Shearers' Motel (8 page)

‘Still on that Coopers, Cookie?' taunted Bertram Junior. ‘What's the secret of that stuff?'

Willie-boy reached across the table and tapped his arm and said he wouldn't mind a Coopers, if there was any to spare. He said sure, have one. He hadn't seen Willie-boy drink alcohol in three weeks. Willie-boy knocked it back, and then got a restless look in his eye, and started bargaining with the others for a share of their supplies.

Some time later Willie-boy stood beside him with his arms folded, swinging a stubby between his fingertips, rocking back on his heels, benignly shickered. ‘These are the nights, Cookie,' he said. ‘It's a real get-together we're having. Pity that Lou ain't here to enjoy it, eh.'

‘Where is she now, do you think?'

‘Fucked if I know, the stupid gel.'

 

There was a serene intimation in the huts on cut-out night: all things would come good. It was a time to get quietly smashed and let the washing-up worry about itself. After dark Leopardwood Downs shed had a special feeling. The owner and his sister, after a cut-out beer, had driven their seven kilometres back to the homestead, where there was mains power, air conditioning, satellite TV, telephone, books, magazines, reading lamps, paintings.

The shearing team was out on its own.

Going outside for a piss, dragging his boots through the sand, he had the feeling that Leopardwood Downs shed had slipped its moorings and was drifting away on the ocean of land. Its motion registered on the long top of the nearby sandhills, where stars raked, blurred, flickered and blinked out. Silence lapped the place around, with an under-rhythm of crickets, nightbirds, and faint rock music coming from Bertram Junior's car, on the other side of the huts. There was a reimposition of distance into ways of thinking here. Time divisions hardly mattered. When communication devices were switched off the global village blacked out. It was always like this. There was release waiting, if you were ready for it.

From over the other side of the sandhills he felt himself and the nine-year-old self that had camped out with his father moving towards each other. The boy had a dog panting after him, a patch-eyed fox terrier crazy for lizards and rabbits, who always came when called, even when yapping deep underground. At the memory of the dog he felt a surge of feeling. He must be drunk to be smiling like this. Dirty was the dog's name — he was always backing out of burrows, shaking off sheets of sand, or getting his nose down between split rocks where snakes hid. They had taken him on holidays to the North Coast, smuggled him back through a tick gate, and he had died in Bourke of a tick bite. The boy had sat crying
on the rough, lumpy lounge, his fingers stuffed in his mouth because he hated the idea of being found crying so hopelessly for a dog. His mother put her arm around him, and said, ‘There's no use crying over spilt milk'. It left an image of Dirty drinking from a saucer, wagging his stumpy tail, looking up and meeting the boy's eye, ready for adventure. Then dragging his hind legs, crashing into the saucer, unable to walk, lying down paralysed and looking at the boy with an expression of desolation.

All that was abandoned, forgotten, or undervalued — wheeled back in the pattern of the night sky. He imagined his father, letting go of anxiety, lighting a cigarette, sitting on the running board of the Chev, just enjoying the boy's presence while thinking of something else. It was what the boy had done with his dog until the day he died; what he did with his own children; what he tried to find in his marriage; what he tried to find in his life. What was wrong with that? It was everything. Maybe just this letting-be was what his father meant in his prayers. He had wanted it for himself then. He wanted it now. Only it was always so hard to find.

The team was so small here in the wide silent immensity of night. What they had in common might not have been much but they had it in plenty. On they went, singing, warring, working. They had got rid of Louella, but behind their bluntness about her was something else — not consideration but a compensating faith. Willie-boy and Bertram Junior had slingshotted her ahead to the next intersection of roads, the next town, the next shed — as if they knew a secret about her but they weren't going to talk about it because it was a secret they weren't even telling themselves. She belonged with them. That was it. And they loved her.

Under the stars, he felt he had arrived where he was going almost before he had started, almost without realising it, meeting his father as just a man, realising that that was all it was between them, the unresolved knowing of other selves that can only be met in self-knowledge. And yet tomorrow he would make the mistake of packing up
and pissing off once more, still searching for something, forgetting what had been in the grasp of his understanding this night.

The hissing, sputtering gas lights hardly showed where the huts were as he moved farther out, breathing in the soft air. At a hundred or so metres, the distance to the truck and bedroll, the huts were blotted out of existence. Long ago the boy's father had offered up his prayer for continuation in the wreckage of the church in Brewarrina. On this night maybe it was answered. What did it matter in what way? His father would have to recognise him half-pissed, living rough, a failure as a family man.

A faint ripple of lightning showed where the huts were now. Stubbies could be heard crushing into the bottle bins at the bottom of the steps. The sound had a special satisfaction — like the grinding of stars.

 

It was late when he returned from his night stumble. Davo plucked a ukulele and sang songs he'd written. They were about people he'd known and attitudes he had, relating to maltreatment of animals, world population, cars, and shearing sheds. (Remind him to tell you the story some time about the shearers who crucified his dog.) Davo had worked with homeless adolescents and would do so again. One of his songs was about that. Another was in the voice of an unborn child. Around the table, people revealed their pasts. Flash split open a plastic pouch and rolled joints. Things went quieter then. Lenny was once a deer hunter, flying into South Island hills by helicopter and tramping back with a carcase slung over his shoulders — forty-five kilos, no worries. Flash's son, Flash said, was four, almost five, the same age as Cookie's youngest. ‘We should get them together in the sheds some time,' said Flash. ‘I get him in the school holidays and take him with me. Kids love playing round these places, rolling in the wool, making car tracks in the dirt.'

Flash said, ‘I always make it back for his birthday. Wherever I am, I just drop everything and head home. Too bloody right I do.'

Rosie for all her wild living sat there crocheting a pillowcase for her baby: she was pregnant, knocking back Jim Beam, inhaling dope. Her stitching was intricate: ‘Show standard,' nodded Bertram Junior quietly to him, proud of accomplishments emerging in people who might otherwise come across as raucous, ghetto-blasting, tattooed, dope-smoking devils with sinewy tails between their legs. Bertram Junior recited sporting statistics, challenging anyone to catch him out. His brain was encyclopaedic. When the cook showed his sporting ignorance Bertram Junior was scathing: ‘And I thought you had brains'. Willie-boy had once been a car salesman. ‘Take this one, you look as though you need it.' That would have been his style. Though it wasn't any sort of a life, either, he said, preferring the sheds despite their hardships. He looked round the room with dark, moist eyes. ‘Our little family is breaking up. It's always like this. You get all the shit. The shit gets sorted out. Everything goes along nicely at last and then, bingo, that's it. No more sheep. Kind of a pity, I think.'

Bertram Junior asked for a taste of Coopers: took a sip, and pursed his lips sourly. ‘How can you drink that stuff?' Then he praised the meal, adding, though, ‘This ain't nothing like a boil-up, I am here to tell you'.

Lenny stood at the door looking out at the horizon flickering like an erratic fluorescent light. ‘You have my cheque ready tomorrow as soon as we finish, Bertram Junior,' he threatened, ‘or I'll have your guts for garters, because there's no way I want to be stuck in this shithouse country without work.'

He asked Lenny where his home was.

‘You're in it, Cookie,' he spat.

 

Then it was the last morning at Leopardwood Downs, last day. Shearing finished just before lunch and once they were paid off the team scattered. Lenny called, ‘See you down the road a bit. Your fuckin' shout — that's the rule, Cookie: your first shed, so you buy a carton.' Lenny wagged a threatening finger.

‘Catch you at the shearers' motel,' winked Flash,
leaping into the moving car with Rosie stretched out on the back seat, already fast asleep.

Willie-boy walked around chewing hunks of fluffy pizza bread left over from a quick, early lunch. ‘We won't get tucker like this in our next shed.'

‘You will if I'm cook,' he replied.

‘Oh, sure,' said Willie-boy noncommittally, glancing over at Bertram Junior as if what Bertram Junior knew, he knew — whatever it was, maybe nothing.

Bertram Junior was exacting a cheery revenge on Barbara for the authority she had exercised over a rouseabout in his shed. She had won, no doubt about it, on the matter of Louella. Bertram Junior wouldn't forget the day. They stood talking against the bonnet of Davo's truck. The caravan had been hooked up, ready to roll, since the night before: Davo and Barb were splitting off, going home for a quick holiday after a year in New South Wales sheds. ‘Let's work together again,' was the vow. Bertram Junior was telling a story to Barb, spinning it out. It was to do with problems he had with his car, how it was a good machine, but it sat low to the ground, and he'd hit a rock coming over from the previous shed, and although Maurie Holgate had been a good bloke and brazed it for him in his welding shed, he was going to have to just poke along on the run through to Bourke, with the cook tailing him in his one-tonner in case of trouble.

‘How are you going there, Cookie?'

‘Almost done,' he called from the kitchen, where he was sweeping the mess and kitchen area, wondering how it was with each pass of the broom that more burrs jerked up from nowhere.

‘Take your time,' Bertram Junior assured him. ‘Gee,' he turned back to Barbara. ‘This rig must cost you and Davo a packet in petrol to run.'

‘Mmm,' said Barb, examining her nails.

Davo sat on the steps of the huts furiously smoking and tapping the face of his watch because he couldn't believe the time they were losing. ‘Let me tell you,' he said over his shoulder. ‘This guy is master of a very old game.'
Bertram Junior's Valiant floated over the track, becoming airborne approaching a ditch and then yawing to the side only when there seemed no possibility of avoiding disaster. Or it mounted the road shoulder and drove along crunching old beer bottles for a while, hitting whipsticks of mulga, and then swooping to the opposite side of the track like a roller coaster trolley. The yellow truck followed.

It was no good slowing down and falling back, because then Bertram Junior slowed too. He saw Bertram Junior's hand adjusting the rear-view mirror, trying to see if anything was wrong. Then with a spurt of dust the front vehicle would be on its way again, indicating Bertram Junior wasn't going to be overtaken, and why didn't people remember they had arrangements?

Most of the time it was as if Bertram Junior drove with only half his attention on the accelerator; as if he drove in response to something played on the tape deck, a disco rhythm, maybe, creating an oscillation, a thrust, a mesmerised nod and a sudden wrench of the steering wheel. ‘Teardrops', it might have been. That was Bertram Junior's favourite at the time. ‘Turn that up,' he would call from the mess-room whenever it came on the kitchen radio at Leopardwood Downs.

He still didn't know if he was going to be the cook at the next shed, and the only way to find out finally was to stick to Bertram Junior like flypaper until he either shook his head or nodded after making a phone call along the way. He still didn't know if the next shed was going to be the Arid Zone Experimental Station at Red Rock Gorge or if it was going to be anywhere. He didn't know if anyone else knew where it was going to be either. He thought now that even Alastair at Clean Team headquarters didn't know. Cooks were playthings. That's what the stories about them showed.

‘He says, “Pack your fucking bags and get out”, and Johnny packs his gear and he's just about to leave. He says, “You better come back”. This goes on time and time again. He fell through the roof once. They sent him up to get something and he fell right through.'

That was the pattern.

Rattling around in the back of his truck were the carry-over shearing supplies: several kilos of onions nesting in a net bag of papery skins, greening potatoes, white rice, rumpled cartons of UHT milk, bakers' flour, and half a sheep compressed into the Esky — a leg, a shoulder, and all the chops. In a cardboard carton were dusty bottles of black sauce, ruptured cellophane packs of mixed herbs, paprika, tomato sauce, and a bottle of parisian essence, which he had found useful in turning gravies from grey unappetising gruels into rich dark substances attracting mopping up with home-made bread. ‘If we don't get you a shed, then all that stuff's yours to take home with you,' PR'd Bertram Junior. ‘Your bonus for doing a good job.' He raised an eyebrow, pursed his lips. ‘Your missus will appreciate it for sure. Specially that outback mutton, it's a treat.'

At an isolated telephone exchange operating from the verandah of a fibro cottage at the edge of a paddock of shining clay, Bertram Junior said: ‘It looks like we're going to have to let you go, Cookie. That brother of mine has put a team into Red Rock Gorge already. It's always the way. It makes me so angry. He takes my best dogs, my best sheds, my best workers. At least he ain't taken my best cook, eh.'