Shearers' Motel (24 page)

Getting to know Rocco, a champion international competition shearer since the age of twenty, he sat in his room on a wet day, when Rocco was sick from eating shellfish that Oxley had thrown in a bag, tossed in the back of a truck, and driven to this point far from the sea among all this red earth and storm-subdued inland light. They had eaten it the night before, when it was already a couple of days old, rank and rich in the damp burlap.

‘I must have been out of my mind,' grimaced Rocco, gripping his stomach, bending double, staggering outside and heading for the dunny again. ‘I'll be back in a while.' He was the only one to get sick.

 

Months before, he had eaten sea urchins with Rocco and Harold behind the sandhills at Port Fairy, cracked them apart with his curved butcher's knife, so that the hard, spiky, mauve-patterned shells crushed with a twist of the handle. He had found a taste for them there: tipped them back till juices and slime ran down his chin. They had seemed like the essence of sea life, concentrated living slimy intestines and eggs of the spiky kina evoking the sway of kelp and the shedding of green, glassy water from
shining rocks. That same time they had eaten abalone by hooking it live from the living shell with the fingers, biting into the clean, rubbery pulse of the meat. It was a feast that had continued back at Reuben's house, with Rocco saying grace in Maori, and men's wives bringing barbecued abalone to the table while men and Louella rinsed their palates with milk, Coke, and Fanta, reaching hungrily for the food. Calls for follow-up helpings were led by Reuben, who got his wife's attention by saying, ‘This is your husband speaking!' — and the extra lots were swiftly cooked in the microwave.

No wonder Rocco and the rest of them had fallen on the sack of shellfish when Oxley bowled in, driving his Toyota truck with its whippy UHF aerial and 30-30 clipped to the rifle rack behind his head, and inviting anyone who was interested to hog in. It was a food reaching back to the place they always called home.

‘This always happens with me. I get too greedy or something,' said Rocco when he returned to the room, looking pale and peaky. ‘Especially when seafood is involved. All my life I've been fighting against myself, for sure. It's only this book that has saved me.' He reached out to his bedside table and touched a well-thumbed Bible. ‘I was twenty-five before I learned to read properly, I'm thirty-six now. I decided I would start at the beginning and work my way through. This book is my schoolbook, my teacher, and my friend. My font of wisdom, Cookie.'

Rocco looked off into the distance in a semi-agonised fashion. The horizon was broken by a turkey's nest dam and a slowly turning windmill. Otherwise it was just red earth and scattered silvery saltbush meeting low drizzly cloud in a ragged line. ‘When I remember what I was like when I was first married I am amazed at myself. I was a warrior-type guy, trained in the martial arts, and if anyone so much as looked at me sideways I would punch them out, no questions asked. I gave my wife a hard time. I banned her from smoking and drinking. I
forbade
: no glass in hand, no cigarette. One night she sneaked out for a smoke. I saw what I was making her do. I was ashamed.
And I said, sit right here, have your smoke, I will never put the hammer on you again.'

Rocco sat up in bed, pulling his sleeping bag cover around his knees. ‘Are you cold, Cookie? Man, I am
shivering
. I must have been a prick of a guy because my wife up and left me. Holding to what Jesus said about marriage was hard. I had everything, all a man could want except fulfilment. It felt as though coming together again was never going to happen. People find it hard to express what is in the heart, while the quickness of the tongue is easy, too easy. I was training and competing all this time, aiming for the Golden Shears. I was one of the world's fittest guys, I'd come that far, but I was weak and empty. I said, “If you're really there, if you can make this thing come back really good, do it, Lord, and I'll know you're real”. This was my prayer. We got back together again. I have a good marriage now. My wife and I are equal partners. I tell her everything, make her part of my life. The teachings of Christ turned on the real me. “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror,”' he smiled. ‘“Then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand, even as I am understood.”'

Rocco swung his legs from the bed, rested his elbows on his knees, and held his head in his hands. ‘I'm not better yet. Harold's treatment is to down two cans of Fanta at one time, and throw up.'

‘You're losing a lot of money today.'

‘That's not real important to me right now,' said Rocco. ‘What I am missing is the joy of a full day's work. That's how I earn my relaxation time — it's well earned. God himself rested on the seventh day, and he was pleased with what he had done. The same with us. The guys I work with on a regular basis mostly are switched on. Many of the guys here, that we see wandering around because it's a wet day, they are so easily robbed of real joy. Many of the best shearers I know have marriages that are busted. The Maori people were a pagan race until a short time ago. What changed a pagan to the man sitting here today? They traded heads for muskets. They were
warlike. Tattooed. The stuffed heads of our people are in the London archives. Sea gods, harvest gods, forest gods, blah, blah, blah. The point is to get to know the Saviour. To know that he's real. What changed the progeny of that race to a person who speaks the way I do? I don't do any preaching.' Rocco stretched back and fitted his hands behind his head. ‘All I do is share my testimony with the guys.'

Oxley selected a half-tonne of volcanic rocks from the paddocks around Mortlake and transported them in his Toyota flat-top through the mallee, across the border, up the long roads of New South Wales and along miserable back stretches to the hot inland town. The rocks were honeycombed, lighter than they looked, but still heavy to handle, charcoal grey in colour, with fragments of glassy imperfection streaking them. They came in the shape of hearts, footballs, and grindstones. Some had depressions in them like finger holds. Others cut to the touch. Mortlake rocks, said Oxley, were the closest in Australia to the ones used in New Zealand.

‘They're not fuckin' perfect, Cookie my friend, that has to be said. But they'll fuckin' do.'

It was morning, and the team was building a ground oven, a hangi. Bertram Junior had made an offer at the start of the year, that they would do a hangi for him some time. It was going to be at the ideal shed, Red Rock Gorge. It had never happened.

Oxley, foul-mouthed, cat-calling, stood on the back of the flat-top heaving the rocks down — ‘cunts and pricks and molls' of rocks they were. It was all happening in a
mate's back yard, behind the corrugated iron cottage, with unsmiling neighbours watching from the back steps of their own corrugated iron cottages.

The dull-thudding, hefty, charcoal-shaded stones were set in a pile on top of a stack of gidgee logs. They looked sullen sitting there. They seemed like Oxley, who needed heat to come alive — an argument, a fist fight, a challenge. The men would dig the pit, build the fire, heat the stones. They would lay down the stones when they were hot, hose them to create steam, and cover them with water-soaked bags. They would set down baskets of food on top of the bags — pork, chicken, mutton, and yellowbelly from the Darling — and cover the basket with laundered, dampened bedsheets, and flat sheets of corrugated iron over the top, and cover them with shovelfuls of earth, and wait until evening, when they would eat.

 

Cal dug the pit. He wore a red handkerchief around his forehead and gleamed as he wielded the spade. The pit was a box. It was a grave. It was a shelter. It was a cell with walls made of earth, where Cal squatted on his haunches taking a break, and rolled himself a smoke from the bitter tobacco he carried around with him — a habit he acquired in prison. Out of this hole would come beautiful food that Cal would tear into. If only Cal could eat up the angry side of himself, that made him go for the king-hit, brood and destroy. If only he could always have a hangi, the routine of the hangi with the mates and the protectors, the hero shearers like Rocco, the father figures like Harold, and the women out of sight with the babies, back in the house under the pressed-tin living room roof, where the evaporative cooler rumbled, making the heat bearable.

The women got the food ready, stuffing chicken and pork, thawing out fish, peeling pumpkin and potatoes. If they came and talked to Cal they made him feel edgy. The ones he didn't like he stared at whenever he met them. They seemed to know something they weren't telling him. Say if he was at the pub and a woman he didn't like was
over the other side of the bar. Say it was that Hazel. He just stared at her all night until she left. The only thing was if one of the women brought him his baby. Then he was entranced and bewitched. Bombed out of his mind when he looked at his baby. He just loved her to pieces.
My baby, my baby, my baby
. He couldn't get over her.

The storms of the week before, that had disrupted the shearing at Welcome Corner, had drifted away, leaving the air clear, shimmeringly hot, working its way back to absolute desert dryness, emphasising the colours of red earth, bronze ridge, blue sky, and the white trunks and pale-olive leaves of eucalypts in the long, narrow yards.

The Kiwis moved around in chunks of coloured sports-clothes. They seemed to have chiselled the sheep-grease off themselves, steamed it away and cleaned their pores with astringents. They brought New Zealand with them, a steady way of doing things, the aura of a green, unmystical island, geologically new, with snow and glacial melt water crashing and cascading through farm paddocks, a place that didn't prey on the sanity like this old, flat, worn and endless continent. Oxley resisted the claims of Australia by going back to New Zealand every year to keep up his attitude. But Harold said he wouldn't even mind being buried here,
that
was how attached to Australia he had become. But then he told Rosie (when they didn't think anyone was listening) that the one thing he wanted most if he died was to have his body shipped home.

 

Rocco swept the dusty ground, making it as clean as the floor of a chapel. He was in a trance of relaxation having come in from a hard week at Welcome Corner, speaking Maori in undertones to Bradshaw, erupting into laughter, moving through the dust-filled sunlight with his broom held loosely in his hands. He kept emerging from the background of the dusty light, leaving a herringbone trace of broom bristles in the dirt behind him. He walked like a cat. Sometimes he paused and stretched, holding the broom across the top of his head like a barbell, maintaining the pose with a kind of upwards grunt, as in a
weightlifter's snatch, as if the frail stick and bare fists were all that held up the sky, and he always had to work at it, there was never any let-up.

Rocco spoke of himself in the plural. ‘Our aim is to make the reproductive side of the industry workable for the family man' … ‘Slot us into a team that's already effective, we're rolling' … ‘We can't take the speck out of our brother's eye, if we can't take the board out of our own.' Rocco set his example to the blokes: to the single ones over from Kiwi looking for a good time, to the married ones torn between the values of the camp-out and the family unit. He showed how far he had come, scanning the way ahead. He said the inland town was ideally suited to the average shearer, who could return here at weekends and spend his money on grog and cards, or play up at the nightclub attached to one of the hotels. He could settle himself in with his cartons, his smokes, his videos, and could even dial a pizza. Rocco feared symptoms of the life he had left behind him in New Zealand. He hated the alcoholism, the unemployment, the crowded families, the broken marriages, the incest, the destructive repetitive patterns. There had to be another way. Rocco knew what was real.

 

It was time to pluck fire from the air and set the process going that would come to completion after dark. Bending a knee, Bertram Junior snicked a cigarette lighter in his big fists. Flame rose into the hot blue sky, sending a column of white smoke spiralling over the neighbours' back yards, arousing the ire of townspeople, who were underground miners and didn't mix with shearers — except now, maliciously, when they made contact by ringing the fire brigade, and then stood at their back doors with their arms folded, their eyes narrowed in the glare, to see what transpired.

As the sirens looped closer dogs barked and children burst into tears. Harold and Rocco rolled their eyes at each other. ‘We might have known.'

‘Leave this to me,' said Harold, and he went out into
the weedy wide street, where he negotiated with a bunch of men in white plastic helmets and dark blue jackets, who were curious to see what a hangi was, and so came down the drive at the side of the house for a look, and didn't think a hangi posed a threat to anyone.

When Rocco finished with the broom he sat on a stump and absorbed himself in the task of weaving food baskets from tie-wire. It was going to take hours. Under his breath he sang gospel songs. The baskets were wide, rectangular, and had carefully fashioned handles. When they were made they would be perched on top of the fire to burn off the galvanising. The fire was well away now. Every so often the gidgee logs would settle, parts of the fire would collapse in a whoosh of white ash, and the dark rocks sitting on top of the pyre would topple a little closer to the ground.

Harold called out to the mate who owned the house, ‘Has your missus got a paddling pool for the kids here?' The mate located one. Harold spread out the plastic, filled it with water, and dumped in a stack of hessian bags to soak. ‘It has to be done slowly.'

The word went around among local Kiwis about the hangi. They saw the smoke. They got the message in the pub. They came calling.

Rocco held himself aloof from some of the people who dropped in. Boland and a group of others came looking for a towrope and they didn't even look at him. It was as if the light was too strong in that direction. Rocco's disapproval could be frightening. Harold commented, ‘In relation to Rocco, he's always listened to the best, and if they're not then he is'.

Others Rocco greeted with an embrace.

One was the pastor Bradshaw had worked with six years before, when he first came over to Australia. Bradshaw he remembered as a model to everyone who met him. His cheerful disposition, strength, light-footedness and honesty created a beacon. Bradshaw liked to help people. He and the pastor started a drop-in centre with a band, coffee shop, meals. The town's youth suicide rate
fell. Bradshaw felt good when he gave people something. Just this morning an old Aboriginal man asked him for a dollar and a smoke. He didn't have either, but he was eating Kentucky Fried from a carton, so he said, ‘Here. Have this chicken.'

On a trestle table in the back yard Bradshaw found a fashion magazine, and leafed through it, gazing at the African models. ‘Oh, black, man, black is in, black is the most beautiful, eh?'

The thing was, though, said Harold, that no one remembered guys like Bradshaw when just one other man started brawling in a pub. That pub was branded as a Kiwi pub, and so the town had a Maori problem. ‘We native peoples of this world are in a bind,' said Harold.

Arnie dropped in to pay his respects to Rocco. His hair was wild and unwashed, and had sticks of grass in it. He was wearing his Indian Head leather jacket, that looked as if it had been driven on, pissed on, spewed on and been scrubbed with dirty water. When drunk, Arnie fell on girl rousies and asked them to sit on his face. It was a case of nailing up the door and locking him in the boot of the car, as Harold always suggested. But this was a Maori occasion here, so he sidled up to Rocco and asked him how he was. Rocco said he was fine, and then looked away. Arnie asked him how his wife and children were, and Rocco said they were fine, and still looked away. Arnie looked pained, scraped his toes in the dust, and was unable to take the next step, the next mighty step that would make Rocco look at him, smile at him, and take him into the fold of his understanding. All it needed was an expression of knowledge about himself, a recognition that he was destined for skid row, and knew it. Then he would be ready for Love.

Cookie sympathised with Arnie. He liked his battered, rueful, friendly nature. It was hard to be Rocco unless you were Rocco. It was hard to know what the condition of your life meant unless you concentrated hard on it like Rocco. It was mostly too much.

Arnie wove from the mate's house into the wide
outback street and headed back to the centre of town to try his luck with Pub TAB.

In the back yard, Rocco swept beer cans off a side trestle with his forearm, sweeping them into a garbage bag as if clearing the temple.

 

The heated rocks were alive in the white ash of the fire. They glowed across their surfaces like cities seen from the air, caught between evening and night in a rosy glitter, spitting out flurries of sparks resembling fireflies in the low sunlight. Their redness was dusted over with a strange whiteness. Their shapes, still retaining the forms of grindstone, football, and heart, now seemed to stir in the heat-waves they generated. These rocks would not thud if they were picked up and dropped but would reverberate with a long liquid echo.

It was a moment of concentration and group attention. The women came out into the back yard with the baskets of meat and vegetables all ready, and rested them on the trestle table. The kids were held back. Rocco and Bradshaw made their judgements. Cal stared hypnotised. Bertram Junior had his arms folded, his legs spread wide. ‘This is it, Cookie. You'll be real interested.'

Bradshaw had the job of transferring the stones to the pit, working them onto a long-handled spade and swinging them across one at a time, inserting them into the ground with exactitude, so that each one on the floor of the hole was reasonably spaced in relation to the other. As Bradshaw angled them in, Rocco reached down with another spade and made adjustments. The sharp edge of the metal scraping on the rocks made tiny sparks again. Here was a version of the force that came into the handpiece — another sort of lightning connecting back. The Maori life Rocco questioned but was still tied to, in language, in belief in family, in belief in one God, in belief in afterlife, was in the fire, in the hangi.

Bradshaw dripped with sweat from his approaches to the fire, and Rocco was the same standing over the pit,
flinging off the sweat, drenched. ‘Keep em coming, brother, steady there, nicely done.'

‘It's
hot
, man.'

It was too slow for Bradshaw, too hot for him to linger wiggling the spade in, finding sometimes that just as he got it, the rock grated back into the ashes again, or fell off while he was bearing it across the red dirt of the back yard, where it smouldered like a meteorite. So he threw the spade aside and grabbed a pair of heavy leather gloves, darting in, ducking out, doing it by hand. The gloves smoked. Bending, weaving back and forth, this action of carrying the fire stones seemed connected to Bradshaw's shearing, his unstinting hard days on the board at Rocco's side, his taking on of challenges from other shearers who came from all over to wager a thousand dollars a time and put the heat on him; Bradshaw's almost burning hands connected to the arts of fire where any error was fatal, and the work could too easily be ruined by a lapse of dedication, application, or faith.

Bertram Junior spoke about a hangi at Wanaaring. There were no suitable rocks, so they went to the dump and got old metal car parts, engine blocks and gear boxes, and set them on top of the fire like a crazy plane wreck. The pit was so deep it needed steps, and so hot in there that they tipped buckets of water on themselves as they went down into it.