by Sarah Hay
‘What you doing?’ he asked. ‘Look like you waiting for something to come out and grab you.’ He squeezed her waist.
‘Which one do you think?’
‘That one up the end.’
She found a broom in the kitchen and swept the floor clean and took out the mattress and left it on the grass outside while Texas attended to the donkey, which was apparently the hot-water system. Despite its rather tangled mess of rusted pipes and the lever that turned the water on, the donkey worked wonderfully and she savoured every moment, shampooing her hair and scrubbing the dirt from her body. By early evening everyone had showered and there were clothes hanging from the line in the yard.
‘Getting ready for the rodeo,’ said Texas.
‘You didn’t tell me,’ she said.
‘Telling you now,’ he said cheerfully.
Texas She was sitting in the same place in the kitchen where she’d sat talking to Hans. It seemed so long ago. Cookie had cleaned it up and opened the shutters so there was more air; the fan swung lazily in the middle of the room, shifting the smell of cooking stew.
‘Looking forward to the rodeo, Cookie?’
‘Dunno, never been to one. Looking forward to a beer.’
‘Oh, I thought you’d done this for years.’
‘My first season.’
‘Would you do it again?’
‘Yeah maybe.’ He looked up from the pot on the stove. ‘Depends on the blokes you work with. This mob been pretty good. I used to cook for . . . Well let’s just say . . . most of them were bastards. Besides this job it’s sort of interesting too. Get to see a bit of the country. You know. What about you?’
‘Oh,’ she began but then realised she didn’t have an answer. She hadn’t thought of there being an end. But it didn’t matter because Texas walked in, wearing a clean shirt and jeans. His hair was still wet. He sat down beside her.
‘Here, move over.’
She moved along a bit but not too far, suddenly warm and receptive, anticipating the touch of his arm on her skin. She wondered if it was the same for him. The flywire door swung open again and their eyes were drawn to a man in a singlet and shorts, with tattoos the same shade of blue as his clothing covering both arms. He had a long ginger beard that grew past the neckline of his top.
‘Goodonyer,’ he nodded and walked across to the sink.
He turned on the tap and rinsed a mug of water before filling it up and bringing it to his mouth. He turned to face them, leaning against the bench.
‘So youse having a bit of a spell here?’
‘Yeah, going in for the rodeo tomorrow,’ said Texas.
‘Wouldn’t mind doing the same. Got to get this road finished by the end of next week. Bloody slow going mate. All that breakaway country, terrible stuff.’
He’d been looking at Texas but he directed the last part of his conversation towards her. She wasn’t sure where to look.
Texas got up from the table and poured himself some tea.
‘You stay here much?’ the grader driver asked. Before anyone could answer he continued. ‘There’s something funny going on. You know every time I get back in here. It’s always the same thing. There’s a bloody bullet shell left on my swag. Like someone’s having a joke. But as far as I can tell there ain’t no one around.’
She looked over at Texas. His eyes were on his tea as he returned to his seat.
‘Dunno mate,’ said Cookie. ‘We just got here.’
The grader driver’s name was Plug and he joined them all for some of Cookie’s stew. It seemed like he’d done everything, been everywhere across the top half of Australia. She was sick of the white neon light. When Plug glanced at her, which was every now and then, she thought his eyes looked strange, like the eyes of a bull that was cornered, especially after he returned from a quick trip outside which he did too many times for her to think he was just going to the toilet. She wanted to be alone
Texas with Texas. Maxwell and Gary were the first to leave. Tommy and Peter smoked and drank their tea. Jimmy sat quietly and Cookie had his feet up on a chair. She took her plate across to the sink, washing and drying it, then turned around, hoping to catch Texas’s eyes, but he was talking about bull catching. The other man, Plug, was watching instead. She went to Texas’s side and placed her hand on his shoulder and murmured that she was going to bed.
The bedroom was lit by a single bulb in the middle of the ceiling. She checked the corners of the room and peered inside the broken door of the chipboard wardrobe. She unrolled their swag on the floor, thinking the bed was too small for both of them, and decided anyway that she preferred the thin mattress they had been using. She turned off the switch beside the door and on the other side was a small window with louvres through which she could see the darkness that was punctured by light, which produced night shadows inside the room. She slipped between the sheets, her body like silk, almost unrecognisably clean. The generator spluttered and died. There was the sound of boots scratching the concrete outside the door and the shape of a head filled the window and then stayed there. She was about to call out and then something stopped her. She became very still, her arms tight beside her, feeling vulnerable, so far down. And then the shape moved away.
Texas was outside the door and his boots clunked against it as he pulled them off. The door opened and closed behind him.
‘Someone was out there,’ she said.
‘Yeah?’ He was pulling off his jeans and his shirt. They fell to the floor. He sat down on the edge of the swag. ‘I turn the plant off.’
‘It was that man. I don’t like him.’
‘Ah don’t worry about him. He’s a bit windy from being out here too long. Or maybe he drinking too much metho. He seeing things, you know. No bullet in his swag.’
He was beside her and they shared the same pillow, the lean length of him touching her.
‘What’s this?’
She laughed and turned towards him.
Later he sat up and fumbled for his clothing, finding the tobacco tin. When he’d rolled a smoke he struck a match, and the orange flare showed the shape of his mouth, his nose and the power of his arms. He lay back.
‘What do you mean, he drinks metho?’
‘Some fellas get a taste for it, you know. Methylated spirits.
Mix it sometimes with orange juice. Not good though. Make you go crazy.’
‘Have you ever drunk it?’
‘Maybe one or two times. When there’s no grog left.’
She took the cigarette from between his fingers and drew back on it, letting the smoke seep out and into the shaft of light from the window which crossed their bodies. They were uncovered and the light was a rectangular square and where it touched, their skin glowed.
‘Is Texas your real name?’
Texas ‘It’s one of them.’
‘What are the others?’
‘The name my father give me when I was born and my skin name in my mother’s language.’
‘Where do they live?’ She was suddenly curious and to soften the directness of her question, she turned sideways and traced a pattern on his chest with her finger, feeling the ridge of muscle beneath the skin.
‘My mother, she got a place in town and they’re going to build a house for her and my stepfather. My sister live there too. Her husband, he got a caravan out of town and sometimes she live there. My other sister’s with another family. Somewhere in Queensland.’
‘You don’t know where?’
‘They never told my mother. She went with some people who wanted her.’
‘What about your father?’
‘That old fella, he was a drover and then a horse landed on his leg and he was no good. Died in hospital. When I was at mission school. He gone when I got back.’
She thought about her own family. Her mother and father had met at college and were married by the time they finished. They’d always worked as teachers and they were home most afternoons after school. She couldn’t remember a time in her
childhood when they weren’t there. They would be missing her. And she wondered what her parents would think if they could see her now.
VI
The rodeo ground was on a flat beside a creek bed. Trucks were pulled up on the far side of some old timber yards and in front of them was a large ring of portable yard. Dust lay above it like brown smoke but it was too far away for them to see any animals. Station vehicles were arriving and people were setting up camp in groups. Texas drove past them and crossed the sandy creek to the other side where there were concrete shelters in which people seemed to live and then to the highway. They drove a mile or so along the bitumen road and turned off into a roadhouse.
‘Where we going to camp?’ asked Cookie when they pulled up in front of it.
The bluish-grey concrete between the fuel bowsers seemed to ripple in the heat.
‘Back at the ground. Just get some beer and some tucker here.’
The roadhouse door swung shut behind Laura. She felt disconnected from the garishness of packaged food, bags of Burger Rings and crisps hanging from hooks, and packets of coloured snakes and other sweets. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted any of it. The others ordered and waited at the counter while the shop owner brought out the cartons of beer.
‘You all right, love?’ said the owner.
‘Yes I’m fine. I’m with them.’
She decided on a pie and sauce. Everything was booked up to the station account.
Texas ‘They take it out of your wages when they get the account,’ said Cookie as he climbed back into the vehicle beside her.
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘Ain’t nothing for free round here,’ he continued.
The pie was too hot to hold and she put it up on the dashboard where it would probably get even hotter. Texas got in beside her. He had three cans in his hand and he handed her and Cookie one each and asked her to open his while he started the vehicle. The beer was warm.
‘Like this where you come from eh? Kimberley cool, beautiful,’ said Cookie.
‘There’s cold beer at the rodeo bar,’ said Texas and then took a long drink.
They returned to the rodeo ground and it seemed that the area was filling up quickly with people and vehicles. Texas left the track to drive alongside the creek, stopping beside a gnarly old coolibah tree that was set back a little from the trees on the bank. They were away from the action but at least there was some solid shade. They sat on their swags and ate and drank. The beer was starting to go to her head. Peter, Gary and Maxwell stood up together. One of them picked up a carton of beer and they all headed towards the trees, the opposite direction to the rodeo.
‘They got family across the creek,’ said Texas.
The hot easterly wind dropped and country and western music drifted across the flat along with the muffled sounds of someone talking into a loudspeaker. Every now and then a horn would sound. Tommy left, saying he was going to enter the bull ride. Cookie followed and then Jimmy.
‘C’mon then. Come and have a look eh?’
Texas placed his arm heavily across her shoulders. They walked awkwardly across the parched colourless grass, her footsteps not quite matching his and him leaning on her a little too much, carrying what was left of the carton under his other arm. The rodeo ring was surrounded by people, some peering through the railings, others on the top rail like rows of birds, clutching cans of beer. Brown hats, grey hats. She noticed an area further back, beneath a small stand of trees, where women sat on eskies around a fold-up table and small children were playing in the dirt.
There was a horse being saddled behind the rails on the far side of the ring. She recognised the words of a song playing. It was an Australian song: ‘I love to have a beer with Duncan’.
A voice over the loudspeaker interrupted the chorus, announcing the name of the next rider for the saddle bronc.
Metal clanged and the gate was released and a grey horse leapt sideways and the rider with it, his hat knocked from his head, arm raised in the air as he held on with the other, body thrusting forwards with the movement of the horse. From the comments around her, she learnt that the horse wasn’t performing, not fighting hard enough to rid the rider from its back.
‘See that strap under the tail? That’s the tickler. Make him buck,’ said Texas.
He opened another can. She drained hers and took the one he was offering.
Texas ‘Put your bloody hooks in,’ yelled someone to her right.
Another horse came out. The heat was leaching from her the energy she needed to stand. Sitting in the dirt, she could see between the rails but the angle was different. Texas’s jeans were dusty and the toes of his boots looked as though they’d been dipped in rust-coloured powder. The seat of her jeans would look the same. Waves of horses and riders rose and fell. Horses contorting, springing and twisting, the rider, like a rubber cowboy, flung in every direction and often into the dirt.
‘Kicked in the shoulder,’ said the voice over the loudspeaker. ‘And he’s up. He’s got the rodeo limp.’
Texas was leaning with his back to the rails, talking to some men in front of him. They were drinking beer. The empty carton lay in the middle of them. She pulled herself up and stood beside him. The three men glanced at her and then at Texas.
‘Going to get more grog,’ he said, leaning in to kiss her but missing her mouth.
She turned back towards the rodeo, holding the railing for support. She didn’t know how long it was that she stood there. The sun on her shoulders had lost its intensity and the event in the ring was now bareback riding. She wondered when it had started and why Texas wasn’t back. She turned away from the rodeo and walked towards the camp, staring into the glare of the sun, pulling her hat down to avoid it, thirsty and stiff, stepping carefully over the grass, avoiding the sticks that might trip her up. Tommy was sitting on his swag. Cookie was lying asleep in the dirt. Tommy looked up at her and grinned. A carton of beer was at his feet. He offered her one and she took it, sitting down on the swag beside the vehicle. It was cool in the shade of the leaves and light danced around the edges as a gentle breeze moved the branches about.
‘Cookie choked down pretty quick eh,’ said Tommy.
He was sitting on the edge of a rolled swag, elbows resting on his knees.
‘You seen Texas?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’ He took a drink from his can. ‘Might’ve been him in a car. A brown car, with a few other fellas and a nanny-goat mob.’
She frowned. Dribble was leaking out the side of Cookie’s mouth and little flies dipped in and out.
‘Maybe go fifty-fifty. With you, eh.’
‘What?’ she asked.
Tommy’s light-coloured shirt was streaked with sweat and it hung loosely from his skinny frame. For the first time she noticed a leather thong around his neck, fastened with the small head of a silver longhorn bull.
‘What?’ she asked again, something she didn’t want to know struggling to take shape in her head.
‘Yeah well. How about it? He’s not here, is he? Probably gone off with some other woman. Don’t have to tell him.’
His lower lip was wet with beer. She flung back at him the words he used so often, and in that moment it felt good to use them. They echoed in her head as she left, clasping the beer, holding it out in front so that she wouldn’t spill it. It was hard to determine the lie of the land when the light was fading and grass grew in such unpredictable shapes, but somehow she
Texas negotiated her way towards the rodeo bar which was now lit by a row of coloured light bulbs. The bar itself was surrounded by hessian so that she couldn’t see clearly, only the shapes of people inside. There was a small opening and men looked up from their drinks, she couldn’t see any women, and the men resembled Tommy, so she turned and walked out again. She drained the can in her hand and threw it in the dirt, trying to look purposeful and brave for the benefit of the people she passed.
She returned to the Toyota. A star had appeared between the
fork in the branches. There was someone in the dirt beside the vehicle. She moved quietly towards it and was relieved that it was Cookie, still sleeping, and that Tommy seemed to have gone. Where was Texas? How could he leave her like this? The darkness crowded around and forced itself on her and she was frightened. How he could love her, claim that she was his wife, and then leave her? She thought of other men, other boyfriends, and how she always knew when it was over. There was always some sign. But with Texas there had been nothing, no sign at all. If only she had her bus pass, her air ticket, her passport, but they were in the cupboard back at the station. She could walk out across the creek and to the highway where the roadhouse was, where the bus would pull in. She’d never run away from anything before, but she’d never felt like she didn’t have a choice before either. She must think of something, work out a plan. Her mind struggled to form an idea. All she could think of was lying down. She took her swag off the back of the Toyota. On her hands and knees, she pushed it under the vehicle and rolled it out behind the tyre. Hopefully they wouldn’t find her here. She must have slept because she didn’t hear anyone return; she woke when the darkness started to lighten behind her eyes and the smell of a campfire seeped into her consciousness.
Cookie was squatting over thin wisps of smoke, snapping twigs in half and arranging them carefully over fine licks of flame.
She moved out from under the vehicle. He looked up.
‘What were you doing under there?’ he asked.
He had a smudge of charcoal on his face, his lips were dry and his eyes squinted as though the light was too bright. She smiled a little sheepishly and when she stood up, her head ached. She realised she hadn’t even taken off her boots before she went to sleep.
‘Where’s Tommy?’
Cookie flicked his head to his left towards a canvas cocoon about twenty metres away from the vehicle.
‘Looks like he’s got company,’ he said.
‘Good,’ she murmured as she moved towards the fire.
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh nothing,’ she said.
