Fifteen — La Petit Mort

The next morning Peter and I were working on the yard when we heard a plane approaching. It wasn’t Friday, and no one had mentioned visitors, so we bounced back to the homestead at lunch time curious to see who our visitors were.

A plane was parked by the swimming pool. Written on its fuselage was Kunnunarra Fire Department. Two men sat with Charlie at the lunch counter, pouring over the map of Bullo spread out before them. Marlee and Danielle bustled about the kitchen, preparing the daily noontime feast.

The firemen were here to light a few controlled brushfires during the early dry season when they, presumably, wouldn’t get out of hand. After lunch they flew off to drop their incendiary bombs, with Danielle along for navigation sake. Peter and I returned to the yard to finish off the last few rails.

At length the plane returned, dropped off Danielle, and again departed. Minutes later the wholesome lass came bustling our way in the diesel. She pulled up alongside the yard and called out, “David! Let’s go!”

“Where are we headed?” I asked as I hopped in the truck.

“Out to the bitumen. The truck carrying the poly pipe is supposed to be coming from Katherine this evening.”

I hadn’t seen the asphalt for six weeks at this point. The idea excited me, both for the company involved, the scenery of the trip, and the chance to reestablish even this meager connection with the world outside Bullo.

I’ve always loved long road trips. Though only fifty miles, the trip would take two and a half hours, equaling my cruise time from Los Angeles to San Diego in the limousine. At five hours duration the roundtrip was equal in length to the drive from LA to Las Vegas – a genuine road trip. Christ, I thought, imagine driving all the way to Las Vegas to pick up plumbing supplies. And that was AFTER the supplier credited himself with having delivered the goods!

On our end the distance was only about one hundred miles round-trip, but the ruts and the gulches – and a decent respect for the vehicle – kept us to about twenty miles per hour. Certainly, we could have gone faster, but the beating the rough road would have put on our truck made the price of speed too high.

We filled the King with diesel and grabbed a few greasy coils of rope from the workshop, then stopped by the house. Sara had put together four coarse roast beef and butter sandwiches along with  cans of green beans, beets, and corn. Danielle had me fill a three -gallon water jug at the concrete tank behind the house as she filled one of her own, and with some last-minute instructions from Charlie we loaded the truck and set off.

Danielle was driving, so I had the duty of opening the gates as we reached them. In the first three miles these gates stood in our way regularly, every five or ten minutes. Gate opening is something that I thought I would eventually get inured too, but it never happened. It remained for my entire stay a nuisance. Gates break the rhythm of eager departures, inexorable impediments to every endeavor away from the house. Pecking order becomes explicit at gates, as the low man hops out to fulfill his duty, a minimum wage doorman at a grand hotel. Gates were also revealers of character, allowing demonstration of charity if someone other than the expected party made the effort, or if one person hesitated to take his turn when two stockhands were expected to alternate. With Peter or Bundy this was never a problem, but with some of the jokers who showed up after Peter and Bundy departed it was.

No, gates are the traffic jam of the outback. Charlie told us he’d once worked on a station that had seventeen gates in seventeen kilometers. With all the stopping and starting that’s no better than driving on the Harbor Freeway through downtown Los Angeles during rush hour.

But we had only five gates our entire distance, making most of the ride an uninterrupted sightseeing trip for me, my elbow hanging out the window, the warm afternoon air blowing through my loose shirt, playing with the brim of my Akubra.

My hat and I had by now become inseparable. The fact that it made me feel like a cowboy had long since passed as its main attraction. It kept the brilliant Aussie sun off my head and neck. The shade its broad brim afforded allowed me to keep my eyes wide open, making distant vision easier. It served as a serviceable water scoop when the water pressure was too low to hose down the horses after riding (as when the generator was turned off) or when taking an impromptu bush bath in a creek. And, not insignificant for a city boy, it made the state of my coif utterly irrelevant.

As the miles of pristine ancient landscape rolled by I turned my head and brought my lovely companion into the panorama. Her dusty rose cheeks were dotted with freckles. Her battered gray hat sat perched just above her full eyebrows. The shabby state of her hat accentuated the youthful vitality of her smooth skin and dark eyes, alight with concentration.

“What?” She asked, feeling my eyes upon her.

“Where’d you go to school?” I asked to distract myself from my baser musings.

“Here, mostly. Mummy taught us when we were young, then we had a teacher live on the property.”

“How long was that teacher here?”

“Until she walked into the propeller of an airplane.” She looked at me to read my reaction. “She and a black fellow about twenty years ago where the only people to ever die here.”

“How did the aborigine die?”

“Rode into a tree branch. Broke his neck.”

My entire being puckered at the realization of how close I had come to making that grim list on Silibark. So close, I thought. It’s always so close.

“Good Lord. What’d you do about school after that?”

“Boarding school. In Adelaide. I hated it.”

Boarding school? This sounded like old Charlie’s idea. “Why’d you hate it?”

“Aw, the girls, I guess. I’d never seen such a bunch of shrews in my life. One or two were friendly, sure. But most were just rude and bitchy.”

“City girls, I’d guess?”

“Of course. Our Academy in Adelaide was top stair. Wasn’t cheap, either.”

“Christ, that must have been different for you.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t stand it. Of course, I didn’t know how certain things…I mean, I’d never shaved before. I didn’t even know that people, women, shaved. Finally, one girl took me and said I should, you know, because everyone else did.” She aimed a chagrined look my way.

“And I didn’t know the words they used for things. I mean, like sex. I’d seen it all since I was a kid, but the words! And nobody would tell me what they were talking about. So I kept to myself, pretty much.”

I tried to imagine this sweet girl, untainted by the intrigues of the idle classes, plopped into a fancy prep school, a girl who’d never played Doctor but could castrate a bull at an age when her classmates would have still been playing with Barbies. As she spoke, I could see the isolation and pain of the time play across her face, twisting her mouth, wrinkling her nose. Yet she spoke with an ease that said it was all too inconsequential and remote to be bothered by, the recollections of a sailor safe in port after a stormy passage.

I found the innocence of this beautiful and shapely young woman powerfully attractive. So many city girls assume an affectation of having seen it all, done it all. Combine an attitude of world-weariness with the superficial preoccupation of adorning oneself for partying and urban women can be exhaustingly shallow. I don’t find ennui terribly sexy. Here was a woman infused with purpose, humbled by her responsibilities yet game enough to confront them boldly. And here was I, passing through her world, a world alien to mine, I a feckless piker in her world of manly men. What could she possibly see in me, and what comfortable future could I promise her? Yet there she sat, a creature bright and beautiful, an arm’s length distant…

My overheated musings were interrupted when Danielle suddenly leaned forward with great interest.

“Damn dogs!” She said under her breath.

I strained my eyes to see what had her agitated. I saw nothing obvious at first, then about seventy yards ahead, maybe ten feet from the roadside, two dingoes stood at alert. We’d interrupted them at a feast. An inert mound of animal carcass lay piled between the two predators.

A moment after I spotted them, they bolted. One of the wiry brown dingoes disappeared quickly into the bush, but the other loped up the road. Danielle accelerated in pursuit.

“Can you shoot?” She asked excitedly, turning towards me for a flash. I answered that I could; ever since knocking seven out of ten beer cans off of my uncle’s fence with a BB gun as a youth I’d fancied myself something of a crack shot.

I took the .22 rifle out of its rack on the rear window and unzipped it from its case.

“Is this loaded?!”

Danielle looked at me for a long moment, then answered with an exaggerated calm, “Well, how about you have a look.”

I tentatively drew back the bolt. The chamber was empty. “It’s not!”

Again I was on the receiving end of a long glance. “Are you sure you can shoot?”

“Yes. I can shoot, once the damned thing is loaded!” As I said this she indicated the glove box, where I found a box of shells. “All set!” I said.

At that moment our quarry veered off the road. Danielle brought the truck to a quick stop. I threw my door open, leapt out, and fed a round into the chamber of the rifle. As I did so I realized I’d been taken over by a compelling blood-lust.

This was an unfamiliar sensation; I love animals, had always had a dog in my house since I was a young boy. Trips we took in the summer to the aforementioned Uncle Mitch’s dairy farm in Ohio were signal highlights of my youth, a place where I’d taken the opportunity to establish a warm rapport with the cows, the horses, the chickens, the cats, the birds, the pigs.

Most notably, the pigs. There was one summer in particular. I was about fourteen or fifteen, an age at which my interest in girls was in full bloom. My annual trips had given me a regular opportunity to survey the progress of a budding vixen in overalls named Jody who lived just down the country lane. On this visit I found Jody’s charms had grown in ample portion since the previous summer. I, however, found my interest hijacked almost entirely by Uncle Mitch’s hogs out behind the barn.

He’d built for them a small shelter that served during the hot days as a vacation resort for the porkers. Given the hygienic habits of the zaftig hogs flies lined the inside walls of the shady shelter like Russian peasants on the Black Sea, buzzing lazily about, feeding, preening, mating. I found that a calculated strike with a flyswatter could kill a dozen of the little buggers at a time. There was something very satisfying about that; the thrill of the hunt, I guess, the quick reward for a serpent-like strike. I later learned that Uncle Mitch and Aunt Yvonne were concerned that I was forming a vaguely unwholesome attachment to his porkers, but the fact is that the hours I spent inside the pighouse that summer were no less (or more) Christian an amusement than an unapologetic bacchanalia of fly slaughter constitutes.

Now, given that I’m not a psychiatric professional, I can’t be certain how Sigmund Freud would evaluate the satisfaction I took in conquering those flies in lieu of neighbor Jody, whether my chosen delight might have been a deflection of sublimated desire. So I’ll demur on the same grounds – my lack of the appropriate sheepskin — from assessing precisely what dynamic might have been playing out with Danielle and the dingo. What I do know is that as I raised the rifle to my eye I’d been overcome with a concupiscent buck fever.

There exists another possibility; perhaps this is a closeted “I love hunting!” coming out story. If so, it too would be a tale of unrequited love. Those flies I’d massacred by the score in the pigsty were the closest I’d ever come to killing an animal. Yet there I stood in the voluptuous Australian sun, aiming across the hood of the car, an aching desire to drop the dingo surging through my veins.

Certainly, I understood dingoes to be enemies of our enterprise; I’d seen their depredations close-hand moments ago in the form of a ravished cow. Yet hatred doesn’t explain my fervor. I didn’t hate the wary canines. But I had spent every hour for the past six weeks doing utilitarian things, working towards the survival of Bullo with these no-nonsense people. Their life was demanding in so many foreign ways that I’d come to trust their guidance absolutely. Early on I’d taken exception several times to the particulars of things, arguing logically and clearly, becoming frustrated when I wasn’t heeded, only to discover later exactly why they were right, and I was quite wrong.

This process humbled me, so as time passed I offered fewer challenges and listened more often. Psychologists who study genocides and the people who perpetrate them speak of the phenomena of deindividuation, where individuals subsume their own moral sensibilities to the prerogatives of the group. It’s the phenomena which let Nazi soldiers commit atrocities on innocents during the day, then, after availing themselves of hookers and booze, sleep well at night.

I don’t know whether I’d abandoned my own compunctions at that moment; I suppose I should leave that judgement as well to the professoriate. I just knew I wanted that dingo dead. I lined up the small brown animal at about fifty yards and fired. At the gun’s report it leapt into the air and kicked into a full sprint. I ejected the spent shell, loaded another, and fired again. No result; the animal was gone.

Frustrated, I slid limply back into the truck, flushed with adrenaline. I grudgingly put the rifle back in its case and zipped it up.

“I think you shot its foot off,” said Danielle. “It’ll die.”

Her words were small consolation. I’d wanted to play my role; I’d wanted to kill the dingo. Instead, I sent it reeling into several days of uncomprehending suffering. I felt in a strange way that I’d let it down, as well as myself and Bullo River. The dingo’s job is to kill weak animals. Mine was to dispatch the dingo when it got caught doing so. It had taken care of its duty, I hadn’t done mine.

Danielle didn’t say anything about my poor shooting. We drove back to examine the cow the pack had brought down. It was an old girl, freshly killed. Ragged tears rent its hide, exposing a mess of flesh and viscera to the merciless sunshine.

This poor thing had not died cleanly, either. It would have been pursued to exhaustion by a pack of ravenous dingoes. When she tired they would have surrounded her. She would have lowered her head, tossing aside the first few attacks from the murderous assembly with her stubby horns. She wouldn’t have had a chance, however. Ignominiously blindsided time and again her wounded legs would eventually have given way, serving up her vitals to the carnivores, and her being to its food chain fate.

We resumed our drive in silence. Several minutes down the road I heard a soft sound from the driver’s seat. I turned to listen. Danielle was singing.

“…drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry…”

“…and them good ol’ boys were drinking whiskey and rye,” I joined in, slowly at first, building to a full vigor, “singin’ this’ll be the day that I die. This will be the day that I die…”