When he took the old Falcon ute out onto the salt and did burnouts, hacking up the thing he loved and hated most, he rolled the vehicle on its roof. Al found him, packed him off to hospital (which was no easy thing), called the wife in the city, and consulted with the doctor. Al told the doctor that he’d always wanted to go to America and that’s why he hung around such a loser. A real paranoid pisstank, was how Al described him.
*
He’d really only made a single friend in Ohio. And it was a strange sort of friendship – one where few words counted for many. And even that friend, Gus Gantry, right from the beginning, said, You don’t belong here.
Gus was a professor of history who’d written a major book on the American Civil War, then sat back on his laurels and made a career out of it. And that’s quoting Gus back to himself. Theirs became a friendship in which Gus spoke, or lectured, and he listened. His understandings of the interior workings of the United States of America were mediated through Gus’s words and ideas.
Their first encounter was Gus in a rocking chair on the verandah of the history faculty building; he was smoking a Cuban and sticking his boots out to block the door. Who are you? he’d asked.
I’m the new professor.
You mean the new part-timer from ‘dooooon underrrrr’?
Yep, that’s me.
You drink whisky? he’d asked.
This is a liberal campus, Gus had said, but it doesn’t really like outsiders if they don’t play their role as curios. You’re a curio. I advise you to follow Ohio State in the football and choose a baseball team as quickly as possible. Don’t ramble on about cricket. Those trees? Black walnuts – they stain everything. Get leaves late and lose them early. Yes, it’s nice at this time of year but it will get humid and electrical storms will have the power out more than on. And the winters are deadly. The weather comes off the Lakes. You’ll have to dig your way out after a heavy snowfall. If you hunt, you’ll find a niche. You don’t? I recommend you buy BB guns for those twin boys of yours to save face, and not much face at that. They can work up to the real thing. A good hunting rifle will get them real cred. More hunting rifles than handguns around here. Oh, and whisper in your wife’s ear that ‘successful’ and ‘competent’ are considered desirable traits in a woman, this being a ‘with-it’ liberal arts campus, but female ambition arouses suspicion and is frowned upon. Generally, it’s pretty easygoing if the students’ parents think they’re getting their considerable money’s worth, and we fawn over them when they come in on open days. Nothing much really happens unless a drinking ritual in the woods gets out of hand and there’s a deer ritualistically killed or a sex act performed without consent, though that’s all usually got around, one way or another. Or, of course, if war breaks out. War really rouses the community. Affairs among faculty are not uncommon though a little tricky when it comes to social gatherings – potlucks are de rigueur! You won’t be judged, but your skill at handling the social situation will be. Best thing is if one of you is going for it, ensure the other has something on the horizon. It all balances out in the end. Actually, we have fewer divorces than the national average. Which takes me back to the subject of war, he drawled. War. Yes, war gets the blood roused around here …
*
The medical team decided the new patient didn’t need airlifting or even driving to Perth, and kept him in bed staring out at the residue of lightning strike. When he was well enough, a nurse turned on the television. The ex-college professor, whose accent had a suspicious American twang to it, started gasping and choking and, despite the heat, clutching at blankets and pleading for warmth. Asked what was wrong, he pointed at The Simpsons and said, The dirty snow people. They are everywhere. I know, I know … I have studied them. My sons are enslaved to them, and my wife is their agent. She is spreading the word down here. I am no longer in a position to keep an eye on her. I abdicate all responsibility – the snow has gotten into the soil and the temperature is rising. The fallout is here like an alliance, deconstructing every last one of us, even the atoms in snow, the atoms in salt, the atoms in dirt.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Antipodes, Best Australian Stories 2013 (ed. Kim Scott), Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge) Anthology, Melbourne Review, Southerly, Warwick Review. With many thanks to Penelope Goodes for her editorial advice.
John Kinsella’s most recent volumes of poetry are The Vision of Error: A Sextet of Activist Poems (Five Islands Press, 2013) and Sack (Fremantle Press and Picador, UK, 2014). His collection, Jam Tree Gully (WW Norton, 2012), won the 2013 Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry. His volume of stories In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012) was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award. Tide, a collection of stories, was published by Transit Lounge in 2013. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, and Professor of Sustainability and Literature at Curtin University.
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