‘Right you are.’
‘Okay then, give me a sec.’
He turned away, cupped his hands to his mouth, yelled loud enough to be heard above the crowd. ‘Red! Blue! Come on!’
Two dogs darted onto the oval, bringing the game to a halt. It was Red and Blue, Tobe’s blue-heeler and his red-heeler. They were chasing each other, nipping at each other, stopping every now and then to wrestle. Tongues lolling and tails wagging, they were playing hard and loving it.
‘Come on, stop pissing about!’
They froze, sniffed the air, looked back and forth, ran again, mounted the fence around the oval with ease, headed straight for me. They ignored Tobe, preferring to sniff at my crotch instead.
‘Get out of it!’ Tobe yelled, his voice unexpectedly violent.
I took an involuntary step back, a little startled and trying hard not to show it. Tobe’s temper was a local legend, a contrary and rage-filled thing that still managed to shock me. Red and Blue flopped down on their bellies, staring at him pitifully.
‘So, where were we?’ Tobe asked, smiling wide, his anger dissipating like a lone cloud under the hot sun.
I shook my head. ‘Lead on, MacDuff,’ I said, waving the way forward.
‘It’s lay on, dickhead, lay on.’
We set off. Red and Blue stayed by Tobe’s side, tails between their legs, still spooked by his outburst. I offered to carry the strongbox while he wheeled his bike, but he just shrugged, telling me not to worry. Slowly, we wound through the crowd that lined the oval, nodding and smiling and saying ‘g’day’ to everyone we passed. I was chuffed that the town had rallied—it was something that didn’t happen very often. But it was funny as well; no one we passed wanted to talk, their eyes fixed on the game. Although we might have come together to enjoy it, we all ended up watching it alone.
Tobe and I stopped in the shade of the ruined grandstand. It loomed over us, a towering skeleton of splintered wood, jagged steel, faded signs. Most of the roof had fallen in, dropping a pile of rubble and scrap where rows of seats had once been. Only the two rows closest to the oval had escaped being crushed, their trailing innards slowly crumbling into a powdery plastic dust, the scraps of leather still clinging to the cushions brittle and worn.
‘I reckon this’ll do,’ I said, eager to sit down and take it easy again.
‘No worries.’
The seat I had chosen almost collapsed under me. Tobe smiled a cruel smile before dropping the strongbox and gingerly settling in the seat next to mine. Red and Blue looked at him quizzically, so he reached out and patted them both.
‘Good boy, good girl.’
He pulled a hefty set of rusty keys from his pocket and unlocked the strongbox, dragging out a battered tin bowl and an equally battered canteen. He poured the dogs a drink and then settled his lanky frame back in the seat.
‘So, what did I…’
Red jumped up on him, cutting him off. She planted her front paws firmly in his crotch and started licking his face. I laughed aloud. Seemingly unable to hide his amusement, Tobe laughed as well and then playfully pushed her away. He told both dogs to sit. They sat. He nudged the water bowl with his foot and told them to drink. They drank. And then he told them to piss off, and they ran.
‘I’ll try that again. So, what did I miss?’
I looked out at the oval. We had moved a long way from the First Country goals and were only an easy spit from our own—I could barely make out the thrashing I knew we were receiving. The crowd roared again, but I couldn’t see why.
‘This mob rocked up about a week ago,’ I said. ‘They set up camp and a market behind the school, and asked around if anyone wanted a game, wanted a bit of old fashioned fun. You know, the usual.’
It was far from that; theirs was the first caravan I had seen in five or six years. It was no wonder they had pulled such a crowd.
‘Looks like things haven’t changed that much.’
‘Nothing ever does.’
Tobe laughed.
‘How about you?’ I asked.
He leaned forward, reached into the strongbox, pulled out a dusty glass bottle and two stained tin cups. ‘I’m good, mate. And it’s good to be back.’ He held the bottle up. ‘Fancy a little something to get the party started?’ I nodded. If it weren’t for creature comforts, the life we lived would be nothing but an all-day grind. Tobe wrenched the cap off, held the bottle to his nose, took a deep breath. His face wrinkled in disgust.
‘I guess something’s better than nothing,’ he said, carefully passing me the bottle.
I didn’t need to bring it close to catch the eye-watering smell of rancid backyard whisky.
‘And for my next trick…’
He reached into the strongbox once again, this time pulling out a metal box about ten inches square and four inches deep. It was his ‘treasure chest’, taken advantage of frivolously and often, there not really being any rainy days left. He opened it up, revealing a thin piece of animal skin folded over on itself. The skin yawned open; inside sat a hefty chunk of the wild-weed that grew rampant in the mountains to the south.
Same old Tobe, he doesn’t change.
‘Nice one,’ I said. ‘It’s good to see that you came prepared. But where’d you get the stuff? The weed, as usual, no worries. But the whiskey?’
Tobe said nothing, smiling to himself.
‘I thought the pub had run its cellar dry?’
Tobe still said nothing.
‘You know how annoying you are, don’t you?’
‘No, Bill, I don’t. You know what—why don’t you enlighten me?’
‘Dickhead.’ Tobe snorted and tried not to laugh.
‘So, come on, where’d you get it?’
‘Well, yeah, the pub has almost run dry,’ he said, deflecting my question. ‘I reckon Lou’s got just enough tucked away to help us forget this woefully one-sided game, and then that’s it.’
He leaned forward, pouring us both a shot. I leaned back and threw my feet up on the strongbox.
‘It’s a bloody shame, there’s pretty much nothing else left.’
‘Yeah.’
Tobe picked up the two tin cups and passed one to me. ‘To happier times.’ I smiled, despite the solemnity of our skol. I’m not sure why, it was one of those things. I hadn’t seen Tobe in a while—he had been out scavenging, running some of his ‘errands’. Whenever he left, there was never any guarantee he would be back. Believe me, there’s no point waiting; I once wasted more years that way than I care to count. As always, I had been missing our bullshit sessions, crap talking and dog wrangling, hazy nights filled with tequila and weed, old records blaring loud and pushing back the dark.
We knocked off our drinks. Tobe poured two more.
A car horn blared from one of the wrecks filling the carpark next to the oval, signalling half-time. Tobe smiled to himself and plucked a wooden bowl from the seemingly bottomless strongbox. He wiped it clean with his grimy T-shirt before reaching into the animal-skin bundle. His nimble fingers shredded weed and homegrown bush tobacco—rough stuff, bred for the drought—and he started rolling a joint, using a crumbling piece of yellowing paper.
I watched Tobe tear and fold the paper, add his special mix and slowly create a monster. I resisted the urge to call out: ‘It’s alive! It’s alive!’
‘Ta-da,’ he said when he was done.
He reached into his pocket and dug out his lighter. It was an antique, made of some dull grey metal. A Zippo, I think that’s what they used to call them. It ran on an esoteric fuel of Tobe’s own design; the flame shot high when he sparked it up. The acrid taint of burning hair and the pungent tang of smouldering weed drifted my way as Tobe lit the joint, singeing his eyebrows at the same time.
A man of strange dignity, he ignored the smell, took a few drags and then passed it my way.