‘Your mother and father must have had some sense of humour, calling you Rufus T. Firefly, eh? Couple of wags,’ I said. ‘To me you suggest a baboon.’
‘What’s that sposed to mean?’
‘It’s from the movie. The Marx Brothers movie.’
‘The who?’
‘The Marx Brothers. The name of your business.’
‘I don’t know who they are, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m just the manager here.’
‘Is your name Rufus T. Firefly?’
‘What’s it to you? You want the van or not?’
It sometimes takes a decent degree of investigation to work out whether someone is a frontman for a business or dodgy operation, but I didn’t need to dig too deep with Firefly. He was illiterate and an idiot to boot. He was as much a part of the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe as a hood ornament on a Splittie. (Memo to non-Kombi people — they don’t have hoods. Got me?)
‘You’re a real tough guy, Rufus.’
‘You’re not kiddin’.’ He cracked his knuckles. I had not met a dumber man since my long-time hairdresser in western Sydney. Sylvio had a good heart, but his cranium was so empty he could have rented it out. (He’d unexpectedly come out with things like: ‘I got my wisdom teeth out last week. Cost me a bomb, but the amnesia guy who put me under was the most expensive. Woah wah, he charged through the nose. I should have knocked meself out, would’ve been cheaper. Me. I shoulda trained to be one of those amnesia guys. Never have to work again.’ Thanks Sylvio.)
‘You like wine, Rufus?’
‘Wha?’
‘That bottle of plonk there. On your shelf. Nice drop?’
‘I’m a beer man.’
‘Of course you are.’
I stood and walked around the desk, took the wine off the shelf and fondled the bottle.
‘Nice,’ I said.
‘Fifty bucks, if you buy the Kombi now.’
‘My, my, Rufus, you’re an entrepreneur as well, eh?’
Sure enough, it was the exact brand of wine I had been shown while watching Field of Dreams with Zim, and had seen in his basement cellar. I made a mental note of the name of the winery. Ertrinken Estate. Gold Coast hinterland. I put it back on the shelf, next to the knuckleduster that appeared, to the naked eye, to have blood and strands of hair gruesomely attached to it.
‘You a knucklehead, Rufus?’ I asked.
‘Wha?’
I put my hands in my trouser pockets, elaborately enough to lift my Hawaiian shirt and show him my neat Beretta tucked into my belt. ‘Show me the van.’
I have to say, it was a beauty. A dull cream, and fitted out with rotting chipboard cupboards and a dicky fold-down bed. The second I stepped into it and inhaled its mouldy aroma, I was twenty again, staring out through a broad, curved windscreen at pristine beaches and ancient forests and a magnificent future full of song, women and, coincidentally enough, wine. Inside that van, all the ills and evils of the world disappeared. Until Rufus’s scratchy, beer and smoke-ravaged voice dragged me back to the present.
‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘Don’t waste any more of me time. You want it?’
Of course, I bought it. I was about to lay down the cash there and then. I could see a nirvana beyond this wretched industrial estate and the seething hatred that came off Firefly like the heat off severely sunburned skin.
I checked my watch. Right on time, my old mate Bluey Stone, former expert mechanic, pulled up in his restored Mustang as prearranged, walked straight to the back of the van and lifted the motor hatch for inspection.
‘What is this?’ said a surprised Firefly. ‘The frickin’ Wild Bunch for pensioners?’
Bluey wore very thick spectacles. I mean, forget the glass bottoms of a Coke bottle. Bluey’s were Hubble telescopes in a horn-rimmed frame. When he looked at you, the impression was not of a man severely visually impaired, but of a lunatic freshly escaped from the asylum. Bluey glanced up at Rufus, still without saying a word, and I could see the prison tough in Firefly momentarily recoil. There is one thing as powerful as a gun, and that’s madness.
‘What do you think, Dr Stone?’
And after a few tweaks and taps, Bluey silently nodded.
‘Thank you, Rufus,’ I said, producing a roll of cash. ‘We’re done here.’
I should have driven straight home in my bus and met the wrath of Peg head-on. It would be a storm I could not avoid. I had raided the retirement fund for a silly old man’s dream. There were a few consequences I could foresee. I’d either be divorced very soon, which was fine because at least I now had somewhere to sleep when she kicked me out of the house. Or she’d kill me and I’d be buried in my Kombi. Which was fine, too. Have you noticed how expensive a good coffin can be nowadays?
But I didn’t drive home. I had some wine to taste, up at the Ertrinken Estate vineyard in the hills.
~ * ~
6
When my deceased friend Westchester Zim heard that I was to attend a wine appreciation course with Peg, he laughed with such throaty vigour that I thought he might have suffered a stroke at the end of the telephone line.
‘Zim, are you okay?’ I asked, genuinely concerned.
‘Fine, fine,’ he finally spluttered.
‘I’m pleased you find me amusing.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just, it’s ...’
‘What? Out with it, Zim.’
‘... like bringing together tomato sauce and duck confit.’
‘Zim, I do believe you are a bone fide snob.’
To make amends and appear encouraging, he sent me a chapter of medical educator Dr Philip E. Muskett’s book, The Art of Living in Australia from 1893. The chapter — ‘On Australian Wine’ — I found fantastically dull, but there were a few gems embedded in its dry prose. He was very enthusiastic about starting a national wine industry, was Dr Muskett. I sensed he liked more than the occasional tipple. ‘Apart from its beneficial influence on the national health,’ Muskett wrote with more bounce than usual, ‘it would cover the land with smiling vineyards ... it would absorb thousands from the fever and fret of city wear and tear into the more natural life of the country’.
Good old Dr Muskett. He had to have been one of the pioneer sea-changers of Australia. (How crowded could our feverish and fretful cities have possibly been in the 1890s? Have another drink, Dr Muskett.) But what a lovely turn of phrase — smiling vineyards.
When I turned into the Ertrinken Estate in the hills behind the Gold Coast, I immediately felt the opposite. In fact, it was worse than that. The entrance gate was something out of an early gothic horror movie, all mossy stones and rusted metal arches. (Fake, of course, right down to the moss. This was the Gold Coast after all.) I swear there was a vulture fashioned into the ironwork, though it could have been a poorly rendered eagle. And believe you me (I’ve always favoured that odd phrase, uttered habitually by my grandfather Herb), believe you me, it seemed sunny on the road through the hinterland (perhaps I was experiencing that inner-dawn of driving my new/old Kombi bus), but instantly dark once I crossed the vineyard’s threshold. Then there was the long driveway bordered with tall and eerie pines, straight out of some dank fairytale in which innocent children in lemon-starched white smocks wander into the maw of a European forest. It was a set from Edward Scissorhands. It would not have surprised me in the least if a wolf standing on its hind legs and dressed as Grandma in puffy pantaloon pyjamas had greeted me inside.