Cloudstreet (34 page)

He took my bloody dog.

Goanna Oil

Old Wentworth found him unconscious under a mound of boisterous flies in the afternoon, roasting like a pig at a party.

Yer bloody lucky a man wuz goin by on the orf chance! the old farmer shouted over the sound of the FJ whose gear box was shot to bits already. Yer woulda died sure as shit I reckon.

Quick watched the gravel ahead. The dog was gone, but the three-oh was beside him. He wasn’t sure about himself at all. He went to sleep.

Late at night he woke headsore and stiff under a sheet on a cot. He looked about. It was Wentworth’s place. They’d lately turned the verandah on the shady side into a sort of sleepout with flyscreens and an old chest of drawers with boyish graffiti scratched into it. It was a cool evening, though Quick could feel the heat radiating from his skin. His chest was taped and there was a bandage across his nose. He could hear them talking in there, Wentworth and his missus. And the girl, their daughter. They’d had the doctor out, he knew. Well, that took care of the week’s pay, the quack and the board they’d charge him. Wentworth had been the one to give him his first shooting job, a break alright, but the old boy was a mean bastard, tight as a noose. He didn’t give anything away, not even kindness. But I’m orright, thought Quick, I’m orright, and he sank back into a blank, overheated sleep.

Quick woke again and there was Wentworth’s daughter, Lucy. She was rubbing his blistered skin with goanna oil. He’d never really spoken to her before in all his coming and going from the homestead, and here she was, smelling of horse, her hair a dirty blonde colour, her jodphurs feasting on her.

Is that really your name? she said. Quick Lamb?

Yeah, he said as she slipped a finger into his bellybutton.

Because you’re fast? Her hands were ducking and diving under the waistband of his shorts.

Nah. No.

Quick had never been rubbed by a girl before. He’d never even kissed a girl. At school he was too sad and slow for romance. And now he looked at the short and bottley Lucy Wentworth and knew he wasn’t interested even now, but he couldn’t bring himself to object about her slipping her grabbers into his boxers.

You’re blushin.

How can you tell?

You just went red in the white bits.

He felt her grip on his dick. He was glad he’d put on clean undies last night. It was a bit of home-thinking he couldn’t shake off. Lucy Wentworth had the grip of a crop duster pilot.

I’m going to live in Perth, she murmured.

Oh? It was all he could manage in the circumstances.

I’m gonna have a flower shop. A floristry.

Mmngh?

My Dad’s gonna set me up.

Hhhyeah?

He just doesn’t know it yet.

Hhhhow long have you planned to do that?

Oh, she chuckled, I just thought of it. Only three minutes ago. I just got it all figured out. She squeezed and put him through a few manoeuvres that ended in a long, stalling climb which had Quick Lamb shuddering at the point of blackout. Then she abandoned the controls altogether and left him dusting crop at high revs.

As Lucy Wentworth went inside with a slap of the screen door Quick was contemplating a victory roll, though he thought better of it. His skin was so tight it was hurting now to breathe, and he could feel his pulse stretching him at points all over. Then he felt sort of guilty in a way he didn’t understand. For a long time he listened to the shifting timbers of the homestead, the clink of dog chain out in the yard, the cicadas dozing in the wheat.

Sleep, Quick, and smell the water leaching. Can’t you hear the boy in the boxboat calling? I’m calling, brotherboy, and you won’t come. And the waters shall fall from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up. And they shall turn the rivers far away and the brooks of defence shall be emptied and dried up: the reeds and flags shall wither, be driven away, and be no more. The fishers also shall mourn, and all they that cast angle into the brooks shall lament, and they that spread nets upon the waters shall languish. From me to you, the river. In me and you, the river. Of me and you, the river. Cam, Quick!

Safety Off

In one week five cockies sign Quick Lamb up to protect their crops. They know he’s the best shot the district’s ever seen and there’s no reason why they should give a stuff about rumours. Lucy Wentworth is not their problem. Roos are. Coming on toward harvest time, as if it isn’t enough to worry about early rain, the boomers are moving in from the desert—reds, and greys alike—eating their way overland. Mobs of blokes hurtle around the paddocks at night with shotguns and crates of Swan Lager doing more damage to the crop than the plague itself and blowing each other’s ears off in a regular fashion. Quick Lamb buys an old Dodge with multiple spots, fixes himself a cage on the back to shoot from, and starts earning dinkum money.

Summer is on the land like fever. Pink zink plastered on him, Quick sleeps the day away beneath the tarp on the back of his truck. He misses his dog. Now and then he’ll spend a morning burning rooticks out of his flesh with a red-hot piece of fencing wire, then lapse back into the stupor of a western. And at night he drives to water and shoots. The bed of the truck becomes varnished with blood until the weekends when he goes to town to scrub out, cash in and sleep up. Saturday nights he sees Lucy Wentworth, or various moonstruck parts of her, in the cab of the truck, parked up some dwindling road behind a decrepit grove of salmon gums.

You’ve got a huge whanger, she says. That’s what I like about you, Quick. A head like that, it’d be eligible to vote.

He never thinks about her much, though he doesn’t object to wrestling her round the cab. He figures he’s along for the experience, and mostly he doesn’t feel that guilty at all. He looks at himself naked in the mirror. It isn’t
that
big. Time just goes along. It proceeds. The summer hardens.

Then a strange thing begins. One night by a dam, as he waits for the roos, he hears the familiar bashing in the wheat and raises the rifle with the spotlight ready. He hears the hacking of breath and sees the crop swaying in the dark. In comes the first silhouette, a leader, so far out in front of the rest that there’s no sign of the mob behind, and when it cracks from the dry, heady mass of wheat Quick hits the spot to get a look at the monster. But it’s a human, a man running raw and shirtless in the light. His face is tough with fear, there’s a sweat on him, and he runs right past and out of the light to the dark margins of bushland. Long after the runner is gone and the light turned out, Quick has the face burnt into his retina, because that face is his. It’s Quick Lamb barrelling by right before him.

He doesn’t call out, he doesn’t go chasing him. He rolls a smoke and thanks God that he didn’t shoot.

Coming up to harvest, it happens now and then. He’ll be sighted up by water and he’ll hit the light and see himself tearing out into the open, right in the sights, right under the first pressure of trigger, safety off. And it scares the skin off him. It starts to affect his shooting. He waits too long now, he lights up too early and loses half the mob. Quick never knows when he’ll see himself in their midst. He thinks about Fish coming in the fruit box. Am I orright? he thinks. Was he telling me true? What was he saying? Was I delirious?

The Florist Shop

Quick drove slowly through the great flat plain with her hand on his leg. The Dodge murmured away, sounding deceitfully healthy. The cab smelled of Brylcreem and old blood. Now and then, a ute passed, bellowing toward town for Saturday night, for beer and dancing. Quick wound down the window and rested his elbow on the sill. He didn’t know where he was driving—he just drove.

What’s up with you tonight? Lucy asked. She had on a small waisted dress that was unkind to her. He saw her bobby sox on the dash in the corner of his eye.

Nothin.

Make a killin this week, didja? she said with a mirthless guffaw.

Nup. I didn’t.

Must be losin your eye, Quick Lamb, crackshot.

Quick said nothing. That thing had been happening all this week, too. Seeing himself breaking out of the wheat into his sights. That made it a month, and he hadn’t shot a week’s worth in all that time.

Crackshot. Make you think of anything?