* * *
The animal rose and watched the wagon trundle into the distance, the grass at the roadside whipping its panels as it went. The animal had climbed high into the mountain in pursuit of a rosella whose flight had been broken and lopsided, and when the car arrived and the noise began it had found itself stranded, unable to return to the ground unseen. Wary of telltale movement, it had settled into the shade in the hope of disappearing, and dropped its chin on its paws. Only its eyes shifted, watching always the progress of the dog in the scrub. It heard, but did not react to, the sound of the rosella scraping the mountain’s surface, the scrabble of claws on the rock. Its nose flexed at the scent of petrol, but this was a familiar thing; the yowl of the chainsaw made it tighten every muscle but its instincts kept it lying still. It did not twitch when the dog turned and looked hard in its direction. Stillness and invisibility had saved the animal before; if it had to, it would run for the caves and crevices, and only as a last resort would it turn to fight. The dog stared for a prickling moment, its paws planted square on the earth. Then it dipped its head and shook itself, and ploughed on through the undergrowth.
Now the disturbance was over and the animal stood and yawned, blinking as the light slanted in its eyes. From here it could see a long way, over the ribbon of highway and into the farmlands beyond. It pivoted its ears, seeking the location of the struggling bird. In several sure leaps it surged to the flat of the mountain and continued on its way.
The construction of the Cultural Centre took two days longer than Gosling had predicted and it was the end of the week before the crew packed the equipment to leave. They went to the pub to mark the occasion and invited Satchel along with them. They drank for several hours and some of the men grew nostalgic and maudlin. They spoke of the building as if they had lived and loved within its walls: they forgot how often it had made them curse, how they’d snagged their flesh on its splintery beams, how they’d slipped on the wood in the saturated morning and sweated on the rooftop each day. Satchel sat with Gosling, his chair tipped against the wall. He agreed to play a game of doubles and he and his partner held the table for three rounds until his partner potted the black. He was glad to return to his seat then, and Gosling bought him another beer. The men pushed coins into the jukebox, punching up songs that were played here over and over again. Songs about wars, about women, about times being hard.
Gosling asked him, “You still considering what I told you? That job up north?”
“Yeah, I’m considering.”
“You tell your mother about it?”
Satchel took a lingering sip of his beer. “No, not yet. She’s had enough to think about, these last few days. She’s started a new job.”
“Your daddy not making it easy for her?”
“He’s being quiet.”
Gosling nodded sympathetically. “Sometimes quiet is worse than noise. Well, don’t rush it. Tell her when the time is right.”
Satchel looked away from the foreman, to the gaudy beating chest of the jukebox. An electrician named Jamie caught up a chair and dumped it and himself in the line of Satchel’s vision. Jamie was young, the baby of the crew, gangly and brash and often in trouble: he reminded Satchel of a pup that has not yet learned it shouldn’t snap at the sheep, in danger of termination if it didn’t learn soon.
“Satchy.”
“Hey, Jamie.”
“Good times, eh? Good times.” The beer sloshed in the electrician’s glass, heaving towards the rim. He lit a cigarette as thin as himself and blew out ringed puffy clouds. “Listen, Satchy – your old man’s a mechanic, isn’t he?”
“He used to be.”
“But he fixes stuff? He fixes stuff for people? That’s what I heard.”
“It depends what’s broken,” said Satchel. “He doesn’t fix everything.”
Jamie’s head wonked up and down. “Yeh,” he said, “yeh. Yeh, I understand that. What – he fixes stuff like generators? He do them?”
“Sometimes,” said Satchel.
Gosling had leaned across the table and was listening, a fist wedged under his jaw. Satchel had heard him say that the young electrician had taken volts to the head. Now, “Why don’t you tell us what your problem is,” he suggested, “and forget all your bullshit?”
Jamie balked, and scratched his scalp nervously, swaying in his chair. He sucked his cigarette. “My dad’s got a knackered generator,” he said. “Broke down about a week ago. Making it rough for him. We got a guy in to look at it and he says it’ll cost two or three hundred to get the thing going. But I heard that Satchel’s old man fixes stuff. And that he doesn’t like being paid.”
“You like being paid for the work you do, James?”
“…Yeh.”
“You do?”
Jamie’s yellow nails fumbled at his face. “Yeh, Gos.”
“Then what makes you think Mr O’Rye doesn’t like being paid for the work he does?”
The electrician’s lips quivered. “…That’s just what I heard, Gos.”
“You heard wrong, then.”
“I mean – what I meant was – he does it out of the goodness of his heart. He does stuff because he likes doing stuff. And he likes just to be paid – a token. You know, you pay him, but not so much he’ll be offended. That’s what I meant, Gos.”
“Jesus, you’re a pathetic little weed, aren’t you.”
Jamie widened his eyes at the foreman and smiled jerkily. Satchel drained his beer and set the glass down. “I’ll ask him, Jamie,” he said. “Your dad still on that property near the rail crossing?”
“That’s the one, Satchy. Gate’s opposite the crossing, you can’t miss it. Old milk can for a letterbox. Thanks, Satchy. Thanks a lot. I owe you one. You know, the farm’s not going good these days, it’s a bad time for everyone.”
Jamie jumped to his feet and scooped his chair under his arm; his smile faltered when Gosling said, “James. You tell your daddy to pay Mr O’Rye properly, hear me? I know your dad, and he’s not so bad off as some. Mr O’Rye isn’t a charity.”
“Right. Right, Gosling—”
“Jamie,” said Satchel, and the young man turned to him a face full of stressful panic. “Don’t give any money to my father, all right? Don’t even mention it to him. He doesn’t like talking about it. When you’ve got the money, you come and find me, and I’ll take care of it.”
Jamie giggled. “Oh, right, I get you. Give you the money and it’s drinks all round. Yeh, I get it, Satchy.”
“Just do what you’re told, you moron,” snapped Gosling. Jamie nodded repeatedly, backing steadily away. Gosling shook his head wearily. “If I was his father,” he said, “I’d have drowned him at birth.”
“You’re a hard man, Gosling.”
“I can’t abide a fool, that’s my problem. And everywhere I look, I see more than enough of them. I don’t mean people like your father, Satchel, I mean the genuinely stupid, the ones born that way. Now get me another drink before I remember I’m unemployed. Better get yourself one too.”
Satchel pushed himself from his chair and went to the bar. He passed the electrician, who stepped aside for him and said, “Thanks again, Satchy, I owe you. I mean it, you know. We’ve got to help each other out, don’t we? Any time you need a favour, you just ask me. Anything I can do, I’ll do.”
“Yeah,” said Satchel, “I know.”
At home that night, when the advertisements came on TV, his mother took her attention from the screen and said, “So the work’s finished now, is it?”
“It is for me.”
“Does Gosling think there will be anything else? Something for you to do?”
“No,” said Satchel. “It’s quiet at the moment.”
“Oh, well.” She was sitting on the couch, her hands spread like bird’s wings on her lap. Before her skin had started to crack, she would knit while watching television, turning out cardigans for William and booties for local fêtes: but it hurt her to hold the needles now, and her hands, uno
ccupied, twisted and fidgeted.
William was sitting at the table, framing his latest painting. He was pretending he couldn’t hear their conversation. Satchel had told him about the ailing generator and he had heard that, had rung Jamie’s father immediately, eager to be of assistance. William liked to feel needed. He delivered wood to the elderly and cleaned blocked drains for them, he’d paint their outdoor furniture and dig holes to plant their trees. He had badgered the Town Council to give him the task of driving the school bus because the responsibility would make him useful: since he did not want the wage that came with it, they gave him the job gladly. When he decided the students would learn more from a day at the mountain than they would cloistered in the classroom, the authorities were not so pleased.
But he didn’t like to hear his wife and son discussing work, and never made inquiries about how their day had been. He turned, now, and held up the picture for their inspection. “What do you think of that?” he asked.
“Lovely,” said Laura.
William gazed at his handiwork, smiling proudly to himself.
Chelsea rang to ask if he would take her to the mountain and he agreed to pick her up in the morning. The station wagon was difficult to start and Moke was stubborn about vacating the seat within it, so he was running late and flustered when he finally pulled up alongside her, standing on the corner of her street where she’d wandered while she waited. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s this bloody car—”
She bundled herself into the passenger seat; he noticed, with some trepidation, that she carried a sheaf of papers. “Can’t your dad fix it for you?”
“He could, but he won’t. He went off cars a year or so ago. He’ll still fix machines and engines – tractors, things like that – but not cars any more.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.” He checked his mirror and nudged the wagon onto the road. “I suppose they remind him of what he used to do. Back when he was a sinner. Who knows. No one knows what he thinks.”
Chelsea said nothing for the rest of the journey but sat up straight and primly, staring out the window as if what she saw was very interesting. She’d dressed with determination against the blustery cold: she wore a scarf, a jacket and a pair of woolly gloves, and she had a knitted beanie clamped down on her head. She looked, to Satchel, like a chubby, multicoloured, rather grave snowman. She looked like she considered the weather a deadly enemy. She smelled pungently of lavender, and he imagined her dousing herself with powder until her flesh was pure white. He rubbed the windscreen with the cuff of his sleeve, squinting to see through the haze.
They turned off the old road and the mountain hunched in front of them, its flat peak swathed by fog that was thick and smoky, as if the rock was smouldering. Satchel wondered if anyone other than himself regularly used this uncomfortable, overgrown, almost obliterated track, and what they would think if they saw him and Chelsea Piper travelling along it together. “I came out here yesterday,” he told her, more to break the silence than anything, “for wood. I didn’t see anything. Moke scares everything away.”
“Dogs,” she said solemnly, “were used to catch Tasmanian tigers.”
“Really?”
“Farmers used dogs to track them, and attack them. Dogs killed lots of thylacines, but I couldn’t find a word about a thylacine killing a dog. Tigers lived all over Australia for thousands of years, but it was the dingo that wiped them out on the mainland. Dingoes are just like dogs, pretty much.”
Satchel rolled the wagon into the misty clearing and pulled up the brake. Chelsea swiped her glove around the window and gazed through the glass.
“Here? This is where you saw it?”
“Just over there.”
“It’s the right sort of place,” she acknowledged thoughtfully. “Tigers lived where there was scrub, so they could have shelter and hide, but they needed open land too, for hunting. It’s quiet here, and safe. It’s in the boundaries of the National Park so it’s protected, and it’s a long way from the picnic ground.”
“No dingoes, either.”
“No, dingoes have never lived here.”
“Probably some feral dogs, though.”
She frowned at him, her brows dipping behind her glasses. “I’ve never seen a feral dog around here. Not even once. If I were a thylacine, this is where I’d want to live.”
Satchel opened his door and trudged through the bracken, the air like a razor against his throat. Chelsea followed him, fussing with her papers. “Here,” he said, halting. “This was where it was, when I saw it. It stepped around this clump of grass and stopped, and looked at me.”
Chelsea picked her way to the spot and crouched, examining the blades and the wet earth. Satchel looked down at the vibrant colours of her beanie and wondered how long she would force him to stay here, shivering. She tilted her head and stared at him, as if she had heard the thought. She asked, “Don’t you think it’s amazing, Satchel? If what you saw was a thylacine, you saw something that is meant to be extinct.”
“I saw something,” he answered, “but maybe I imagined it.”
Chelsea puckered her face. “You didn’t even know what a thylacine looked like, but you saw one anyway. You told me you had seen a dog, and you knew you hadn’t imagined it. You believed in what you were seeing, when you thought all you saw was a dog.”
He couldn’t think of a reply to that. Chelsea straightened, smearing raindrops from her gloves, and headed back for the clearing. “Dingoes never got to Tasmania,” she told him over a shoulder; she had to lift her feet high to clear the spikes of the grass, and her smooth-soled riding boots slid on the moss of buried rocks. “The thylacine did, because some of them crossed the landbridge that used to hook Tasmania to the mainland. But the dingo never crossed it because the sea levels rose about thirteen thousand years ago, and the landbridge disappeared into the Strait before the dingo reached it. Tasmania became an island, then. Thylacines went extinct on the mainland about three thousand years ago, but they survived in Tasmania because there were never any dingoes there, to compete.”
“You’ve been doing a lot of work.”
“Yes,” she said, standing still, “it’s given me something to do. Even if it wasn’t a tiger, it’s given me something to do.”
He nodded, understanding, but still he was surprised: she had never seemed to have enough interest in living, to ever find herself bored. He knew that boredom was a continual and grinding burden in a small town, and that it pressed most heavily on girls. Young men brightened their days with sport that was played with great drama and seriousness – when Leroy’s doctor told Leroy that his football days were over, that his knee could stand no more hideous dives, the town had gone into mourning for the loss of its best rover in decades – and as they got older they could swap the playing field for the local hotel, where they would find their former team mates reliving shameful robberies and sublime victories. Young women, however, were not encouraged to thus enliven their existences. Many of them left school early, and held part-time jobs at supermarkets and Bargain Bins until they were sacked at eighteen by bosses unwilling to pay them an adult’s wage. Many, still children, produced children themselves, and lived tired, run-down lives in run-down, tired houses. Chelsea did not live such a life, but he wondered what she did do, in the long hours between taking the students to their school and bringing them home again. “I wanted to find out what happened to them,” she was explaining, and he nodded distractedly. “When something doesn’t exist any more, you can forget it was ever here at all. You forget that it was real. It becomes something make-believe. Like a unicorn. But the tiger wasn’t a pretend animal, it was real. I wanted to know why it isn’t supposed to be here.”
She sat on the edge of the chopping stump, which bore the fresh gouges of the chainsaw’s whirling teeth, and hung her head. “I’ll probably end up making an idiot of myself,” she said. “I shouldn’t have even bothered. And – I shouldn’t have dragged you out here, you’re c
old—”
“I’m all right,” he said. He brushed a rock clean of leaves and spider skins and sat down, clutching his freezing hands together and crimping his toes in his boots. “Keep going.”
“Are you sure? Because I’d understand, if you want to leave—”
He shook his head but she eyed him anxiously. He waited, and she looked again at the earth. “The thylacine must have been happy in Tasmania,” she said eventually. “It was the top carnivore. The books say there probably weren’t very many of them because Tasmania is small, and a small place can’t have many big predators or it runs out of prey. But the tigers lived, and nothing bothered them, and they survived.”
She paused to consult the papers she had wedged in her jacket pocket, reacquainting her memory with the facts. It must have taken her hours to fill the lines with her bulging, babyish handwriting and he pictured her at the library, her hair piled around her hands as she wrote, the creases in her forehead denting deeper and deeper. The big town’s library was housed in a sprawling, gracious building; when Satchel was a boy it had regularly sent a bus full of books to his town, for the borrowing ease of the locals, and its arrival had been a highlight of the week. The service, however, had been discontinued years ago. “An explorer named Abel Tasman landed on the island in 1642,” Chelsea was saying. “No one had discovered the place before him, so he called it Van Diemen’s Land. They changed its name later, to Tasmania. When Tasman’s sailors went on to the land they saw paw prints that looked like they’d been made by a tiger, and that’s how the animal got its name.”
“And because of the stripes?”
“And maybe because it looks a bit like a cat. They gave the thylacine a lot of different names. They called it a hyena, and a marsupial wolf, and a striped wolf, and a zebra opossum. They wanted to make it be like other animals, ones that they recognized. But it wasn’t like other animals. It looks like a dog because it evolved the way the dog did, living the same lifestyle and using the same skills, but it wasn’t related to dogs, or cats, or anything. It was just what it was, the way it needed to be.”
Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf Page 7
