by Peter Ness
‘To add to my misery, the dingy soon became firmly stuck on a sandbank. Exhausted, I gave up with life. Then, as I lay face down on the sandbank in the shallow water trying to suicide, the tide went out. All I got was a mouthful of wet sand and a whole crowd of hungry crabs biting and nibbling at my legs. A pair of dolphins turned up to taunt and laugh at me. Once the tide came back in, the boat floated off the sand bar and I gave up on any attempt to die. Not long after that the waves caught the dingy overturning it on a small reef, tossing me headfirst into the water. Back then, I couldn’t swim. Then, just as I thought I was done for help came, as it always does, in the most unusual and unexpected way. Anyway, to cut to the chase, I met your Nana not long after the dolphins, whales and aliens rescued me.’
‘Aliens?’ Jo sneered. ‘Yeah, sure. In your dreams.’
‘Jo! Don’t be rude,’ I nudged her.
‘Yes, when the aliens aren’t abducting folks and shoving things up their — well, analyzing them, they sometimes help us out and leave things for us to find, — the good ones anyway.’ Raising my eyebrows and nudging Jo I clutched at the now dull green glowing pendant and slid it under my shirt. Pops, continued. ‘Sorry, where was I? Well, later in the day I tried to end it all by stepping in front of a semi-trailer as it plowed through the Dalgetty Store intersection. But, I couldn’t even do that right. The semi-trailer driver spun the wheel to avoid hitting me, cleaning up Jim’s brand new BMW instead. Jim just stood there open-mouthed holding the door handle as his new uninsured car headed up the road, propped up on the front of the semi-trailer as road kill. His girlfriend immediately dropped him; Marj married Martin Dunbar three months later.
‘As I tripped over the sidewalk, I bit my lip. The blood poured out of the side of my mouth. I sat in a daze staring across at the vacant sign on the corner shop window. Then, my eyes slowly wandered up the tanned legs of this gorgeous heavenly angel in a pink dress who had stopped, peering down at me. That was the first time I met your Nana. After that, my life transformed for the better—,’ he chuckled, recollecting her sweet smell. ‘She looked down at me, held out a hand and asked “Is there anywhere in this town where I can buy a decent pie and a soda?” It was love at first bite. So, having something to live for now, I rented the vacant shop, opened up Locke’s café and then married her.’
‘Okidoki. So, what’s the moral to the story?’ I asked with a smirk, scratching my eyebrow. ‘There’s never an easy way to top yourself?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Jo replied flippantly. ‘It’s: You get what’s left over after everyone else takes what they want.’ The pendant wiggled about below my shirt, as if it too were having a good laugh.
‘Some people never learn,’ Pops sighed heavily. And then he tapped the dashboard, humming and keeping in beat with the misfiring engine. The brakes creaked and groaned as he parked the vehicle in front of a grocery store café near the Crackatinnie service station on the outskirts of town. Then, he waited patiently as Jo and I forced our way out. After scratching at his crutch, Pops rubbed his nose and then handed us each fifty cents.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Go buy an ice-cream and a soft drink each. Keep the change.’
‘Pops, your wig’s rotated into the three o’clock position,’ I whispered as he opened the squeaking café door — well, it was actually a Vege[19] shop, but who cares? Stopping in his tracks now, Pops hurriedly adjusted his wig. Leaving us inside rifling through the comic section, Pops wobbled unstably back outside with a bottle of cider in one hand and an empty glass in the other. Pops small frail body slumped down on a chair beside a wooden table. Then he rotated to watch a tennis game on the other side of the road, taking it all in. He laughed lightly, soon engrossed in it.
#
London: Mid-August, 2012
‘Huh? That’s odd. Hey, Peter. Look. The handwriting is different on this page too.’ Andrea said. ‘It’s in blue ink again. “A small invisible balloon-sized bubble-entity hovered—.” Someone else wrote it.’
‘Oh! Goody! The pixie just arrived,’ Peter cut in.
‘The pixie? You think it’s a pixie?’ Andrea sneered.
‘Yeah, of course,’ Peter replied. ‘Heni Hani is Peter Pan. And—, the pixie is Wendy.’
‘Huh? Amanda is Wendy. You mean Tinker Bell, don’t you?’ Andrea queried.
‘Yeah! That’s it! The bubbly thingy is Tinker Bell!’ he said excitedly.
‘I don’t think so,’ Andrea replied. ‘But each time the story talks about the bubble-entity it’s written in blue ink and stops referring to Heni as “I”. Let’s read on and find out more anyway.’
#
Meanwhile, at Crackatinnie Service Station:
A small invisible balloon-sized bubble-entity hovered above the café on a ridge adjacent to a bitumen highway. A shiny black panel van slowed down as it approached the small South Australian town of Crackatinnie. A small brown-haired girl glanced up from reading a comic, peeking out of the grocery store’s café window and watching the van approach.
The panel van kicked up a thick soup of dust as it pulled into the Caltex service station (petrol station) to its left, its brakes creaking noisily. The vehicle jerked to a grinding halt in front of a pair of old reddish-brown and partly rusty fuel pumps, which rested on a slab of grey cement. The dust billowed, lingering, hanging suspended in the air.
A red Caltex sign sat perched on top the service station building. A large pole with a red star poked high out of its roof. In America, they call these places “gasoline stands”.
The dark-skinned service station attendant twisted his gnarled head, squinting, as the panel van drew to a stop. Then, the pile of swirling dust smashed into him. Lance Abbott turned away coughing violently as the suffocating dust engulfed him, filling his lungs.
As the dust settled, the black panel van door creaked open and a man dressed in a neatly pressed black suit stepped out. Clicking his neck, he slid off his sunglasses, tucking them neatly into his top jacket pocket. The man began to walk briskly towards the door of the service station building. Suddenly he stopped, scratched his cleanly shaven chin and flashed a quick look across at the still coughing attendant. Ah! He had forgotten something. Turning, he strode back and slammed the panel van door shut one-handed. It clanked shut.
Lance Abbott eventually took a deep breath. Glancing up he analyzed the short, well-dressed man in his late forties with the bar-code hair-cut. The man was flicking a Stetson hat through the driver’s side window now. The reader may recall Goto, the man with the bar-code haircut, from the previous chapter. It’s the same guy. Well — maybe.
‘Huh, white man — a city slicker too,’ Lance mused. Reaching down with one hand he felt for the air compressor switch. The air compressor fell dead with a splutter. Squatting now, with one eye still on the stranger, Lance re-checked the tire pressure with a gauge. ‘Hmm. That’s about right.’ Standing, he loped with an ungainly limp, slowly rolling the top-heavy truck tire over to the side of the building. Lance left it bouncing against the brick wall. Then turning to adjust his glasses he took another well-earned deep breath, and then leant against the tire. ‘I wonder what business a man like that has in Crackatinnie?’ he wondered as he played with his wedding ring, which dangled loosely off a gold chain around his wrinkled neck. Then standing, he stretched his aching back, grunted and then rotated the tattered and faded blue baseball cap on his thick crop of curled and matted dark hair.
Goto, the stranger in the dark suit, was new to this hick town. His eyes flickered up towards his vehicle and then he flashed an untrustworthy glance at Lance. He adjusted the few long strands of thin hair which wiped his head with his fingers. His scalp was nearly visible through the wafer-thin hair. Goto narrowed his eyes at the attendant now and rubbed his pointed chin. And then, stepping carefully off the cement slab he crunched along the gravel towards the building. Stopping now, Goto slowly rotated as his eyes splashed across the small hick town. He took a mental note of several rows of houses hidden between thi
ckets of large gum trees pockmarking the far ridge.
‘Yes, the town of Crackatinnie is indeed small. Perhaps a few dozen people live here, at most,’ Goto mused. His attention now turned to the man with the battered and wrinkled skin. ‘Dark brown eyes — walks with a pronounced limp, — gout perhaps. That makes him, fifty-five, maybe older. He must own the place,’ he thought, eyeing Lance off, then taking another step. Splat! His shiny black polished shoe landed in the middle of a fresh puddle of muddy water. Goto’s eyes dropped. He scowled robotically, in disgust. Several long furrows crept across his temple, so he rubbed it.
Lance’s head jerked up at the sound, the gold chain around his neck bouncing on its string. A satisfied grin formed in his wrinkled face, displaying a gap in his white teeth.
‘These City Slickers are all the same,’ Lance mumbled to himself, looking down at his ring, ‘Never look where they’re going.’ Playing with the ring again, he wandered over towards the panel van now. Goto’s head turned sharply. He glared at Lance, narrowing his cold grey-blue eyes, as if he had heard him. The smile on Lance’s face evaporated. He immediately dropped the ring, which bounced around his neck. Then he turned the other way engrossed in some menial task, picking up a bucket.
Goto gingerly shook his foot dry. Kneeling now, he flicked some fresh brown mud off his shiny black boot with the back of his hand. Lance began washing the dirty front window of the panel van. Goto’s eyes now analyzed the fresh mud splats on its side.
‘Fill it up,’ Goto ordered, rather abruptly, in a strong Texan accent and then turning he strode towards the door of the building. There he stopped momentarily in front of the glass door, staring back at Lance over his shoulder. The sun reflected, glistening off the bonnet of the black panel van. His eyes rested on a tar tennis court enclosed by a large wire fence, hemmed in by shrubs, on the other side of the road. Directly opposite the service station a patchy eucalyptus thicket encroached to the edge of the bitumen road. Behind the tennis court, and closer to town, the goal posts of a football field poked up like fine needles over a canopy of eucalypts. A large white screen that appeared to be a drive-in theatre in the distance protruded a row of pine trees; it was in fact the score-board of the local footy oval.
‘How primitive,’ Goto spat out with a loud snort. On the service station side of the bitumen road and across from the tennis court stood a café — really just a grocery shop that sold everything. Lance owned that as well. Now, a short and rather scrawny elderly man in his mid-sixties, sporting an extremely odd head of hair, snared Goto’s attention. Sitting at a table the old man was engrossed in a game of tennis taking place between a man and woman. One side of his hair was shortly cropped — due to a recent fight with a lawn mower, no doubt. The other side was covered with a matted wig which kept slipping across to the side. Goto laughed quietly in amusement as the old man kept unconsciously readjusting it. Lance glanced at the old man and then at Goto, and laughed with him as he wiped the panel van windscreen dry.
Now Goto snapped a fixed snare back at Lance, who abruptly stopped laughing. Their eyes briefly met. Goto’s finger pointed, drifting toward the fuel tank.
‘Filling the tank up with fuel is my next task, but multi-tasking? Hey! Don’t look at me,’ Lance thought, eventually nodding and giving a thumbs-up.
‘Good, we’re on the same page.’ Goto nodded and then squinted at the sun in the western sky. Startled, his eyes flashed down to his gold watch. ‘Oh! Is that the time already?’ The bright summer rays beat down shimmering off the long glass windows, venetian blinds on the inside trapping the smothering heat from entering. A shadow extended from one side of the building. Several large, water-marked posters hung on the outside of the glass, hinting the presence of a drive-in theatre in the neighboring Pikawina. Glancing briefly back at Lance, and then across towards the white screen in the far distance, Goto elbowed the glass door open. And then, he strode in with an air of arrogance. The glass door bounced shut, vibrating on its hinges. The bell jingled noisily.
Lance limped to the back of the panel van now. Here he un-screwed the fuel tank cap. Sliding the nozzle in clumsily, Lance began to slowly work the squeaking hand pump back and forth. Still 1973, the faded reddish-brown petrol bowser was the old type. He wondered when they were going to install the new version. That would save him loads of time. Wiping the sweat beads off his brow now, Lance continued to work the pump. His eyes focused on the pinkish-blue petrol flowing down the clear plastic hose towards the fuel nozzle. The petrol rotated, clicking and buzzing counter-clockwise as it gushed into the tank. This was, after all, the southern hemisphere. The metal numbers on the fuel bowser flicked over, noisily clattering and humming. Vapor wafted out of the tank, drifting, dancing in a haze in the light wind. The smell of petrol fumes hung in the air. Lance smelt them. They smelt good. Like money. Petrol sales were money. Dark eyes glinting in the sunlight, his wrinkled face smiled at the thought.
Shortly afterwards Goto exited the building grasping a bottle of Cola in one hand, juggling a box of Viscount cigarettes and Redback matches in the other. The bell jingled noisily. Placing the glass bottle to his mouth Goto took a long swig.
‘Ah! That feels better.’ The sparkling, fizzing, fluid oozed smoothly down his dry, parched throat. After draining the bottle in one long gulp he then flicked it across into the rubbish bin (trash can), which was aptly labeled “Bottles and Cans” in faded yellow paint. Crash! The glass bottle bounced off the empty cans, lucky not to shatter. ‘That’s not half bad,’ Goto grunted, ‘worth every penny.’ Staring long and hard at Lance now he strode across toward him. ‘How much do I owe you?’ he asked.
Lance cocked his ear, his answer not immediate. The fuel nozzle clicked, the fuel gurgled up to the brim, overflowing. Lance lifted the hose, rotating the handle upside down, letting any remaining petrol drain into the tank. Replacing the fuel nozzle back onto the petrol bowser and tightening the fuel cap, he turned to face the stranger.
‘What’s a Yank doing in this neck of the woods?’ he wondered.
A sharp crack of sticks and a rustle of trees scared the birds. Squawking noisily, a flock of cockatoos flapped out of the bushes on the other side of the tarred road. Goto’s head jerked up and around. His eyes narrowed in telescopic vision as he focused in on the birds. Almost immediately, his attention was diverted by Lance’s voice.
‘Well. That’ll be $7.50 in total boss,’ was Lance’s uncomfortable reply. Moving restlessly on his feet, Lance tried not to make eye contact with the city slicker as Goto passed him $8 in cash.
‘Keep the change.’ Goto creaked open the panel van door, slid his Stetson to the opposite seat, climbed in and slammed it. The starter motor spun with a whine. The engine roared to life. Crunching it into gear Goto drove slowly, mechanically, up the road. Lance stood watching, leaning on a broom.
‘What a strange chap,’ he grunted, shook his head in thought and turned away to count the money.
Sam also known as Small Elk, the girl in the small, clear and almost invisible, now one meter diameter bubble-entity hovering above the nearby grocery store café also watched, intently.
The panel van edged past a small thicket of trees on the left. Then, with a groan, it drew up on the side of the road in a small saddle between the service station and the grocery store café. A dirt road veered off to the left from off this main bitumen road, heading north-west. Leaving the engine idling, Goto creaked open the driver’s side door. Stepping out now, he slammed it shut, and then strode to the rear of the vehicle. Ears pricking up from the roar of an approaching vehicle, Goto halted, waiting patiently for it to pass. Goto waved at the driver, who nodded back. The police car flicked past whipping up a gust of wind and billowing dust. It headed down the main drag towards town, directly ahead.
All this time, the short and rather scrawny elderly man, affectionately known as Pops, remained seated outside the shop further up the hill. As the police car spluttered past him Pops raised a hand, and then hurriedly checked th
at his wig was fastened correctly.
Goto took his sunglasses from out of his top jacket pocket and then slid them on. He briefly surveyed the scene from his new vantage point, one hand rubbing his clean-shaven chin. Pulling out a packet of cigarettes from his other top shirt pocket Goto fingered one out. Sliding the packet back into the same pocket he felt in his trouser pocket extracting the box of Redback matches. Goto took his time to light his smoke, and then shook the match slowly, watching the flame as it died out. Noting tinder-dry stubble poking through the fresh green grass on the edge of the road he placed the dead match back into its box, deftly closing it with the same two fingers. Taking a long slow suck on the cigarette he inhaled. Then he blew a smoke ring into the air.
‘Ah! That tastes good.’
Walking back towards the front of the van now, Goto spun the box of matches onto the front seat through the open window. They fell on the floor with a clatter, spilling everywhere. He grimaced, annoyed at his own stupidity. Reaching in, ignoring them, he took his Stetson hat between his finger and thumb. Then, standing upright he thrust it squarely on his head, rotating it and then pushing it down firmly.
Goto strode back to the rear of the vehicle now and drew open the creaking back panel van doors which desperately needing oiling. Next, he reached in dragging out a spherical translucent blue, glass-like orb, carefully placing this on the ground behind the vehicle. Reaching forward, Goto depressed a circular button on the top of the half meter diameter orb. The upper hemisphere of the orb clicked, slowly depressing. Its base began to spin clockwise with a low, almost silent, whirring hum. Then the orb began pulsating and glowing, a luminescent pale-blue. Now slowly rising, it levitated at knee height on the spot. A flashing strobe light, as bright as the sun, pierced the afternoon sky.