Trails in the Dust

by Joy Dettman

  The newspapers of the time had called Laurie Morgan the redheaded water-pistol bandit. Georgie was only a peanut in Jenny’s belly when he’d been arrested, when a Salvation Army couple had returned an absconding fifteen-year-old to the loving arms of her parents. Jenny had run from them too, run to Granny.

  There were sixteen years between Georgie and Jenny. Jimmy had been twenty months Georgie’s junior. She had no recollection of him as a baby and little of Jenny, until she’d returned from Sydney with a three-year-old boy. He’d had a father, or a photograph of his soldier father and when she’d demanded her own father, she’d got one, a framed mug shot of Laurie Morgan, cut from a newspaper.

  *

  The last time Jenny had driven this road, Jim had been in the passenger seat and Katie in the back, holding on to two pups, Lila’s litter mates, bought by old Paddy Watson. He’d wanted a breeding pair.

  She wasn’t thinking about those pups. She was thinking of Trudy and Croydon but mainly about the mouth behind that ski mask and the eyes. Her passenger was no Duffy. He was Trudy’s parasite. He’d been missing since around the tenth of June. Today was the seventeenth – and if he’d washed his feet since he’d gone missing, she’d eat her hat, which she’d left in Italy. She’d left her blue skirt in Switzerland, her beige slacks in London. They’d stayed up since the elastic, but their backside seam had split with sitting, and she’d never liked beige anyway.

  A signpost flashed by. It could have said N 60. Her speedo said a hundred and thirty, too fast to give her eyes time to focus on signs. She’d never seen Nettleton. Had known about it since infancy. The train used to go through Woody Creek to Nettleton, to be turned around and sent back to Norman’s station.

  No pinch-face patrolling this road. She wanted his siren and glanced at her passenger’s ski mask. It had circles for his dead-snake eyes. She knew them well. She knew his stumpy hands too. And what the hell were they doing holding a gun?

  Couldn’t believe any of this. Couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen him. Too many trees, and her concentration had been on missing those trees and what movie might have been playing tonight at the cinema. She’d been carjacked in her own front yard by her gun-toting son-in-law.

  It was probably a replica and, replica or not, he’d stopped pointing it at her. He was holding it on his lap and watching a truck approaching.

  ‘He’ll see your mask. If you think you’re fooling me with it, you’re wrong,’ she said. No reply, and the truck driver was only interested in getting his load to wherever he was going.

  The sky to the west was black. She was driving into that storm, but the road was straight, as were the train lines it followed.

  ‘Slow down,’ he said.

  ‘Scared of dying? We all have to do it one day.’

  She’d found Jimmy. She’d held his hand when he’d walked her to the car, and he’d kissed her goodbye. Her money was safe for the grandchildren. Juliana’s brooch was safe with Georgie. Granny’s beads were safe.

  Trudy had been named beneficiary on her life insurance policy – if Jim had predeceased her. He had. Trudy would get that money, if the company paid up. They’d probably prove that speeding had been the cause of death and refuse to pay. They’d taken months to pay up for Jim’s accidental drowning, but they had, while she’d been in Switzerland.

  That damn road decided to curve away from the railway lines, and another loaded transport was coming at her around the curve and wanting the entire road. She was going too fast to give him what he wanted. Almost side-swiped him – and scared her passenger. He braced for impact, drew up his knees, and she caught a glimpse of what stunk. His right foot was bare and bloody. Dried blood.

  ‘Shoot yourself in the foot with your gun?’ she asked.

  ‘Shut your flapping mouth, you ugly old bitch,’ he said, and he pointed his gun at her nose.

  ‘Shove it up your own and pull the bloody trigger,’ she said.

  It looked real. Laurie Morgan’s water pistol had looked real enough until you saw its rubber-bladder handle.

  All roads around Woody Creek were dead flat, but well beyond Watson’s land now, that road had become a series of curves. Forged by a drunken bullocky on a dark night, Jenny thought, easing back on her speed and glancing in her rear-vision mirror. Hadn’t seen a car behind her until those curves. She’d picked up a tail of cars and trucks, and one of them was almost riding her bumper bar.

  ‘Get off this road,’ he said.

  ‘Show me another one,’ she said, and hoped that the driver on her bumper bar saw his mask and phoned the cops. Her passenger must have had the same thought. He scrunched down in his seat and removed his mask – and he hadn’t shaved for a week.

  ‘What the hell has been going on while I’ve been away?’

  They were passing her. Four cars and one truck, on a passing lane, strangers, annoyed that she’d forced them to slow down.

  ‘Get off this fucken road!’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to Nettleton,’ she said. There’d be a police station there. When she’d been a kid, they’d had a boarding school. A few Woody Creek farmers had educated their sons in Nettleton. They’d have a police station. She’d do a wheelie into its driveway and lean on her horn.

  Glanced at his gun. Granny used to own one – a rifle. She used to keep a packet of bullets on her kitchen mantelpiece. As a youth, Jim had owned a rifle. His father bought it for his twelfth birthday. Jenny had never held a gun. Should have shot Vern Hooper with Granny’s. I would have been out of jail by now, she thought, then noticed her fuel gauge. It was showing red. Should have taken the mileage. She’d had more than mileage on her mind at the time. Kilometrage, she self-corrected. The Toyota counted kilometres, not miles.

  A big dusty ute beeped as it went by. It looked like young Paddy Watson’s twin cab. Should have flashed her lights at him, given him the driver’s SOS.

  She passed a tractor attached to a trailer loaded with rams, passed two bike riders, pushing hard on their pedals to get to where they were going before the storm hit. It was coming at her. There was a curtain of grey rain ahead and she and those bike riders where heading straight for it.

  What is it that turns some youths into bike riders and others into addicts? she thought. Why had Georgie become who she’d become – and Raelene?

  She hadn’t given birth to that girl, but she’d raised her from a three weeks’ old baby, had raised her until Ray died, and loved the demanding little bugger. Blame Florence Dawson for who she’d become. She’d taken a seven-year-old brat and given back an out of control twelve-year-old.

  And look at Jimmy. Whatever Margaret Hooper had been, she must have loved Jimmy. She’d raised a good man.

  Morrison Grenville. It was a good name. A month ago, she’d told herself that she’d die happy if she could see him, touch him again. She didn’t want to die today. She had pre-publication work to do on We’ll Meet Again and she wanted to finish her Parasite file and find it a title.

  Designer jeans, she thought. He was wearing his designer jeans. They needed a wash. His black hoodie might have come from Kmart.

  And the rain hit, sheets of it. She turned on her wipers, eased back more on the accelerator and glanced at her fuel gauge. Never, in all of her years of driving, had she run out of petrol, or not since she’d been a licensed driver. She’d run out of petrol in one of Laurie Morgan’s stolen cars. He’d been nursing a broken ankle, and in those days a driver had required two good feet to drive a car. At fifteen, she’d had the feet but not the knowhow.

  Life is a circle, she thought. I’ve been around the block and returned to the beginning, driving a parasite with an injured foot – though there must have been a few good genes in Laurie. He’d given her Georgie.

  Wiper blades flapping like frantic wings, doing what they could to give her vision. She sat forward, watching the white line, the white posts – like driving through a pea-soup fog, she thought. She wouldn’t have seen a kangaroo. Maybe they had sense enough to find s
helter during downpours.

  Her speed was down to fifty before the rain eased off and she could see where she was going – and see a manmade structure playing behind the trees, dodging from one side of the road to the other.

  His eyes were younger. They may have identified that structure before Jenny’s could name it a silo.

  ‘Turn,’ he said. ‘Turn here.’

  There was a signpost at a T-intersection, Nettleton 5. She didn’t see where that minor road was heading.

  ‘Turn, I said!’

  ‘I’m out of petrol,’ she said.

  There were three silos, big ones, but before they reached them, Nettleton started slinking out of a saturated landscape – a farmhouse, wet sheep, then another house, then a row of houses and overflowing gutters.

  It was no Willama. It was an overgrown Woody Creek.

  ‘Drive around the shithole,’ he said, the gun barrel in her ribs.

  ‘Whatever we’re running from we’ll need petrol to keep doing it,’ she said, and braked to give way to the vehicle on her right.

  Hotel on the corner, taller than Woody Creek’s but as old. Two women with baby strollers sheltering from the rain beneath its veranda, a fat old Labrador waiting beside one of the strollers. No sign of a police station or a sign pointing to a police station, so she drove on, looking on both sides of the road.

  Saw an IGA supermarket on her left, next door to a railway station. She was looking at the station, thinking of Norman’s station and remembering waving trains on their way and being so happy when a passenger had waved back. She was thinking of the day Amber had come home on a train when the barrel of his gun dug in deeper. He’d seen petrol pumps.

  She braked and turned left into a rundown service station. It had three pumps and a blue overall-clad chap working in a tin shed. She pulled in so that her tank was close to the lead-free pump, turned off the motor and unclipped her seatbelt, not to get out and fill her tank, but to run.

  And he knew it. ‘Move out of that seat and you’re dead and he’s next,’ he said, he, the chap wearing blue overalls, now standing in his doorway, unwilling to get wet just for a few dollars’ worth of petrol. No one else around.

  What could she do? Call his bluff? Make him prove that his gun was real by committing suicide and murder? She looked at it. It looked real.

  And that chap in blue overalls decided to get wet. ‘Nice bit of rain,’ he said, and half of his front teeth were missing.

  Jenny wound down her window. ‘I hope it made it to Woody Creek. Our farmers have been screaming out for rain.’

  ‘Fill it up,’ her passenger said, and as the chap removed her petrol cap and started pumping fuel, Jenny pointed to her handbag. His feet were on it. He didn’t move to get it. The gun in her ribs didn’t move.

  ‘Unless you’re paying, I need my handbag,’ she said.

  He didn’t move until the pump kicked back and the petrol cap was on, when he aimed his gun at the chap who couldn’t afford false teeth.

  ‘Go, or I’ll blow the rest of his fucken teeth out,’ he said.

  She stole that tank full of petrol. In one movement, she turned on her motor, yelled ‘Sorry,’ then took off in a spray of muddy gravel, because that toothless chap was better off robbed than dead, and because she’d got a good look at that parasite’s eyes. He was on drugs. She’d seen his eyes that day in Croydon and had her suspicions. Today she knew why his eyes had always reminded her of Raelene’s. Drugs killed the life in them, killed empathy, emotion. Dead snakes had more humanity in their eyes.

  She turned off the highway the next time he told her to, turned left into a side street, a residential street, sealed, or its centre was sealed. She drove by houses for a long block, by a house or two in the next block, then no more houses and no more bitumen, only a potholed muddy track heading off into bush. She braked to turn around.

  ‘Drive,’ he said.

  ‘There’s nothing down here.’

  ‘I said fucken drive!’

  His gun damn near up her nose, she smelt its killing power. She might have loathed the sight of him but hadn’t feared him. She feared that gun, and if she was going to end up dead, far better to end up bogged and dead close to Nettleton. There’d be more chance of her body being found.

  Life’s full of potholes, me darlin’, Granny used to say. If we keep our eyes on the track ahead, we can dodge the worst of them.

  Little Jenny Morrison had learnt late how to dodge the potholes of life. She’d been lucky to make it through infancy, very lucky to make it to her fifteenth birthday. She dodged a few more potholes while he helped himself to her handbag, to her red wallet. The secondhand man’s notes were in it with a few English twenties and her red bank card. It would access around four thousand dollars – if he could access it. Her Visa and her other bank card were in her old wallet, still in Greensborough.

  Her rings weren’t. She’d zipped them into an inside pocket of her handbag. Had offered the diamond rings to Trudy. She hadn’t wanted them – and he didn’t find them. He pitched the bag back to his feet but put her wallet into his windcheater pocket and removed a glass bubble pipe.

  GREENSBOROUGH

  Georgie’s mobile buzzed as she turned in to her driveway. She didn’t pick up, not until the motor was turned off, when she sighed and reached for the phone.

  ‘I’ve been trying to call Jenny for hours, on her landline and mobile. I called Harry, and he said she’d be at the Gold Rush Motel. She’s not there, Georgie. They said she hadn’t booked in.’

  ‘She’ll be at one of the others,’ Georgie said. ‘She’s handing over her keys at eleven tomorrow, in Willama.’

  ‘There’s more to it. I should have told you. I should have told Mum yesterday.’

  Georgie closed her car door, pointed her keys, then walked inside, the phone to her ear.

  Katie and Paul were watching the news. She stood, bag over her shoulder, mobile to her ear, until a footballer’s injury took precedence over a bad smash near Willama.

  ‘I’ll give Harry a call,’ Georgie said. ‘Paul’s got a class tonight. I have to go, Trude.’

  She didn’t call Harry. She was moving her car to let Paul out when the landline rang.

  ‘It’s Vonnie,’ Katie said, pushing the phone at her as she stepped inside. She’d turned the phone onto speaker.

  ‘Harry said not to panic you, Georgie,’ Vonnie said. She was long-winded. Time had always stretched longer in the country, but she finally got around to why she’d called. ‘Jenny’s car isn’t at the house but there’s a black SUV parked in her shed and it’s been in a smash. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to see the news, but they’ve been talking all day up here about a stolen black SUV that was involved in that smash on the highway.’

  ‘We watched it,’ Georgie said.

  ‘Well, why I’m ringing is, Harry wants to know if Jen’s still got that hidden key? Teddy’s gone around to get the police and Harry doesn’t want them breaking down doors to get in. I mean not with the new buyers moving in tomorrow.’

  Katie knew where to find Jenny’s emergency key. They’d had to use it before Christmas, when they’d taken the twins for a walk and Pa had gone to sleep watching television.

  The ABC had more news about the crash and the stolen SUV. They said that the owner of the vehicle had been dragged out of her car at traffic lights in Broadmeadows, that her seven-year-old daughter, buckled into the rear seat, had been driven thirty kilometres along the Hume Highway before the carjacker tossed her out.

  At eight-thirty, Channel Seven showed a security video, a silent video, but worse for its silence. A masked robber armed with a metal rod was smashing up the office of a service station, the attendant backing away from him while pointing a gun.

  ‘Why didn’t he shoot him?’ Katie asked.

  ‘He would have ended up charged with murder.’ He’d ended up in hospital with serious head injuries.

  Georgie was showering when her mobile rang again. Katie took th
e call, hoping it was Jenny. It was Trudy and she was howling, and dealing with Trudy when she wasn’t howling was bad enough. Katie took the phone to the bathroom door and, her finger covering the speaker, she relayed Trudy’s news.

  ‘The police are saying that Nick is the one smashing up that place on the video. That he’s on the outside video filling up Trudy’s car with petrol.’

  Georgie turned the water off.

  ‘She said that Nick’s cousin and two of his mates have been arrested and she wants to come over here,’ Katie said.

  And Georgie was out, wrapped in her dressing gown. She took the phone. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘They arrested Nick’s cousin and everyone’s here. I have to get out, Georgie,’ Trudy howled.

  ‘Arrested for what?’

  ‘They’ve been cooking ice, and Nick has been working with them. I thought they did gardening.’

  ‘Cooking ice?’

  ‘The police broke in today and caught them at it. If I get a taxi over there, can you pay for it? I haven’t been out since the hospital. I should have told you,’ she howled.

  Georgie’s landline saved her. It started ringing. She handed her mobile to Katie and took the call.

  It was Harry. ‘Jen’s not in the house or the yard. The local chap has been onto his city mates and they’re saying that it’s Trudy’s bloke, that Jen’s driven him somewhere.’

  ‘If she’s with him, she hasn’t gone willingly,’ Georgie said. ‘Make them understand that – or give them my number. I’ve got to go, Harry, my phone needs charging.’ It was beeping its warning. She placed it on its charger, then took her mobile.

  ‘Text your father, Katie,’ she said, and then tried again to calm Trudy.

  She’d always been a howler. She’d howled at Christmas time when she’d spoken of divorce – and if she’d gone through with it, it would have been finalised by now.