had plugged into the show cells. I finished a sentence and leaned in. I took a big whiff of it and the smell was like nothing I’d known, it nearly knocked me down, machine oil and solvents and ink and something underneath.

  The smell of truth.

  I knew then it was a way I could use to set out me own true self. I could be free from Smoov’s moody changes and the beatings and grief he gave me, which was funny really because it was Smoov who showed me writing in the first place so I could document his shows and I kept all the trancecrypts in the typewriter case along with these pages here. Smoov showed me the shapes of the letters all lined up on a grid, and you turned the crank for a new line and the machine moved one row in the tab and together the whole thing rattled out lines of letters running down the page and across the page it spelled out words. The typewriter is an instrument to take measurements of your mind, and it leaves behind road signs on the page to show the way.

  Now I still got this typewriter and no more of Smoov’s trancecrypts to write down. Just how I found a way inside meself. I’m telling you this story and it’s the truth. It’s all true, every word of it, I swear, written in campfire smoke and truckdream haze aftertaste. Smoov showed me writing to write down the notes of his shows. He showed Isa too, but she didn’t take to it like me. She was always more interested in being a showman herself and interpreting the trancemissions from the Wotcher. She reckoned the Wotcher held all the knowing of the past and if she could find the right link to get into it and extract the knowing we could rise our selves up and live in the glittering gigacities again. The machines would all work how they should and not be scavenging for bodies and parts just to live and there would be a system again, a straight system like what they’d had back then where the buildings talked to each other, grew in amongst each other like a forest and the world was a sweet and easy place.

  Smoov thought it too but he was all for interpreting the signs and meanings of the Wotcher’s leavings. He was looking for a pattern in the jumbled sounds and images beamed down from on high each night. But for Isa, it was different, she didn’t have no time for patterns. She wanted to get straight at the heart of things and find a way to talk direct to the Wotcher and get the secrets. She went at it straight, like a goanna to a feed, to find a way into the coding of the Wotcher’s trancemissions so that the desert backroads could raise itself from the dust and the troddendown mud.

  She was always tweaking her link to the Wotcher and looking over Smoov’s shoulder for tips and so it was up to me to find out the ways of the typewriter’s lettering and keep track of Smoov’s showings. Smoov was a picture showman going from camp to camp and they’d come from miles around to see what he’d do with the lightning up on the screen, which was really just a white sheet strung up between two rusting shipping cans. We’d travel on the road showing hellfire pictures for folks to know the way of things. Telling the stories of the end times and the broken down system and them trucks what came screaming along the desert highways and thrumming their tech.

  Chapter 3

  We fell out of the wet season and wandered the backroads shanty towns, building back up the show gear after the raid and trying to steer clear of any brumby trucks. It’s all mixed up in me head. I’m shuffling the deck, trying to find a way to order things. One night we was in a camp and saw the Wotcher show coming in, it was another showman called Dane Roadson. The pictures he lit from the Wotcher shined on the screen, fragments of the old times and put together with trucksong and static fills. One stuck in me memory, a picture of a bold black truck rolling on an open highway where all the lanes were clear. It roaded fast and the rider sat up high in control. They must have had some wicked tech back then to make a truck so tame like that, I was in awe. Roadson shifted on to the telling part and started up his rambling of lessons on how to live and how to pull together and hear the Wotcher’s static in our own lives and find the pattern of the knowing of the old times. The gigacities were wasted and deadly now but if the Wotcher could be tuned right, we could take them back. All the people from the camp and the lands around were there to hear it and they sat while he did his thing, but that night he was too high and by the end there weren’t much meaning to be taken from it. He didn’t put it all together like a good showman would. Me and Isa ate corn cobs charred with coal and chicken grease, and sat on the ground as the camp folk wandered past in the dark. Mangy dogs ranging around just out of firelight, fighting and fucking. Me bones got the jump on me smarts and I turned to Isa and tried to pash her, but she wouldn’t have a bar of it, though our arms and legs were touching. We were sitting close and she didn’t seem to mind that too much. Me dick was hard as. Smoov was off somewhere doing deals, swapping patches and haggling for tobacco and ganja and cactusflower grog.

  ‘I’m not gunna,’ she said.

  ‘Aw, come on,’ I said.

  ‘Nah, I gotta keep me head. I’m gunna be showman one day too. There’s more to life in this world than what you can see in the backroads, and showin’s the way to get a window on the gigacities.’

  ‘Showin’s not all there is,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the secret of findin out the Wotcher’s knowin and the seeds of the past times and how to get back to what we’ve all been cut separate from,’ she said.

  ‘Ah I’m sick of hearin of the old times. Howdya know it was so good back then?’ I said.

  ‘It’s in the pictures of the gigacities, in the fragments from the Wotcher’s trancemission, the towers of light and the buildings that spoke to each other and the system of the world that worked so sweet,’ she said.

  I tried it on again, slipping me arm around her but she turned away. I said, ‘Don’t you see how we could be together and I could get outta here away from Smoov and his beatins?’

  ‘I gotta stick by Smoov and learn the secrets of the show, so as I can crack the Wotcher’s knowin of the gigacities. It’s more than just a matter of makin enough connections in the patterns to find out the truth. Smoov’s on the wrong track, and I know I still gotta lot to learn, but I reckon there’s a way to get inside the Wotcher direct.’

  ‘I don’t care nothin for the Wotcher.’

  ‘You should care. Smoov’s blind in his thinkin about it, but maybe there’s a clue from the Wotcher, maybe teamed up with a truckmind I could find the key and reseed a gigacity and lead the backroads folk back there.’

  ‘Don’t be so up yerself,’ I said.

  ‘Whad
da you know about anythin?’

  ‘Not much but I dunno how many more beatins from Smoov I can take. Carn, let’s leave him and his stupid show. We could start our own show. He’s on a bum steer anyway, like you said.’

  ‘Smoov’s shifty, but he’s me dad,’ she said. ‘He keeps things to himself and won’t let me in on all the different codes to channel the Wotcher. I need to stick it out with him a bit longer before I can form me own show.’

  I wondered if she just didn’t like me that much but the signs were there sometimes that she did so I kept me candle lit.

  Roading, always roading. One shit heap after another. Traffic on the highway clogged with people and trucks and trolleys and droans skating over cracked tarmac and humming in the air. Flapples flying high up in the sky, black and rust specked shapes catching the light on bare silver claws and sharp metal beaks. They rode the air hot up off the baking ground, looking for machine meat to eat in the bodies of trucks and robo droans fallen by the way. We came up on a group of indie trucks daisychaining in a circle, and there wasn’t nothing that could stop Smoov from going down there and working a chat with them. Indies were a different matter to brumbies. They still played by the code of the road and could be wrangled with patches to give up their truckdream haze that they made in onboard synthfacs. Smoov was born with the gift of the gab and he loved the taste of haze so he pulled out his linkmaker. It was a scratched up slab of aluminium that you held in your and and it tuned your mind in to the trucks’ frequency, something from outta the past that only the showmans and a few others like truck detailers had control of. Me and Isa stood by the gear while he blinked the patchfile tags through his linkmaker on the trucks’ freek. Down off the side of the road, in a small gully, they grouped in the groove, pumping a rocking dub through their sound systems. It was a growing, growling mess, heavy bass and drumthump hitting you in the chest so you felt it rather than heard it. Felt the power of it, felt the falling snare hit rimshot crack on the frontbeat and the lazybones shaker on the back. Horns dripping wet with delay and the whole thing was a jammy vibe right from the start. They were patterned indies, dressed in decals and lightshifting scrollwork moving all the time, you couldn’t look at them for long because you wouldn’t move at all, you’d just be there in a trance.

  Smoov was well skilled and used to the ways of indie trucks. He knew how to wrangle them, how to tame them with patches, make them do what he wanted done. I’d watched him do it and I learned a few things over the years. I’d learned how the trucks would trade with riders and showmans like Smoov, how they’d swap their truckdream haze for patches that the riders made to trip out their truckminds. And the sounds they jammed shifted and changed over the years in different phases too, rolling through their culture like the phases of the moon meeting back around the beginning again. This time Smoov was trying to get rid of some old junk patches and at the same time to feel his way into this new mob. They might have some contacts, there might be some roading. They could help us shorten the time between two points in the backroads, or give him some sweet haze that he could get high off.

  He went down to the mob and they didn’t move or nothing. There were droans skittering and flapples flying around, scrounging for parts, but this wasn’t a big meet up and there were slim pickings. The indies didn’t give any sign they’d seen Smoov, they didn’t care. He was just a puny bloke and they were humming with power and tech and gleaming with moving glyphs and paintwork. Beats rocking, donks throbbing, swapping sounds and patchtag files to change the patterning of their minds, and Smoov always had something tasty, something good to share and trade for the haze that kept the backroads running nice and smooth like the outside of Smoov’s linkmaker worn shiny from being clutched in his hand.

  Down by the side of the creek I sat with Isa while we waited and she told me the story of the creatures in the rocks that came out at night when no one’s looking and stole the breath from young babbies and how the indie trucks came on the land and rutted like wild animals, smashing into each other and flying sparks in the night sky and making babby trucks that over time had come to learn how to make the haze to pull the best riders with the best patches.

  I sat there letting the sound of her voice fall around me like soft rain. I was in heaven. Then she started talking about this bloke called Crow and I snapped out of me dream, remembering that crow on Mum’s body.

  ‘Crow wears a coat made from shredded truck tyres and he’s a scavenger, a trickster. He roads slow from camp to camp, stickin his beak in to any business where there’s profit to be made from the shreds of others’ pain. He’s always ready to extract his toll from sufferin. But he’s got a magic about his self, he can change his shapes dependin on the company he keeps and he knows the ways of the backroads truckriders and how to live off the land as well. He can turn others’ minds around to do his own work with a crinkle of his white eye.’

  I said, ‘I never heard that before.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Isa said. ‘True fact. I ain’t seen him meself but I seen the marks he’s made in the world.’

  Later on Smoov came back and he was high on wild indie truckdream haze. He talked a hundred mile an hour about them indies that was also tuning to the Wotcher’s freek.

  He said, ‘One thing to do is to play to a indie’s pride. They’re all vain and they like to have things no other truck has got. If you can offer them something rare, they’ll trade with you for it. Trade for roadin or truckdream haze. You gotta be careful coz you never know what they is gunna do, but if you can find the right truck, you can make a team, truck and rider. You can make a pair, like a pair between a showman and the Wotcher. Hook them through the link and show them you got patches to trade. You can even use the patches to get the trucks to do what you want sometimes, it hits them like haze hits a human. And like haze, it’s a leash you can jerk.’

  Smoov ranted on and on though we had heard it many times before. But there was always something you couldn’t predict with Smoov, always some surprise coming out of his mouth. That night he said this: ‘Them trucks is gettin more and more interested in the ways of interpretin the Wotcher’s trancemissions. They don’t got the same kind of thinkin as a human, but they know the Wotcher’s part of their own past too. I reckon they got a feelin of kinship with the Wotcher, like sometime back they come from the Wotcher and the Wotcher’s got the keys to their codin, see, and if they knowed what it was, they could take control of the present and breed their own hybrids. They’re loadin fragments from the Wotcher’s frequency into their trucksongs and puttin them together like a showman would, to find the patterns.’

  I could see Isa was hooked up intense in Smoov’s words, she was listening hard. What I took from what he said was the trucks thought they could find their own past in the Wotcher and use it to make a better future, like we were trying to do. Then the haze took Smoov over and he turned mean and swiped me with his fist till the sparks flew in me head. And looking back, maybe I should have done things different, taken me swag and headed out on me own right there and then. But maybe it doesn’t make any difference.

  Next day we saw a camp of desert people. They’d been there long before the flapples and bigdogs and trucks and goanna droans came, and they’d be there longtime still. They knew the places to dig for water, they knew the ways of hunting meat, they knew how to cook and how to live off that land. They didn’t want nothing to do with the indie trucks what roared and shook the rutted roads and they didn’t want nothing to do with dusty riders and showmans and sandblasted followers of truckdream haze. And I thought they’d got the right idea and we got the wrong of it.

  Chapter 4

  It was later on. The moon had fatted and wasted with none to account and no more sign of brumbies. We were on the plainlands and down in the dirt, digging for old hardware in the rubble of broken ruins. Me and Isa picked through the muck, mining for data on dead media drives. Smoov was a little way off, wild scraggyface hair but digging carefully. He could scan the drive to pull
the fragments of pictures or sounds and splice them in to spice the show from the Wotcher. He was a showman, and the showmans were the only ones who could extract the data and interpret what came up from those wells beneath the earth and from the shining Wotcher up above.

  Isa’s brown hands were working next to mine, going over broken cases and copper wires. I looked up and caught her eyes and she smiled. I lived for those smiles. They were me campfire embers on a cold desert night. Smoov collected a clatter of junk up over the rise. Always digging, looking for the pieces that were going to make the puzzle fit together. But there wasn’t no fit, no together, just the pieces. I knew it by then, even if I was too young and dumb to say anything. There was only the puzzle, only the smooth surface, nothing underneath. Especially nothing in the junk we dug up out of the ground, just bits and bites of random signs left behind from people who were long gone from the earth.

  I climbed over a mound and reached down to pull up a hefty case, to find underneath was a creature that looked like a snake with dirty metal skin lying there against the ground. It was so still I didn’t see what it was until I was right up close. I siezed up. It glistened wet and nasty, ten hands long and thick like a root. Its tongue flicked. Its skin was black holes in the world. Its red eye glowed in the shadows and it made a shivering slivering whisper as it reared up on its back and looked right at me. I called out, me voice quivering.