by Steven Lang
‘Bastard,’ she said, braking hard, throwing Kelvin onto the dashboard. ‘Sorry,’ she added, continuing on, glancing in the mirror.
The car seemed to have suffered no damage.
‘What the fuck was all that about?’ Kelvin said.
‘He’s just a prick, that’s all.’
They came down to the ford. She stopped and changed back into first.
‘As if Carl would let him out there. He’s a weasel that guy, a fucking weasel.’
Kelvin was going to say that he looked familiar but decided against it. Sometimes it seemed everyone here reminded him of someone else. As if there were only a limited number of versions of people in the world.
As Jessica pushed the car into the water the grating of metal on rock was repeated, followed by a sudden staccato burst of unmufflered motor.
‘Bastard,’ she said again, ‘fucking bastard.’
seven
Carl heard it before the dogs. He was standing at the kitchen bench, the coffee pot on the stove, taking the black liquid in one of the small cups the way he had learned in Italy. It was difficult for him to sit to take a meal, not from fear – he was not that driven – but from laziness. The rigmarole of transferring from pot to plate, plate to table outweighed any benefit which might accrue from sitting by himself. It was simpler to stand at the bench, a book propped open against the backboard at a distance which suited his eyes.
He lifted his head. The dogs, alert at least to his every nuance, perked up their ears. When the sound of an engine became clear they put on a great show, jumping up and racing out of the house. At another time he might have laughed. Instead he called them to quiet with an urgency they heard and obeyed. The noise was wrong, too loud for the distance. He thought at first it might be a helicopter, its rotor blades chopping up the sound, throwing its distorted echo off the hills.
He checked the house.An instinctual reaction. From outside he watched the opposite hill through a pair of binoculars. After several minutes he glimpsed a grey Holden, lurching over the ruts.
He went to the other end of the veranda. By leaning out he could keep the car in view as it followed the track down to the old workman’s cottage and stopped. She must have come over for the plums and lost her muffler on the way. That was all. Two people got out; he couldn’t identify anything else. Jessica wouldn’t bring just anyone, but the other person meant almost certainly she wasn’t coming to visit.
He was prey to layers of conflicting feelings: relief, annoyance at the disruption, yearning, disappointment that she wouldn’t come, irritation at that, and underneath it all a surge of loneliness which threatened to grow and infect everything.
He’d spent the morning in the north-west paddock. From where he stood he could see where he’d been working, knocking out the regrowth, pushing it into piles, burning it in windrows. The grass was starting to come through, almost electric green beside the black piles of ash; superphosphate green, she called it. There was pleasure to be had in just the sight of it, the clean line along the edge of the forest, the darkness of the big gums, the thought of the fence he would build with split posts, the tractor resting near where he would put the gate. It should have been enough to stop him going to see her, but it wasn’t.
Bugger the fence, he thought, thinking in Australian.
This time the dogs were ahead of him. They ran backwards and forwards between the Toyota and the house.
‘Right,’ he said, waving a hand. They gave a single excited bark and jumped onto the tray, shuffling for position.
She was standing next to the car with her hair tied back, wearing home-made pants and a blouse, one hand resting on the open window, the other fending off the dogs who were running between her and her silky bitch.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Jessica,’ he replied, but his eyes were on the man over by the old trees.
‘Kel,’ she called, ‘come and meet Carl.’
Well-built, handsome, he guessed, though not much more than a boy. Clean eyes hardly glimpsed because he hid them when they shook hands, tilting his head down and mumbling. Nothing in the hand either, a limp thing, a wet fish; someone should teach him that before he got much older.
Carl couldn’t say he felt too pleased to be introduced to the new, the younger, replacement.
‘Thought we’d better get the plums before the birds,’ she said.
‘I heard you. Thought you were a column of tanks. Come over to the house when you’re done and you can put her on the ramp, we’ll take a look.’
He turned to the boy. ‘Where you from?’
‘Sydney,’ Kelvin said.
Evidently he thought this would suffice. Carl waited.
‘That was a while ago, I’ve been around, I was up at Cairns, and in Darwin.You’re from the States aren’t you?’
‘I was.’
Carl assumed Jessica had filled him in. If she hadn’t then the clothes should do it. He wore old fatigues around the farm and still kept his hair cut like a soldier’s, crew on the top, almost shaved above his ears and around his head. He had even, he did not think it was taking things too far, managed to find an old pair of dog tags to wear inside his shirt.
He backed the Toyota under the trees so they could stand on the tray to pick the plums. The fruit was small and stony but sweet. Jessica said she was going to make jam, but it would be a dangerous brew for the teeth, full of pips.
Carl got Kelvin to drive the car onto the ramp, then made coffee while they waited for the metal to cool. The afternoon sun was on the valley; the mixed breeds of cattle, Hereford, Murray Grey and Brahmin, dotting the paddocks.
Jessica was organising some sort of protest. She wanted him to come along. But even if things had been different she’d have had no hope. He would have thought she knew that by now. She had, after all, got as close to him as anyone; although what she had almost found out was not the truth about his past, but the truth about his feelings. In the end he had resisted even that. For her sake. To protect her. Out of love. That he hadn’t told her was proof enough. That he had suppressed the temptation to invite her to live with him in his highland fastness, to come live with him and be his wife, raise Brahmin-cross cattle and dogs, hell, even children.
‘A funny thing,’ she said, drinking the coffee, the boy off to the side as if it was the most normal thing in the world. ‘You know the muffler? I ran into Andy on the road, poking his nose into everything. I had an argument last night with Jim, at the main house, a stupid thing. Andy bought into it, said if I wanted to take action against the mill I should come see him.’
‘What did that mean?’
‘They were talking about putting spikes in logs, the usual shit.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told him to get fucked. He was on about it again today – that’s how come I went off the road. He wanted to come out here too. He didn’t say as much but you could tell.’
Only a month before Carl had gone to Bega for the cattle sales. Afterwards, against all practice, he’d allowed himself a beer. He’d been leaning on the bar when someone had come up behind him and said, ‘G’day, Frank.’
It took months to grow into a name, adopting it so that when he heard it he would turn, naturally, seamlessly, as if he’d worn it all his life. And if that was hard to do, it was even harder getting rid of it. The requirement not to turn, to pretend he didn’t hear, to avoid even the flinch, the tightening of the shoulders which is the giveaway, which is what they’re looking for, is almost impossible to achieve.
The man touched his arm. Only then could he allow himself to respond, finding himself faced with Gazza in all his glory, the sleeveless T-shirt displaying the tattoos on his upper arm, the semi-shaven face, the calf-high boots and tight black jeans, the mullet. ‘Sorry,’ Carl said. ‘Do I know you?’ holding out his hand. ‘It’s Carl …’
At least he caught on quickly.
‘Carl,’ he said, ‘that’s right, sorry mate, remember me? Gazza? Cairns?’
Taking his hand in his meaty paw.
‘Gaz. That’s right. Must be what, three, four years? How is it? What brings you to these parts?’
Gazza so pleased at the coincidence that it was necessary to have a drink.There’d been a time when he might have had the strength to refuse, but he’d softened. The crop they had grown together had paid for Carl’s farm, several beasts, a four-wheel drive and enough to get by on, at least for a while. Gazza hadn’t fared so well. He’d gone back to his old mates, always trying for the next big deal, importing smack, except this time it turned out the cops were onto them. He hadn’t got caught but he’d lost it all. ‘Everything ’cept the car. I do a bit of travelling these days. Thought I’d come up the Coast Road. Less traffic, if you get my drift.’
Theirs had been what Carl called a business friendship, a partnership that lasted for the period of the agreement and was finished, done, completed, when it ended. Gazza was not so clear about things. He thought the whole world was his friend.
Over a beer Carl hoped to impress on him his need for privacy. Gazza was enough of a crim to understand, but the meeting worried him. If Gazza had found him, then others might. For almost three years he had been undisturbed. He had begun to think he could live a normal life, could go into a pub after the sales and talk cattle with the locals, could clear scrub from paddocks, build a dam, love his dogs, watch the dawn and the midday and the coming of night and not be attentive to the prerogatives of his past. The incident had reminded him that he hadn’t been forgotten.That somewhere, in some office, on some computer, in some shoe box somewhere, the essential piece of information remained.
‘That muffler oughta be cooled by now,’ Carl said in the boy’s direction.
Kelvin followed him out to the shed, a large open-sided structure cluttered with farm machinery, full of the smell of hay and cows and diesel, the dogs at his heels.
The ramp was a crude affair, a couple of slabs running up onto stumps. It was just possible for the two men to squeeze under the front end of the car.
‘Do you know anything about these things?’ Carl asked.
‘No,’ Kelvin said.
The exhaust pipe had come apart at a join. The separated ends were bent and rusted.
‘They’re filthy, dirty and recalcitrant, if you know what that means. Ornery if you don’t.We’ll need to make a sleeve.’
He went back into the shed and rummaged around, found a piece of old flat iron and curved the steel around the pipe, folded up the loose ends like lunch wrap, using a pair of multi-grips. Then he wound some wire around it and made a sling which he attached to the underside of the car.
‘That should hold it.’
His fingers were black with the oil and the dust from the rusting pipe.
He was surprised about the boy, about her bringing him out here like that. She must have wanted Carl to look him over. He did not know what that meant. Perhaps she was asking him to become, or maybe it was an acknowledgment that he already was, a kind of guardian, someone who would look out for her, someone to run to in times of trouble. After they’d stopped with the sex she had got on with her life. She’d had no idea of the effect she’d had on him. She regarded him as a friend, useful for fixing or cutting or building, for listening to her endless stream of problems and plans. What did he get? Access? Perhaps. She was beautiful and young, lithe and natural, deeply intense. Just to have her around the house was enough. The smell of her. There was still the need for sex, but that could be managed elsewhere, even in a town as small as Bega. Now, he thought, she was asking him to go a step further, to include in this arrangement the new man, the one she was sleeping with.
‘You don’t talk much,’ he said.
‘There doesn’t seem to be much to say right now,’ Kelvin said.
‘I like that, I can’t abide chatter.’
He brought his gaze to bear on him, pinning him against the stump. He was good-looking. He could see what it was she liked about him, the freshness, the strong features as yet unmarked by lines. But there was something deeper, too, unexplained. Kelvin’s was a face waiting for something, for life to light it up. Presuming someone was home in the first place.
‘If you’ve had enough of the pines I could use a hand out here for a few days. Fencing,’ he said.
Kelvin thought about it for a moment. ‘I’d like that.’
‘Monday then,’ Carl said, crawling out from under the ramp.
eight
Carl handed him a crowbar off the back of the tractor.
‘Three foot deep,’ he said, ‘bout this round,’ holding his hands the width of his shoulders apart.
Kelvin had never placed a strainer post. He thought he was fit from the pines but sinking a hole in debased granite proved a different manner of work, every millimetre of subsoil hard won with the bar, the shaft of octagonal steel grasped in two hands and launched at the base, released at the last moment to avoid the jar as it hit, picked up, its weight increasing in direct proportion to the number of times, and launched again. Blisters began to swell along the top of his palm and in the valley between thumb and forefinger before he was even halfway down.
Carl came over and looked in. ‘Wider at the base,’ he said.
The hole was deep. Kelvin rammed the bar into the sides near the bottom, sweat gathering in beads on his forehead.
Carl split posts. He’d cut the trunk of a tree into lengths and now he ran the blade of the McCulloch down the sides of each one, sectioning it, the saw bucking and screaming and grinding. When he was done he put it aside and took up a wedge, tapping it into the end-grain, then rammed it home with a nine pound hammer, swung hard. In the silence after each blow the log continued to creak, every fibre resisting the wedge. When the timber gave, the post sprang away from the heartwood, falling on the ground with a blunt musical sound. Carl pushed it away, picked up the wedge and began the process again. He worked steadily, relentlessly, managing to make the use of such a hammer look light. In the end all that was left of each log was a small central pole, ragged, like something naked.
Kelvin lay belly-down on the ground, reaching into the earth with his bare hand to scoop out the last of the loose dirt. He wondered if this could possibly be the way it was done. At least this time Carl was satisfied. He looked in, grunted, then dropped the bar into the hole, leaning it against one side. He brought the tractor over and backed up to one of the strainer posts, using the hydraulics to lift the end off the ground. Between them they managed from there to prise up the log, the base of it sliding down the bar, a great mother of a thing, a tree trunk, smooth and round, square-cut on the top.
When it was in they both put a hand on it, feeling its strength in the ground. They looked across the top at each other and smiled. They sat back and rolled a smoke, drank coffee from a thermos, stared out over the paddocks. It was an overcast day, the air warm and close, the flies heavy on their backs.
Kelvin looked down the path Carl had cleared for the fence.
‘By week’s end we’ll have a line of wire strung,’ Carl said. ‘Where I come from the ground’s so hard most o’ the year you couldn’t fix a post. Had to build fences that stood by themselves. Buck’n’rail. So cold in the winter the thermometers froze.’At times Carl’s accent seemed almost a parody of itself.
Around lunch it began to rain. They had the two strainers stood, and a third, an in-line post, placed in a gully where it would hold down the wire when the tension came up. They abandoned the work, Kelvin riding the back of the tractor to the house, liquid with exhaustion.
Jessica had driven him to the crossing in the morning. Their second night in her home had been almost domestic, the lack of sleep playing on them, promoting a kind of softness, their bodies too tired for sex but too enamoured to resist. Working with Carl he had found himself subject to a strange and disconnected play of images, just within the range of consciousness. They were strangely banal, being no more than pictures: the flower garden outside her door; the view through the windscree
n as they rounded a corner on the narrow forest road; the kitchen in her house. Nothing was happening in them, but they still had the power to tilt him off balance; they had a hidden emotional content which served to keep him half in her world, even while the tractor rumbled across the main paddock, the dogs running behind.
Carl took him in the house. Lunch was bread and cheese, more coffee, a simple affair made awkward by their presence together in the rudimentary kitchen. Out along the fence line they had been surrounded by unlimited space, the green fields sloping down to the dam, the eucalypt forest climbing into the hills, the very sky. Carl’s presence had been something of a defence against such vastness. Within the walls of the house he was larger, formidable. Kelvin escaped to the veranda with a book, curling up on an old sofa that smelled of dog. Across the grey weatherworn floorboards, beyond the rail, the rain had begun to fall heavily, in sheets and gusts, obscuring the longer view.
In the evening they played chess.With the coming of the rain Carl had lit the fire as well as the stove to keep out the damp, but it made it so hot inside that they needed to prop the veranda doors open. Moths congregated around the lamps. They drank a beer and played and then drank a couple more. Carl replied to his attempts at conversation in monosyllables. Kelvin, losing, took affront, seeing in his opponent’s silence a comment on his performance. He was an impulsive player, going in strong in an attempt to gain dominance of the board, pushing at Carl’s pieces to prevent him from bringing his strategies to the fore. He failed to see Carl’s defensiveness as a strategy in itself, drawing him into vulnerable places where he was open to attack.
