Here Until August

by Josephine Rowe

  Forgive me, she said, not a question. Heard you’re driving to Melbourne next week.

  And from whom did you hear that?

  Your truck, she pressed, undeterred. It has a tow bar, yes?

  So that’s it. Hitching yourself to the nearest available wagon. As per.

  A pause on her end of the line. Too soon, I realized, and to smooth things down I asked what the tare weight was.

  Tare weight, she repeated.

  How heavy.

  Not so heavy, it’s just one of those—what do they call it—a canned ham?

  Canned ham. All right, Ham. But we’re pushing straight through, no sightseeing, minimal piss stops. I’m offshore end of month.

  Maersk still owns your bones, then, she said.

  Only till the oil dries up. Don’t you be getting lofty on me, deserter.

  And I suppose I shouldn’t ask why you’re going to drive four thousand klicks, then turn around and drive right back again. Working holiday?

  Well, as of now, if anyone asks, I’m helping out a mate.

  Which mate is that?

  As of right now that’s you, Skittles for breakfast.

  When we get to Victoria she’ll put the Cardinal up on blocks on her sister’s farm, somewhere out in the alluvial fields. Spend time feeding horses and walking the dry creek while she waits for her life to come find her. Me, if I’m lucky there’ll be a couple of days left for me to lie on my brother’s couch with his kid and cats on my chest. Real-life tourism. That’s if we ever make it that far. I feel the Cardinal lagging behind the Ranger, dragging air, its resistance to momentum. I feel if I put my foot down too quick I’ll rip the chassis right out from under it, leave another ruin for the landscape to claim as its own. Wrecks are strewn through the scrub like strange sculptures, some of them torched, some of them sifting quietly back to the earth, flake by rusty flake. Every now and then there’ll be a fresh one; license plates gone but the duco still bright under the layer of Nullarbor dust.

  Thirty kilometers out of Caiguna, Thea asks me to pull over. So I pull over, thinking she needs to either throw up or find a convenient patch of scrub. She jumps down from the passenger side and takes the tire iron from the back. In the rearview I watch her run back to a red Nissan, forty meters off the highway. No plates. ID number scratched off if they knew what they were doing. Thea circles the car, scoping it out as though she’s going to raid the loose change from its ashtray. She puts her face against the driver-side window, then walks around to the back and jams the iron under the lid of the boot, prying it open with a few swift pumps of her slender arms. The boot gapes, and I see the slouch in Thea’s shoulders, but can’t tell what it means. Disappointment? Relief? She leaves the car yawning in the hot wind and lopes back to the Ranger, tugging the scarf from her hair to dab sweat from her face and neck. I hear the tire iron clank into the bed before she slumps into the passenger seat.

  What’d you find?

  Nothing, she says, wiping grease on her jeans.

  What were you hoping you’d find?

  Nothing, she says again. I was hoping I’d find nothing. Let’s just drive, hey?

  She paws through the glove box for a CD, settles on something mournful and wordless, and I think that will be the end of it. But we stop again for a deserted Excel just past Madura, and twice more between there and Mundrabilla. Each time it’s the same thing; watching Thea’s back as she jogs towards the Honda Civic, then the old Datsun Bluebird, swinging the tire iron at her side like some post-apocalyptic vigilante. But she has some trouble with the Datsun, can’t jemmy the boot. I watch her growing larger in the rearview as she comes back and leans in the passenger window, resting her head on her sweaty forearms.

  Can you give me a hand?

  What is it? I ask her. What exactly are you doing?

  Like you said. It just makes me. Uneasy.

  Her own eight-inch headlines. Her own mental scrapbook of gruesome tabloid clutter. All the terrible things the mind spits up when it’s given enough space.

  No more, I tell her. Come on, get in.

  She lifts her head, but that’s all.

  Look, I say, I don’t think you understand. The chopper leaves on the twenty-third, with or without me. And if I miss this hitch, I’m twelve grand down. I don’t know if that means anything to someone who throws diamonds into a river, but it means something to me.

  Okay, she says. No more, I get it. But it’s as though the words have snapped free of their meaning. I understand, she says. No more after this one. But can you just give me another two minutes?

  Thea uses her two minutes to do impressive violence to the Datsun, taking out all six windows, the headlights and taillights, sending the wing mirrors skittering into the scrub before turning on the shell and leaving fist-sized dents in the metal. I watch the arc and sweep of the tire iron and I remember how she used to dance. Her efforts ring out across the still air, the empty sky, and her rage seems piteously small against that hugeness.

  All this trip I’ve been watching her, thinking that it might be that simple; stepping out of your life as if stepping out of a lift and onto an unfamiliar floor, adjusting your gait to something purposeful. As if it could be like that, clean and easy, just the hum of the unseen cables lingering in your ears, a little vertigo and the floors below forgotten, flooded for all you know or care.

  But it isn’t clean or easy. I’m figuring out how I’m going to get in between her and the car she’s attacking without losing any jawbone, when she finally lowers the iron. She takes one more swing at a fender for good measure, then looks at her Cartier. Looks back at me. Holds up two fingers.

  I say nothing as she climbs back into the passenger side, her face all salt and dust and snot, her silk top sticking to her skin. She closes her eyes and after a few minutes her breathing shallows and slows. When we were kids she’d sleep in my bed, too wasted on Toohey’s Old and Hyde Park punk to make it back to her own. I’d find her whichever T-shirt was smallest and cleanest—an ironic op-shop find, Dog Swamp Bowls Club—and she’d stand there and change right in front of me. There was the tattoo of the red bird perched on her hipbone, kept secret from her parents. There were her martini-glass tits. Any more than a handful’s a waste, right? Did she know what she was doing? In bed she’d fling her limbs out in the dark, get an arm and a leg over me like I was something she wanted to climb. Sleep-talking drunk with her wet mouth against my shoulder, C’mere you.

  But nothing ever came of it. She met Thiago in her second year of uni. He was older than us, in Western Australia for god knows why—did they not have biological arts, or whatever he was mastering, in the other hemisphere? Then it was ten years of pretending I liked the guy. No, I did like him, or I would have, if things had been different. But he had a lot of money and he had Thea. I maybe could’ve stood one or the other, but both was too much, the salt and the wound.

  Twenty minutes from the border I pull into the Eucla roadhouse and leave Thea sleeping while I search the truck and the caravan for rogue fruit. I emerge from the Cardinal blinking back the sunlight, holding two oranges and half a lime. Thea’s awake by then, standing in the car park staring nonplused at the hand-painted sign in front of the roadhouse’s fiberglass whale: Please Keep Off The Whale.

  You slept? I ask her.

  A bit.

  You should eat something.

  She looks doubtfully at my handfuls of citrus.

  Something substantial, I tell her.

  She’s the kind of person who wants to hear the history of everything—what the chicken in her risotto was fed on, where the fabric of her shirt was made. I’m relieved when she just asks for a toasted sandwich.

  We sit at one of the shaded picnic tables, unwrapping our sandwiches, washing them down with a warm bottle of beer I found under the driver’s seat. The pale band of skin still shows on Thea’s ring finger. She keeps her left hand splayed in direct sunlight, the faster to scorch the mark away.

  Like a brand, she says, squintin
g at the ghost ring. Like I’m one of those men, she says, one of those sad bullshitters you see drinking in the bars of chain hotels the whole world over. Hoping to pick up some exotic concha while my wife and my kids are on the other side of the world, getting dressed up to Skype me.

  You don’t have kids, I tell her. You don’t even have a wife anymore, and she flicks a sandwich crust at me.

  Look, she says, I’m not asking what your little side business is here.

  I cram my mouth with the last corner of greasy ham-and-cheese and shake my head. Good, I’m not telling.

  But if they search us at the border …

  They won’t find anything. There’s nothing to find on this leg.

  She looks back at the truck as though it might burst into flames. Shit, she says. Okay, I am asking.

  I’m still not telling. Really, I promise. What does the west coast have that the east coast wants?

  I don’t know, she says. Giant Sandwiches? Why do you even need to make all this money?

  Do you mean, Why do I need to make all this money for myself? Because most of us don’t get it handed to us in a sparkly fucking envelope.

  It wasn’t like that, Thea says quietly.

  For a while we’re stranded there, silent, with the discarded takeaway wrappers, the gray wood of the railway-sleeper table carved up with decades of names, cocks and balls and cartoon hearts, until Thea rescues us both by reaching across for my wrist, tapping the place where a watch used to be.

  That night I wake gasping for breath, the air in the tent blood-warm, near rancid. I gulp it down and the tent seems to breathe along with me, expanding and contracting, a dirty canvas lung. Swiping at the walls I finally find the fly, unzip the screen, and fall out onto the dirt. Twelve feet away, the Cardinal squats, grainy in the early dark. Loose-moleculed—I could put a hand right through it. Reach through the aluminum walls and shake Thea by her bony ankle. You’re still doing it, aren’t you?

  A fish-belly blue is creeping in at the edge of the sky. I unfold a camping chair and sit at the little card table still crowded with sauce-encrusted plastic plates and burned-down candles, the syrupy dregs of a ten-dollar wine. What’s left half-fills a mug and I sit there nursing it, staring out at the highway. Waiting for morning and the bone man but only one of them shows. Daylight burns off the bad dreams like fog but the roos and the dogs lie where they’re scattered.

  Past the border the coast leaps up to chomp at the desert for two hundred Ks of toothy scarp. Wrecks slide past the passenger window, inland side, and Thea lets them go without a word. On the stereo a Spanish audio guide repeats transactional phrases hypnotically: I would like, I would like … I can’t find my, I can’t find my … Shoes. Coat. Wallet. Keys. I mangle one word after the next while picturing the losing of all of these things, a room I have to keep walking back into. I can’t find my … Book. Phone. Dog. Daughter. This pulls me away from the ache in my back and the cramp in my gut, away from the stuffy cab with its smell of roadhouse food and dirty clothes. I would like, I would like … until Thea snaps it off.

  Fuck, you know what I would like?

  It’s a language, Thea. You can’t be angry at a language.

  Since when were you interested in learning Spanish? What’s wrong with French or Italian?

  I try to think of a joke, something to soften her face, but it’s treacherous territory and too hot to tread it. I just drive. Then I speak up.

  I thought you’d be away longer. I thought it would come in handy.

  Right, she says, sorry, and the word seems as foreign, coming from her, as zapato or escudo.

  A person probably can’t be angry at a liqueur either, she says. But every time I get a whiff of Fernet-Branca I want to be sick.

  Well. I reckon you’re safe out here. Though I’d like to see the look you get, trying to order one.

  A hand-painted sign pointing south promises three whales for five dollars. A decent unit price, concludes Thea. We pull off the highway, leave the truck and caravan crouching in the shade of retirement-funded fifth-wheelers, and follow the boardwalk out along the bluff. But there is only the one whale. At first we can’t make sense of it, the sad pattern that goes:

  Buoy. Whale and buoy. Buoy. Nothing. Buoy. Whale and buoy. Buoy. Nothing.

  Tangled, we finally understand. The bright orange ball bobbing up to the surface of the ocean, and the whale breaching a few seconds after. Then diving again, pulling the marker down with it.

  Is there something we’re supposed to do? Thea asks. Like some hotline we should call?

  What could they do?

  We stand there half an hour, letting the wind lift our clothes from our damp skin while the whale tows the buoy out to sea.

  What’s it like out there?

  I don’t know, I tell her, I’ve pretty much forgotten life as a whale.

  On the rig, smart-arse.

  Like living on a ship on stilts. In the galley of a ship on stilts.

  Yeah, that’s what I thought. I think I’d love that.

  You’d hate it. There’s nowhere to run.

  But do they like you out there, those guys? Do they appreciate your cheffing?

  My effing cheffing …

  Those hi-vis guys do not say effing.

  No, I say, they do not. And I don’t know if you could call it cheffing, making vats of ham and scram for a hundred and twenty FIFOs. It’s not exactly haute cuisine.

  So come back to landlubbing, she says. Start a food truck or whatever it is you people do nowadays.

  But I do like the money, I admit, because this is true. I like the helicopter rides. The correctional-orange overalls. The complete and total annihilation of anything resembling a body clock.

  Thea gives me a sweet, sad smile. One day, I think. One day I am going to … but I can’t imagine any further than my tongue circling her nipple, her navel. Her hands in my hair, guiding me down. I can’t see how sex with Thea becomes a life with Thea. I turn my back on the ocean, grind the heels of my palms into my eyes till colors flood in.

  Why don’t you let me drive awhile, she says.

  With the caravan?

  It’s not like I have to do a three-point turn with the thing, she says. Or, you know. Even a one-point turn. I’ll go bats if I’m just sitting there, riding shotgun the whole way. I can take us as far as Ceduna, at least. I can do that far. You have a go at sleeping.

  From here I only wake twice: the first time as Thea pulls over to the shoulder at dusk. She shirks out of her jeans, rolls her briefs down her legs, balls them up and stuffs them into the glove box. Then she goes out into the darkness to piss standing up, leaning back like a man. This might have seemed something like intimacy if I’d never watched her destroy a Datsun.

  The second time I wake it’s properly dark, desert dark. We’re stopped again, in the middle of the highway. Thea is motionless behind the wheel, bare-legged, her briefs back on but her jeans still crumpled on the floor, tangled up around the clutch.

  You’re okay? I ask. Then I see him picked up in the high beams—a kid in a gray hoodie, standing still as a spotlit animal. Hood so low I can’t make out his face, but one of his arms is raised over his head, a brick in his fist.

  I don’t know how long we sit there, the truck idling beneath us, Thea’s bleak post-rock surging and dying away and surging again in sad orchestral waves until I reach across and turn it off. We wait for the kid to drop the brick and bolt, or to spring forward and launch it through the windscreen, but he never moves.

  Wouldn’t his arm be tired by now? murmurs Thea. Wouldn’t it be asleep?

  I don’t know, I tell her.

  Where’d he even find a brick out here anyway?

  I shake my head; it doesn’t matter. I make to crack the door and Thea says, Don’t. Please just don’t. So I wind down the window instead. Stick my head and shoulders out of it and scan the darkness beyond the highway, the black of the world that our headlights can’t touch. He wouldn’t be alone, not in this plac
e—somewhere out there a gang of kids are crouched with sticks and knives. A jerry can of petrol. Dangerous boredom. I listen, straining to hear the inevitable ransacking of the Cardinal, but there’s nothing yet. Just the white noise of insects, the song of the baked earth cooling.

  I yell out, Hey! and the night takes my voice and throws it back at me, but the kid with the brick doesn’t even flinch. I yell out, Hey, you little shit, put the fucking brick down. Nothing. I pull myself back into the car and wind the window up.

  Forget it, I tell Thea. Some bullshit backwater prank. Just go on—he’ll move all right. Or you want me to?

  No, she says. I’m okay.

  Thea lifts her foot from the brake, and the truck creeps forward, closing, inch by inch, the distance between us and the hooded kid.

  You wanna give him reason to move, I tell her, and she puts her foot down and we jerk forward.

  Then everything happens as in a movie we’ve already seen. We get close enough to see his face, the way it tightens. The intent to damage. We get close enough to see his skinny arm flex.

  Then comes the sickening lurch as Thea brakes again. The symmetry of our flight from the Ranger, Thea still bare-legged, white cotton briefs like an Elvis dream turned nightmare. She gets down on all fours to look under the bed and we meet that way, across those few feet of dreadful space, the heat of the day still there in the road beneath our bellies.

  I am there, half under the truck, Thea’s face showing me my own terror. And I am also somewhere far off. Somewhere high above us, a satellite’s distance, where nothing that is happening or about to happen down in that scumbled expanse is of any consequence at all.

  It’s from that height that I’m whispering, Move. Move now. Please. Knowing that neither of us will hear.

  What Passes for Fun

  Somewhere close to the end of things, we drive past a pond and see that only its frozen surface remains, two inches thick and half an acre across, just levitating there. How is this possible? we ask ourselves, and we stop the car to look. The pond’s surface has frozen around a stand of cattails, and that’s what is propping it up now—all those thin, hollow stalks—as though it were the canopy of some modest structure, something we might assemble on a beach or in some other treeless place to keep the sun off the babies.