Shearers' Motel (12 page)

Art of frying chops was to get the outside colour right — dark, crisp, unburnt, retaining juices. Trimmed fat during cooking. Leisurely spending of time, standing there pushing sizzling chops around. Three minutes to twelve and all was ready, a last straighten of dinner items, a quick wipe-down of the table, an ear tuned for the shed and the dying away of the engine. Got rid of apron, made
tea, and was found idling against a bench as the team trooped in, filling the wide kitchen with elbows and shoulders.

‘This looks good.'

‘Eh, chops.'

‘You're spoiling us, Cookie.'

He glanced up from the tattered pages of an old book as if in surprise.

‘Look at im. Nothing to do. Loafing round all day reading.'

Two men his age came to the shed, and he thought, these could have been me. Couldn't they?

Why not?

York had gone to school upriver from Bourke. They compared stories. They had watched the same floodwaters go past forty years before. They had floated sticks, crossed over to the opposite bank in flat-bottomed tin boats hauled hand over hand on ropes, and pulled catfish from mud pools. They thought they had even competed in the same interschool sports, the kids from York's town arriving in Bourke on the back of a truck — a shearing contractor's truck with bench seats on either side. The girls wore belted tunics and sandshoes without socks, while the boys, barefooted, wore collarless shirts, knee-length itchy felt trousers and braces. Maybe York was the fat ginger-headed boy at the boundary who could never get to the ball before anyone else. Just as, if York thought about it, he would remember a skinny Bourke misfit bowled for a duck, who lost himself in daydreams inspired by ant beds while he was supposed to be fielding. You were the way you were as an adult because you were connected to the way you were as a child. Either you
played variations on the connections until they became intricate as notes in music, or you sat in the corner where you had begun, and you sucked your thumb.

Down there in the Riverina among Kiwis York was wide-eyed, suspicious — out of context like a possum in daylight. ‘The Kiwis have ruined their own country by doing what they're doing here. They don't want to be there any more,' he muttered. His thick red hair was combed to the top of his head like a boxing glove. He kept a comb in his back pocket and took it out many times a day, running it backwards with a familiar angling of the wrist, while darting his neutered tomcat eyes around, checking on work practices. The style-setting moment of York's life was when he went to Sydney to work in the wool stores when he was eighteen, and became a bodgie. He had come back and got married at twenty-one. Between then and now he was always a union man, he fitted in. ‘It was good enough for our fathers, it is good enough for us.' Now he was nudging fifty. Once in his home town a priest said to a young boy, ‘Now there's this other young fellow coming here and he's going to be an altar boy, do you know him?' And the young boy said, ‘Yes father. I do. His father scabbed in '56.'

York had a memory like that. ‘All us people who stand by the union and stand by all those rights that have been won for us originally, we are being discriminated against because we are staying to our old times and these scabs are coming in and they're working any times and for any money, and in the long run it just has to ruin the whole shearing industry.'

York was the replacement presser. Mack was down with blood poisoning. Harold required him to pen up as well. York said he would have words with Clean Team Alastair about that. Apart from trudging back and forth with armloads of wool and heaving them into the press, York was expected to leap the railings and disappear back into the gloomy depths of the shed and chase sheep up, just so these import shearers and professional scabs could increase the amount of wool he had to press,
making his day a lot harder. There should be another person employed to do that, believed York. I'm going to have words with Alastair, I am.' It was the same thing Davo had said at Leopardwood Downs. Except Davo had said it with a biting, feisty exasperation, while York whinged.

‘Davo?' said York, his chunky head swivelling around and his eyes narrowing at the mention of the name. ‘Tall skinny weed of a bloke? Originally from Victoria? Married to a classer?'

He nodded. ‘They're friends of mine.'

‘They still work for Alastair, do they?' York offered him a cigarette. Usually it was the other way around. York looked animated. ‘I have a mate who'll be interested to hear that Davo's still in circulation. He's been tracking that Davo for a year. Davo wants to watch out. He might find he has an accident some time, like the steering gear will go on his ute or something.'

‘What's your mate's problem?'

‘Davo belted him with a length of wood, and my mate owes him one.'

York stayed in his room until mealtime, and when the meal was over he went back to his room and lay down again. Okay, he was tired from the physical effort because he hadn't worked in a while. But it was as if he wanted to stay out of sight in case anyone he knew caught him there, working in a non-Australian shed in Australia. He felt like a traitor. It was an agonising problem he had to sort through, and it gave him a worried frown. And he knew it would be too much for him, in the end. York had worked through agonising problems before, and got nowhere. York was a sleeper: he couldn't change. He was still back in a time when the sheds were a hierarchy of men and the only dark people around were no bother. Australian blacks and certainly the odd white Kiwi, Maori too, they always had them with them. But they fitted in, then, and didn't move round in controlled teams. If Abos worked in the sheds they kept to themselves, or were as if they were white, and pitied their own people, and rightly
so. (Not the way they were in York's town now, drunk, thieving, stirring.)

 

York didn't bother coming out of his room one day when a loud, excited voice started shouting from near the washroom:

‘Jesus fucking
Christ
, come and look at this, will you, everyone, hey!'

People poured out. The overseer from his hut, the other shearers from their rooms, the cook from the kitchen, the station hand from his propped farmbike, where he was flirting with Rosie and Louella. They came too, wondering, ‘What's this guy onto now?' and Sadie crawled out belly-flat from under the quarters' floorboards and started yapping.

A handsome barefoot man wearing a Hawaiian shirt, holding his beltless shearing denims up with one hand was dancing outside the washroom. That was Quinn.

‘Look, can you believe this,
look
!'

What so amazed Quinn was the commonest sight in Australia — a line of ants. There were tens of thousands of them in a well-defined swathe about thirty centimetres across, each ant as big as a broken match and each like the next ant identical, every darn one of them made up of black dumbbells of body connected by amber joiners and supplied with delicate constantly-feeling feet and jaws like a baby crab's. They came out of a crevice in the crumbling wash-house wall and they disappeared into nowhere under the overseer's hut.

The crowd drifted away. ‘Ain't he seen an ant before? We don't believe it.'

Well, he hadn't. Not like these. ‘Shit a brick, they're carrying food, look at this, Cookie, they've got rice, bread, sugar, tea — the little mongrels are doing themselves proud.' They were a wonder of the world to Quinn, whose head jerked back as his eyes followed a gush of parrots low overhead, ‘The fucking colours knock you out!' he exclaimed.

All clean, Quinn arrived in the kitchen with his tobacco
tin and his papers, and after poking around in the food boxes to discover where the ants were getting in, he found himself a perch near the stove where he was out of the cook's way (he thought), and spent the last half-hour or so before tea yarning and smoking.

‘Now look at this bottle here,' says Quinn, twirling vinegar in his hand. ‘It has a sort of a horse on the label, a unicorn. Look at these matches. Redheads. How about that. And the boot polish, Kiwi, eh? Defiance flour, that's an interesting name. Aeroplane jelly. Podrova stock powder, is that widely known in Australia? See here, it's made in Yugoslavia.'

One day Quinn brought in a bunch of herbage. ‘Taste this, Cookie. Interesting, eh? I was talking to the cocky and he told me it's what the sheep eat. Not at all unpleasant, salty, not too bitter, dry.'

He was always gathering wildflowers.

Quinn at forty-nine had an ex-wife and a grown-up family of sons (he passed around rugby photos). He'd recently broken up with his girlfriend in the South Island; she was a shearers' cook and hotel cook. She used to do up the two legs at once. Have the shoulders boned out, roll and stuff them. She was only twenty-three years old. Quinn said his mates used to say it proved the mathematicians wrong: forty-seven into twenty-three would go. Quinn himself had been a cook for a stretch, along with much else. ‘Fourth cook in the Auckland Travelodge.' At the age he was, the same age as Cookie, Quinn had left the country of his birth for the first time. He caught the plane to Adelaide and the bus to Broken Hill, where Harold collected him in the Hi-Lux at the weekend and brought him down to the shed. It was a typical transition from New Zealand. With sheds organised Harold or Clean Team Alastair bundled workers into cars and hurtled them through the night. Maoris were a travelling people. Headlights revealed ghostly boomers drifting up to the side windows and if they were lucky, flicking away. Sometimes they hit. Crammed in the back seat were eighteen year old girls from Napier, ageing men from
Timaru, mid-twenties married couples from Whanganui. Like Christian T and Pam at Leopardwood Downs they'd studied maps but couldn't believe it was a two- or three-day drive to Sydney or the Gold Coast. They woke up in strange places: couldn't believe those places. The doors of the rooms opened on flatness. Earth was red, sky pale, then molten. Grass had never been invented. It was a furnace in the middle of the night. The birdcalls were weird. Insects crawled on the skin. Snakes were a nightmare. Foxes howled like madwomen. There was no local town.

 

‘These are my first impressions,' said Quinn, ‘but there is something about this country that blows my mind.'

‘Have a beer,' he offered Quinn, on the Friday night at Gograndli when he broke out his Coopers and started to feed into himself the numbing, stunned-mullet quality of too-long-withheld pleasures.

‘I'm right with this,' said Quinn, holding up his cigarette between nicotine-stained fingers.

‘You don't drink?'

‘Not at present, no.'

Quinn asked: ‘What's this thing I keep hearing about, a billabong?'

He told Quinn what billabongs were, reaches of river cut off from the main channel, where water was held far into dry times, so they became year-round havens for waterbirds.

‘Show me where the billabongs are,' said Quinn.

They set off on a Sunday morning, down past the bank where he had parked his truck and camped in it. Louella and Lenny were sitting there on a log.

‘Get out of Cookie's bedroom,' said Quinn.

‘This is the lounge,' said Louella. She collected Sadie and scooped her into her arms, hugging her with a fierce, blind affection.

In the tangled, shady light of the riverbank a wagtail shirred ahead from grass-stalk to grass-stalk. Quinn angled his head, looked thoughtful, and tried to say what
the sound of the wagtail reminded him of. ‘You know those old galvanised iron kerosene pumps — they operated with a ball or something inside, and they had a wire handle. They made a sort of chuckle-chuckle knock-knock sound. Did you have them in Oz? You did? Well, that's what the wagtail is like.'

Quinn said: ‘I've been a lot of things: truck driver, bridge builder, shepherd, meat worker. I always listen to people. I was a trawlerman, and I got to know Japs. People say you can't know them, but you can.'

The billabong stank of mud. Carp crowded in to the shallows where they were dying. Sadie waded through them, snapping to right and left. Quinn unbuttoned his shirt, stood back with his hands on his hips, and surveyed the birdlife with dark, shining eyes. There were pelicans, ducks, cormorants, finches. Quinn handed over his camera, and settled himself on a heronshit-patterned dead tree. He spat into his hands and brushed back his hair, and tidied his moustache.

‘I want my girlfriend to see that I'm happy over here,' he said. ‘She thinks maybe she knocked me for six when she told me she wouldn't be seeing me any more. But you know, when they're that young, you're sad all the time because of the age difference. It's like dancing with smoke. The Japs say “utsoroi”, the moment when things are changing. The moment of death. That light should come on, is it on? Okay, take my photo.'

Cal came into the kitchen, half-smiling, angling sideways, staring at the food table with a disdainful twist to his thick, wide lips. He was a physical force come to a standstill. The floor seemed to dip in the direction of Cal like a weatherboard whirlpool. Others milled around while he made up his mind what he wanted.

‘I don't care, Cookie,' he shrugged, transferring food to his plate with a blunt wrist action. Pumpkin, peas, mashed potato, mutton. What did it matter? Burgers and chips were Cal's soul food, beer and Jack Daniel's his spiritual refreshment. Fights were his glory.

He watched Cal trudge around the spread, getting his share of tinned fruit, UHT cream (crushing the carton in his fist), red jelly. ‘Anything else?' No reply. The others pressing behind him expressed their usual exhausted truculence — ‘This looks good' — ‘What's this here shit?' — ‘Pile it on, Cookie' — but Cal made him afraid. There was nothing compromised about him. The first time, when he asked him his full name, his eyes cannoned in slow motion towards the questioner. Then he looked down. ‘Calvin.' The utterance was like the drop of steel into the innards of a pinball machine. It held Cal's
attention while he wallowed in introspection. The name rolled, tumbled, slipped from his tongue. ‘Calvin' — said with an extra, unneeded movement of the lips, a foam of spittle at the corner of the mouth, as if between the ‘I' and the ‘v' there was something else, a chomp, a rip, a delectation of strangeness. Then he raised his head again, as if coming up from the depths of water, shedding a weight. Something echoed back into his brain as he met another set of eyes. ‘Calvin.'

Watching Calvin eat, he imagined him gnawing on human bones and spitting gristle to the dust. He thought if there came a night when graves opened and the dead walked, Calvin would be there.

One day at Gograndli Station Cal became animated. ‘What's dis? Dis any good, Cookie?' He was in a good mood. It was corned leg there on the table — a different colour. Something had touched him, an incident in the shed, a word of praise or blame or aggression, a letter from home? He poked the mottled pink and brown of the meat with serving tongs. Back in New Zealand Cal's uncle was a famous Maori orator. The family kept an eye on him. The overseer was Cal's cousin. The others were animated, light-hearted or grave, having the full range of experience to play with. But Calvin seemed to have wrestled potential to a standstill — crushed it with inexorable strength. He only moved fast when he ran for a cold beer, or raced to the showers before the hot water went. Then his run was like a heavy trot, a topple, a lumber. Other times he dragged his toes in the dust.

 

One Sunday morning at Gograndli Sadie went crazy following new smells. She tracked splashes of blood. He walked up from where he was camped on the river and saw a shadow in the meat house. A freshly killed sheep had been put there the night before. Now it had a companion, a smaller, darker double. He went up to the gauze and saw it was a wild pig. Its chest had been cleaved open and the guts taken out. His dirtied butcher's knife hung where the last knifestroke had finished. Dried mud caked
the pig's grey, mottled bristles. A jellied mass of ruby-red blood lay splashed on the cement.

He learned what had happened. Cal and the classer and the shed hands had driven to Ivanhoe to go to the pub. Coming home their headlights had caught a sucking pig on the rain-spattered track. The classer set his dog to it. The dog cornered the pig in a culvert. Someone found a screwdriver in the glove box and ran out into the dark, and drove it into the pig's brain.

On Monday while he prepared the pork there was a battle going on in the shed over Cal's attitudes. From what he could gather Winston Didale wanted Cal sacked. He shore in a dream, he had seen it himself in the few minutes before smoko, when he took the sandwich boxes over and lingered a minute, assessing the scene before going back to fetch the tea billies. ‘Cal is lazy,' said Harold. Straightening his back from his work Cal had the preoccupied, distanced look of a man about to do something immediate, particular. The same wide spread of gravity that ripped galaxies apart focused on insignificant Calvin. Where was the knife, the pigsticker, the gun? Cal had all the time in the world as he lowered his handpiece and unclenched the cramp in his fingers. The grower stood beside the wool table with his arms folded over his skinny chest, his mind full of the implications of a few cents here and there, the hocks not taken off cleanly, the national disaster of second cuts (where the sheep were left striped with unusable wool). While Cal rotated his gaze, work structures shattered. They were bullshit to Cal — the collapsing and re-assembling pattern of the camp; the administrative needs of the contractor, the one who looked after him, Harold; the wants of the grower; the paperwork; the food orders; getting the wool away.
Pah
.

Harold took Cal aside and spoke a few stern, whispered words. ‘It grieves me to see you with these attitudes, brother.' Cal dropped his chin. Okay, he'd surrender his handpiece and work the wool board instead. Why de fuck not.

Calvin was no longer a shearer. He was a rousie now,
what he had been since the age of seven and younger. What he had been since the mothers strung their baby baskets above the wool tables, bringing them into this life. There he went tripping along in his Adidas with a millet broom held loosely between the fingers of one hand, skirting, getting the shit separated from the bellies, arm-loading fleeces down to the end of the shed where the owner still kept an eye on him. That owner — who was he? No shape or form that Calvin could see.

One day this same Calvin would take up the knife inside himself and he would carve. One day he would cut his image inside the house at the inland town where he lived with his unwedded wife and his new, beautiful daughter with her tiny brown limbs, her smokily glowing skin, her blue water-pool eyes and her lovely dark-petalled lips. Calvin would find himself holding her and chuckling with a deep, bewildered delight, and then he would go outside and think for a minute, and then he would come inside again and get started. Stubbies would smash on the walls. Upturned, the record player would shatter. The TV and the video would crash. Then Calvin would come to Harold's house and take the twin-cab ute. He would drive for five hundred kilometres with his foot to the floor, take apart a shop in one of those towns over the border there, because something was needed for his child, something that no one would let him have, and turn around again and come back to the Western Division, listening to police calls on the UHF scanner, feeling himself slow down, tire, sink back red-eyed, satisfied, ready for the handcuffs and the time ahead when he would contemplate against the blankness of a cell wall whatever it was that appealed to him, locked him in, held him down, made him do what he did, made him who he was. Calvin.