by Tony Birch
‘That’s four kangaroos,’ I counted, as Gwen swore to herself and the force shook the car.
Rachel slapped me on the shoulder. ‘You’re horrible. All those animals are dead and you don’t care.’
‘I care. Jesus, Rache, I didn’t run over them. But it’s my job to look after the body count.’
Gwen told me to stop teasing her.
‘I’m not. I can’t help it if the road’s full of dead animals. If she don’t like it she can keep her eyes shut.’
I leaned over the seat and looked at the speedo. We were down to thirty on a single-lane stretch of the highway. There were a lot of cars and trucks coming towards us, and a long line of traffic tailing us with no chance of overtaking. Drivers had started tooting their horns. When a car did get to pass, the driver would pull a face, or stick a finger in the air. Gwen was now grinding her teeth and sweating like a pig. She looked from the side to the rear-view mirror, not sure what to do.
‘Hey, Jesse, do you reckon we should pull over and let these cars by?’
It was a bad idea. We’d be a sitting duck for anyone following us.
‘If we stop we mightn’t get the car started again. I think we should keep going.’
‘What about if I keep the motor running. Maybe that’ll work?’
‘I still don’t like it.’
‘Well, we’re hardly going anyway.’
She spotted a sign up ahead – ‘Scenic Route’ – pointing to a side road. ‘We’re taking this turn-off.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’m not sure of anything. But I don’t want these bastards up my arse abusing me all the way back to Melbourne.’
The road we turned onto was empty in both directions, which was lucky for us, as the car was crawling along like a snail. It didn’t look too ‘scenic’ to me. At first the land was just as flat and dry as it had been back on the highway. But as we drove on, the country started to change. There were a few more trees here and there and some low humps we drove over, as the land got hilly. As each hump got a little steeper the car found it harder to clear the next rise. It coughed and choked and almost came to a stop near the top of a hill before picking up enough speed to clear it.
I could see a few houses and other buildings at the bottom of the hill. The car went quiet; the motor had cut out altogether but we were still moving. Gwen turned the key in the ignition and pumped the accelerator. Nothing happened. She looked at the dashboard and thumped it with a fist.
‘Shit. Shit. The petrol gauge is on empty. Already? How can that be?’
The car picked up speed and raced down the hill. We crossed a wooden bridge over a dry creek and drifted into the main street of a town. As the car slowed again Gwen eased it off the road and put a foot on the brake. I wound down my window. We’d come to a stop outside an old stone building with wide steps leading to a pair of heavy wooden doors. A cannon was mounted on a slab of stone in front of the building, with the names of dead soldiers written on the slab in gold lettering.
Gwen was making a strange noise. I couldn’t make out if she was crying or laughing. Or maybe both at the same time. She took a few breaths and ran her hands through her hair.
‘Let’s see what we got here. Come on. Out of the car.’
She stood on the footpath, looked up and down the street and pointed with her chin. ‘Looks like there might be a servo on the corner up there. Could be a mechanic around. Maybe we should walk up there. What do you reckon, Jess?’
As far as Gwen knew we had no money for repairs. I was thinking about sneaking a roll out of the bag in the boot when Rachel sat down in the gutter and arced up.
‘I’m not going to walk all the way up there. I’m hot. I want to stay here.’
Gwen opened her mouth, about to yell at her, then stopped herself, took a breath a spoke quietly. ‘Please yourself, girlie. But don’t you move from here.’
She took out three bottles of water from the boot and handed one to me. I ripped the top off and skolled most of the bottle, even though the water was warm.
She took the top off another bottle and passed it to Rachel. ‘Like I said. Don’t move an inch.’
The shops we passed along the street, a general store, a butcher shop and a dressmaker, were closed. Some of the shopfronts were boarded up and deserted. The service station was empty too, and the petrol pumps were chained and padlocked and covered in cobwebs. Gwen walked over to the workshop behind the pumps and put her hand against a dusty window. She looked through the glass and knocked a couple of times.
When nobody answered she took a step back and turned a full circle. Her denim dress was drenched in sweat. She threw her hands in the air.
‘What is this place? A ghost town?’
‘Looks like it.’
She sat down on a step out front of the workshop and took a drink from her water bottle. She poured some water into her hand and splashed it on her face. I walked out to the footpath and looked back at the car. Rachel hadn’t moved. The road leading into the town was empty. I stood and watched Gwen for a bit as she lifted the bottom of her dress and wiped her face with it.
‘Do you reckon Ray’ll come looking for you?’
‘Come after me? Why would he?’
‘I don’t know. He might be pissed off at you for not telling him you were leaving.’
‘Oh, he’ll be fucken angry, all right. We racked up a nice bill at the motel and they’ll know we nicked stuff from the rooms. He’ll have to pay for that as well.’
She laughed just thinking about it.
‘But he won’t come after me. Him and that Limbo, they had something cooking that’ll keep them busy for a while. He won’t give me a second thought. I’ve seen the last of Ray Crow.’
‘Help yas?’
A man was standing in the doorway of the workshop, wiping his hands with a dirty cloth. He put it in his side pocket and stuck a cap on his head. He was wearing a boilersuit unbuttoned to the waist that showed off a belly streaked with grease. The boiler suit was caked in a mix of oil, metal flakes and dirt.
Gwen got to her feet and tried fixing her hair, as if it might make her more presentable.
‘We’ve had a breakdown. Our car’s back on the street there. Could you have a look at it?’
When he answered I couldn’t understand much of what he said. His lips hardly moved, like a ventriloquist. He took out a handkerchief from his back pocket, unwrapped a set of false teeth, top and bottom. He stuck them in his mouth. His bright smile stood out against his grubby whiskered face.
‘That’s better. You say you broke down?’
He listened closely as Gwen told him what had gone wrong with the car. He smiled again, keen to show off his teeth, and pointed to the bruise on the side of Gwen’s face. ‘Looks like you’ve had an accident too. Your face has been knocked about.’
‘Don’t worry about me, I just want you to look at the car.’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Okay, I’d better have a look at it then.’ He offered a hand to Gwen. ‘Gussie. Gus Rizzo.’
As we walked back to the car I asked him where everyone was.
‘This town’s gone. Has been for years. We haven’t had proper rain in more than ten years. There’s no water and no work. The youngsters have all taken off for the smoke and the farmers that haven’t gone to the wall or blown their heads off don’t have much to come into town for.’
Rachel had moved from the gutter to the shaded steps of the building. Gus touched his hat when Gwen introduced him to her.
When he couldn’t get the car started he lifted the bonnet and talked to himself as he fiddled around with different parts of the engine. We stood back and waited until he lifted his head. He was holding a piece of hose in his hand. There wasn’t much left of it.
‘See this? You’ve got no pe
trol getting to the motor. Car won’t get far without petrol. There’s your problem. The fuel line’s stuffed. Something’s blocked it and split the webbing. What petrol you had in the tank has been pissing out all over the road.’
He put the length of hose to his eye and tried looking through it. ‘Can’t see daylight. Going by this I reckon your tank is full of shit. Can’t be sure of it but someone might have sweetened it for you. Couple of pound of sugar. Someone who didn’t want you getting far.’
He twirled the hose between a finger and thumb.
‘Can you fix it?’ Gwen asked.
‘Sure I can. I can replace the length of fuel line for you. I don’t have the same part but I can put something together that’ll do the job. But, if your tank has been stuffed with, and I’d say it has, won’t be long before the line blocks again. Or it’ll play up some place else. The carbie, most likely. The only way to fix it proper is to drain the tank and clean it out. And a couple of other things on top of that. Can’t do that in a day.’
Gwen muttered ‘fuck’ under her breath.
‘Exactly,’ Gus added.
‘Can you do enough to get us going again?’
‘Yeah sure. But I can’t guarantee how far you’ll get. That’s all.’
‘Could we make it to Melbourne?’
He took his hat off, scratched his head, put it back on again and scratched his belly. ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
He saw her face drop. ‘But you never know,’ he said, smiling. ‘No harm in trying. At least I’ll get you back on the road. Let me go back to the shop and grab some tools. You happy with that?’
When Gwen answered that she had no money I almost blurted out, ‘We do.’ Gus saved me from dobbing myself in.
‘You’d fit in here, love. No one’s got a cracker. Can’t remember the last time I was paid for a job.’
He stroked his belly again. ‘Round here, we usually barter.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You know, I get paid with something of like value. We’ll work something out.’
As Gus walked slowly back to his workshop Gwen pulled me aside.
‘Jesse. Why don’t you get Rachel and yourself another drink and take her for a walk?’
Rachel overheard us and called out, ‘I don’t want to walk.’
‘Yes you do. Go on, Jesse. Take her.’
‘Take her where?’
‘I don’t know. Find somewhere.’
Gus was soon heading back, swinging a toolbox in one hand and lugging a jerry can in the other. A hedged wall ran along the side of the road across from us, broken by metal gates with long metal spikes sitting on the top. I grabbed hold of Rachel’s hand and dragged her to her feet.
‘We’re going for a walk.’
‘No I’m not. Where to?’
‘Over the road there. I reckon there might be a secret garden behind those gates.’
She looked across the road, interested and sussing me at the same time. ‘How do you know? I bet there’s nothing there.’
‘Might not be. But do you reckon someone would go to all the trouble to plant a hedge that long and put those big gates up if there was nothing behind them? I don’t think someone would do that for nothing. Are you coming or not?’
I gave her time to think about it.
‘You coming, Gwen?’ she asked.
‘No. I’m going to stay here and give this fella a hand.’
We crossed the road and walked alongside the hedge until we reached the gates. They were shut but not bolted. When I pushed against them, they cried out. I turned to Rachel.
‘Lets take a look inside.’
She leaned on the gate and stuck her head between the bars. We could see a few trees, dry patches of grass, and some flowers growing beside the pathway leading away from the gates. I noticed statues and headstones in the distance. It was a cemetery. When I walked through the gate Rachel didn’t budge.
‘Are you coming?’
‘Don’t know yet. I’m still thinking. It looks like a scary place.’
‘Well, don’t think for too long or you’ll be on your own. I’m going in – you can stay here, or go back to Gwen. But I don’t reckon she’ll be too happy if you do.’
‘I’m coming,’ she whimpered, and ran after me.
She grabbed my hand and squeezed it tight as we walked along the pathway to the first row of graves. Lanes ran between the graves as far as we could see.
‘This is just like a city,’ she said. ‘An old city. Do you think so, Jesse?’
She was right. It looked just like a city. I read the headstones as we walked. Stuff about the dead people in the ground, like how long they’d lived, how they died, who their parents and brothers and sisters were, and, on some headstones, where they’d gone after they’d died. Like Joseph John Ross, who lived until he was eighty-eight and was now ‘waiting at Heaven’s gate’.
For as long as I could remember I’d never believed in a heaven or hell and didn’t think that Joseph John Ross, or me, or Rachel, or anyone else was going anywhere after we died except in the ground or all burned up. When a kid at the foster home had asked me if I believed in God, and I said no and told him what I reckoned happened to people after they died, he bawled like a baby. I knew it should have scared me too, but it never had.
Rachel picked up a bunch of fake flowers from the ground in front of Mr Ross’s grave. They were made of cloth and had faded to a dirty red colour.
‘Do these belong here, to this grave, do you think, Jesse?’
‘Don’t know,’ I said, taking a look around.
There were flowers on other graves and more scattered between graves. There was even a bunch of flowers stuck in the branch of a tree.
‘They could have blown here from any grave in the cemetery. They don’t belong to anyone.’
‘Can I keep them, then? If we don’t know who they belong to?’
I looked down at the miserable bunch she was holding. ‘If you like. I don’t care.’
Some of the dead had been in the ground for more than one hundred years. I thought about what they might look like down there, with all the flesh off them, and no air, and all the dirt on top of their coffins, trapping them. There were no fresh flowers on any of the graves and the low iron picket fences around some of them had almost rusted away. Some of the headstones had toppled over like fallen buildings and were broken in pieces. Most of the stone statues standing over the graves were also broken. We walked by angels with busted wings or missing arms and legs. I stopped in front of one of the angels. He was offering me an open hand. The fingers on the hand were missing and his face had tiny holes all over it, as if he had a disease. A large statue of Jesus Christ stood over the next grave. He had the same marks on his face and had a finger pointing to the place where his heart should have been.
But his heart was missing. It had been chiselled out of his chest and stolen.
Rachel was standing a few graves down from me wiping the face of a small statue with her t-shirt. It was a girl with a pair of large wings sprouting out of her back. She wore a dress and her hands were held together in prayer. She looked sad. Rachel stepped onto the stone slab over the grave and stood next to the angel.
‘I like this one. She looks like me. Don’t you think so, Jesse?’
I didn’t think so but said that she did anyway, which made Rachel happy. We stopped at another grave off on its own, under a tall ghost gum. The roots of the tree had grown under the grave, lifting one corner and collapsing another. It looked more like a boat stranded in a dry lake, and the marble slab on top of the grave had moved, opening a dark hole.
I lay on the slab. As I looked down into the hole I felt a cool breeze on my face. I could see a spider web through the darkness. It had trapped a dead bird. I got Rachel to pass me a pi
ece of wire lying on the ground next to the grave. I poked at the web with it and told her to stick her head in the hole too and take a look.
‘See that? That’s what happens when you die and get buried in the ground. Spiders and bugs eat you. And big slippery worms burrow their way into your skull. They slip in through the holes where your nose was and come out your mouth.’
‘Stop it, Jesse.’ She punched me in the arm. ‘Don’t you say that. I want to go back now. You give me the creeps. Are you coming?’
I was still busy poking at the spider web.
‘Nup. I’m gonna stir up the devil.’
She punched me again. ‘Why are you trying to scare me? You’ll pay for this. It’s scary for the dead people too. I’m not staying here.’
‘Please yourself,’ I answered with my head stuck in the hole.
I was sure I heard an echo deep within the grave and kept poking at the bird until I’d freed it from the web and it fell deeper into the grave. I heard footsteps behind me. I knew Rachel wouldn’t have had the guts to walk back through the cemetery on her own.
‘Are you a brave young man? Or maybe just a silly one?’
I looked up to see a long thin scarecrow blocking the sun, sending a shadow across the grave. I jumped up, stepped back, and tripped and fell over a large tree root. The scarecrow laughed. It was a thin old woman with stick arms and legs and straw-coloured hair under a hat. She was wearing a moth-eaten black dress underneath a man’s suit coat. She lifted a bony finger and pointed towards a stone bowl sitting on the end of the grave.
‘Do you see that, boy? Do you know what that is? In the urn? Look.’
The bowl was full of dirty water, and had trapped hundreds of insects and spiders. The old woman looked up to the sky. Its colour had changed from a clear blue to streaks of orange and red without me noticing.
‘Has not been a lick of rain over this place in months, possibly more, but see that? Verter water, that’s what you’re looking at, boy. It’s stronger than holy water and it will spirit her to the other side. Spirit all of those who are worthy.’
