Trails in the Dust

by Joy Dettman

‘Go to bed, Trude. It’s no good dragging the boys around at this time of night. I’ll call you if I hear anything.’

  Then, with both phones silent, Georgie sat down and Katie picked up the remote to search for news. The world might end but the canned laughter would play on. She muted the laughter and flicked to the ABC. No commercials on the ABC but a talk show unfit for human consumption.

  ‘Kill that,’ Georgie said.

  She wasn’t ready yet to lose Jenny, and Jenny wasn’t ready to go. She’d watched her coming through that door at the airport, expecting decrepit, but she’d looked younger than when they’d dropped her off a month ago.

  ‘I’ve spent years claiming that the old bugger in the clouds had it in for me, and look what he gave me?’ she said and she’d grabbed Georgie and kissed her within an inch of her life. ‘And I told you not to bother coming all the way out here, that I’d get a taxi.’

  She’d talked all the way home, about Jimmy, about Italy and about the secondhand man who’d said he’d be in Woody Creek early the next day. ‘If I drive up there today, I won’t have to leave at dawn tomorrow,’ she’d said.

  Katie flicked channels until she found the news. Channel Seven had a reporter on the spot. She didn’t mention Jenny’s name but got the basic facts right, that the fugitive was believed to be the son-in-law of an elderly woman, that it was believed he had taken her hostage and was now driving her early model white Toyota.

  He is armed and dangerous. Do not approach.

  ‘Where would he get a gun from?’ Katie asked.

  Georgie had a fair idea. She had a better idea when Channel Seven showed that security video in its entirety. The image was no clearer but given more information, she could see Nick in the movements of that masked, rod-wielding robber. They saw him smash that rod into the service station assistant’s head, saw the assistant crumple down behind his smashed counter.

  Georgie sat, her eyes fixed on the screen, watching that same old repetitive story, replayed too many times on Melbourne television – and when had she given a thought to those waiting at home within arm’s reach of telephones? She and Katie were the waiters tonight.

  Harry received a mention. Mr Henry Hall, brother-in-law of the missing woman . . .

  ‘Henry?’ Katie questioned, before questioning brother-in-law.

  Georgie’s mobile buzzing like an annoying mosquito, Katie muted the television.

  ‘I burnt his passport,’ Trudy said. ‘I should have let him go.’

  ‘Turn the television on to Channel Seven, Trude. They’re calling Jen his hostage and he’s got a gun, that service station’s chap’s gun.’

  ‘He’s probably killed her,’ Katie yelled and Channel Seven cut to a commercial. The world might end but viewers would still need to know where they could buy the cheapest washing machine, what was on special this week at Woolworths, and who to call if they wanted to prepay for their funeral.

  ‘Pa watched that thing,’ Katie said, then she started howling.

  ‘Stop that,’ Georgie commanded. ‘I don’t need your tears right now – and she’s indestructible. You should have seen her yesterday –’

  ‘I didn’t see her yesterday,’ Katie howled. ‘You made me go to school.’

  A newsreader had news of another martyr blown away to paradise with six of his victims, just people, just kids. Australian boys were over there fighting an enemy that blended in with the general population. How did they know who to shoot, to bomb? You can’t bomb an entire community. You can’t do much against religious fanatics.

  Can’t speak your mind about them either. Tongues had been hobbled since the eighties, schoolchildren brainwashed, parliamentarians taught to mouth newspeak gobbledygook. Once there was a world and the world was good –

  Paul came in at ten. A techno whiz, he’d taught Georgie how to use a computer. He also made good coffee, made three mugs of it, and tonight Georgie didn’t comment on that third mug. She needed Katie awake tonight and close, needed Paul on the couch beside her. They were all she had – and Jenny.

  There was room for three on the couch. They sat bunched there, drinking coffee, Georgie thinking that fourteen-year-old kids were older than they’d been in her day, and younger too. She’d been a week shy of her fourteenth birthday the day she’d started working for old Charlie, had known nothing about the world, other than the importance of money and the power of men. She’d had three ambitions at fourteen, to get Jenny away from Ray King, to become as rich as Vern Hooper, and to find her father, dreams she’d never expected to achieve behind Charlie’s counter. That job had been her first stepping stone.

  But Ray died, Jenny left town, and Georgie had inherited responsibility for Margot. For another twenty years, she’d stood still on that first stepping stone – until the fire, which for some reason, she’d been allowed to survive.

  Channel Seven showed a police roadblock on the Mission Bridge and a row of traffic lined up on both sides – as it may have been on the night of the fire.

  A hot summer night that one. Tonight was cold. Five minutes ago the weather reporter had told them that the forecast for tomorrow was for heavy showers and a top temperature of twelve. Somewhere out there in the cold dark night, Jenny was . . .

  ‘She likes driving,’ Georgie said. ‘Remember the night she turned up at the back door when we were eating dinner?’

  That had been on a summer night. They’d had two air conditioners blasting when they’d seen her through their glass door.

  ‘Just passing. Thought we’d drop in,’ she’d said, and she’d laughed at their shocked faces. Jim had been behind her. He hadn’t been laughing. She’d taken him out for a drive to cool down and when he’d nodded off, she’d continued driving. The temperature, sitting on forty for a week, their house would have been an oven. They’d been gone by daylight. She’d left a note.

  Ta for bed. Have to get home before Trudy leaves for work. Jen XXX

  From birth those boys had been her life, and Jim’s.

  ‘She’d spent her life pushing kids around that bloody town in strollers. She pushed Donny around in a wheelchair for eight years,’ Georgie said. ‘Then Trudy, then the twins.’

  ‘What happened to Donny?’ Katie asked.

  ‘He died young, in a home for the retarded. She looked after him until Ray died.’

  ‘Why would she take him back and look after his kids when he’d cheated on her with another woman, Mum?’

  ‘She didn’t, or not as a husband. I’ve told you. He lived in a back room.’

  ‘Why would she look after the other woman’s kids?’

  Good question, Georgie thought. Guilt, maybe. Payback to Ray for the two babies she’d aborted in Armadale. That was the only reason Georgie had ever been able to come up with. ‘She loved Raelene. I think that looking after her helped to get her over losing Jimmy.’

  ‘What about Trudy?’

  ‘She said once that being able to love her eased her guilt over not loving Margot.’

  Trudy wouldn’t receive a dollar from Jenny’s will. ‘Tie it up tight, Georgie,’ Jenny had said on the phone that night. ‘Make sure he can’t break it.’

  There was a copy of it in the concertina file with a disc Jenny had sealed into a manila envelope. To be opened in the event of my death, printed in red on both sides of the envelope. Georgie had no idea of what was in it.

  Another commercial break, headed by a newsflash. Paul left the room to shower and shave. Katie flicked to a movie, an oft-played movie, the actor searching for his abducted daughter.

  ‘Did your father ever come looking for you?’ Katie asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You had a father. Did he ever go for custody of you . . . or whatever it was called in those days?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Lack of interest.’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Lack of interest.’

  ‘You
’re so frustrating when I ask you anything about him,’ Katie said. ‘He was my blood grandfather, Mum.’

  ‘I didn’t know him.’ Didn’t want to know him by the time she’d found him. She’d been in her mid-forties.

  The movie broke to commercials, and another newsflash. Channel Ten showed Jenny’s shed and the big dark vehicle parked in it.

  ‘It’s like watching one of those true-crime television shows, except we’re in it, so it’s a horror show,’ Katie said. ‘How could he drive that car in there without Lila hearing him?’

  ‘She’s been with Harry since before lunch,’ Paul said, sitting down again.

  ‘She wasn’t last night. They said before that he’d been involved in that bad accident on the Melbourne road.’

  ‘Shush,’ Georgie said.

  Police in two states are searching tonight for a gunman and an elderly woman, taken from her home this morning . . .

  ‘She wouldn’t like them saying elderly. When I used to ask how old she was, she’d say sixty and a big bit,’ Katie said. ‘Will the police phone us if they find out something?’

  ‘Yes,’ Georgie said.

  Or they’d knock on the door.

  GOAT TRACKS

  The thump of the Toyota’s undercarriage bottoming out in a water-filled pothole jarred Jenny’s mind back to the present and made him drop his bubble pipe. He hadn’t been blowing bubbles in it, but holding a disposable lighter to its bowl, making whatever he’d put into it bubble.

  Her motor howled, her wheels sprayed mud, but the car refused to move forward. She’d never been bogged. She’d heard tales from those who had been, so rammed the stick into reverse and hit the accelerator again. And her good little car moved backward. It gave itself a mud bath but got out of that hole, and he unclipped his seatbelt to search for his bubble pipe.

  She’d seen bongs for sale in the newsagency and had asked about them. The owner told her they were used for smoking tobacco, though everyone and their dog knew what was smoked in them. Her passenger wasn’t smoking marijuana. Raelene used to smoke it. Jenny knew its smell. The twins would have loved his little pipe. They’d love blowing bubbles for Lila to chase.

  Where were they tonight? Where was Trudy? What had gone on while she’d been away?

  Her bladder, threatening to burst, wouldn’t hang on much longer. She knew where to find every public toilet on the road to Melbourne, had pulled into most of them at one time or another. She’d chased a fourteen-year-old Raelene across an oval near one toilet and brought her down with a rugby tackle. Every couple of months, they used to leave home at dawn, hit the city by ten, get Raelene to her appointments with the child psychologist, case workers or other experts on child management, then get back into the car and drive home in the dark, no glasses necessary back then.

  Needed her glasses tonight. Her bifocals were in her bag. She’d told him she needed them when the night became too dark to wear her sunnies. A black night now, her headlights cutting a narrow pathway through scrub land.

  ‘Pull over,’ he said.

  She’d learnt obedience. She’d have a bruise on her ribs to prove why, and a sore spot behind her right ear. She braked and blinked her eyes into focus. He was going to get rid of her. She was going to end up roadkill for wild pigs – or maybe scrub kill. She’d watched enough criminal shows on television to know that killers usually made their victims walk a distance from the road before shooting them.

  She wouldn’t walk obediently. He’d have to shoot her on the run, or zig-zagging. She’d seen that done on television too. The actor had survived.

  He didn’t tell her to get out. She unclipped her seatbelt as he opened his door. She left the shift in Drive but kept her foot on the brake, her every muscle tensed to hit the accelerator hard as soon as his feet hit the dirt. She might knock him down with the open door or drag him with her. Didn’t care if she ran over his head.

  He didn’t get out. He did what he needed to do where he sat, started adding his water to the goat track – and to her door lining.

  His hands were occupied.

  She killed the headlights, grabbed for the strap of her handbag, flung the door wide and hit the dark running. She didn’t zig or zag as seen on television. She didn’t run either, not as in really run. She told her legs to get her into the scrub anyway they could, and they did, his animal scream pursuing her – and her old parka. Its sleeve had caught in the strap of her bag. She could barely see a hand before her but could see the pale blue of that parka. She reeled it in, balled it and ran deeper into the scrub, giving no thought to the wild pigs she might disturb.

  Or to low-hanging branches until one grabbed her hair and gouged her brow. It hadn’t got her eyes and it didn’t slow her pace. She didn’t look back, not until she found something resembling a tree, not a big tree, but far enough in from the track for her to bare her backside in a semi squat and to wonder again why the male animal had been designed for convenience and the female designed for the male’s convenience.

  No moon, a few patches of stars breaking through a cloud-covered sky. Maybe the rain had moved on. She’d got her bearings earlier from a slim moon. Didn’t know now if she was facing north, south, east or west, only that he was behind her, and that he’d been sucking on that pipe for hours and was stark raving crazy.

  She’d left the shift in Drive. It had been in reverse when he’d got into the car and without her foot on the brake it had moved with no help from her. She’d expected it to move on down that track, but it was waiting for her like a faithful dog. Couldn’t see it, but his screaming sounded too close.

  She pulled up her pants and slacks and was stooping to pick up her handbag and parka when a night beetle buzzed past her left ear. In the split instant before she heard the Crack, she’d thought it was a beetle.

  He’d shot at her. He’d damn near shot off her ear. He could see her, and faster, with an empty bladder, she zig-zagged deeper into the scrub, one hand feeling for the pearl-in-a-cage earring in her lobe. It was still there.

  Crack!

  No buzz of warning that time, and just when she didn’t need it, that scythe of moon slid out from behind a cloud to paint the scrub and her parka silver.

  She was heading north. That track and his gun were to the south and the bitumen highway around twenty kilometres east. Too far away. There could be a fence down here somewhere. She wanted a fence, a paddock, a house in that paddock.

  Crack!

  Kids always say, ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead.’ Guns don’t go Bang! They make a whip-crack, a loud whip-crack in the silence of this dead land where no bird, no frog, no cricket dared to breathe. She could hear her own breathing, hear every footfall. He was probably tracking her.

  Probably wasn’t, not with one bare and injured foot, not through this country.

  She got in behind a stand of scrub to catch her breath and to put her old Michelin Man parka on. It might give him a target to aim at, but the night was cold and that parka had always been warm, and it had a hood. She pulled up its hood, found and tied the cords, fiddled with the zipper until she got it started, then pushed on by the light of the moon to find a fence.

  No fence, no house, but she saw the glow of car lights on that track, her car lights, she hoped. He was going.

  Crack!

  Not yet, he wasn’t. That was four shots. In the old cowboy movies, handguns only held six bullets. She and Jimmy used to count them so they’d know when the bad guy had to reload. Technology had done for the gunslinger’s six-gun. These days, in television shows, guns had slide-in clips that held as many bullets as the producer or director required them to hold.

  Her mouth was dry. She had a bottle of water in her handbag and could thank Rome for that. After their first day in that city, she’d never left the hotel without a full bottle of water in her handbag. She’d filled that bottle with Melbourne water before leaving Greensborough.

  Heard her motor roar. Nick Papadimopolous, a city man, had been left stranded on a goat tr
ack, with an injured foot, midway between no place and nowhere.

  Crack!

  That was five, followed by a roar of pain from her Toyota’s motor – and a pig’s scream. That scream sounded close.

  She’d seen three feeding on roadkill beside the bitumen road. His bullet must have hit one of their relatives.

  She’d been bush-bashing towards the north and that non-existent fence. His gun was to the south, that screaming pig to her west. She turned east, towards that last bitumen road.

  FIFTY-EIGHT KS FROM HAY

  ‘Did I wake you?’ Harry asked.

  ‘I was catnapping. What’s happened?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘A kangaroo got him. Jen wasn’t with him,’ Harry said.

  Ten past four, Katie asleep on the couch, the television still playing. Paul had gone to bed at two. Georgie’s eyes had been closed but her ears open to Yankee voices, a panel of them on the Yanks’ version of a talk show. There’d been no news of Jenny, not for hours.

  ‘Has he said anything?’

  ‘He’s dead. He was dead when a truckie called the accident in, fifty-eight kilometres from Hay. There’s nothing on that road, or nothing but trucks and dead roos. The last time I was up that way I must have counted two dead roos a mile.’

  ‘She wasn’t in the car?’

  ‘No and not flung out of it either, they say. She’s been with him. They found her wallet on him.’

  Harry still believed that he had to yell down a phone line to be heard. The average ear couldn’t take one of his calls, or not against the ear. Katie stirred. Georgie wanted her to sleep through this night, so took the phone into the study.

  ‘He hated her, Harry. She slapped his face before she went on her tour. He’s killed her.’

  ‘Trudy’s not with you?’

  ‘No. She’s coming across in a taxi in the morning. Her sister-in-law has got a house full. They’re burying his mother on Monday.’

  ‘Lucky he’s dead, or the loss of his mother would have probably got him off with a slap on the wrist. They’re getting a search party up there at daylight to look for her,’ Harry said.