Dirt Music

  Just a cuppa. Maybe a beer later.

  No worries!

  When Rusty brings the tea back it tastes coppery, worse than stewed.

  Here, says Rusty, almost jovial. He tips a bit of Southern Comfort into each mug. Rusty’s chronic tonic.

  Fox sips his bitter tea and stares at the dance of flames. The drone of the road seems to vibrate in him still. The night is thick as a blanket.

  Why Wittenoom? asks Rusty.

  Fox tells him about the old man and the asbestos mine. The mesothelioma and the monumental bastardry of the cover-up.

  There was a Midnight Oil song, right?

  Fox nods. He doesn’t mention the dying, the actual way he went. The yellow slaughteryard eyes, the horrible swelling trunk. The falling down and liquid shitting and desperate respiration. In the end it was hospital. Lying there like a man being held down in a tub of water. Neck straining at the end of him as though he might get his head out and take a clean breath if only he pushed hard enough. But he was drowning anyway. And Fox sitting at the bedside too young to drive legally. Darkie and Sal waiting down in the carpark.

  For revenge, says Rusty, I could understand it. But from what I heard there’s nothin there, no one.

  Rusty seems a long way off.

  He said it was God’s own country up here, says Fox. And I was headin north anyway—

  What, further north?

  Yeah, all the way.

  Take you to Broome if you shout me the juice.

  Fox shrugs. Orright, he murmurs. Spose it’d give the trip some shape.

  Shape. Yeah. That’s what I’m after. I’m gonna get shaped up in Broome.

  Yeah? How’s that?

  Rusty starts grilling a couple of T-bones on an old fridge rack. Fox feels like he’s looking at him from the other end of a drainpipe. Out beyond the firelight there’s only blackness.

  My fella in the Range Rover. He’s in Broome this month.

  How d’you know?

  I paid someone.

  Shit.

  Mate, he purrs conspiratorially. I’m all organized. Gonna give his trip a new shape.

  My lips are numb, says Fox at the very moment he thinks it.

  Rusty snickers.

  You put something in the tea.

  Relax.

  Shit.

  Fox listens to the thousand tiny sounds of the hissing fat, the throbbing coals, the beef bones expanding in the heat.

  Here.

  Fox suddenly contemplates a hot steak on a torn strip of cardboard. His leg burns. He feels it, feels it.

  Rusty’s gnawed bone drops into the fire before Fox picks his up to begin. A sprinkle of ash settles on him as he eats.

  When he’s finished he turns to see Rusty in the open door of the Bedford with his jeans around his knees and a needle shoved into his thigh.

  Morphine made me an orphine, says Rusty. So what’s your excuse?

  From a long way off the sound of a car. It’s more road roar than engine noise; it rolls against the gorges and returns like backwashing surf. Fox sits and listens, watches Rusty as if through the wrong end of a telescope until lights bleach the mesa ahead and a motor eases into a coasting deceleration and a vicious grate of gears. In a blaze of headlights something pulls in nearby. As it wheels around on the gravelly pad Fox sees it’s an old stationwagon, an EK. Someone, a woman, calls out.

  Mind if we camp over here?

  Suit yourself, says Rusty.

  The car pulls away a few yards and the engine dies and the interior light appears yellow and feeble as doors open.

  A man and two women wander over to the fire stretching and groaning as they come. The man has wild hair and a beard. Elastic-waisted pants, a shimmery waistcoat over his bare chest. They’re barefoot. The women wear baggy cotton dresses, and jangly bangles.

  G’day, says the man.

  Where you headed? says Rusty.

  Perth. Comin back from Darwin.

  Long way.

  Fox looks carefully at each woman’s face. The fire twitches in their eyes; it lights up the studs in their noses and brows. They seem young, eighteen, twenty.

  Quiet, isn’t it? says one. Her arms in the sleeveless dress look downy.

  Can we cook on your fire? says the other. Her hair is thick and tight with curls and it hangs down to her elbows and glistens in the firelight.

  They bring a cast-iron pot already full of rice and vegetables to the edge of the coals and stir the slurry with a long steel spoon. Fox watches with a tired detachment.

  Woman crouches, stirring, hair lit in flickers. Someone offers him the bong but he barely notices. Steely Dan in the Bedford. Lips tingle with pins and needles.

  You don’t say much, says the man.

  Superior being, says Rusty.

  We can dig that, says the girl with all the hair.

  Fox gets up with infinite care and pukes his steak into the dirt behind the Bedford. When he straightens himself he discovers that he still has the greasy bone in his hand and he hoiks it into the darkness. Unsteady and slimed with sweat, he hauls his swag out of the van and drags it a little way beyond the firelight where he lies on the canvas and watches the dandruff drift of the sky.

  The earth thrums beneath him, stirs with a thousand grinding clanks and groans like the deck of a ship in heavy weather. He feels it twist and flex and murmur and, deep down, between rivety stones, there’s an endlessly repetitive vibration like a piston-chant foghorn drone. Whorrr, whorrrr, whorrrrr.

  He surges in and out of darkness, sleep, stupor.

  Two of them—Rusty and the girl with all the hair—backlit by the fire. On her knees in the dirt. Something glitters on her tongue. The surfer’s dry crow laugh. Her hair in his fists.

  Fox lies back with his throat scorched. The ground purrs against his skull. The dark, the hiss of static.

  Sometime then, later perhaps, the girl or a girl is over the fender of the stationwagon, hair and arms lolling with Rusty upright and jerking like a shot man. Then so much yelling.

  A small creature with eyes ablaze trembles beside his swag a moment and flees.

  Silhouettes blur past the fire with screams propelling them. Fox rises incrementally to an elbow and summons a cry that never comes. Convulsion and confusion in the flickering half-light. The bearded man shirtless. Great gout of sparks as something crashes into the fire.

  My pack, Fox thinks. I should have kept it by me.

  The sound of breaking glass. Men and women screaming. And in the last seeable moment of the night, the sight of Rusty beating the stationwagon with his unstrapped leg like a madman flogging a dog. Fox falls back with flares and flashes beneath his eyelids. They crackle and buzz like neon. He sleeps, it seems. Lights out.

  Fox wakes with the hot sun on his face, and when he shifts onto his side he sees a girl facedown in the dirt beside him, her cracked heels, the down on the back of her thighs a mist in the morning light. She smells of patchouli and sweat. The pattern of her cotton dress is a field of tiny shells in purple and white. For a long time he considers touching her but is afraid of what he might find; she’s only half an arm away and his hand flutters back and forth until she finally breaks into a snore and his hand falls in relief. A posse of cockatoos passes shrieking overhead and the girl stirs. Her small, crushed and dirty face emerges.

  Hello.

  Hello, he croaks.

  She rests her head on the edge of his swag. There are sticks in her hair and smears of red grime across one cheek. Her breath is bitter.

  I’m Nora.

  He nods and sees beyond her that the other car is gone. Rusty’s arm hangs from the open door of the Bedford and his leg lies on the dirt nearby.

  All around, the country is high and red. When Fox gets up he sees stars and his lips prickle. He finds a drum of water at the rear of the van and drinks greedily from it. He reaches into his pack, to discover that he hasn’t been robbed.

  Fox drives them through the gorge country. He feels like he’s driving t
hrough a movie. A western. Mesas, buttes. Cliffs, gulches. Nora sits with lips parted, breathing through her mouth, only half awake. They don’t talk. He feels queasy and anxious, uncertain about last night’s proceedings but alive to the fact that she doesn’t want to talk about it or anything else. From the moment they got up she’s just acted as though she’s along for the ride. He drives while Rusty sleeps in the back. The surfer wakes when they hit the rugged corrugations at the turn-in to Wittenoom.

  In the gutted old settlement Fox steers them up paved streets with footpaths and remnant gardens but no houses. Almost everything has been pulled down and carted off to stop people living here. Front steps and concrete pads lie bare. Here and there a set of house stumps, a driveway. A forlorn school sign. Sections of low neighbourly fence, exotic trees, trellises with bougainvillea and jasmine wound through. A few people seem to have persisted but mostly it’s just empty streets and health warnings. At the end of the last bare lane Fox pulls up on the cracked blacktop and gazes out at the canyon wall. Back up in there, he supposes, was where they mined the blue asbestos with it billowing in drifts all round them. When the old man was a sandy-haired young fella with a bookish wife at home and some land down south he had an eye on.

  The Bedford idles. Above them the gorge rises like a breaking wave, red, purple, black.

  Didn’t expect it to be beautiful, says Fox, not meaning to say it aloud.

  It’s not, says Rusty. It’s fuckin hot and dusty and the coons are welcome to it.

  The girl looks back at Rusty then at Fox; she blinks.

  Fox realizes he’s seen enough; more to the point he wants to go now.

  The girl opens the door, climbs out and squats. Her piss bores against the stony earth.

  Fucksake, growls Rusty.

  Fox turns to look at him but says nothing. Rusty lies back on the foetid jumble in his leopard-skin jocks with his stump blunt and angry looking.

  I’m hungry, says Nora climbing in and shutting the door on the heat. I could eat a horse.

  Eat me, says Rusty.

  You’re a pig.

  And it’s my truck you’re in, so fuckin watch yer mouth.

  Fox turns the van around and winds his way back down the empty streets, busy driving to keep himself from saying anything.

  What? yells Rusty. That’s it? You come this far and that’s all you wanna see? This is the place that killed his father and five minutes and a dose of hippy piss is all he gives it?

  The girl looks at Fox, he can feel it but he doesn’t meet her gaze as he drives on past the remnant dwellings of the diehards and out onto the corrugated red track to the highway.

  Yer ole man must be proud.

  Shut up, will you? says the girl over the battering of the suspension.

  Suck my stump.

  Yeah, sure.

  And I’ll fuck your big hippy rump.

  God, you’re low.

  I’ll pump and I’ll pump and I’ll pump and I’ll pump—

  Fox stuffs Steely Dan back into the deck and drowns Rusty out. After a time he sees the surfer in the rearview mirror with a syringe stuck high in his leg again, lurching with the sway of the vehicle, and ten minutes later he’s lolling back with his hand on his cock mouthing the words to the music.

  Through the deep red ranges they clatter, below stony foothills stippled with snappy gums whose limbs are mere whiskers on the jowls of the great bluffs and buttes above them. Up there the clefts harbour shadows black enough to unnerve him. Sit here looking long enough, he thinks, and those shadows’d suck the mind right out of you. Just one indrawn breath from all those gill-like fissures. These ranges look to him like some dormant creature whose stillness is only momentary, as though the sunblasted, dusty hide of the place might shudder and shake itself off, rise to its bowed and saurian feet and stalk away at any moment.

  His thoughts reel on until at a sharp bend in the road Fox sees a solitary termite mound whose black shadow beats a path to its door. A moment later there are others, a whole colony of them. He brings the Bedford to a sliding halt.

  You all right? says the girl Nora as he climbs out.

  I just want to see this, he says as their pastel dust wake boils up and overtakes them. I’ll only be a sec.

  The hot air is thicker than dust. He strides out through bunches of spinifex to stand among the red monoliths. He puts his hands on the first one he comes to and feels the rendered form of the thing, traces the creases at its sides, hot to the touch. A spinifex pigeon takes wing nearby. The Bedford’s horn begins to honk.

  At the huge, bleak roadhouse the girl asks for rice. The woman behind the counter smirks. Back out on the highway Nora eats her pasty with a look of martyrdom. Back on his mattress Rusty sits with a silver thread of drool suspended from his chin.

  They come down out of the brilliant gorges onto a vast savannah. They cross the Fortescue River, and iron nubs and boulders begin to jut from the grassland.

  Fox wonders if he should have made more of the stop at Wittenoom. He could have gone up to the minehead. But the old man would have thought him a bloody idiot. All that asbestos puffing up at every step. Be like an insult. Let the dead bury their dead—isn’t that what he said?

  For a long time he wants to talk to the girl, figure out what’s what, but she seems impervious as a lizard to his frequent looks. Eventually when he’s given up, she speaks.

  He your mate?

  You must be jokin, he says. I was just hitchin.

  She nods and puts her bare feet on the dash. Air balloons her dress. She pegs it down with her hands.

  You orright? he murmurs.

  She shrugs.

  D’you know where your friends went?

  Perth, I guess. Amber had to get her kid.

  Is that where you’re headin?

  Yeah.

  Well, you’re goin the wrong way. You know that?

  She doesn’t move.

  Shit, he says.

  A windblown tear rides off her cheek into her hair.

  How old are you? he asks.

  Sixteen.

  God.

  God? she laughs bitterly. God is sixteen. And she’s a girl.

  Well.

  And men fuck her to death every day.

  Look, he says, bewildered. We’ll drop you at the next town. You can get a bus. Port Hedland, I spose. You’ll probably catch your mates.

  The girl says nothing. Fox begins to notice graffiti on every outcrop.

  The Great Northern Highway finally ends at the junction with Highway 1. Fox makes the turn. The low flat floodplain is bleached yellow, the colour of a dried biscuit. It feels coastal but the sea is not in sight. This stretch of road is festooned with shredded radials, beasts, beercans.

  Welcome, Nora says, to the land of the big white bogan.

  What?

  Rednecks.

  They plough on but the van feels motionless on the shimmering plain. Boredom eats at Fox. He writhes in his seat.

  After the longest time, maybe half an hour, the saltpiles of Port Hedland rise above the plain. In the desolate outskirts of the iron port, a badlands of power pylons, railyards, steel towers and smokestacks, they pull into a roadhouse whose dirt forecourt is black with spilled diesel. Disassembled roadtrains. Pre-fab buildings stained with iron dust. Hitchhikers sleeping beside cartons of Emu Bitter.

  Fox pulls up beside the pump and peels off some money.

  Here, he murmurs to Nora before Rusty stirs. Just hitch into town if the bus doesn’t stop here.

  She nods. She smells of mouldy towel. She takes the money and climbs out. The door closes with a thump.

  Fuck, I need a piss, says Rusty. Where are we?

  Hedland.

  Shithole.

  Been here before?

  Nah. Where’s the chick?

  Gone for a leak, says Fox. Want me to fill it?

  I’m not keepin you on for the company.

  Fox gets out and pumps petrol while Rusty straps his leg on. They meet at the
register.

  Get some of that steak, says Rusty pointing out a whole vacuum-sealed fillet behind a beaded glass door. She likes meat, that chick.

  Buy it yourself, says Fox, wishing he’d been the one to hide in the toilet. If it wasn’t for the girl he’d be bailing out here. A child with a steaming plate of chips before her stares at Rusty’s prosthesis. Under fluorescent lights it gleams a shocking pink against his floral boardshorts.

  No money.

  It’s too big.

  Rusty scratches his scalp through the musty furrows of his dreadlocks. Through the window Fox sees Nora climbing back into the Bedford. The miserable dumpy girl behind the register sighs dramatically.

  We’ll have the porterhouse, love. Ring it up.

  Fox pays and carries the meat out cold against his chest.

  Nora doesn’t even look at him as he climbs in.

  He drives, his anger giving out to desolation. The two-storey roadsigns don’t help. Perth is 1650 kilometres south and Kununurra the same distance north. Halfway feels like no way.

  For a while there is the consolation of the grand mesas that rise from the ravaged floodplain but they give out onto the same dreary flatlands with grim, narrow creeks.

  Fox drives with odd flashes erupting behind his eyes.

  The De Grey River, brown and wide on its tree-strewn banks, gives a moment’s respite as they fly across the bridge.

  Rusty rolls a joint and shares it with Nora. She tokes on it with feeling. Fox’s lips tingle and for a few minutes one of his legs trembles. No one speaks. The fungal smell of dope fills the van.

  Fox drives.

  The two in the back rustle in the stash bag.

  The plain, the plain, the plain.

  Rusty begins to sneeze.

  Fox knows it’s cattle country by the dead bullocks, but he hasn’t seen a live beast yet. This far north there are no fences. He has cramps with the flashes now.

  All along the roadside are the remains of campfires, strewn empties, rubbish. From the north the Landcruisers and Cherokees drag their loads. It’s like a column of well-heeled refugees. Fox needs to stop. He has to get out.

  At Pardoo he pulls in. It’s just a fuel pump and van park. He climbs out and reefs his kit from under the surfer in the back. Rusty lolls, slit-eyed. The pack smells of him as Fox pulls it on.