There was nothing wrong with the motor cycle, a ten-year-old 1927 H-series AJS. The fault was with the petrol. In all this drought-stricken Mallee it was the one place a traveller could be sure of finding water.
My son was seventeen years old. He had powerful thighs and thick arms hanging low from sloping shoulders. His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye itself, sand-irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong's, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand.
The hearing aid was in his ear but not connected. The ear spluttered and exploded, crackled and fizzed as it always did, whether connected to the hearing aid or not. With this ear he remembered me – the grief-mad father who had struck him one awful evening at Clunes.
The new Mercury sidecar, a heavy attachment better suited to a large motorbike, proclaimed his business: "Snake Boy Badgery" and the crudely He saw the mailbox when he was still a mile from it – a pale blue thing sitting on the sand which slowly revealed itself to be what he had known it was anyway – a four-gallon drum on its side with a small veranda soldered on to keep the weather out. A soft sandy track led from the mailbox through a stand of stunted Mallee gums and up a gentle rise to where a house – its corrugated iron walls gleaming silver in the heat – stood on a bare orange patch of earth.
Charles stopped at the mailbox and read the sign. "Chaffey." He was already nervous. He wondered what sort of person Chaffey would be, if he would be suspicious, or sarcastic or rude, if he had sons who would taunt him or daughters who would laugh at his funny looks, if they would refuse him water, deny him a feed, or give him both and then send him out into the dark unfriendly night without wondering if he had a bed to go to.
The gate was not made from wood or iron, was more of a trap than a gate, a strained contraption made from fencing wire and a complicated series of loops and levers that served to tension the wire and slacken it off. He had not come across the system before (not surprisingly – it was the product of Les Chaffey's ingenious mind) and so took some time to get it open and even more time to get it shut.
Marjorie Chaffey saw Charles undo his scarf and belt and place them in his sidecar. When she saw him comb his hair she thought: "Salesman."
It was late in March but still very hot. The wheat had long been taken in but still lay in sacks at railway sidings where it was being eaten by mice. The earth had been ploughed and seeded twice but the expensive seed had never germinated and the paddocks, the subject of mortgages and other substantial documents, were drifting like bad dreams in the wind.
Marjorie Chaffey tried to read the sign on the sidecar as it approached but she had left her distance glasses on the mantelpiece and so could not make it out.
The veranda was only two feet above the sandy soil, but it gave her the advantage over strangers and she remained there as she always did, looking down at the machine (shining black, glittering gold) which fell silent, not sharply or cleanly, but like a noisy meeting slowly brought to order.
The rider did up the buttons on his suit coat. He was, she saw, only a boy.
Charles tried to see her face, but the sun was in his eyes and the woman was in shadow. "G'day missus."
"G'day." The reply was as flat as a shutter on a window.
He squinted up at her. It would be a small exaggeration to say that he sought love in the stranger's shadowed face, but none at all to say that he wished approval and acceptance. He was a stranger moving amongst strangers, finely tuned to acceptance and rejection.
"Hot enough for you?" he asked.
"Hot enough."
He was sweating inside his heavy suit, but he wished to appear a man. He also wanted to say, I'm just a boy. I won't harm you. All I want is a feed and a place to sleep.
The woman on the veranda was as still as a goanna that knows itself watched and even the feathery touch of her broom as it shifted on the floor reminded him of a goanna's forked tongue as it smells the air.
"Boss home?" he asked her. He knew the black eye made him look unusual. He would have liked to explain the black eye to her. He was sure she was a nice woman and kind to her children. He could not explain the black eye. He was ashamed of it.
"What you after?" she asked.
"Oh," he blushed and made an arc in the sand with his boot, "bit of business."
"What sort of business would that be?"
A mouse ran across the veranda and she flicked it halfheartedly with her broom. The mouse ran up the handle of a rusting shovel, along the horizontal corrugations of the wall (Charles saw it, soft as a shadow across the silver) through the window and into the house. She removed the prop from the corrugated-iron shutter so that it dropped closed with a clang.
"Mice bad?" he asked.
"Bad everywhere," She said defensively.
"I come from Jeparit today," Charles said. "They were bad up there. By Jove they were. Eat your buttons."
"Eat your buttons everywhere." Charles did not hear her, nor did he notice the three safety pins on the front of her floral dress. "Eat your toenails in the night," she said.
Charles was fiddling with his hearing aid, a heavy metal box that pulled his suit coat out of shape. It came on with a roar. He grimaced.
"Sorry," he said, putting his head on one side as if he might, from this angle, penetrate the shadow. "I'm a bit hard of hearing."
"Ah," she said, suddenly sorry for him. "You didn't miss nothing. Just talking about the blankety mice."
"Got a cat?"
"Got two," she said, defensive again, "but it does no good."
Charles could smell, already, although he was not yet invited on to the veranda, the sour dank smell of mice. "I got something better than a cat, missus."
"Better talk to my husband if you're selling, but he won't buy nothing. If you've got mousetraps or that sort of thing you're better off to save your legs. He's up at the forge," she said, becoming angry, again, about the glass of water she would have to offer him.
Charles trudged around the back, past the hot silver walls, around the corner of the kitchen house. He had hoped that the man was not at home. He would rather, any day, deal with a woman for there was always a soft spot to be found in the hardest of them.
He was careful not to tread on the dead, sandy vegetable patch. He threaded his way through a rusting garden of ploughshares, tines and scarifiers and made his way, without hope, towards the dark mouth of the bright-walled shed. His hearing aid crackled and he missed the sounds of a man smithing and the cries of white cockatoos, three of them, as they passed overhead on their way to a stand of trees above a dry water-hole; their cries, coinciding with the slow powerful movement of their wings, were like big creaking doors in need of oil. Charles saw the birds but they only depressed him. He had swapped his nets for petrol.
The forge was set up at one end of the large earth-floored shed and he saw the red glowing piece of metal in the gloom before he saw the farmer himself. As he walked towards the shower of sparks he did not take in the unusual nature of the shed – the shelves packed with odd-shaped pieces of metal, the neat handwritten labels. He walked past a drill press and a lathe without wondering why a farmer would have such equipment. What he did notice was the tractor – an old T Model cleverly converted so that the heavy chain transmitted power to large metal wheels.
"Petrol," thought Snake Boy Badgery.