Wedding Bush Road

by David Francis

  Cloudy Gray lurches over with schooner in hand. “I like that Sharen,” he says with a wet-eyed blink. “She’s like a night at the drive-in, except you don’t need a car.”

  “Fuck off, Cloudy,” I say.

  No one suggests otherwise.

  “You must have a lot on your plate,” whispers Mavis as if she understands. What the hell’s she mean by that? “What with Ruthie and all.” Ruthie, the least of my problems. She lifts her glasses and puts them on, grills me with aqueous eyes. “How’s America treating you, since those planes ran into the buildings?”

  I think of how a place can treat you. “Different and the same,” I say. “Just like here.”

  “What’s so bloody different about here?” Tony yells, spittle from his lips.

  “Cloudy’s drunk,” I shout the obvious and even Ted McDonough laughs but Bobby’s coming through the archway. “How’re the pokies, Bobby?” I ask.

  He tries to square his eyes, leans against his brother for support. I remember them as mean drunk teenagers, the Italian boys at the CFA parties at the local hall. They’re both flabbier now, paunches, even Joe Madragona’s balding. They’ve given up footie to watch cricket at the pub.

  Bobby balances his hand on his brother’s bready shoulders. “The apple doesn’t fall far,” he smiles. “How is your old man?”

  He’s not just meaning Earley but Sharen and me. I chug my beer with an illicit, edgy feeling as Bobby rollicks closer, gathering his thick hands into fists. A punch comes at me and I duck, pound him solid with my good hand right in his distended gut, courtesy of Kiwi Thunder. He crumples, winded, over the stool, and all is silent. Yes, I think, both hands burning, I’ve wanted to do that since I was kid. Maybe this is why I went to the boxing gym. Bobby coughing and his brother’s not moving toward me; his eyes are empty as plates. I leave a twenty for Mavis, claim my beer and take it with me out the frosted seagull door.

  I should have asked Daniel if it was okay to let Lauren drive. But the way he was on the phone makes me want to yell out the car: Me cago en tu puta madre. At least I’m not driving, in the dark, snaking along these cliffs. Lauren points at lights in the coastal trees and yaps about old timber cabins that are “architecturally significant.” They look like boxes from here and the road makes me seasick. I haven’t spoken for an hour, too busy staying awake in case she really does run off the road. She says we’re nearly there but I could have flown to Australia by now, see what’s really going on. The more I try not to think of him, the more I hear his phone voice.

  Gracias Cristo, we finally turn up a track near a bridge. There’s a waterfall up in the hills, she says, but I don’t tell her I need a bed, not Iguassu. I have no idea what I’m doing. Just getting farther away from Daniel when all I really want is him. Despite his familia de locos. His stupid, steakhouse self.

  Darker still as I turn off the music and we bump along in silence, the car lights spraying yellow on enormous redwoods and the eyes of animals. Possums, she says, or deer. In the trees? The questions I’m too tired to ask. Too bushed, as Daniel calls it. Then a shape on the branch of a huge eucalyptus, this time a dress with bird wings, feathered and beaded, fringed arms that spread out like it’s an eagle partly made from a skin. “My Christmas tree,” she says as we crunch along the gravel. The apparition wafts in the breeze with green coruscated balls strung between branches. Osage oranges, she calls them, and I nod but I’ve only heard of Osage County, a play I saw in New York. For all I know, Daniel’s family could be the Australian version of that one. Raro. Chiflada.

  A dim porch light shows an open thatched carport, a rustic cabin with walls made from branches. Inside, a giant rusted sign strung along the wall. D’ASSU, and below it, ASSUR. She says it’s from a demolished insurance site in Paris but I don’t know from insurance; that’s Daniel’s weird work world. I stretch out on a cool Danish sofa with a roll back and, from the pile of books on the side table, I pull a ragged copy of Beowulf. Undecipherable Middle English. I look up at Lauren in the lamplight and ask if she can read this.

  “I just like the shapes of words,” she says, and it’s true that the language looks majestic. I just hope she doesn’t cut it up for art. She throws a chalky firelighter into the potbelly stove and a flame goes whoosh, lights up the oversized black-and-white dairy cow on paper taped to the wall. A vintage wedding dress is suspended from the bannister above me, names on paper ribbons stuck to the hem. Darius. Aaron 1. Victor. Cassius. The Monster. I ask her who The Monster is and she tells me he was her deaf Buddhist.

  “Why are you single?” I ask.

  “Because of guys like them,” she nods at the names that cascade from the dress, then asks what the deal is with my man.

  “He’s gone walkabout, or bush, or whatever they call it.” I try not to sound so dejected but the anger has taken up residence as an ache in the pit of my stomach. Part of me wants to throw her books across the room but it’s hardly her fault.

  “You could pin his name up there,” she says, points into the layered petticoats.

  I could but I won’t.

  Through the undraped window, I gaze out at the filmy appendages of the bird dress drifting about in the night as if nobody cares. It makes me want to climb up the tree and try it on, see if I can fly.

  Lauren stands back from the fire. “Come upstairs,” she says. “I have something to show you.”

  The steps wind up, treacherous as the road, bending to a loft with a big round bed she plops down on. It sloshes slightly. She watches up through a wide glass skylight, cantilevered open like a wing. I perch on the end on the wobbly duvet. The room is spare but for a row of pixie shoes, a pair of biker boots, and a tall plastic tubular lamp. She points out Orion’s Belt and the Dog Star as if she just discovered them. As I collapse down, our arms graze and together we observe the silent vibrating sky. I wonder if I’m officially homeless, if I might just keep the Jeep and drive north through the night. Portland. Seattle. Vancouver. He said it was “our” Jeep. He said he wanted to see the Canadian Rockies. I wish I could drive to Cuba.

  Soft footfalls on the roof and a narrow fur face appears through the gap between the skylight and ceiling. Black circles mask the small bright eyes. “That’s my boyfriend,” says Lauren. “He visits every night.” The raccoon peers down at me and bares its teeth, a smile or a grimace, and Lauren takes my hand. We stare up at the shadow of the animal framed by stars, and then it pads off across the glass. In the gradual touch of her soft curled fingers, I cave into the realm of sleep.

  TUESDAY

  I sit on the gate and watch magpies glide through the morning, the wooden earring Reggie dug up clutched in my hand like a charm. If I could just let Tooradin be Tooradin, let my mother die with Reggie mouthing Dreamtime stories, Sharen laying on hands, leave Earley to creep around the edges of his own home, let Walker steal the rest of Ruthie’s ancient ponies. But now I’ve telephoned Isabel five times and she hasn’t picked up, after all the times I didn’t get up to answer her calls. I imagine returning to Laurel Canyon, the guesthouse stripped of her. Bookshelves without her Neruda or Lorca in Spanish, the photos of her in Japan, and her print of the famous gold and silver Klimt. The face of a fair-skinned Isabel dressed in threaded bullion. The time I first spotted her at the French bistro in Los Feliz. A dark leggy girl in white linen pants at the table beside me, both of us eating French onion soup. The way she smiled then lifted her sunglasses, her eyes crinkled up as if she already knew me. I drove her to a yoga class and thought it was odd that she’d traveled from New York with her mat. I didn’t mean to wait but I couldn’t help myself, loitering outside at the magazine stand. We walked round Hancock Park, the manicured lawns and California bungalows. Her dark unmade-up model’s eyes, the way she moved so easily, willowy and tall. Her hair held up in a tangled updo, falling down. A beautiful girl trying hard to look ordinary, it pierced me through. I kissed her in the car in the bank parking lot; it felt inevitable. A feeling so far from this. Her voice soft and sultry
. Yet here I am—Old Nev out there, digging at thistles. Old Thunderfella standing sunken-backed in the rust weed down by the pump shed, out here all these years, barely recognizable. This field that’s been here all this time, waiting. The tinges of green in the cooch grass and kikuyu. The lone willow bereft of the branch I used to climb. My mother would hum as she handled the clippers, tracing the shape of a saddle and girth. Abandoning and being abandoned feel somehow interchangeable. A space forms between things. A body becomes bifurcated, struggles to sense where it can stand alone. This body, my hands, like hers, our separated yearnings. I stare up into a gaping sky streaked with cirrus. Mare’s tails, my grandmother called them. I wish she were still alive, out in that fibro plank cottage instead of Sharen, it would be so much simpler. No blackened chassis smudging the horizon. Those three horses grazing around it as though it’s always been there. Everything innocuous. I touch the scab between my fingers, feel the ragged stitches. Healing and now sore again, the ache for Sharen comes again like hunger pains. But what is this? It can’t be just to show my father how it feels to lose. It’s more a need for this gray earth, wanting to feel it ooze up through me, to bury my face in the soil, taste it in my teeth.

  The sun gets high and I can feel my mother watching out her bedroom window, keeping an eye out as she used to. The grass fading into the stillness, almost green in patches underneath way out where it’s been cut and baled. The oblong bales in rows, not yet carted, waiting to be stacked in the shed. A shorthorn heifer sniffs the air. What will it be when my mother is gone if I’m not here?

  “Let’s go,” she shouts from her open window, playing life goes on. I want to toss the wooden earring down into the dry grass paddock, back into this bad-luck earth where I buried it as a kid, but my fingers won’t let go.

  I DRIVE HER to town in a hot airless silence, the snarl of the sun at the Station Road junction, the dog’s front paws up on the console, panting between us. I concentrate hard on the gravelly sand, a surface designed for tailspins.

  “Old Thunder foundered last spring,” she says. “His soles dropped. Your father wants to put him down.” My father’s strange desire to put elderly horses to sleep. My mother reckons it’s mostly to console their lady owners afterward.

  “Perhaps you should before winter,” I say, feel her spirit sag at my use of you.

  “Perhaps you should while you’re hanging about. Do something useful. Before he ends up in some dusty riding school in Scoresby.”

  “Is that where Walker sends them?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “That or the abattoir at Wont-haggi. Either way, Reggie’s keeping lookout now.”

  I look over and try to assess how she’s coping. She stares out at the back paddock where my father once wanted a polo field until she said he should first develop an eye for the ball. She seems so self-contained, determined as ever.

  “You and Reggie seem to have everything under control,” I say.

  “Are you plotting your escape?” she asks but doesn’t turn her gaze from the farm as we pass it by. The Sunday night seven years ago when I told her my plan to leave the law firm here and head to America, a short vacation from Hedderwicks in Melbourne when I had no desire to return. I told her how I could no longer wrap my head around my work, the thorny conveyance schemes and stamp duty, papering the “Darwin Shuffle” to minimize taxes, so complex I couldn’t keep the trail of transfers in my head. “I might have a chance to ride jumpers in the US,” I told her. She’d once gone to Ireland to do the same, ride with Colonel Dudgeon. I didn’t tell her I yearned to lose myself in faraway cities, to wash this place from me once and for all. “This is your home,” was all she said, but when I flew from Tullamarine with my riding gear and a resumé in hand, letters of recommendation, I wondered if this was just where I was from.

  Near the tree at the Tooradin Hall where my mother likes to park in the shade sits Walker, slouched on the steps with a paper-bagged bottle. “Don’t stop here,” warns my mother, the dog leash wrapped tight about her fingers. She knows better than to ask him things. I think of his coarse fingers on Sharen, his open hand against her face. Does she taunt him or is she just the object of his rage, pulling and repulsing different parts of her? Hungers of their own.

  “Poor old Rags,” my mother says and I remember the pony’s show name: Rags to Riches. “I’m going to call the Cranbourne cops.”

  “They have better things to do,” she says. “Reggie won’t let Walker catch any more.”

  “What if Walker catches Reggie?” I roll the Prius to the curb outside the new Food Mart, which my mother still won’t enter.

  “Then I’ll be on my own,” she says, reaches for the post box key looped over the indicator. Box 90 inscribed on the tag. The hundreds of postcards I’ve addressed to that box, from the show-jumping stadium at Conyers outside Atlanta. Everything going swimmingly here. Watching the jumping finals. The German stallion that won the grand prix was dead the next day from drugs or exhaustion; no one seemed surprised. Cards from Casa Grande, Arizona. The horse van broke down and we’ve waited a week in the desert for engine parts, made makeshift stalls for a million dollars’ worth of horses. Hope all is well on the farm. Horses who didn’t have health papers to cross state borders so I drove because I had no truck licence to lose, turned off the lights of the eighteen-wheeler to sneak across state lines.

  “Reggie can look after himself,” my mother assures me, gives me a quaint sort of smile as if trying to understand why I’m so quiet. Her age-spotted face and flyaway hair, smudges on her glasses. Then she hikes her shopping bag over her shoulder, her body a mix of tenacity and tremors. “C’mon, Mr. Pip,” she says and the dog jumps through between the seats. “We’ll go it alone.”

  Watching her get out, her tenuous limbs and the way she uses Pip for balance, I suddenly want to hightail it to Sydney. Why is it me who wants to run away? As if I’m trapped by something outside me. By this old woman who’s stalking some unsuspecting farmer at the Ready Teller as if for sport, standing so close he shifts to block her from the screen. To cheer me up, she throws a coltish nod at me and proceeds inside, the dog at her heel, but the automatic doors seem to startle her, whooshing open. She leans to steady herself but the glass is sliding away, then she rights as if she’s a dinghy on water, and proceeds. The way she pretends to be brave. Or maybe it’s genuine courage. A thing she sees in Reggie. When I just have the itch to run away.

  Silhouetted inside the neon supermarket, dwarfed by the height of the shelves, beneath the tube lights, she fishes a list from her dilly bag but she won’t know where anything is. Pulling the keys from the ignition, I go to help but a familiar figure emerges from Coastal Clippers, the salon next door. Sharen, barely recognizable on the newly raised pavement, shaking out a haircut. Short and blown dry, streaked a softer blond. A fresh white miniskirt and espadrilles as if she’s a prosperous young mother from Mount Eliza. She checks her makeup in the window, raises a sleeve to examine a bruise on her upper arm.

  As I get out, she notices me, pushes at her new hair. “What you reckon?” She sits on the metal bench, crosses her legs and pretends to show off her espadrilles, her newly waxed legs glisten. Having a turn at being who she isn’t. Maybe that’s who I am in LA. I know I should go to my mother but I’m walking up the steps to her. She lights a Virginia Slims. Her red and pink shirt already damp in the heat and slightly see-through. Her bra is red. “Just getting back in the game,” she says and she touches the leathery tan on her legs and I notice a new bruise on her thigh she’s hiding.

  “Want one?” I’m nodding as she hands me a smoke and I kiss it alight from hers as she scoots over so I can sit. She twists a fine silver necklace around the forefinger of her free hand. I suck in the welcome hit of nicotine and her musky haystack scent, combined with a chemical waft from her hair, the sun strong as knives in our eyes. She’s staring out across the highway to the bus shelter, a lone shaded figure. Walker, watching us. She holds my hand tight and I turn to her. T
his time I notice teeth marks red on her neck. “Why do you let him hurt you?”

  “Got no choice,” she says. “He always tracks me down.”

  “Maybe there’s a part of you that likes it,” I say. “Like the part of me that likes you.”

  “So you like me?” she asks.

  “All I know is with you right here and Walker watching, I want you more.”

  A bus comes through and stops with a great rush of air brakes and then exhaust. High and maroon with shaded windows. We watch as if expecting something magic. The bus makes a hiss and accelerates, leaves the structure empty.

  “Maybe love’s like that,” says Sharen.

  We watch the dust and the bus as it heads out of town as if from a tunnel of its own making. I pull her hand up to my mouth, rest my lips on the silver chain that wraps her finger, but as the dust cloud settles we both light on Walker through the glare; he’s heading back to the bridge.

  “There’s something wrong with him,” says Sharen. “He wants what he wants and he don’t care what happens.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” I ask.

  “I don’t know how to stop him,” she says and turns to me with her sapphire eyes. “So what’s wrong with you, Daniel?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. If I was Reggie, I could slide through the swill of the sluice gates, float with the tide out to sea and be emptied into nothing but mud, wait for the tide to refill me.