The Butt (17 page)

The two remained like this – massively stoical in the face of many tiny irritants – for the next two hundred corrugated miles, until Bimple Hot Springs came into view, and Tom suggested they stop to get something to eat.

‘At what?’ Tom queried. He too was flicking but irritably, and he wondered how long it would be before he could treat the flies with such disdain.

‘Oh, yairs.’ Mr Courtney tugged up a handful of hot sludge from the slough they were lying in and applied it to his broad, sun-reddened brow. ‘Y’see, yer bing-bong could kill only the odd moa or flipper with his primitive spears, right. Then we pitched up, and we brought rifles, right.

‘Well, yer bing-bong, he’s a happy little bloke, has no thought for the morrow. He thinks “meat” – now, don’t he, so he goes on one bloody almighty killing spree. Been on it for near on eighty years now. Wiped out most of the moai, wiped out the flippers, wiped out the auraca – bloody feral camels and horses in all, yeah. Now yer bing-bong, he only takes the choicest cuts – even his bloody dogs get sweetmeats! All that bloody meat lying around – all these damn flies.’

Mr Courtney allowed his considerable bulk to slide down still further, so that all that was left of him above the mud bath was the top half of his face; his outsized chipmunk teeth gnawed on the sludge.

Mrs Courtney – who was even bulkier than her husband – gave a hippo snort, shifted in her picnic chair and affirmed, ‘Bloody bing-bongs, yeah.’

Bloody, thought Tom. Bloody, bloody, bloody.

They had found the Courtneys already comfortably ensconsed at the Hot Springs. Their Winnebago was the only vehicle in the parking lot, and, despite the bullet holes that peppered its rusty sides, its candy-striped canopy, with the picnic chairs and table beneath it, gave their little encampment a gay holiday air. As did Mrs Courtney, who, draped in a tent of a dress patterned with hallucinogenic Van Gogh sunflowers, insisted on serving the new arrivals with tea.

‘You’ll be lucky if the fat slag in there will dish up for you, yeah,’ she had said as she pottered with kettle and tea bags. ‘Silly cow’s scared of her own shadow.’

To Tom, who was unknotting the muscles that the drive had tied up, this remark was doubly ridiculous: Mrs Courtney was fatter than any cow.

The scarred clearing in the gum trees, with the steaming wound of the hot springs burping sulphurous fumes, had a minatory atmosphere. As did the motel, a ramshackle corrugated-iron building with a warped veranda that was raised up on stubby stilts.

To test Mrs Courtney’s hypothesis, Tom walked over, unhooked the screen door and went in. A plump girl with carrot hair and cartoon make-up – a purple Cupid’s bow masked her own thin lips – was sitting on a high stool poring over a celebrity-gossip magazine.

Tom was taken aback: apart from a narrow walkway running from the door to the counter, the entire room was behind bars – solid, steel bars that extended from floor to ceiling. In front of the counter there was a slit through which keys or candy bars could be exchanged for money. There were plenty of candy bars on the warped wooden shelves, together with cans of soda and beans, and stacks of Bimple Hot Springs postcards. There was an automatic rifle propped against the wall beside the girl.

Tom remained silent; so did she. He looked first through a blurred windowpane, then at the floor, where between his booted feet flies clustered in neat buttons, each a mutated splash of spilt, sticky fluid.

The girl, very deliberately, licked first her finger and then her thumb. She didn’t appear scared of anything. She turned a page.

‘We’re full,’ she said dreamily. ‘And there’re no take-outs ’cept burgers – bloody bing-bongs hit the last convoy.’

Prentice now brought the burgers Tom had ordered across to the springs. When he had seen the name on the map, together with the symbol denoting a road stop, Tom had pictured sylvan glades and clear pools of invigorating, mineral-tangy water. The reality was this smelly mire fringed by ghost gums, the bark peeling from their emaciated trunks. The naiads were these obese Anglo retirees from down south, who were wandering the interior on a permanent vacation.

At least the mephitic stench kept most of the flies off. Tom struggled out of the morass. His torso and limbs were smoothly coated with coffee-coloured mud.

‘You look like a bloody bing-bong,’ Mrs Courtney laughed, and Prentice snickered through a mouthful of burger.

By the time Tom got back from dousing himself under an outside shower, Prentice had finished his own snack and was gingerly removing his clothes, a towel – which Tom recognized as one of his own – wrapped around his waist like a kilt.

Prentice shifted awkwardly from one leg to the other, struggling out of his jeans. He hunched over to hide his crotch from view. Tom grimaced. But, despite his effortful modesty, as Prentice pulled up his swimming trunks, the towel’s flaps parted, exposing white thighs and a pink hairless scrotum.

Tom felt the twinge of the scar the makkata’s knife had left in his own thigh. Yet it wasn’t until Prentice was on his back in the mud bath that Tom realized what had provoked this: Prentice’s own groin had been devoid of marks of any kind.

Once he had reached the mud bath, Prentice lowered himself in and began to flop about in the muck, pushing his whole head under and squirming. Coming up for air, he made arcs for his eyes with fingers-for-wipers, then said: ‘I say, Brodzinski. I expect I’m quite a funny sight covered in all this – you wouldn’t mind bagging a photo, would you? My lady wife will find this awfully jolly.’

The burger was inedible – burned at the edges, near frozen at its centre. The stale bun flaked away on to the beaten earth beneath the Courtneys’ picnic table; the sesame seeds pattered on to Tom’s damp lap. He recalled the advertising copy on the billboards; ‘The table’s set, the silver’s polished, we’ve checked under the table for flippers – so where the hell are you?’

The child molester wallowed in the springs, applying mud to the corruption on his neck.

‘That’ll help,’ Mr Courtney observed. ‘Bloody good for eczema and such things, yeah. These springs are the only decent spot left in these parts,’ he continued. ‘Bloody bing-bongs have done for all the good land ’tween here and the Tontines.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Tom asked.

‘Just what I say.’ Mr Courtney lifted another handful of mud and let it plop on to his occiput. ‘They’ve grubbed up all the trees. They get a length of chain, stretch it between two utes and drive through the bush. Once the tree cover’s gone, the first few downpours’ll wash away the topsoil. But if it ain’t turning to desert quick enough to satisfy their black hearts, then they salt it for good measure.

‘All this land’ – he gestured grandly – ‘was bloody bonzer for stock before the bing-bongs crawled in from over there. They did for the game; now they’re doing for the bush ’n’ all.’

‘But why?’ Tom interjected.

But Mr Courtney kept right on: ‘You wanna know the sickest thing?’

‘What?’

‘They are! They bloody are!’ chimed in Mrs Courtney, who had popped out of the Winnebago’s door and now came flapping towards them, a gaudy moa that had somehow managed to escape the natives’ hideous decimations.

They were an hour out of Bimple Hot Springs when the country began to change again – change in such a way as to confirm Mr Courtney’s description, if not necessarily his analysis.

The gaps between the gums grew greater, while the tinder-dry grasses straggled away, revealing jagged stumps, supine trunks and bone-white fallen boughs. Salt pans fingered their way between the remaining trees, their rims glinting in the burning sun, which beat down mercilessly on their little SUV.

The flies too were merciless. In desperation, Tom said Prentince could smoke in the car; he even asked him to blow smoke into his face. Prentice happily obliged. To Tom, the cigarette smoke smelled unbelievably piquant – as if a filet mignon were being griddled between his companion’s fingers. To counteract the dreadful hunger, Tom asked him: ‘You don’t believe that stuff about the natives getting deser-tification grants, do you?’

‘Of course I believe it, old chap,’ Prentice exhaled back. ‘Because it’s absolutely bloody true.’

‘But surely it’s the Anglos’ ranching that did for . . .’ He waved at the moribund bush. ‘. . . all this?’

‘Some elements’, he continued, ‘won’t rest until all the cultivated land is gone – the cane country up north, even the good pasturage and arable land round Amherst. Bloody all of it.’

Bloody-this, bloody-that, bloody-all-of-it. Why was it, Tom wondered, that this was the entire nation’s favoured intensifier? Besides, with this much bloodying going on, there must be a lot of actual blood. This rumination clotted his flyblown mind, and a chant started up in his inner ear: ‘Bloody-this, bloody-that, bloody-all-of-it. Bloody-this, bloody-that, bahn-bahn-bahn-bahn-boosh . . .’ for mile after mile, as the fireball arced over them and Prentice puffed.

Tom was so mindless in this mantra that he scarcely noticed the first few burned-out vehicles to the side of the road, with bullet holes peppering their bodywork, their windshields smashed and tyres fire-flayed. Then, twin-rotored helicopters began to chatter overhead. These lurched in the hot air, as awkward in flight as roaches.

Then Tom saw the back of the line.

There were Winnebagos and saloons, road-trains with multiple semi-trailers and smaller trucks, pick-ups and SUVS – all crammed with native hunters, their kills lashed to the fenders.

The line was off to one side of the road, and there was room to drive by it. This Tom did for a mile or two, until, with no sign of an end to the procession of vehicles, he pulled up and turned to Prentice: ‘How long to the next road stop?’

Prentice examined the map. ‘Maybe another five klicks.’

Tom hailed a native, who sat erect behind the wheel of an ancient Ford pick-up. ‘What’re you guys in line for?’

The man turned red-veined engwegge eyes towards Tom; his face was masked with indifference. ‘Gas,’ he clicked. ‘Then road block. Only gas fer a thousan’ klicks – plenny road blocks.’

He snorted derisively, then spat a stream of brown juice through the window on to the rusty roadway.

Tom, having left Prentice at the wheel of the car with strict instructions to pull forward if the line moved – ‘No matter what your degree of fucking astande is’ – now worked his way back along the scores of stalled vehicles, gathering the required change as he went.

Most of the drivers were indifferent to his plea. They sat in their hot boxes, oblivious to the flies dancing on their faces, and listening – Anglos, Tugganarong and natives alike – to the radio commentary on the same interminable sports fixture that Prentice was obsessed by.

As he moved from fan to fan, Tom gathered that this was being played at the Capital City Oval, between the national side and a team from Prentice’s homeland. The commentators spewed the usual trivia, but Tom did learn – with considerable pleasure – that Prentice’s team were losing by many points.

This explained the sulky expression on his face when Tom eventually rejoined him. Tom dumped the forty bucks’ worth of coin into his cupped hands.

‘Go along to the motel and check us in,’ he ordered. ‘You can at least do that, can’t you?’

Prentice stubbed his cigarette out in the car ashtray with unnecessary violence. ‘Only so long as I don’t have to carry anything, Brodzinski.’

‘Anything?’

It was the first time Prentice had referred directly to his own crime. Tom again felt the urge arise to force the foul man to reveal exactly what he had done. He pictured a summary execution out in the desert sunset: Prentice kneeling beside a shallow grave he had, in a break with taboo, dug himself. His face was a study in contrition; ‘Goodbye, old chap,’ he was saying. ‘Sorry for any inconvenience I may’ve caused you . . .’

‘Whatever.’ Tom snapped back to the present. ‘I’ll wait here; if we don’t fill up with gas now, things will go badly for both of us.’

The sun swelled, grew darker, its ripe bulk squashed against the horizon. The stony bled, so unlovely in full daylight, transited rapidly through a bewildering succession of poignant shades: roseate red, early-spring violet, silvery-grey – until night empurpled the gigantic mesas in the far distance, and bunches of stars dangled down from the empyrean.

The gas line had barely moved.

Prentice’s game had long since been abandoned for the night, and the radio station had ceased transmission soon afterwards. Tom twiddled the dial, but he could find no other. They sat, not talking, and Tom ruminated: would it go as Swai-Phillips had suggested? Once the rifles, the cooking pots and the cash had been delivered, would the constipated legal process back in Vance loosen up? Maybe he would be at home in Milford in time for Thanksgiving. The candles modelled like effigies of the Pilgrim Fathers would be burning on the sideboard in the dining room, wax dripping from the brims of their black hats.

‘Look,’ Tom said eventually, ‘I gotta get some sleep. I’m gonna drive the car off the road a ways, then we can take the valuable stuff and head for the motel. We’ll have to get the gas in the morning.’

‘Are you sure that’s wise, old chap?’

Tom was only grateful he couldn’t see Prentice’s superior expression, and the idiotic lappet of his dyed hair. Tom turned the key in the ignition and pulled off Route 1. With headlights off, they bumped a few hundred yards into the desert. Then, humping the rifles, their ammunition and the boxes of Prentice’s ribavirin and amoxycillin, Tom followed him towards the blazing lights of the road stop.

Later, they stood at the motel’s sixteen-metre line while Prentice smoked and Tom applied the ointment to his psoriasis.

‘The hot springs seem to’ve cleared this up,’ he said. Then, hating his own note of wifely concern, he added: ‘You should’ve stayed there.’

Prentice only grunted.

They were both tired and hungry. There was no hot food available, except for meat pies from the gas station: sad pastry sacks containing a disgusting purée of minced meat and potato. Even Prentice hadn’t been able to finish his.

Besides, rank exhaust and gasoline fumes hung over the whole area, while the heavily armed paramilitary police manning the checkpoint introduced a nervy tension to the soiled atmosphere.

‘I’m gonna bunk down,’ Tom said, and handed Prentice the tube of ointment.

For a few seconds the macho remark sustained him, then Tom found himself alone in the neon light of his rental cubicle, with its blue insecutor fizzing and popping as the night bugs committed unpremeditated self-murder.

Tom woke in the utter darkness. He could hear the wheezing and trickling of the aircon’, a generator pounded, a helicopter chattered overhead. He had fallen asleep reading the Von Sassers, and the weighty tome still sat on his chest, pinning him down, a somnolent lover spent by coitus. Shreds of dream whirled behind his eyes. He had been reading of the engwegge ceremony before he slept: how the women chewed the seared shoots, then passed the wad from their mouths to those of the men. He had dreamed of Gloria doing the same to him, her assiduous tongue pushing the bitter cud.

Tom groped for the cord and yanked it. The tube flickered, then slammed the cinder-block walls, the concrete floor and the rifles propped in the corner into stagy existence. The Gloria succubus flew towards the insecutor, then fizzed and popped out of the playlet. Tom groped for the bottle of mineral water and drank deep of its warm, brackish contents. He felt like a cigarette; felt that deep and visceral need for nicotine that had long been absent. Felt it as if it were a banal mode of lust.

Outside the arc lights blazed down on the checkpoint. The long gas line had evaporated, and the only vehicles Tom could see were a couple of police half-tracks parked in front of the steel bar lowered across Route 1.

He wandered on to the garage forecourt. Behind the plate-glass windows a clerk was sitting by the cash register, drinking a can of Coke. It could have been somewhere on the outskirts of Tom’s own home town – the building was that international, that dull. The oval sign bearing the corporation’s logo was an a priori category: this was how creatures like Tom viewed the world.

He found himself inside, fondling the crackling balloon of a bag of potato chips. The clerk looked up at the sound.

‘Forty Greens,’ Tom said.

The clerk pulled an ectomorphic pack from the rack. ‘We only got fifties, mate,’ he explained, holding it aloft.

Tom pulled limp bills from his jeans pocket. Together with the cigarettes he received a promotional lighter with the legend EYRE’S PIT: EXPERIENCE THE DEPTHS OF PROFUNDITY printed on it.

Back in the night, Tom stalked to the edge of the forecourt, then took sixteen careful paces. Peering at the gravel between his boots, he could make out the expected line of butts, tidal wrack left behind by the great perturbation of human need, its empty troughs and satiated peaks.

He fumbled with his fingertips for the little cellophane ripcord, desperate now for the smoky parachute to open over his head.

Then stopped.

What would be the point? It wasn’t as if he would only have one – he’d have another twenty or thirty thousand, a world-girdling belt of braided tobacco strands . . .

If Prentice was grateful to find the car filled up with gas and parked outside the motel block when he emerged the following morning, he did a good job of hiding it. His eyes were like raw eggs in the monochrome dawn: greyish albumen that he rubbed with his ugly fingers.

‘Bloody awful night’s sleep,’ he groaned. ‘Bitten to buggery. I’d swear those insecutor things just ginger up the mozzies.’

‘See here, Prentice.’ Tom was resolute. ‘Last night’s motel was twenty bucks, Tree Top Lodge was sixty-five. The car rental is on my fucking Amex. There’s been gas, counter meals . . . How much longer d’you expect me to pick up the goddamn tab?’

‘I say, old chap.’ Prentice was insouciant, as Tom stomped in and out of his motel room, loading the car. ‘You certainly got out of bed on the wrong side this morning.

‘Brodzinski,’ he said, his tone becoming conciliatory, ‘I’m fully intending to pay my way, it’s just that I’m suffering a temporary financial embarrassment – the ribavirin cleaned me out.’

‘Oh, really?’ Tom snidely mimicked Prentice’s accent. ‘How have you been paying our mutual friend, Mr Swai-Phillips, then, old chap?’

‘Well, um, to tell you the truth,’ Prentice said, flustered, ‘he’s handling my case on a no win-no fee basis. But look here.’ He ran on, clearly not wanting this to sink in too deeply. ‘My wife’s cousin promised me he’d wire some funds to the Tontines; we’ll settle up there.’

Tom barely registered this; he was thinking about Swai-Phillips, recalling the lawyer’s brusque assertion: ‘I don’t do no win-no fee personal-injury cases.’ Surely this was further confirmation – if any were needed – that from the outset, Prentice’s offence had been far more serious than his own?

After they had negotiated the maze of blast walls wreathed with razor wire, then sat – mute but tense – while the bored Tugganarong cops checked the underside of the SUV with telescopic mirrors, Tom was surprised by the cursory inspection of their laissez-passers. The officer leaned in through the window and slung the papers on to Tom’s lap.

‘You headed to the Tontines?’ he asked.

‘Sure am,’ Tom replied.

‘You blokes have a good trip, then.’ He waved them on with the muzzle of his sub-machine gun.

Beyond the checkpoint Route I stretched out ahead, a dirty tongue already flexing in the building heat. The surface alternated between metalled and dirt, so Tom concentrated on his driving, changing up when they came off the blacktop to avoid wheelspin.

Apart from the agitation of the flies and the soughing of the wind through the windows, there was silence in the car. After an hour or so, Prentice turned on the radio. There was a faint whoop of joy. ‘Yes! He’s had him! He’s clean-bowled – and he’s not going to like that one little bit, he’s . . .’ which then faded into static. With a tortured expression, Prentice hunched forward and dickered with the radio controls as if he were a blind piano-tuner. Then, deflated, he sat back.

Tom wondered: where has all the traffic gone? The road-trains, the pick-ups and the retirees’ Winnebagos that had been in line for gas the night before had all evaporated. The highway was empty, and the hurting blue sky devoid of the twin-rotored helicopters that had clattered overhead the previous day.

Towards mid morning, Tom saw a burned-out car beside the road. He slowed to assess whether this was a recent happening; but then, seeing the rust streaking the buckled panels, and the interior choked with sand, he accelerated.

Soon there were other abandoned vehicles. Some were more or less intact, with perhaps only a rumpled fender, starred windows and a few bullet holes in their side panels. Others had been wrung-out by awesome forces, their bodywork twisted and crushed, as if a giant child, tiring of his toy cars, had had a destructive tantrum. There were SUVs, pick-ups – even the trucks used by the paramilitary police. Every sort of vehicle Tom had seen on Route I was present in this edge city of hulks. Further away from the road, he saw a gasoline tanker, its tank opened out in petals of blackened metal.

Prentice, normally keen to sermonize on the basis of this or that wayside attraction, remained silent, rocking and rolling as the car bucketed along.

Then there came a quite ordinary sedan – ornamental tissue box still intact on its rear-window shelf – that was still alight. Vivid flames licked the mashed hood, dense billows of black smoke clotted in the air. Prentice roused himself a little as they drove by – then relapsed into torpor. Not knowing what else to do, Tom kept driving.

But a few miles further on he had to stop.

The first indication that something was seriously amiss came when a clutch of helicopters roared low over the car. These were single-rotor aircraft with bulbous plastic canopies. Even though they were gone in moments, Tom saw the missiles mounted beneath them. Where the helicopters disappeared over the horizon a column of smoke was visible; although whether this had been caused by them or was an effect they were seeking to dispel, he could not be certain.

Tom slowed to a crawl as two cops approached the SUV. With fluorescent batons, they directed him into a lane formed by striped cones. They also held signs. One read NO WEAPONS, the other GET IN LANE. Beyond the cops, stubbed out in a crater by an inky finger of smoke, was McGowan’s road-train.