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
For a year or so Quick thought he had hold of himself. He could feel time passing without harm, and though his misery pictures danced on the caravan walls while he slept, they never woke him nor skipped into his dreams.
Earl and May fed him, worked him like a dog and told no one he was a Lamb. Locals still remembered those crazy Biblebashers and their fake miracles.
Winter bored on and he lived an orderly life in his slow, methodical way. He washed every day, cleaned once a week, and managed to see his awkward working hours out by thinking through the importance of every task. You could see it in the way he unlatched the tailgate as pigs pressed against it squealing, how he took his time at the weigh-bridge, how conscientiously he waved cars by him as he hugged the soft edges on narrow roads. And if you met him pulled into the rest bay beneath a stand of white gums along the Coast Road and you shared a smoke with him, he wouldn’t strike you as stupid. He’d seem overserious maybe, a little late off the mark when it came to getting a joke. You’d guess he was a bloke who hadn’t seen much but who was ageing somehow too quickly. There was nothing exceptional in him but for the fact that he could never seem to be ordinary. He had some mark on him, like a migrant or a priest. You could tell he was trying with you, trying to fit.
Quick Lamb drove without pausing. He caned himself with work and Earl and May could hardly believe their luck. He thought he was coping, but he was miserable, lost, drifting, tired and homesick as a dog. He didn’t think about it. He drove. He drove. He just drove.
That winter, some things happened, some incidents occurred.
Throttling the old bus rotten through the bends past Capel, crazy with sleeplessness, Quick lost his brakes on the hill before the rail crossing. The lights flashed red and he could hear the train’s diesel engine sounding its bullish horn down the tracks. He had nine ton of super on the back and now that it was mobile it wasn’t of a mind to stop. He went down through the gears like a man down a fire-escape, and when he hit rock bottom he could see the snout of the train flashing through the trees. All he had left was the handbrake and maybe the ditch at the roadside. The old knocker was hissing air and shrieking pads. The motor roared with quick comedown.
Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me, a bit of his brain said, Thy rod and Thy staff …
He was slowing, he knew it, he was pulling her back, but in the hundred yards that were left now he couldn’t expect a dead stop. He’d be rolling slowly, creeping right into the rush of freight cars.