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by Ron Elliott

  Evelyn finally said, ‘You shot that guy in the park.’

  ‘I shot him in the groin actually. On the groin? Lovborg, in Hedda Gabler, shoots himself in the bar. We always liked that at school. Got all us girls tittering. He was shot in the bar.’

  ‘He was trying to protect us.’

  Adam stood in the street watching the garbage truck coming up out of the darkness yet again. He thought it had been only a few days ago. He recalled a dream of it too. He wondered if rubbish trucks came every night in the city. It whooshed and clanked towards him like his grunting metal nemesis. Its orange light whirled. Its rear crushed and ground and stank. As it reached him a diesel cloud spurted, blinding him with black smoke.

  ‘I can and I will,’ yelled Adam at the thing.

  ‘Good for you.’ The smoke cleared. The garbage girl stood in front of Adam smiling. ‘Is that for the bin, then?’

  Adam looked down to the battered box at his feet. ‘No. No,’ he managed to say.

  ‘Cool,’ she said and looked in the litter bin which was empty. ‘Way cool.’

  Adam put his foot on the box, thinking she might try to take it from him.

  She said, ‘Did you see the sky tonight? What a motherfuckin’ pumpin’ sunset.’ She turned to the departing garbage truck and chased the red glow of its tail-lights, yelling, ‘Frank, wait, you bastard.’

  Paul, the guy from next door, was standing on the pavement a couple of metres away, looking at Adam. He started walking. ‘Oh, neighbour guy. Just getting some milk. Want any?’ He kept walking past Adam and down the street. Adam watched him. He turned a few houses down, made a show of waving and pointing further down the road before he kept walking.

  Adam lifted the heavy package and rammed it into the empty litter bin. Then he ran. He ran past the garbage truck and the garbos. He ran past the bins waiting outside the flats. He ran past the cat and leapt through his open window.

  Inside, he grabbed the .303 and climbed up through the ceiling. There was no sign of Harry, so he climbed up onto the yacht. Harry and Mary were in the unfinished cabin, naked and fucking. Adam climbed onto the cabin roof and from there up into the rafters where he slithered through the gap in the tiles and so up and on top of the roof of the flats, dragging the rifle with him.

  Way downstairs Jane watched Paul through her binoculars. He had the box open and he was stroking the golden ball. He dragged it out of the bin and started to carry it up the hill.

  Jane turned from the window and picked up the zip gun from the couch. She began to insert a bullet. ‘We’ve got the package now.’

  ‘So you’ll let me go?’ asked Evelyn.

  Down in the street the garbage girl emptied the bin from flat one. There were a lot of leftovers and sawn bits of furniture and a McDonald’s bag. She noticed that flat two’s bin had lots of computer packaging and no food refuse. It was one of the things she liked doing, besides ragging on the truck drivers – reconstructing the people whose rubbish she collected. For instance, she knew that in flat three there lived a couple of prostitutes. Flat four was unoccupied. Elementary, my dear whatsaname.

  Baby was in the garden outside the open window, coiling, ready to spring once more.

  Chris wasn’t aware of that. He only had eyes for Antigone whose glorious neck feathers he was busy nuzzling. ‘You are the most beautiful bird I have ever seen in my life.’

  She pecked him on the chest a couple of times, but then looked up. ‘And after? Will you say that after ... this?’

  ‘There is no after. There is only this.’

  The garbage girl emptied her bin into the back of the garbage truck. The McDonald’s bag slithered into the chute towards the grinders.

  Adam lay in the prone position on the up slope of the roof, tracking Paul with the sights of the .303. He was from a farm. He’d grown up with guns. His finger was on the trigger. All he had to do was pull. Pull the trigger and finally act, taking control of his life and with one great act of power and violence, wipe away all the grovelling and fear and failure. All he had to do was kill Paul and become a hero and make whole his fractured psyche.

  Ego. Ergo. Time slowed. Adam’s id made his finger squeeze the trigger. At a fraction of a millisecond before that, his superego pulled the rifle forward and down.

  There was a bullet in the chamber and the shell detonation sent a nearby owl flapping into the air.

  The bullet hit the pavement at Paul’s feet, making him drop the box, which sent the golden ball rolling down the hill.

  The bullet flew up off the street and might have sailed safely into the sky, but for a quaint rooster-shaped weathervane atop a nearby house. Ping. The metal rooster spun wildly. It also sent the bullet ricocheting at an eighty-four degree angle onto the back metal of the garbage truck. Ping, the bullet sounded as garbage collectors dived for cover.

  Shatter went the lounge window of flat one as the slightly slowing .303 bullet entered Paul and Jane’s lounge room where it hit the side of the zip gun, which was pointed at Evelyn. Ping. Jane screamed in pain as her gun catapulted from her hand and into the screen of her computer. Thunk.

  It was from this moment that circumstance and coincidence combined with the hitherto rudimentary mathematics of projectile trajectory to affect the bullet’s path and life force.

  In Paul’s haste to abandon cooking and fetch the package he had left the fridge door a little ajar. The bullet hit the fridge door in the kitchen. Ping. The bullet bounced off the fridge door at such an improbable angle as to go exactly through the eyehole of flat one’s door and into the eyehole of the door to flat two. Phht. Phht.

  Which was a stroke of luck for the two canaries who were obliviously mating in one of the cages on the table. The bullet entered one end of a beach umbrella pole negligently lying on the table, exiting the other end as if it were a makeshift rifle barrel. Baby the cat had only then leapt at the cage of birds. She found the bullet, midair. Wwwaaa. Although a large number of calculable angles and losses of velocity and power would have suggested the heavily dented bullet might be about to simply drop, it still had sufficient force to carry Baby out the window and into the garden. Thud. Baby and the bullet were dead.

  Adam lay on the roof. He had failed again. It was as though he were cursed. He rolled over on his back and looked up at the sky. ‘Why, why?’ he yelled, not seeing an owl circling there.

  The garbage truck exploded in a white conflagration. The surrounding letterboxes were pulverised. Windows shattered and walls crumbled as blast force and giant chunks of hot metal sprayed.

  Harry and Mary fell away from each other in the cabin of the yacht in awe as Adam clambered past.

  Chris and Antigone disengaged. ‘Holy fuck.’

  Antigone’s cage knocked over in the concussion. ‘Yes, it was.’

  Adam slid down the ladder and raced for his smashed front door and the fire beyond.

  Paul chased the golden ball all the way down the street and halfway across the intersection, where he skidded to a halt when he saw it come to rest at the feet of a policeman who had come out of the McDonald’s there.

  The cop wasn’t paying any attention to the ball or to Paul. He was looking up the street where various bonfires were punching holes into the night. ‘It looks like Mary’s place,’ he called.

  To the policeman behind Paul, who had just grabbed him by the windcheater. ‘So, son, looks like the ball from the museum robbery. Got anything to say about that?’

  Adam waded through a torrent of water pouring from upstairs where Mary’s and Harry’s pipes must have burst. Once he’d fought through the deluge, he pushed through shattered wood and fallen bricks into what was once Paul and Jane’s flat.

  ‘Evelyn! Evelyn!’

  ‘I’m here,’ came a weak voice.

  Adam pushed through the smoke and the growing flames, the dampness of his clothes protecting him. He found her under the computer desk, diving down next to her. She was smouldering. ‘Evelyn,’ he coughed. ‘I found you.’

/>   ***

  The next day, the garbage truck still lay like a big burst tin can in the street metres from the burnt out Commodore and Rover.

  Adam stood watching a giant crane hoisting Harry’s nearly finished yacht up above the missing roof. Harry must have been standing on some surviving joists. He directed the operation with one arm around Mary’s shoulder.

  Adam went into what was left of the vestibule. He was covered in soot and dirt and plaster dust and something that smelled like chickpea curry. He found an eviction notice nailed to the doorjamb of his flat, citing theft of private property, being one garden umbrella as the reason. It was Friday. Adam had been in the city for five days and already he had been evicted. He thought he had probably lost his job too.

  He didn’t go into flat two or up to flat four. Instead, he went to the hospital to see Evelyn. If he had gone in, he might have seen Chris going to the open door of his cage to peer out at the world.

  ‘Are you going?’

  Chris turned around and went back to Antigone, running his beak along the back of her neck. ‘Are you kiddin’? I’m a cage bird. I’d die out there.’

  At the hospital, Adam found Evelyn’s bed empty. He eventually found her in Howard’s room. She was sitting in the visitor’s chair by Howard’s bed.

  ‘Evelyn,’ he said from the door.

  She looked pleased to see him. ‘Adam! Have the police found Jane?’

  ‘No. Escaped, or atomised.’

  She turned and patted Howard’s leg. ‘Look at my hero here. He took a bullet for me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Evelyn whispered loudly, ‘They’ve sown it back on but his penis might never get hard again.’

  ‘Well, you know, they might be wrong,’ said Howard forlornly.

  ‘Oh, you.’ Evelyn reached out and tweaked Howard’s nose.

  Adam turned away and nearly bumped into a girl in a wheelchair.

  ‘I got burned,’ said the garbage collector girl.

  ‘Me too,’ said Adam.

  She sat in the wheelchair with both her arms completely straight out and bandaged in a kind of ready but empty hug.

  DOUBLE OR NOTHING

  For the first time in our history we are located in the right part of the world at the right time.

  –Wayne Swan, Australian Treasurer, 2011, post-GFC1.

  Dave Kelly was not in the middle of nowhere. He was somewhere; somewhere between Newman and Marble Bar in the far north of Western Australia. Marble Bar is the hottest town on the planet. The earth is red and black and so filled with minerals that working there is like standing on the hotplate of a barbecue.

  Dave crouched on top of a bullet hole–riddled wire mesh telephone cage repairing the antenna next to the solar panel. It was midday and the solar panel thrived. So did the litter of flies on Dave’s sweaty shirt. They gathered and bit through the fabric and then fought to get to his mouth and eyes. The husk of a dead kangaroo lay across the road, ignored by the flies now that Dave had come along, like a godsend.

  Dave felt the screwdriver start to slip through his sweat-slick fingers and leaned to catch it but missed and it dropped and disappeared in the soft red dust below. ‘Shit,’ he said as he stood. That’s when he saw the jeep coming towards the T-junction where he was working. It was going like the clappers, trailing dust and heading straight at Dave. Dave looked at his Telstra van parked by the solar telephone, then up at the approaching jeep which showed no signs of slowing. If Dave was a betting man he might have tried to calculate the odds of a vehicle collision between the only two cars within a three hundred kilometre radius.

  The jeep tried to turn right without braking, and began to slide sideways. Dave felt a little surge of excitement as he looked to where he could jump to avoid being skittled, but the front wheels of the jeep caught as it cut across the corner and growled away, showering Dave in a wave of thick, choking dust. So he didn’t see the crash. He just heard the unmistakeable thump and the sad, empty clatters.

  ***

  Dave’s van skidded in its own slew of dust coming to rest a hundred metres up the highway.

  The jeep lay on its back, one wheel still spinning. A mobile phone was ringing amidst the bits of luggage and food and broken glass. Dave found the driver, his legs pinned under the jeep. There was a lot of blood and no pulse. The flies were already gorging. The mobile phone stopped ringing, so the only sound was the slow gurgle of liquid escaping from some ruptured engine part.

  Dave looked along the debris trail that led from the jeep to a shattered tree stump near the road. The unlucky bastard had hit the only tree in a thousand kilometres. Dave dialled on his Telstra sat phone.

  Something flashed in the sun. Dave walked towards it.

  ‘Newman Police Station.’

  ‘Yeah mate. Car accident. About a hundred and fifty K north of you.’

  ‘Near the phone box?’

  ‘Yeah, very near the phone box. Anyway, the driver’s dead.’

  ‘Oh. Okey-doke. No rush then, eh. Be up in a few hours. Don’t touch anything.’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’

  Dave looked down at an aluminium case. He looked back to the man lying under the jeep and to the desultory scatter of his personal effects. He looked out at a stretch of temporarily unmined emptiness of the North-West. Maybe it was the heat and its dry crushing weight. Maybe it was that the dead man looked vaguely like Dave himself. Maybe it was the lazy backhanded bad luck of the tree stump. Whatever the cause, Dave was given to an uncharacteristic moment of soul searching.

  ***

  ‘You know,’ said Dave to Terry on the phone later, ‘I thought of Maverick.’

  ‘The film Maverick?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s sitting on a horse with a noose around his neck in the middle of the desert with the rattlers slithering out of the sack towards the horse’s feet, and he thinks the first lines he says in the film...’

  ‘He thinks he should give up gambling?’

  ‘Not at all. No. His voiceover says, “It had been just a shitty week for me from the beginning.”’

  ***

  Dave was installing a wall phone in a perfectly air-conditioned executive apartment kitchen.

  The owner stood talking on her mobile in the living room. The curtains were open and she looked out at sailboats on Perth’s Swan River as though they were all hers. ‘I don’t care, Richard. Sell everything European. Yes and German. Even German. They may get dragged down into this. I want to lay low until this new meltdown finishes ... melting.’

  Dave checked the dial tone and gently replaced the landline telephone in its new cradle on the wall. He looked over to the lady, ignoring him as she listened to her mobile. She was dressed in a business skirt and blouse. Diamonds sparkled from her ears. More diamonds winked and twinkled from around her neck. The ‘at home’ jewellery.

  She was in her mid-forties and in pretty good shape, but she had one of those small mouths which seem best shaped to indicate angry disappointment. ‘And dump Asia. No, Richard. Not the Chinese. They don’t count as Asian. I know the Japanese never used to be considered Asian either, but have you seen their GDP to national debt ratio?!’

  Dave headed for the bathroom. It was a palace designed for an Ancient Greek. There was slate with gold trim and a wall-sized mirror. Dave lifted the phone and heard the dial tone purring again.

  He went into the bedroom, frightening himself as he confronted two Daves stepping towards him. The lady sure liked her mirrors. And her telephones.

  The bed was unmade and strewn with light filmy lingerie. Dave picked up the telephone on the bedside table, checking the dial tone there. She liked her diamonds too. There was a chunky diamond bracelet on the bedside table. Dave picked up his tools from the table and two pieces of snipped wire he’d missed from the installation.

  ‘Richard, am I going to have to spell everything out to you every step of the way this morning? I don’t care whether it’s night there. It’s morning here. Don’t be pedantic.
The Indians are usually Asian but just might be a little Chinese right now.’

  Dave closed the bedroom door, silencing Richard’s dimness about economic racial profiling.

  He picked up the bedside telephone and dialled. Daryl answered at the other end, saying the company name, ‘Sure Thing, You Betcha.’

  ‘Daryl, can I talk to Mungo?’ asked Dave, keeping his voice down.

  Daryl was one of Mungo’s enforcers. He made up for his lack of physical power with hard work. ‘If you haven’t got it, Dave, Mungo’s not gunna be happy.’

  ‘Yeah, well I want everybody to be happy. So, can I talk to him?’

  Dave picked up the bracelet and twirled it around his index finger watching the pretty sparkles while he waited for Mungo. There was a book on the table. Ellora’s Cave. Beg. There was a huge-chested black man kneeling before a woman’s shoulder.

  ‘Is this good news, Dave?’ asked Mungo at the other end of the phone.

  ‘It’s going to be excellent news, Mungo. Five hundred on Denmark Prince. That’s today at Flemington.’

  ‘How is this good news, Dave?’

  ‘That’s five thousand right there, only hours away.’ Dave watched himself in one of the mirrors. Saw his face bright and happy and convincing.

  ‘Which, even if it comes in, Dave, isn’t enough, is it?’

  ‘No, but I get to keep my legs for a few more weeks while I work on the rest, don’t I?’

  ‘See, there you go doing it again, Dave. You think you’re making a joke, but what you’re really doing is describing exactly what’s going to happen.’

  Dave heard a noise and turned to find the woman in the bedroom, her little mouth crumpling smaller.

  Dave turned back to the phone and said, ‘No Terry, it’s still feeding back with the echo. I’ll try calling you back from one of the other lines.’

  ‘Kelly!’ yelled the phone as Dave hung it up and then stood to smile at the owner.

  ‘Looks like I still got a couple of glitches to iron out.’ Dave smiled again and then politely smoothed the sheets where he’d been sitting.