by Steven Lang
‘There you go,’ Andy said to Jim, slipping out from behind the wheel, leaving the engine running, pulling a small bag out of the back. He went through to the rear of the building. Kelvin took up his position in the driveway. Jim drove off. There were no lights in any of the buildings. Five beige Landcruisers were parked in the small tarred area behind the offices. Beyond them was a tall cyclone fence confining larger machinery. Kelvin checked the boom. Where it came down beside a metal post there was a welded box protecting the hardened steel padlock from tampering.
He slipped back through to where Andy was working on the door of one of the Toyotas.
‘The boom’s locked,’ he said, whispering.
‘Fuck the boom,’ Andy said. ‘Go back and keep lookout.’
Kelvin went back between the buildings. Even before he’d got to the point where he could see the street Andy had the door open and was twisting in underneath the steering column. Nothing was happening out the front. The single streetlight was reflected in the puddles on the road. Concern at what Andy was going to do to get the Toyota out took hold of Kelvin’s mind. The boom wouldn’t easily come apart, even if rammed with the roo bar of a Landcruiser, and the noise and the mess would draw all sorts of attention. The industrial area was desolate, with only one other building a hundred metres away, looming in the darkness. Over on the highway, a couple of blocks away, a truck went past, its orange lights blazing. There was nowhere to hide if someone came. On the office wall a sign in the shape of a shield announced the property was watched over by Easts of Eden Security.
He heard the Toyota start and ran back through.
‘All clear out front,’ he said, swinging in the door, Andy sliding into the passenger seat, saying, ‘Gloves.’
‘Right,’ Kelvin extracting his from his jeans pocket, pulling them on. ‘How do we get out of here?’
Andy looked at Kelvin as if he was some kind of a fool. ‘We drive,’ he said, pointing.
There was no fence around the parking lot.The only obstacle between them and the vacant block next door was a line of small natives planted in chip mulch.The blood rose to his face. He eased forward and then out onto the road, searching for the knob to pull on the headlights, Andy stuffing his hair up into a cap.
Jim was waiting at Quarantine Bay, the panel van tucked in under the casuarinas.
‘Quickly now, and quiet,’ Andy said.
They transferred the drums, and a chainsaw in case of fallen logs, managing it all with what might be said to be military precision, but Andy’s instruction rankled. As if he had taken it upon himself to become their leader. It wasn’t that Kelvin wanted the role, he just didn’t want Andy to have it.
Out on the highway, Kelvin driving because of his short hair, wearing a beige work shirt bought the day before at St Vincent de Paul’s, the white gloves abandoned as being just plain stupid, he tried to make conversation.
‘You got the door open pretty quick.’
‘Something I learned in Canberra,’ Andy replied, ‘when I was a kid. Come Saturday night we’d go joy-riding, pinch some cars and take them out in the woods near Cotter Dam. Drag-racing. It was what we did for recreation.’And he didn’t say, ‘not like some other kids,’ but it was implicit: Andy’s working-class roots were like a badge. But then he didn’t mention, either, that it was through that business that he’d got into this whole thing. That was another story. Instead he fished around in his tobacco pouch and pulled out a ready-rolled number.
‘You sure we ought to smoke?’ Kelvin said. ‘I mean, don’t we need to be, like, focused?’
Andy wet the outside of the joint between his lips. He leaned forward so he could see past Jim. ‘Nobody’s forcing you,’ he said. ‘You’d like a smoke, wouldn’t you Jimbo?’
‘Just a little one,’ Jim said. ‘Can’t see a little bit of smoke going down the wrong way.’
Twenty-five kilometres south of town they turned inland on the Forestry road, and started to climb. There had been little traffic on the highway at this time of night, and on this road there was none, just the wide easy curves, Kelvin’s eyes fixed to the small section illuminated by the truck’s lights, on the lookout for roos.
‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘I never looked, there’s hardly any fuel.’
Andy was holding in some smoke. ‘Hey man, anyone ever told you you’re a panic merchant? Take it easy. Plenty of fuel where we’re going.’ He blew out the smoke and shook his head. ‘I mean. Fucking relax.’
They turned off on Taggarts Road, a broad dirt highway rolling along a ridge, a serious road, built for logging trucks, the trees tall and straight and wild on both sides, dark forest stretching forever.They’d been driving for almost an hour and they seemed only to be going deeper into the trees, there was no end to them. In the dark of the night it felt as though there was no possibility of humans being able to destroy such a forest, that maybe they were wrong and the loggers were right; except for the road itself, this extraordinary indifferent thing pushed directly into the heart of the place.
‘Slow down, man,’ Andy said. ‘I need to get my bearings.’
A side road offered itself, the only sign being a piece of plywood tacked onto a picket with the numbers 18/20 painted on it in rude letters.
‘Here,’ Andy said.
This was a narrower road, winding down off the ridge. Now, occasionally, there were open spaces above or below them. As they swung around one corner the headlights picked out a bare burned scree bordered by a wall of distant pale trunks, the cut edge fragile in the white light. Other tracks peeled off to either side. They kept to the main route, this narrow scar cut sharply into the hill, twisting back on itself again and again so that they wondered how far it could go down, how logging trucks could make it up, until abruptly it ended, delivering them onto a broad flat circle complete with machinery, a loading ramp, a portaloo and a stack of peeled logs. On one side a couple of forty-fours and a ten-gallon drum stood in their own little patch of stained dirt. Kelvin did a turn-around.There was no one and nothing else, only several tall trees inexplicably left around the edge, their trunks excessively naked and, in the centre, the bright yellow dozer and snigger parked neatly side by side, like giant toys.
‘Don’t turn off the motor,’ Andy said. ‘I don’t want to have to start her again.’
Kelvin backed over. He stayed in the cabin while Jim and Andy fiddled with a hand-pump that was fitted into the top of one of the drums. Andy was holding the torch, giving instructions to Jim now, whose job it apparently was to work the pump while Andy filled the tank on the Toyota. Then they unscrewed the pump and took it out of the forty-four, and replaced it with a plastic funnel. Jim hefted one of the five-gallon drums off the back of the truck. Andy held the funnel. In the torchlight the sugar and diesel showed hints of colour as it poured out in a smooth stream, slightly viscous. When they were done they put the pump back in the drum and screwed it up tight, put the empty on the back of the truck.
The heavy dark smell of the fuel came back into the cabin with them, like below decks on a trawler.
‘Right,’ Andy said.
Kelvin put the truck in gear and headed back up the hill. It was as simple as that.They hadn’t even looked at the machines.
‘How much do you reckon they’re worth?’ Jim said.
‘Sweet fuck-all after they put that shit in them,’ Andy said.
‘If you had to buy one.’
‘I don’t reckon you’d get any change out of a hundred grand. Each.’
‘Shit,’ Kelvin said.
The ability to grasp what they’d just done, and were about to do again, came slowly. He could feel rather than see the flattened forest around. He imagined one of those machines down the hill preparing to pull a log back to the dump; the motor failing, spluttering, belching black smoke from the little spring-loaded exhaust cap, refusing to take up the strain. The men gathering around it, trying to isolate the problem, bringing the other machine down to snig it up the hill and then that one fa
iling too. Both machines crippled in a gully, tied to each other, the workers scrambling over them in their yellow hard hats, earmuffs clipped up like vestigial ears. He imagined their rage when they figured it out, their hopeless, directionless rage, the terrible force of their hatred, and he laughed out loud, filled with a strange elation.
‘They’re not going to be happy campers when they work it out,’ he said.
‘There, my friend,’ Andy said, ‘you’re not wrong.’
‘It’s not just the loggers is it?’ Jim said. ‘It’s every bastard up and down the coast. The cops, the chipmill, the insurance agents …’
‘Too late to back out now,’ Andy said. He pointed at another side road. ‘Take a right here. But listen, these bastards’ve had it coming for years. We asked them nicely, didn’t we? We said, “Please stop.” How many times did they think we were going to do that?’
He’d argued with Jessica about it, without actually saying what they had in mind.
‘Are you saying you wouldn’t be glad if someone fucked up a whole heap of machines out in the forest?’
‘Of course I would – ’
‘See.’
‘ – on some level – ’
‘You know all this talking isn’t going to make a bit of difference. You need to make them sit up and take notice,’ Kelvin said, hoping to make both Andy’s and Carl’s arguments work against her.
‘There’s ways to go about these things and there’s – ’
‘You just don’t want to get your hands dirty.You’d be happy – ’
‘Will you let me finish! You’ve had your say, let me have mine.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Like fuck you are, you’ve got that look on your face.’
‘What look is that?’
‘Your stubborn look.Your I’m-here-but-I’m-not-going-to-listen-to-you look, your nothing-can-touch-me look. If there’s one thing that shits me about you, Kelvin, it’s that look.’
‘So speak. I’m listening.’
‘I want to stop the logging of these forests. I don’t want a war.You start blowing things to the shit and you’re going to have guys shooting at each other.’
‘Right.’
‘You don’t think so? Your trouble is you think everyone arrived here yesterday, like there’s no past attached to this.You think that because the people who live here have nice white skins and drive Holdens they’re less capable of killing people than Africans or South Americans or Asians. You’re not even scared of them.You read books but you have no sense of history. It’s precisely because they have nice white skins that they’re more likely to. How do you think we got to be the winners here? D’you see any Aboriginals around here? Huh? You think this place was empty when whites came? You’re living in a dream world.’
Furious with him. As if he didn’t know the nature of the place; as if he wasn’t the one who’d been born there.
At the fourth site the rain came back. There was one tall tree on the edge of the flat and the wind was whipping at its branches so hard that Kelvin could hear the leaves lashing against each other above the motor of the Toyota. A great orange Komatsu was pinioned in the headlights while the boys did their work. It had a blade the size of a house and a great steel rod sticking forward above it like a bowsprit, what they called a tree-pusher. Someone had welded extra bands of steel onto the blade, a criss-crossing of beads which served no clear purpose. He went over to look at it. The tracks were as high as his shoulder. He put his hand on the rectangular steel plates, feeling their cold hardness, their extraordinary weight, the polished surface already tinged with a patina of rust.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Andy called.
The machine was of such a different order to everything he knew, impressive not only in its size but also in its solidity. Jim wandered over to join him. He hauled himself up onto the tracks and into the cabin, ignoring the first spots of rain and Andy’s calls. He sat himself on the single black plastic seat in the cabin and took the controls in his hands, leering down at Kelvin, a schoolboy playing engine driver. Except against the size and solidity of this machine he was a child. This ugly, brutal device was what humanity was really about. Kelvin did not know how any of it was made or how it did what it was supposed to do, or how to make it do it. Other men, more focused than he, were responsible for these things; they had devoted their lives to mining and purifying and forging steel, to shaping it into component parts and designing ways for them to go together to make this thing. Kelvin’s contribution was to contaminate the fuel in a couple of forty-fours in a logging dump out the back of Woop Woop. As if such an activity would make the slightest difference. It was starting to rain properly. Sheets of it coming down silver in the headlights of the Toyota. Jim had found something up in the cabin, a shifting spanner built to match the machine, a chrome thing just like the one in everyone’s toolbox, except this one was over a metre long. Kelvin ran back to the truck. He expected Jim to follow but he stayed on the machine, the wrench in his hands. Kelvin drove over next to it and yelled out the window through the rain, telling Jim to get the fuck off there, which he began to do, clambering down onto the tracks, still carrying the wrench like it was some sort of sword or axe.
‘Leave that behind,’ Kelvin said.
Jim ignored him, negotiating his way along the top of the slippery plates of steel, the rain pelting him.
Kelvin tried to open the door but he was too close to the dozer, ‘Fucking leave it,’ he said.
‘It’s mine,’ Jim said. He stepped down onto the tray. He put his prize up against the cabin, behind the empty drums. Unencumbered he swung off the other side and into the passenger door, his clothes soaked through, his beard dripping. Kelvin didn’t move.The windscreen wipers were crap.The headlights showed a patch of mud across which water was beginning to flow.
‘What the fuck d’you take that for?’ Kelvin said. ‘We agreed, we take nothing, we leave nothing. This is serious fucking business, remember?’
Jim stared straight ahead.
‘No one’ll notice,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t fucking matter. Let’s get out of here.’
‘Can we?’ Andy said.
Kelvin looked at the other two. He was about to object again, to make a stand. It was nothing to do with being discovered. It was simply wrong. Bad karma to steal someone’s tools. But if it was bad karma to steal a wrench, what was it to fuck a dozer? That was too hard. He put the truck in gear.The logging dump was at the bottom of a steep road which proved to be badly drained; streams of water were already cutting channels into the debased granite. A couple of hundred metres up, at a narrow place between a high yellow bank on one side and a drop-off on the other, there was a seam of clay. As soon as the Toyota touched it the wheels began to spin, the rear end skittering out towards the edge. He dropped a gear, and then another, but it made no difference.
He stopped and backed down, allowing the weight of the machine to carry it across the slick surface. When he was on firm ground again he got out and locked the hubs. The rain had, if anything, increased. Little rivers were flowing through the channels the tyres had cut in the clay.
He put the truck in low.
‘Gun the bastard,’ Andy said. ‘Take a run at it.’
Kelvin ignored him. He ground forward at less than walking pace. For a moment he thought they would make it but the seam must have been deep because the wheels just kept slithering.
‘You know how to drive this bastard?’ Andy said.
‘Clearly a fucking lot more than you do.’
‘You need to take a fucking run at it,’ Andy said.
‘It’s all yours,’ Kelvin said, letting the vehicle’s weight take it back down a second time. The road was now revealed in the headlights as a mess of thick grooves. ‘Come on Jim,’ he said, getting out. ‘When he gets stuck we’ll give him a push.’
Andy slid across to the driver’s seat.
‘You in four-wheel drive?’ he asked.
Kelvin j
ust looked at him.
‘I’m going back down a bit further, get up a bit of speed,’ he said.
‘Listen,’ Kelvin said, ‘keep away from that edge.’
They stood on the side of the track, their hair plastered against their heads. Andy came roaring up between them. When the wheels hit the clay they began to spin furiously, digging in, sending up great sprays of mud, the truck’s rear sliding sideways. They could see Andy silhouetted against the headlights, fighting with the steering wheel, turning it this way and that.
‘Come on,’ Kelvin said.
They put their shoulders to the tray but it was less than useless, only covered them in great gouts of mud. Andy wouldn’t let up until the vehicle was at right angles to the road. He stepped out, swearing. The three of them looked at each other, at the road, at the Toyota, at the earth wall lit by the headlights. The rain was cold. It was perhaps three in the morning.
‘Let’s have a look-see how wide this seam of clay is,’ Kelvin said. ‘Maybe it’s not too long. We can get some bark and logs and corduroy it.’
He started up the hill. He was cloaked in mud, starting to shiver, but was propelled by, if nothing else, sheer terror. Andy turned to follow. The clay was like lead around his boots.
Jim called out, ‘Hey, boys, it’s all right, it’s all right. There’s a winch.’
He was standing between the headlights like a refugee from Moby Dick, pointing at the bullbar.
‘Oh you sweet thing,’ Andy said. ‘Oh you sweet little bastard.’
It took two pulls to get across the seam. By the time they made it back onto the ridge road every part of the Toyota was covered in mud.
Kelvin was driving again. He pulled over, careful to keep on the hard surface.The three men stared out through the curved wedges of clarity provided by the windscreen wipers.
‘Fuck, eh,’ Jim said.
‘Fucking fuck,’ Andy replied.
Kelvin rested his forehead against the steering wheel. At least the rivalry had disappeared. For a moment they were just three men, together, giving thanks.
‘Well, we fucking did it,’ Andy said. ‘We fucking did it.’
