We met when he asked me if I would buy him a drink because the barman would not serve him. I started an argument with the barman and got both of us thrown out. We then wandered into another pub and I bought him cigarettes and drinks till my money ran out. He was genuinely surprised that I only had twenty dollars on me. We then went back to his house and fucked. I fell asleep on his mattress while he stayed up listening to music on a cheap ghetto-blaster, getting stoned on a bong.
In the morning he made me a disgusting coffee and smoked my last cigarette. When I snapped at him he offered me a drag. I watched him go to the wardrobe, search behind a pile of T-shirts and lift out a plastic mineral-water bottle. He sat by me on the mattress and covered the opening of the bottle with his mouth. After taking a few short sharp breaths he offered the bottle to me. I smelt strong chemical fumes and backed away.
‘I’m all out of dope,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘You can either sniff this or it’s nothing.’
Glue sniffing is harsh on the lungs. I coughed into the bottle and he started a melodic chain of laughter. I lay back on the pillow and tried to chart the rush from the solvent. I experienced nothing except the faint throb of a hangover. But when I tried to lift my head up again, to take in another snort from the bottle, he had to help me. Again, the laughter. I sniffed some more and felt the beginning of a rhythmic tattoo beating at the back of my head.
His room was bare except for the old wardrobe and the single mattress. A pile of dirty clothes lay in a heap against a wall, and a torn tie-dyed sheet was nailed across the window. Two pictures were Blu-tacked to the wall, a poster of an American rapper and a photo of a very old Indigenous woman.
‘Who’s she?’ I asked.
‘My nan. She’s up north.’ He got up and pulled a T-shirt over his slender frame. ‘I’ll be back soon. You want to wait for me?’
I was touched that he trusted me with the care of his tiny kingdom. I nodded and sank back into the mattress. He left me with a kiss, and placed the plastic bottle with its clear liquid contents by my side.
•
The truck driver begins to tell me about his life. I’m not really listening, more intent on being lulled into a trance by the landscape we are gliding through. I’m making a mental note of the number of carcasses we pass. Twelve roos. Eight wombats. A score of large birds. The trucks must be going exceedingly fast, for the bodies are torn apart, smashed by the velocity of the impact.
‘There’s gonna have to be a war soon in this country.’
I look up at him and he’s glancing over at me.
‘People are getting ready,’ he continues, ‘arming themselves. And who can blame them? The fucking government is in cahoots with the niggers, giving them all this land, paying them money so they can get drunk and piss it all away.’ He snorts angrily and accelerates. I offer neither resistance to nor approval of what he is saying. ‘Do you know those bastards get money to send their kids to school? And what do the parents do with all that money? Drink it or spend it on drugs. The pricks up in Canberra keep giving them our money, buying them houses and cars.’ He is animated now, anger and passion softening the hard surfaces of his skin, making him seem younger. ‘It’s our money that pays for all those gifts to the bloody blackfella while he sits on his lazy arse and sells his kids and wife for extra cash. They’re cunning bastards. No natural intelligence at all, just animal cunning.’ He spits out this last insult. ‘They know how to use the system. But the bastards are making use of my taxes to live the good life.’
His voice drops. ‘I hate them. Every last fucking one of them. I work my arse off to feed and clothe my family, drive these bloody trucks across the continent three, four times a month, and then have to pay most of it back to the government so it can waste it on these ugly bastards who won’t work, can’t make anything, have never been any good for anything.’ The hate in his voice is hot. It blows hard into my face. ‘I reckon we need to kill each and every one of them. The women and children too. I’m mad about kids, myself, I can’t wait to be a grandfather. But when I see one of those black babies and know what it’s going to grow up to be, I want to take it and smash it against a wall or on a rock. I want to see it die in front of me.’
We pass a sign announcing a roadhouse a few dozen kilometres up the road.
‘I need to take a leak,’ I tell him. Then I close my eyes and try to shut out the world.
•
The roadhouse has been worn dull by the weather. Even the huge orange and yellow advertising sign is faded and dirty. Two trucks are parked on the other side of the road and I get ready to jump out. The driver tells me to join him in the truckies’ section of the restaurant when I finish up in the toilet.
‘Grab yourself a coffee,’ he tells me, ‘and sit next to me. If they think you’re with me you won’t have to pay for coffee.’
The toilet smells of piss and mice. I stand up for a long time before I can get any urine to flow, and when it finally comes it is a slow and puny stream. I rest my head against the cool ceramic of the cistern. Outside a wind is murmuring. I look down at my soft dick and start pulling it. I think of fucking the truck driver in the mouth and come quickly, dripping three days’ worth of semen onto the toilet lid. I wipe the lid, flush the toilet, and wash up at the sink.
Inside the restaurant, a bored young girl in a black T-shirt is smoking a cigarette at one of the laminex tables. She gets up when I come in but I shake my head and immediately she sits back down. Tina Turner is playing on the radio. A partition separates the dining room into two sections. The first section is empty. I walk past it and into the section marked TRUCK DRIVERS ONLY. Four men are sitting around a table. One of them is my driver but he fails to acknowledge my wave. I blush as I shuffle towards the coffee urn, conscious of my slender weak limbs, of the heaviness of my T-shirt, dark jeans and runners. The broad-shouldered men around the table are all in singlets and shorts, and they all wear their masculinity easily. So easily that their brutish physicality seems effortless, almost elegant. I sit down awkwardly next to them, pulling a chair from another table and placing it a little off to one side of the main group. No one bothers with introductions.
The coffee is scalding and tastes awful. I put it down and wait for it to cool. One of the men is talking about the blackfellas claiming back ancestral land. He too has skin marked by sun and wind, but the tight curls of his blond hair and the metallic grey of his eyes temper the erosion of his body. A delicate weave of blond hair creeps up his arms and his singlet fits tightly around a firm roll of flab and a well-muscled chest. He leans forward as he tells his story and I take in his aroma over the burnt fumes of the coffee.
‘You know who’s paying for them?’
‘The government,’ answers my truck driver.
The blond man looks exasperated. ‘Fuck, mate, of course, but who else?’
The other men wait for the answer.
‘The Jews, of course, and all the other fat businessmen they have in their back pockets. They’re all in it.’
‘They’re in what?’ My question booms around the circle and they all turn towards me. The blond man tilts his head at my truck driver, who gives him a slow nod.
‘Arming the bloody boongs,’ he replies.
It takes a moment for the words to sink in. ‘Arm them for what?’
‘The war.’
I fight back the urge to laugh in his face.
He shifts his chair closer to me. ‘Some of us have already started storing away guns, started building a militia. The fucking politicians are in the pocket of the black man. We can’t depend on them.’ He leans back and smiles at one of his friends. ‘At least there ain’t too many of the pricks left, eh, Davo? With enough warning we should be able to kill the fuckers off in a few days.’ He turns quickly back to me. ‘As long as we’re all in it together, right, mate?’