Cloudstreet (35 page)

You don’t have to talk like that.

Oh, Quick. I forgot you went to church. I bet all you do is look at those old ladies’ bums.

Some of em have better bums n you.

You bastard.

Quick felt his throat tighten. I’m sorry, Luce. You shoulden push me like that. I take a lot of crap from you.

And plenty more, you get plenty more, don’t forget, crackshooter. What other girls you got in town like me?

Quick laughed. What others are there, full stop? Geez, ya haven’t got much competition.

You’re so dumb, Quick Lamb.

I believe it.

Spose you feel sorry for me.

Spose I do. A bit.

Well, you shouldn’t.

Quick shrugged. He’d slowed the Dodge so much they were barely moving. It seemed like a fine pace to him.

You think I’m a, a conquest? she said.

Nah. Nope. I never went after you. He thought: no you’re not a mountain I’d choose to climb without havin the idea put in me head.

You come by every Saturday night, mate. Isn’t that comin after me?

You asked me to, once.

Oh, you’re just obedient then?

Reckon I am. More than I should be. With you.

So it’s just you takin orders. Whip me pants off, Quick. Get me knees up, Quick. It’s just you bein obedient? She was starting to snarl now. Quick let the Dodge ride to a stop on the gravel shoulder.

Well, you have a nice way of askin sometimes.

You bastard. I taught you everything you know!

Who taught
you
?

You bloody bastard! You thought your dick was for cleanin your rifle before I took you in.

Did you take me in?

What do you reckon?

Quick looked at her face, green in the light of the speedo. There was always going to be something waiting for him at the end of this, and maybe he deserved it, going along without any feeling at all. Maybe he was a bastard. But things had just gone along like this without him caring either way. She was around, he was around; he got used to it.

Trouble is, she said, I got to like you.

Quick felt a hot blur of embarrassment. He opened the door. The air was warm and breadscented. He turned the motor off and got out.

Hey Quick, you’re not … are you?

What?

Leaving me here, I thought you were gonna leave me out here.

She got out, stood on the doorsill and looked across the roof at him.

Don’t be daft. I want some air, and while I’m out here I reckon I’ll take a piss, orright?

She giggled nervously: you’re a duck, Quick. A sittin duck. You’re dumber than a post.

Quick said nothing. He heard her coming round his side of the truck as he unbuttoned his flies. The sky lit up over the wheat round a bend in the road. A car coming. He tried to hurry.

Can’t you go? she said with a laugh, grabbing his arms from behind.

Leave off, willya!

The headlights splayed out across the ripe paddocks, veering through the bend. Quick shrugged her off and felt his stream ease out at last. He forced it along, knowing he was beyond stopping now. He thought he had a few seconds. He tried to be cool, but the note of the motor coming out of the bend wasn’t reassuring. There it was, bolting out of him like he hadn’t had a leak in his whole life before. Coming out of the bend, the lights hit the top of the cab. Quick tried a complete shutdown, failed, and started crabwalking for some shelter behind the truck, but when he turned round he saw Lucy standing in nothing but her bobby sox. That’s how the lights hit them, full whack, him with his dick out, and Lucy with those big breasts in her hands. The car pulled up, brakes snickering.

Evening, said the Shire Clerk.

Well, said Quick.

Quick packed up the Dodge and was gone within an hour. The town was afire with gossip and Lucy Wentworth, beside herself with happiness, began her negotiations for the florist shop at breakfast. Her father, who’d been at the dance when the Shire Clerk arrived, took out his account book to do his sums. His face was the colour of gunpowder. Mrs Went-worth wept. She blew her nose absently on the teacosy and wondered how she could ever go into town again.

Well, thinks Quick as the Dodge runs smooth and unhurried between walls of wheat into the even plain ahead. Well, that’s that. That’s that, for sure and certain. All the heat has gone out of him now and he’s noticing things. Like they’ll be harvesting here any day now, any day at all. Like he has a quarter of a tank of juice left. Like he’s not sure about himself, what he thinks, what he’ll do. He drives away from the dawn.

Outside Bruce Rock, at the beginning of the faintest morning light, he sees a blackfella standing with his thumb out and a gladstone bag at his feet. He is tall, white eyed and half grownover with beard. Quick takes his foot off the pedal a moment, but drives on. A few miles down the road he’s out by the gravel shoulder again—thumb out, bag down. Quick, who isn’t in the mood to think it through, pulls over and opens the door.

Ta, the man murmurs, getting in. He seems to fill the cab, even with the gladstone bag on his knees.

Quick winds his window down all the way and then begins to wonder.

Wanna smoke?

Yeah. Ta.

Quick passes him the pouch and watches him roll. The road goes on.

Hungry? the black man asks after a few miles.

Yeah, I could do with a bite.

From his gladstone bag the stranger takes a bottle and a loaf of white bread.

Whacko, says Quick.

The black man pulls him off a hunk of bread and Quick takes it. Then the bottle. It scourges his mouth. It takes everything he has not to spit.

What is this stuff?

Muscatel, the black man says.

It burns down inside him bringing on some unexpected comfort. They drink and eat, gliding down the road. After an hour Quick feels like he could just start in and tell this blackfella everything, the whole business. About how he took off from his family in the middle of the night, clouting the Pickleses girl with his bag. The jumping trains, the walks along the tracks, the nights he spent in dry grassbed—ded ditches under the sky. Of the jobs he took on clapped—out farms, and the shoots he went on with shickered country boys, and how he got his name as a crack man with a rifle. The way he started pulling in good money culling roos. And last night’s business. Quick gets so that his throat is itching with it, but the blackfella doesn’t say anything. He leaves no gaps for that kind of talk the way he sits there erect and shadowy in his corner of the cab. Quick taps the fuel gauge which seems to be on the blink. The wine and bread seem inexhaustible, and he has a good look at his passenger. He’s never seen an Aborigine in a pinstriped suit before. The blackfella pulls out a fob watch big as a plate and consults it.

How we doin fer time? asks Quick.

Aw, well as can be expected.

Quick feels warm with wine, and emboldened.

Where you from, mate?

Aw, all over.

I mean where’s your family.

All over.

You must have a bit of a job. That’s a nice suit.

Bit of a job.

Family business?

Always family business.

Headin for the city?

The black man nods.

Family business, says Quick, smiling to himself. And for the next hundred miles he can’t get boo out of him while the petrol tank stays on quarter full.

They roll down the baking scarp into the city where cars are parked outside pealing churches.

Sunday, says Quick.

The river flashes at them between trees.

Where can I drop you? says Quick.

Just follow the railway line.

Quick shrugs and keeps driving. He doesn’t know where he’s headed himself. South, maybe. His mind keeps coming back to Margaret River. Maybe he’ll go and see the old farm, get some work somewhere. Or maybe he’ll stay here in town, find a room, get a job, buy a suit. He doesn’t know.

They follow the line across the causeway and the river islands till they’re in the heart of the city, then beyond, until Quick’s palms start to moisten. The streets get more and more familiar.

Any place in particular? he asks uncomfortably.

They roll up Railway Parade along the grassy embankment and the date palms and weeds and fallen fences. Quick sees the great sagging west wall of Cloudstreet and hits the brakes.

Where exactly do you wanna be dropped off, mate?

The man points.

I … I … I’ll drop you at the corner.

At the corner the blackfella takes up his gladstone bag and gets out.

Comin?

Quick Lamb laughs fearfully and guns the Dodge away.

Baulking At Shadows

Quick drove until half a day later the Dodge finally ran out of juice and he woke from his steering daze to see that he had come back to Margaret River. And there was his father’s cousin, Earl Blunt, hosing down a truckload of pigs outside the town hall.

Earl Blunt, Egypt, said Quick.

Earl looked at him. Mason Lamb.

You still doin haulage.

You still doin nothin.

I need a bed.

I need another driver.

I’m hired.

Earl Blunt rolled his eyes and hosed pigs.

Earl and May lived in a truckshed by the road out of town. They had been married twenty years now and had no children. They were farmers as well as truckies, and they were rough as guts. Earl could feel no pain and he could not imagine it in others. The Depression had made him hard; war had beaten him flat and work had scoured all the fun from him. He was hard beyond belief, beyond admiration. On a Sunday night Quick saw him apply a blowtorch to the belly of a fallen cow before going back inside to pedal the old pianola for May. The land has done this to them, Quick thought; this could have been us.

Quick moved into a plywood caravan up on blocks behind the shed. The yard smelled of diesel and grease. It was full of rusting crank cases and radiators, butchered Leylands and Fords and fanbelts coiled about like exhausted snakes. In the mornings, Quick woke to the roar of bees out in the karri forest, and all day way beyond dark, he drove for Earl and May: loads of cattle, pigs, superphosphate, rail-sleepers, bricks, to Perth, to Robb jetty, Pinjarra, Manjimup, Bunbury, Donnybrook, all the time wrestling a bastard of a truck with stiff steering and slack brakes and keeping wide of the transport coppers and their safety rules. He rolled up to farms without stockyards and learnt to throw pigs up two storeys by hand. He wrung the tails of steers, he shovelled seven ton of super and did not whinge. Late at night, just for May, he double de-clutched on the pianola and tried to be happy. After all, it was 1957 and he had his whole life ahead of him. He was his own man.

Some Sundays he took his Dodge out to the old farm and parked on the boundary. The place looked good. He thought about climbing the fence and looking into the gash low in the old blackbutt to see if his threepenny bit was still there. But he couldn’t bear to know. There were a lot of things he just wanted to fail to remember. He didn’t mind being lonely; he was used to being sad, but he didn’t want to baulk at shadows for the rest of his life.

Still, Quick had old habits. On Sundays, he got the newspaper and cut out pictures of those less fortunate than him, and stuck them on the plywood walls of the caravan where they danced in his sleep like everything he ever wanted to avoid. He did not think of home, but home thought of him.

Tho Mine Enemies Rail