‘Just getting a look at the country — never really seen much of it.’ He wondered if he would be asked to leave.
‘Working life, eh?’ said Klyde agreeably, as if he himself were a keen businessman. ‘Easy to forget about it out here.’ He nodded to a fat pink sky. Klyde loaded and sighted his rifle, the tips of his fingers black from engine grease. He lined up, taking his time, then he looked at Leon. ‘Mate, this is something close to heaven,’ he said and squeezed off a bullet, which exploded an orange and its sweet smell came into the air. He passed the rifle over.
‘It’s a pretty unusual place you’ve got here,’ Leon said in what he hoped was an even voice. The orange vibrated in the sights. It had been a long time. ‘Can’t thank you enough for helping me out.’ He shot the orange and it burst, and he felt a deep well of satisfaction.
When Klyde next spoke, taking his aim carefully, the log now wet from juice, his voice was tight but his words were slow. His tongue darted out of his beard, pink and quick to wet his lips. ‘This is where a man can just fuckin’ be his natural own self.’ He shot and missed. He breathed in deep through his teeth and as he exhaled he shook his head, putting the gun down at his side. ‘There’s some of us, yourself included I’m sure, have seen and borne witness to a number of terrible things. And as you’ll know, those things haunt a man.’ He handed the gun across. Leon found his arms suddenly lacked the strength to lift it.
‘And at home everyone wants to act like we haven’t seen those things, or done those things. But we have, an’ that’s not a fair thing. It’s not.’ Klyde was watching the oranges, so Leon looked too. ‘I got a friend stepped on a mine out there. We all heard the click. He stood still, an’ we all got round him with our ideas and shit. Tried holding it down with a bayonet, tried it from every angle, thought about tying a rope round his middle to pull him off, but we couldn’t have gone quicker than the blast, we knew that. Thought up ways all afternoon, meanwhile he’s stood there, sweating, at twenty-one years old. So in the end he says to pile up his leg with rocks so the mine’ll only take off up to his calf, or maybe if he’s lucky just the foot. An’ anyway he’s standing there crying and shouting, telling us all to get the fuck away and piss off, and we all take cover and you can just hear him there on his own crying and swearing. Then the boy does it and after the bang, after all the dirt comes down over us and there’s that smell, we scramble up to him and he’s white in the face and his whole leg’s off and the other foot too. And he died. An’ I told everyone there, went round telling them if any bastard ever talked about it again I’d fucking shoot them in the face, no trouble.’ He turned and looked Leon in the eye. ‘No bugger’s looked after us.’
Leon lifted the gun and took aim again but now his heart bounced his arms. ‘See,’ Klyde went on, ‘but here, we’re all in the same boat. I can tell you are, or else you wouldn’t come rambling through the desert alone and half smoked. This is the place a bloke can let loose.’ He inhaled and sucked air through his teeth again. From the corner of his eye he was aware of Klyde stretching out his arms at the sky. He pulled the trigger just to have taken his turn, but the bullet still found its mark. He looked at the place where the orange had been, surprised.
Klyde carried on loudly, ‘This place is man town. There’s no women, no children, it’s just us.’ He gestured to the blasted oranges like they were a field of daffodils. ‘And we can do what we want.’
Leon handed back the gun and saw that Klyde’s eyes were shining and wet.
No one asked him to stay, but no one seemed to expect him to go either and it was comfortable. He slept deep black sleeps and nothing woke him but the morning. The days were spent hunting and talking and fixing things, even if it was just a hole in a bucket or a blocked pipe, there was some satisfaction in it that he hadn’t known before. Out the front of the house was a jungle of metal and scrap. You would pick up a piece, sit in the dirt with a drink and make things — a chair out of old fence and chicken wire, a bin out of insulated pipe. Sometimes useless things, a family of logs, each one with a different expression, wearing funnels and rusted colanders for hats, nails for eyes, scraps of oil-stained cloth for clothes. Leon cut a person out of a tin can, yellow with sharp fingernails, a ring pull for an empty head.
There was one called Colin, someone else was called Grub and there was definitely someone called Jarred, but still he was only ever able to recognise Klyde for certain. All of them wore wide beards and long hair, and everyone swapped clothes. They had a way of licking their lips with their hot little pink tongues that made it look as if they were smelling the air. Every so often a few of them would make off to the nearest shop. It was a day’s trip away and the idea of going seemed dreadful. The thought of those naked beardless faces, of the chatter and the sidelong looks. Because the shop was a gas servo the food they came back with was of a type. A lot of chips, chocolate bars and beer. Sacks of cigarettes, coffee and a loaf of bread each to eat fresh. One evening someone turned up with a clutch of rabbits, which were gutted and skinned, and roasted on a stick over the fire. Among the scrap and cigarette butts of the yard was the sound of low talking, the crack of beers being opened and the smell of burning rabbit hair.
There was an old mirror in the toilet, with most of the reflection taken out of it. The toilet itself wasn’t often used by anyone — you had to get water to pour it down and it was a waste. Someone had chalked the word LADIES on the door. Most of that sort of thing took place out behind the scrub and wattle, and it was a better set-up altogether than going into that dark and stinking room. But he went in there anyway because he remembered the mirror. He knew the beard was there, could feel it peeling its way through the skin of his face, but it was still a shock. It was long rather than wide, because he hadn’t shaped it like the rest of them. It hadn’t grown so long that it got in his way yet, but it was still long, and parts of it were white. He hadn’t expected it and he sat on the loo seat for a moment to take in the time that had passed. His eyes were lost underneath his eyebrows, which had gone feral, his shoulders were like cow skin and lean, just the sinew showing. His lips were blood bitten and dark, and just like the rest of the men, when he licked his lips his tongue was surprisingly pink and quick.
Out in a dry field close to midnight Leon felt the pull of home like a bite on a reel. He was drunk, had spent the afternoon drinking and shooting cans with Colin or Jarred, had even joined in at lazily trying to pick off a chook. The chook was having none of it, and after Leon had taken two lackadaisical shots it had simply walked off round the back of the house and sat smugly in front of the diesel barrel.
The plan hatched when night had fallen and the last of the damp potato chips had been snaffled between them. The idea of rabbits again made Klyde fart dirtily in disgust. Red meat was what was called for. They piled into the back of a Ute and hooned off into the desert, Klyde now and again switching off the headlights, setting them adrift in the cold black air. Leon imagined he was near the sea and that the bellows and grindings of the truck and its passengers were the sounds of water attacking the land, and the high yells of the men were seagulls and plovers.