Trucksong (4 page)

Got to their camp rideless come sundown. The healing folks sat round their campfire. Bald white fella in a rooskin coat and his missus with pierced ears, lobes long and hanging down to her shoulders. Smoov told them what happened and they brung out their bags and their herbs and smoking incense.

Isa let them look at her arm and they checked her pulse and eyes and her tongue, bloke fussing over his tote bag and the missus looking on steady.

Missus said, ‘Them slinky snakes has been eatin of the poison ground of the past and so theys be come poison themself.’

The bloke said, ‘Nah, the slinky snakes
is
the poison. They’ve come up outta the ground wrung by the poison of the old times. Before the glitterin gigacities falled into rubble, there were no snakes. Then the viris ate out the guts of the machines of the past and brung the smashed-up trash and snowfallen ashes. Now the slinky snakes is been birthed.’

‘Ah, youse don’t know nothin bout the past,’ said Smoov. ‘It’s all just dodgy guessin and imaginins. Now tell me, what can yer do for her?’

‘No tellin. I seen only three others who been bit, so it’s hard to say. Two fellas died right there and one scaled up and become metal till he were ate by a flapple.’

Isa turnt her eyes on them weakly and said, ‘I’m all right. If I was gunna cark it, it would of happened before now. I’m not gunna be ate by a flapple neither.’

She scratched at the metal scales on her arm.

‘It’s true,’ said the bloke. ‘She’s crook all right but I don’t think she’s gunna die. The poison been slowed long enough now for her system to soak it up.’

Smoov grunted then said, ‘Boy, get down the creek and fetch some water for our friends.’

I did what he said. We couldn’t stay there though, we had to get moving. There was always danger from brumby trucks and so when Isa’s fever broke enough and the sun was high up in the sky we set off for Hind Pass, Isa slung over Smoov’s shoulder. I carried all the gear plus weedseed damper and honeybee nectar and tea and tobacco. Smoov with his ganja and cactusflower grog brewed in plastic bottles. All that was left of the old world was plastic. The grass grew high up roadside in front of mountains of plastic bottles, plastic bags, plastic buckets, plastic shapes, all that plastic greyed out and sometimes the earth throwed it up, it didn’t have no colour no more, it was grey as dust. When the ground vomits it up, there’s people in rags picking through the trash of old time. People with bags full of rope and copper wire and fallen ash on top of the ash, stinking oily tides of trash washed up from the dirty land. Cliffs fallen down, tongues of fire, tongues of land licking tongues of black water eating up the ground.

Isa was weak and shivering, there was a nervous feeling in me belly as I remembered how close she’d got to the slinky snake and I thought maybe she wanted to get bit. I didn’t know what it meant but I was putting it together with her thoughts and reckonings on how she wanted to team with a truckmind to crack the Wotcher and that she’d need Smoov’s linkmaker to do that, and maybe from the poisoned ground of the poisoned machines, the slinky snakes had brought a new change into the scene. And what chances Isa might be willing to take to get around Smoov’s blocking and stalling and find out the knowing of the system that ran the gigacities. Smoov was still giving me the cold shoulder silent treatment like it was all me fault and me face was broken and throbbing from the beating. There was rain on that track through the backroads to Hind Pass. A rumble in me guts and a rig rolling on the road. It was a silver Kenworth and it was covered in glittering glyphs and symbols, made me broken heart race to see it and feel its rumble and hear its throaty roar as it came closer. Smoov cursed and tried to hail it on his wavy linkfinder but he was lumbered with Isa and before he could dial in the right freek it was too late, the Kenworth was dust.

So on we trudged through that day and the next and before noon on the third I saw something was dogging our tail, I could see the dust behind. We kept on going, fast as we could, which wasn’t that fast. Pretty soon it was clear that the follower wasn’t moving any faster neither, though it was gaining slowly.

‘Is it brumby trucks?’ I asked.

Smoov glowered. ‘They would of took us before now if it were trucks. It’s somethin else.’

‘Let’s pull over and hide in the scrub while they go past,’ said Isa.

‘We got no idea what it could be back there, nor what is their program. We keep movin till Hind Pass,’ said Smoov.

We kept on that road under the blare of the white sun and the hot breath of the air sucking water out of our skins with its dry kiss. A riot of white clouds high up in the gasping sky. Smoov looked back to take a measurement, the chrono and the tachyo cranking in his linkmaker, figuring time and speed and distance.

Isa was pale and scared. Being snakebitten changed her. The skin round her arm was all scaled up with mealy metal flakes.

‘It’s bad, whatever’s followin. I can feel it,’ she said.

Smoov didn’t say nothing, but I could tell he were afraid. Afraid for Isa and afraid of the follower. I caught the vibe off of Smoov and his showman’s instincts so I pushed us along a little faster. If we could stay ahead of them till sundown we could lose them in the dark.

‘How come they’re goin so slow?’ I said.

‘How come you’re goin so slow? Keep moven yer arse,’ Smoov said.

So we kept on all through that smokey afternoon, the slow race a grindstone around our necks, playing on our minds.

‘We should just stop and face em, see whatever’s comin,’ I said.

‘Whaddaya know of it anyway? Just keep movin. When night comes we’re gunna get off the road.’

The afternoon stretched and time wasn’t fixed but flowing thick like engine oil in axle grease. I gritted me teeth and put me back into the haul, and the sun slowed as it tracked across the sky. Off in the distance to the east the green scrub drab on red wiggly mountains. In the west the sun a burning eye hole sinking at last beneath the line of the earth and the follower at the selfsame distance behind, judging by the dust and the view we could get of their movements from the linkmaker.

Dark fell quick and we didn’t waste no time getting off the road a short way and then Smoov messed up our tracks with bags and found a hollow place in the ground to stow the show gear and we crept off back up the road never hoping to see whatever it was that was following. Rustling in the spinifex spooked me but it was just nightime creatures and off in the distance robo bigdogs whining on the hunt. We found a place to lie real quiet and the night stretched longer than the day before but we were tired. We found some sleep inbetween fitful turnings of eyes scanning the blue black horizon for signs of any moving thing.

In the morning we went back and all the show gear had been found and looted. It could of been by a flapple or an animal or robo but there was only one thing taken, a pendant of Smoov’s that gave him the codes to the Wotcher’s trancemission to use in his linkmaker. He went dark and cursed the sky.

‘What was it that got taken, Dad?’ Isa said.

‘It was a pendant, that’s all. A link to the past. It’s only just a memento. It’s got no use, and no use to the one who took it neither. I remember all the glyphs and codes in me head. Carn, we got some ground to cover today to make it to Hind Pass by sundown.’

Smoov tried to play cool about the pendant but I could tell its loss hurt him. Isa warmed herself by the fire and said, ‘I wonder if what was followin us could of been Crow.’

‘Ain’t no Crow, it’s all bullshit. Keep yer drongo imaginins for yer show preps,’ said Smoov.

‘It’s true as I heard it,’ Isa said. And after a bit she said, ‘Can I look through the show notes for patterns?’

‘Nope. They’re only for showmans’ eyes.’

‘But Jon’s no showman.’

‘That’s right. He’s a ugly dumbshit halfwit that keeps all the gear right and does what he’s told.’

I dunno why I didn’t run from them both except for the times I could see Isa’s smile. I boiled up the billy and we had some tea and roady made from weedseed flour, water and honeybee nectar. Smoov smoked up like he always did and off we roaded, this time with nothing following behind but empty space and Smoov got stoned and brooded on the pendant that was stolen and I wondered if it was Crow that had been the follower and that rifled the gear and stole the pendant, like Isa said. And in the sky a flapple rode the air moving off the salt pan now the sun was up. The blasted landscape all around was so lonely and wrecked but still sometimes I had to stop myself from getting caught up in it. One minute you cursed its white emptyness and then the next you rounded a corner and saw a new view of wonder and beauty.

We made it through that next long day, Isa weaker and sick still, like she had seen a ghost. Maybe that’s what passed us in the night, I don’t know, or maybe it was just being snakebit, but I thought I saw a glimpse of Smoov’s pendant when she moved her hand from pocket to pack. I kept me mouth shut and put one foot in front of the next all the way to Hind Pass, about twelve clicks south and then we could see the shape of its tin walls in the red desert and it was a happy sight.

We hit Hind Pass shanty town with the show gear all stashed. Isa weak still but she flashed me a smile, friendly face in the frowns and tears of the road. Smoov was grim of look, he was starting to get right for fixing on the Wotcher and the trancemission he would channel. He was roadwise and able, always thinking on the next move, but it was up to me to scan the faces to see how things were going to go down in the camp. The folks were gathering for the show, getting ready to hear what they could take from Smoov’s pictures and the messages he brought down from the Wotcher. They saw the show as a way of coming together and trying to understand how the pieces all fit. And Smoov sold them on the idea that one day if they listened hard enough and gathered enough connections through the patterns of the Wotcher’s signal there’d be a message that would shine down and put back the system from the past time.

Kids ran past the show cart shouting, ‘Show, show, show,’ and Smoov still with that steely look in his eyes. One kid ran alongside us hitting a old tyre with a stick. The sun set through the ash in the air. It was a smaller following than I thought we would get. We’d been there before, it’s on the show circuit from camp to camp through the desert backroads. Dogs were lying on the ground and chooks clucking and pecking and the air rasped me throat with dust and town smell.

The kids following us along besides the cart scratched at the tarp and tried to see what was under the covers. Smoov smacked their hands away. One kid looked at Smoov, dirty face tangle of hair.

‘Is the Wotcher gunna come down and save us against the brumbies?’ the kid said.

‘Wotcher don’t come,’ Smoov said. ‘Wotcher passes by high in the sky.’

‘But the horse head prophet said—’

‘Wotcher don’t make no innerference. It just tells its messages and the showmans interprets them so you know how to live. Maybe there’ll be a message from the Wotcher in the show for you tonight.’

We roaded in on a track lined with shacks. Women sat on mats woven from plastic mined from the wreckage of the past and what came after. Blokes were smashed off their face on cactusflower grog brewed in plastic bags buried in the ground. Kids running around everywhere, and everywhere I looked I saw the faces of the starving and the empty. Smell of sour sweat and cookfire smoke, drying rabbit skins, chillies on strings. Smell of blood and guts fresh from butcher knives, smell of sewer and rotted garbage, smell of meaty smokehouse. Smell of diesel jenny, smell of newmade molecules from truckjuice alkaloid synthfac.

We rolled up to the show place, all laid out in the centre of camp. Many times before we had done the show. It was our meat and our bed, it was Smoov’s lifework, sweat of his yakka. It was his raising and his following and it would be his dying too, and the ending of his road was coming up fast. He rolled up a smoke and sat in the shade of the cart while he readied his linkmaker for the Wotcher’s pass. In behind his eyes the trancemissions came every night for him to choose from and pattern the Wotcher’s message.

The kids gathered round now, and the old folks came too. I’d been charging the cells all day, charging them off the alternator sucking juice from the friction of the rolling wheels of the cart and the turn of windprop. I creaked a case off the cart and started stowing the gear. Smoov puffed on his smoke, blowing great grey gouts of it from his nose. He was getting ready for his role. Isa sat by the crates I took out. She studied Smoov, studied his face and his hands, making sure she took in all the things she could. She was prepping to innerface with the Wotcher’s trancemission herself. There’s a secret way to it, a secret that only the showmans like Smoov knew — how to find the right freeks. They kept it to themselves through secret rites and the secret language and the linkmakers the showmans past on through the ages to catch the Wotcher’s message.

Sun went down, lightning in the west crackling dry sheets. No smell of rain. I strung the white tarp from where the show would come forth. And then the Wotcher spun, moving slow and the flash of it came up from the east like a shining eye in the sky. There was a gasp from the folks in the camp as it passed and the wonderment from the crowd that something like that could be so high up and move so slow and regular, and the power of those who must have put it there, and the hope that there’d be another way back to the time when a vessel could be launched and floated like a star. In the wake of its passing it left its messages in the showman’s linkmaker and out of the crackle of static and noise came the signs the showmans used to earn their meat and their smoke. They could listen the Wotcher. They could sing the signal and tune to the freek of it.

The kids were quiet as it passed but after it was gone they started chattering, even the older ones who I’d seen come many times were excited for the show, that crackling message from on high. Wotcher gave the knowing that something better had come before and maybe one day someone would piece it all together where it all made sense and we would find the road back into the gigacities. The earth would be calm green again and the waters blue like in the Wotcher picture shows and the buildings of the gigacities would grow in the ground like concrete trees with steel leaves and they would talk together like they used to and suckle the poison from the ground.