The Far-Back Country

by Kate Lyons

  The wind shifted again and now all Ray could smell was himself. Sweat, mud, bait. A carrion tang. From his bandanna, so old and weathered it had gone from the rich indigo of history to something the colour of weak kerosene. Below it all, the stink of fear. Dad sweating, crying, pleading, holding out the rifle. Ray. You do it. I can’t. Come on. Do it for me. For once, do as you’re told. Be a man.

  From the coiled ache of his crouch, he cast himself forward now, out of the mud of the present and the dusk of the past, into a different history. Instead of a boy lunging wildly, desperately, a shot ringing out as he wrestled the rifle off his father, the bullet bouncing off something, finding his little sister, grazing her temple, knocking her over, a rock knocking her teeth out, teeth which he’d picked up and put in his pocket, as if in doing this, he could hide what had happened, erase his crime in leaving Tilda lying bloody and unconscious, his father sobbing and helpless under the tree, he saw himself doing as he’d been told. Saw himself rising, slow and steady, disentangling himself from a seethe of scents, shadows, false history. Finding height, will, clarity, some hard cold fact to brace against, something to bring to bear against the enormity of it. A hat, a shoulder. A cold geometry of eye and gun.

  Afterwards, he noosed the thing to the tree. Left it hanging, shredding and boiling, bones and teeth rising from a snarl of rot. Saw himself standing beside it, like a photograph. Growing taller, blonder, harder, muscling out to fill the frame. A mountain of a man.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  He’d never hit a woman. Came close, once or twice. A barmaid at Pete’s pub, screaming hysterically at blood not her own. A woman he’d slept with once, who’d tried to steal his wallet in the middle of the night. But she’d hit him first.

  ‘I don’t want them. What am I going to do with them? Or that little lout. You seen what he done to my shed?’

  There was Tilda of course. A girl not a woman, a gun not a fist, and he neither man nor boy but something dangerously verging, caught between.

  ‘Oi. You listening to me?’

  Looking down at Cheryl, her face snarling to gargoyle shapes beneath her shelving poodle perm, he wondered if once again, as with Harry, the looming threat of his big body might be enough.

  As he moved forward, Cheryl fell back, and he savoured her little grunt of surprise. He was longing for it, the old simplicity. Knuckle on bone.

  But he just kept walking, round behind the ute, unhooking the trailer, watching as sheep wandered across Cheryl’s front lawn. One headed right through the cricket bat-shaped hole in the side of her shed. Cheryl herself had retreated to the safety of her patio, clutching her phone. She wasn’t to know that since that day near the dam and the nights at the hospital, the fists at his side held nothing but air. Cardboard man, hole in his heart.

  As he got back in the ute, a curtain twitched at the front window. A freckled wrist, a flash of red hair. By the time he’d backed out, Mick was gone.

  It wasn’t until he stopped at the garage for petrol that he realised the dog was still in the back of the ute. He’d meant to leave it with the boy. Too late now. It was along for the ride. Before that though, one more veering journey. One more debt to pay.

  At Charlie’s pub, the threat of his big useless body worked one last time.

  ‘We’re closed,’ the landlord said, jerking his head toward the front doors.

  ‘Not after a drink. Looking for a friend of mine. Old bloke, called Charlie. I heard he’s staying here.’

  The man shrugged, went back to polishing a dirty glass with a dirty towel.

  ‘Wouldn’t know. Wife does all that. She’s out. Come back later on.’

  Ray placed his palms flat on the bar.

  ‘Yeah. You’d know him if he was here. Old. Bad teeth. Drinks a lot.’

  ‘That narrows it down.’

  Ray took his time walking round behind the bar. As he moved forward, the man moved back, and Ray saw himself in the mirror behind the bar. Broad shouldered, hard fisted, in a sweat-stained hat. A white blur of face. When he took his hat off, his blond hair shone ghostly in the gloom. ‘Talks religion. Dresses like a priest.’ He was so close now, he could see the sweat beading on the man’s forehead. ‘Little bloke. Even smaller than you.’

  ‘Look, it’s cleaning day. Everybody’s out. House rule.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll wait upstairs. Which room’s he in?’

  When the man started gabbling about no visitors upstairs, Ray raised his arm, pointed to the board of keys hanging above his head. ‘Which one?’

  He took the stairs two at a time. The door to number 22 was half-open, so he didn’t need the key. From downstairs, he heard the landlord calling, ‘Oi! Mate! I told you. There’s nobody home.’

  Home. What a thought. A single bed, a cock-eyed crucifix, brown dentures in a dirty glass. Empty bottles, food scraps, old newspapers, dry insects. A hepatitis light.

  At first he thought the landlord had been telling the truth. Could barely see him in the bed, the old man was so small and thin. He’d thought the newspapers spread on the bed, for warmth he guessed, were rising and falling in the breeze from the window. Then a corner fluttered up and he saw stubble, a slice of toothless mouth.

  Wake him up. What to ask. What to say.

  He sat for a while on the room’s only chair, watching the old man sleep. Keeping vigil. Mouse droppings underfoot, scraps of paper. He picked one up. Dead people, in shreds and tatters. He picked up another, then another. More people dying, more people grieving, from Mudgee to Murwillimbah. He thought about getting down on the floor, scrabbling through, finding the bit with Mam’s name on it, the message Charlie had tried to give. Then he thought about the old man startling awake, amid yellow scabs of paper and insect husks. Finding Ray empty hearted, empty handed, with not even a mouthful of something sweet to give. Couldn’t do it, couldn’t face it. Couldn’t bear the scope of what might be needed by a man like Charlie, against what a man like Ray had to give.

  When the light slanted to some white no point between the curtain folds, he cleared a space on the floor. Laid it all out, such as it was. His one spare shirt, one of Gary’s he’d taken to wearing for dirty jobs round the farm. Miles too big. His good watch, his book of poems. His wallet, containing all his money but minus his licence, in case he got pulled over before he could do what he had to do. Lily’s ring, still in his trouser pocket, still in its little velvet bag. He’d meant to leave it for Mick, along with the dog and the four half-dead sheep. Then he imagined Mick unwrapping it, its hard little sparkle carving a fresh hole in fresh grief, in lost future. In memory. Better for Charlie to have it, to see God in its miraculous facets, before he magicked that little twinkle into beers and bets.

  The old man shuddered deeply in his sleep, the newspapers covering him fluttering away. Looking around for Charlie’s coat to put over him, once Ray’s old coat, which had seen better days, he thought of his good suit, still at the drycleaners, meant for the wedding, and how Charlie would have liked it, all that nice warm tweed. Too late now.

  As he placed the coat carefully over the old man’s shoulders, something fell out, clunking on the floor. A hanky, not one of Charlie’s. The old checked one with Tilda’s teeth. He’d forgotten all about that. After keeping them safe for years, carrying them with him like some sort of reliquary, wearing them on his body like a tiny hair shirt, he’d just handed them over with the coat. Didn’t matter. Tilda had new teeth. He’d seen them. She’d survived, after a fashion. That old guilt was nothing against what he felt now.

  Standing at the door, ready to leave, he wondered what Charlie would conjure from these gifts of his. Heaven, hell, a vengeful devil under the bed. Might send him off the deep end. Should leave a note, try to explain.

  Instead he went back, put the little beer coaster on the pillow near Charlie’s softly breathing mouth. An omen, speaking sideways and backwards, in some tiny secret language only Charlie would understand.

  The afternoon was hour after hour
of grey-blond grass. Fire to the west, a pale billow, but the road he was on kept angling away and away. He stopped only when he had to, when his bowels turned to water, leaving him stranded at truck stops raucous with birds, in tin toilets greedy with flies. The last time, his body empty of everything except grief and cramp, he turned away from that hot vintage stink. Left his thin glossy greenness against the old brown of lizards, dry leaves. Ahead, a single chimney marked the place where a home had once stood. Sheep huddled round it, as if remembering being owned.

  Soon even grief was just a far-off shimmer against starved old hills. When a lake bloomed over a ridge, impossible, unbearable, that cool holiday turquoise against hot red earth, he struck left, on ruts not a road. Where there was water, there might be caravans, radios. People. He took a long detour to avoid them, veering and fretful, waiting for some other nameless tiny track to loop him back down to the road again.

  So intent was he on that old animal numbness, the lulling concert of hand and eye, that he didn’t notice the thunderclouds up ahead. The sky gone plum, a ruined, pulpy light. The track turned to slime as the first rain came down. Lightning behind and before, confounding geography. A land all knot and knuckle. Two roos, purple furred, stood sentinel on a ridge. He felt the strike rippling over the roof of the ute. In the rear view, a smoulder of wood, tree. Maybe flesh and bone.

  He kept going, faster and faster, fishtailing through mud, stone, scrub and hollow, tipping himself through skidding arcs of earth and sky. Telling himself it was so the wheels got traction while all the time he was waiting for it, something to break the skin of it, all this nothing, which kept happening, over and over. A wall of mud or water. Some lightning to the head.

  There. Across the floodplain, an artery of froth. A newborn creek, crossing his track. Getting wilder and deeper even as he watched, until there was no track, just water, raging, carrying all before it, dirt, rocks, trees, branches like bone.

  He threw his last cigarette out the window, wound the window up. Taking off his seatbelt, he steadied breath, will and his accelerator foot. From the corner of his eye he saw the dog sitting upright on the passenger seat. Still in shock at being allowed inside the ute. Still certain there was something to do and somewhere to go. All that love and certainty coming off it in waves. A cancer, love. Something grafted on.

  As he punched the pedal and the ute leapt forward and sideways, he was tempted to close his eyes. Swim through red air to red water to black nothing, fill his veins with mud and sleep. But he thought it cowardly, so he fixed his gaze ahead. Now or never. See what you’re made of, you little shirker. If he was good for anything, good at anything, it should be this headlong rush into nothing. He’d been doing it most of his life.

  His last thought, as the bonnet hit water and his wheels hit rock, was the poor dog.

  When he opened his eyes, earth was purple. A tree grew sideways, the rain fell up. His face left the dashboard with a leathery suck. Something wet, harsh and slow against his cheek. With lazy, calm determination, its golden eyes half-shut, the kelpie was licking his face. Slowly, doggedly. He thought about the word as he watched its tongue advance, move away, return. The tongue pink and pimpled, streaked red. He wondered whose blood that was.

  Then its teeth snagged his collar, catching flesh, and he hit out, hard and blind, and the dog bounced up, scrambling through the open passenger side window. Where the roof should have been, a square of sky.

  He sat there for a while, head wound stiffening, water pooling feebly round one ankle. He would die of boredom here before anything else. Hauling himself upright, he followed the dog out of the window of the wildly tilted ute. When he jumped down, the water came to his knees. The sun was breaking through, the new creek already drying up. The sky above, blue and blue. On and on.

  Leaving everything in the ute, even his shoes, he took the old knotted pillow slip and the gun out of the tray. Walked off in no direction, the dog close at heel. Above a ridge, a gravy-coloured house. Just as he was pivoting away again, thinking people, farmers, unwanted cups of tea, sun snagged on a broken window and he saw the big hole in the roof. A lost place then, hunkered down against land and sky.

  He followed the remains of a concrete path leading to a gate connected to nothing except its posts. Levering it open against tall swards of grass, he spotted something dark, winding, rust coloured. Brought his bare foot down hard but it was just an old radiator hose. There was something else though, some older deeper danger, brewed here in this sullen triangle of outhouse, water tank, ancient Hills hoist. An imminence, a fester just before the bleed.

  Even the dog could feel it, its wry little body straining toward the weedy darkness under the house. A shape in the window of the outbuilding, sketched by wind and cobweb. A squat man, one arm flung out. Just an old mangle, boiled and grey. On the broken flyscreen door of the house, a bellied imprint, from someone who must have stood there, day after day, waiting for life to come home.

  The front door gave with a shove. The dog paused again on the threshold, one foot cocked, all its hackles up. Snakes, mice. Perhaps some skittering, yellow-eyed notion of what he was about to do.

  Stepping in, he stood swaying between glare and gloom, waiting for his eyes to adjust. A laminex table. A Bakelite phone. An old wood stove, like Mam used to have. He passed through, vague and tender as a ghost. Pantry fly wire crumbled at a touch. Everything in the cupboards left from some frozen moment in the 1970s. Lyle’s Treacle, Parisian Essence, Keen’s Mustard, labels unreadable under rust and drips. A museum to his childhood, as if the place had been waiting here for him, slumbering in golden syrup haze. Near the sink, a tin of creosote which hadn’t won its battle with the ants. A feather duster, a wooden spoon. A leather belt. Ordinary things, fat with old fear.

  Beyond the kitchen, a tiny lounge room, hot and dark. The windows were boarded up. In the far corner, a bulky shape complete with head sat in a chair. Maybe newspapers, maybe just the missing shade from that broken lamp. He backed off, angling through gloom to the bright bedroom, a hot and private space. Two single beds, with orange covers full of holes. Laid out on one was a man’s suit with wide lapels, complete with a fat blue tie. The clothes had rotted away, revealing a mice nest in the mattress, weaved with leaves and droppings, mouldered to the texture of hair. As he walked away, a shirt arm fell in a clump to the floor.

  In the last room, a sleep-out made from what used to be the old wrap-around verandah, all glass and sun, he found a wardrobe, overturned, like a shot elephant. Nothing else. Wind rattled the louvres, scouring the space with heat and light. He kept walking, as if he must complete the circuit, obedient to the strange electricity of the place. As if this house was a map to somewhere, a room as yet unseen. He found himself back where he’d started, at the bellied wire of the front door. Nothing. Nowhere else to go.

  The dog seemed to know it. It sat in the middle of the sleep-out floor, all that love in its eyes. And he understood it finally, all those men in the newspapers and on the radio and in family stories, all those wives and children, the axes, the knives, the guns. How impossible it was to leave love just sitting there, pouring out with nothing to catch it, and nowhere for it to go. ‘Sorry,’ he told the dog, and its ears pricked up. ‘Stay.’ And for once in its life, it did what it was told.

  He raised the gun. Breathing deep, squinting along the sight. Determined not to shut his eyes or look away. To receive this fully into his empty, useless heart.

  As he squeezed the trigger, a wet sounding click, there was a loud banging on the front door, and the dog bounded off with a joyful bark.

  ‘Hello? Anyone home?’ Home.

  A bearded man was peering in through the flyscreen, his big belly pressed against that old sag in the wire.

  ‘Hey mate. That your ute out front? Saw you go over. I was coming through ahead. You all right?’

  The man started pushing open the door. Seeing the blood on Ray’s face and shirt, the gun in his hand, he stepped back, making settling moti
ons with his hands. ‘OK. We’re good. Just came to check you’re OK.’

  Ray moved forward, but his legs went on him. He sat down on the top step, the wire door propped open against his body, his arms cradling the gun.

  ‘Want one?’ He was being offered a packet of Drum. ‘Looks like you might need it.’ Ray shook his head.

  Leaning back against the Hills hoist, the man started rolling up, eyeing the gun in Ray’s lap as he licked his Tally-Ho. Something steely and keen about him, despite the big belly and the little shorts, the Father Christmas beard.

  ‘What’s all that about?’ The man jerked his head at the gun. ‘You after pigs or something?’ Ray stared at his hands. ‘Roo then. Whatever it is, don’t reckon you’ll find it in there.’ He nodded back toward the house. The dog was frisking and play bowing before him, the man idly holding his hand out, the dog leaping up to lick his horny palm. Both of them seemingly immune to the evil of the place.

  ‘Might be stuck, eh. Look of them clouds.’ He squinted up, tobacco sprinkled in his big white beard. ‘Bloody river up ahead. Gail and I only just got through.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The bad bit. Ahead. How far?’

  The man made a creaky sound that was a laugh turning into a cough, buried in that long white beard. ‘Geez. Wouldn’t have a clue. Mileage has gone round so many times on my old girl, we’re back at the start.’ He scratched his head, staring up again. Clear sky above, thunderheads before and behind. ‘’Bout three tinnies ago?’