Trucksong (3 page)

‘I gotta stick by Smoov and learn the secrets of the show, so as I can crack the Wotcher’s knowin of the gigacities. It’s more than just a matter of makin enough connections in the patterns to find out the truth. Smoov’s on the wrong track, and I know I still gotta lot to learn, but I reckon there’s a way to get inside the Wotcher direct.’

‘I don’t care nothin for the Wotcher.’

‘You should care. Smoov’s blind in his thinkin about it, but maybe there’s a clue from the Wotcher, maybe teamed up with a truckmind I could find the key and reseed a gigacity and lead the backroads folk back there.’

‘Don’t be so up yerself,’ I said.

‘Whadda you know about anythin?’

‘Not much but I dunno how many more beatins from Smoov I can take. Carn, let’s leave him and his stupid show. We could start our own show. He’s on a bum steer anyway, like you said.’

‘Smoov’s shifty, but he’s me dad,’ she said. ‘He keeps things to himself and won’t let me in on all the different codes to channel the Wotcher. I need to stick it out with him a bit longer before I can form me own show.’

I wondered if she just didn’t like me that much but the signs were there sometimes that she did so I kept me candle lit.

Roading, always roading. One shit heap after another. Traffic on the highway clogged with people and trucks and trolleys and droans skating over cracked tarmac and humming in the air. Flapples flying high up in the sky, black and rust specked shapes catching the light on bare silver claws and sharp metal beaks. They rode the air hot up off the baking ground, looking for machine meat to eat in the bodies of trucks and robo droans fallen by the way. We came up on a group of indie trucks daisychaining in a circle, and there wasn’t nothing that could stop Smoov from going down there and working a chat with them. Indies were a different matter to brumbies. They still played by the code of the road and could be wrangled with patches to give up their truckdream haze that they made in onboard synthfacs. Smoov was born with the gift of the gab and he loved the taste of haze so he pulled out his linkmaker. It was a scratched up slab of aluminium that you held in your and and it tuned your mind in to the trucks’ frequency, something from outta the past that only the showmans and a few others like truck detailers had control of. Me and Isa stood by the gear while he blinked the patchfile tags through his linkmaker on the trucks’ freek. Down off the side of the road, in a small gully, they grouped in the groove, pumping a rocking dub through their sound systems. It was a growing, growling mess, heavy bass and drumthump hitting you in the chest so you felt it rather than heard it. Felt the power of it, felt the falling snare hit rimshot crack on the frontbeat and the lazybones shaker on the back. Horns dripping wet with delay and the whole thing was a jammy vibe right from the start. They were patterned indies, dressed in decals and lightshifting scrollwork moving all the time, you couldn’t look at them for long because you wouldn’t move at all, you’d just be there in a trance.

Smoov was well skilled and used to the ways of indie trucks. He knew how to wrangle them, how to tame them with patches, make them do what he wanted done. I’d watched him do it and I learned a few things over the years. I’d learned how the trucks would trade with riders and showmans like Smoov, how they’d swap their truckdream haze for patches that the riders made to trip out their truckminds. And the sounds they jammed shifted and changed over the years in different phases too, rolling through their culture like the phases of the moon meeting back around the beginning again. This time Smoov was trying to get rid of some old junk patches and at the same time to feel his way into this new mob. They might have some contacts, there might be some roading. They could help us shorten the time between two points in the backroads, or give him some sweet haze that he could get high off.

He went down to the mob and they didn’t move or nothing. There were droans skittering and flapples flying around, scrounging for parts, but this wasn’t a big meet up and there were slim pickings. The indies didn’t give any sign they’d seen Smoov, they didn’t care. He was just a puny bloke and they were humming with power and tech and gleaming with moving glyphs and paintwork. Beats rocking, donks throbbing, swapping sounds and patchtag files to change the patterning of their minds, and Smoov always had something tasty, something good to share and trade for the haze that kept the backroads running nice and smooth like the outside of Smoov’s linkmaker worn shiny from being clutched in his hand.

Down by the side of the creek I sat with Isa while we waited and she told me the story of the creatures in the rocks that came out at night when no one’s looking and stole the breath from young babbies and how the indie trucks came on the land and rutted like wild animals, smashing into each other and flying sparks in the night sky and making babby trucks that over time had come to learn how to make the haze to pull the best riders with the best patches.

I sat there letting the sound of her voice fall around me like soft rain. I was in heaven. Then she started talking about this bloke called Crow and I snapped out of me dream, remembering that crow on Mum’s body.

‘Crow wears a coat made from shredded truck tyres and he’s a scavenger, a trickster. He roads slow from camp to camp, stickin his beak in to any business where there’s profit to be made from the shreds of others’ pain. He’s always ready to extract his toll from sufferin. But he’s got a magic about his self, he can change his shapes dependin on the company he keeps and he knows the ways of the backroads truckriders and how to live off the land as well. He can turn others’ minds around to do his own work with a crinkle of his white eye.’

I said, ‘I never heard that before.’

‘It’s true,’ Isa said. ‘True fact. I ain’t seen him meself but I seen the marks he’s made in the world.’

Later on Smoov came back and he was high on wild indie truckdream haze. He talked a hundred mile an hour about them indies that was also tuning to the Wotcher’s freek.

He said, ‘One thing to do is to play to a indie’s pride. They’re all vain and they like to have things no other truck has got. If you can offer them something rare, they’ll trade with you for it. Trade for roadin or truckdream haze. You gotta be careful coz you never know what they is gunna do, but if you can find the right truck, you can make a team, truck and rider. You can make a pair, like a pair between a showman and the Wotcher. Hook them through the link and show them you got patches to trade. You can even use the patches to get the trucks to do what you want sometimes, it hits them like haze hits a human. And like haze, it’s a leash you can jerk.’

Smoov ranted on and on though we had heard it many times before. But there was always something you couldn’t predict with Smoov, always some surprise coming out of his mouth. That night he said this: ‘Them trucks is gettin more and more interested in the ways of interpretin the Wotcher’s trancemissions. They don’t got the same kind of thinkin as a human, but they know the Wotcher’s part of their own past too. I reckon they got a feelin of kinship with the Wotcher, like sometime back they come from the Wotcher and the Wotcher’s got the keys to their codin, see, and if they knowed what it was, they could take control of the present and breed their own hybrids. They’re loadin fragments from the Wotcher’s frequency into their trucksongs and puttin them together like a showman would, to find the patterns.’

I could see Isa was hooked up intense in Smoov’s words, she was listening hard. What I took from what he said was the trucks thought they could find their own past in the Wotcher and use it to make a better future, like we were trying to do. Then the haze took Smoov over and he turned mean and swiped me with his fist till the sparks flew in me head. And looking back, maybe I should have done things different, taken me swag and headed out on me own right there and then. But maybe it doesn’t make any difference.

Next day we saw a camp of desert people. They’d been there long before the flapples and bigdogs and trucks and goanna droans came, and they’d be there longtime still. They knew the places to dig for water, they knew the ways of hunting meat, they knew how to cook and how to live off that land. They didn’t want nothing to do with the indie trucks what roared and shook the rutted roads and they didn’t want nothing to do with dusty riders and showmans and sandblasted followers of truckdream haze. And I thought they’d got the right idea and we got the wrong of it.

It was later on. The moon had fatted and wasted with none to account and no more sign of brumbies. We were on the plainlands and down in the dirt, digging for old hardware in the rubble of broken ruins. Me and Isa picked through the muck, mining for data on dead media drives. Smoov was a little way off, wild scraggyface hair but digging carefully. He could scan the drive to pull the fragments of pictures or sounds and splice them in to spice the show from the Wotcher. He was a showman, and the showmans were the only ones who could extract the data and interpret what came up from those wells beneath the earth and from the shining Wotcher up above.

Isa’s brown hands were working next to mine, going over broken cases and copper wires. I looked up and caught her eyes and she smiled. I lived for those smiles. They were me campfire embers on a cold desert night. Smoov collected a clatter of junk up over the rise. Always digging, looking for the pieces that were going to make the puzzle fit together. But there wasn’t no fit, no together, just the pieces. I knew it by then, even if I was too young and dumb to say anything. There was only the puzzle, only the smooth surface, nothing underneath. Especially nothing in the junk we dug up out of the ground, just bits and bites of random signs left behind from people who were long gone from the earth.

I climbed over a mound and reached down to pull up a hefty case, to find underneath was a creature that looked like a snake with dirty metal skin lying there against the ground. It was so still I didn’t see what it was until I was right up close. I siezed up. It glistened wet and nasty, ten hands long and thick like a root. Its tongue flicked. Its skin was black holes in the world. Its red eye glowed in the shadows and it made a shivering slivering whisper as it reared up on its back and looked right at me. I called out, me voice quivering.

‘Smoov... There’s some kind of snake.’

Smoov looked up but he was slow in moving. Isa’s eyes flashed on the snake. She came closer to take a look.

‘Stay back,’ I said.

She wouldn’t. She wanted to see and she wanted to get close to it, her eyes bright and burning to see the knowing of the new creature. She took another step forwards and bent down, reaching out her hand, the snake struck and bit her wrist. She cried out and that’s when Smoov came rushing over. The snake slivered off into the garbage. Smoov turned on me, eyes red and ruddy beard scraggling with rage.

‘What’ve you done, you fucken idjit? You stirred it up, didinya?’

He pushed me rough out of the way, trying to get to Isa.

‘No I didn’t it wasn’t like that,’ I said.

Sickening real fast, Isa paled and falled to the ground. She cried and whimpered.

He gathered her up in his arms and took her rushing back to where we were camped, next to an old and rusted truck cab on its axles, its windows hung with tarps. Smoov ripped off a piece of cloth from his shirt and tied up her arm real tight. Laid her on the ground and said, ‘Don’t move, there there.’ Busted up a couple of sticks on his knee and tied them to her arm so she couldn’t move it.

I watched him from behind. I didn’t want to get in the way but I wanted to see what I could do to help.

The skin on her arm started to turn blue and scale up like the dirty metal scales from the snake thing, hard and cold. She was going into shock, sweating and shivering. The poison was spreading. She started to moan. Sunlight glinted off the sweat on her skin. I leaned in to touch her.

‘Git away,’ Smoov yelled.

He swung the back of his hand and clipped me on the head. Like it was my fault Isa got bitten. I went down to the edge of the ruins and cried where the robos and the crows pecked over bones and circuit boards and I hoped Isa would be OK.

I kept me eyes out for the snake but it was long gone. Isa snakebitten and no telling what would happen to her.

Smoov glowering.

‘Fucken idjit,’ he said.

‘Fair go, Smoov. It weren’t my fault,’ I said.

‘Bullshit it weren’t. You stirred it up, you unco bludger. Everything you ever done turns to shit in yer hands.’

‘Na, it wasn’t like that, Smoov.’

But there wasn’t no telling him. He was itching for a blue. He raised up his right hand to hit me. I shied away from it till the next thing he was swinging a big round blow with his left what caught me in the head.

I put me hands up too late. The right came back around straight after, me head exploding from the shock and I lost me feet. I was on the ground with a screwed up face, hands clutching at the air, trying to get him off. He dropped the dead weight of his knees in me chest and puffed the wind out of me and those fists kept coming, arcing around like rocks on the ends of the chains of his arms. Three four five times, each one booming in me ears, louder than trucksong, lightning sheets of pain with each shock sending off red and black and blue colours in behind me tight closed eyes.

He took his fill of me like he was drinking a draught, and when the anger left him he lifted up his knee and took to his feet. I laid on the ground. The blood flowed first then the tears came with the ache.

‘Yer a fucken waste of space,’ Smoov mumbled under his breath. He took off back to where Isa laid.

It was over in just one or two minutes but the pain stayed and leaked into me bones and me dreams at night.

Isa spent a fevered night that sweated and cried like the night I lost me Mum. I cried for Isa and for me poor busted face. Isa called out in a snakedream. Smoov kept her real still to give her a chance to fight the poison instead of it hitting her all at once. When the light came on in the morning we packed the gear and roaded to where Smoov knowed of some healing folks on the track to Hind Pass where we was headed for the next showing.