The recipient of the lecture is not a wilful child or a recalcitrant teenager but a strikingly homely blue heeler named Spike. He’s a large white dog who looks like he’s been splattered with navy-blue paint but never hosed off. He barks.
‘Okay. Good.’ With a nod, Corey turns to exit the cockpit, then stops. ‘I don’t need to tie you up, do I?’
A bark.
‘I’m not having this conversation now.’ He points at the animal. ‘Stay.’
The tall Australian pilot slides out of the day-glo-yellow, teardrop-shaped chopper and turns to a small, decrepit building at the edge of a desert. A single-engined Beechcraft and an old Bell Jet Ranger helicopter are parked in a sandblasted hangar nearby. In the middle distance, two passenger jets, a Boeing 737 and an Airbus A320, are parked beside a runway near a simple terminal building. This dusty little aerodrome is Alice Springs Airport, gateway to Australia’s Northern Territory.
Corey does his best to pat off the fine film of red dust that covers his clothes, which include a faded blue T-shirt, Levi’s 501 and black Justin boots. He pushes his Randolph Engineering sunglasses to the top of his head, revealing blue eyes, then enters the building through a grubby glass door, propped open with a milk crate in the hope of encouraging air circulation in the sweltering heat.
The building doesn’t look any better on the inside. At the rear of the long, basic office three men play poker around a small card table, the ceiling fan above working overtime. Corey forces a grin and approaches the warped and buckled reception desk that cuts the space in two. ‘Fellas.’
The first guy, Harry Kelsy, a tub of lard in his mid-forties, ignores him and keeps his eyes on his cards. The second guy, Roy McGlynn, thin, thinning and thirty, glances at Corey, releases a ‘woof’ under his infamously pungent breath, then looks back at his cards.
Corey ignores them and pushes on. ‘Les, can I have a word?’
The third guy rises from the card table. In his mid-fifties, Les Whittle has a pinched and unhappy expression until he smiles, which he does for Corey. ‘Sure, what’s up?’
‘Sorry to disturb. Look, I was wondering if — if there was, if you could see your way clear to maybe throw a little work my way? If you have anything spare. Sightseeing, or runs out to the remote communities, whatever’s going.’ Corey tries his hardest not to sound desperate.
Les considers the request. ‘Aren’t you workin’ for Clem Alpine at the moment?’
‘Been doing some odds and ends for him but it’s —’
‘Woof.’
Corey ignores Roy. ‘It’s not really making ends meet —’
‘Woof.’
Les turns and fastens Roy with that pinched and unhappy expression. Roy doesn’t meet his eyes, just studies his cards. Les turns back to Corey. ‘Sorry ‘bout that. Look, this is difficult. You know I’m subcontracted by the operators.’
Corey nods a little too eagerly. ‘Yeah. Sure.’
‘So the problem is, if I hire pilots they don’t want then they don’t hire me.’
‘It happened once. Once! Three years ago. Can’t they get past it?’ The desperation finally shows.
‘Everyone remembers it, mate.’
‘I know, but jeez. Maybe you could talk to them? I guarantee it won’t happen again.’
Roy pipes up. ‘No one wants the crazy dog guy flying them around. It’s not that difficult to understand.’
Tub-o-lard Harry adds his two cents. ‘Maybe his dog could explain it to him —’
‘Woof!’ This bark doesn’t come from Roy. They turn.
It’s Spike, standing by the open front door.
Mortified, Corey moves to him, his voice a low, hard whisper. ‘I told you to stay in the chopper. Get out!’
Spike barks.
‘I don’t need your help.’
‘I think you need a lot of help.’ Harry twirls his finger beside his head in case anyone didn’t grasp the mental health inference.
Spike leaps over the reception desk in one muscular bound, flies past Les and lands in front of the card table where Harry and Roy sit. Teeth bared, a sinister growl emerges from deep within the animal.
Harry and Roy leap from their chairs and take refuge behind the table. ‘Get that mongrel out of here!’ Over the course of the sentence Harry’s panicked voice rises an octave.
‘Spike!’
The dog turns, barks at Corey.
‘Get behind!’
Spike turns back to Harry and Roy and growls again.
‘Now!’
The blue heeler pivots, leaps the counter and takes up a position behind his master. Suddenly it’s very quiet. Corey looks at Les, mortified by the turn of events. ‘Sorry about that — I - please don’t let it affect —’
‘You should probably leave, mate.’
Corey nods resignedly. ‘Yep. Probably should.’ He doesn’t want to. He wants to stay and persuade Les to hire him. Unfortunately, the pinched and unhappy expression tells him it’s not going to happen.
Corey turns and heads for the exit. Spike growls at Harry and Roy one last time then follows him through the door and outside into the vivid afternoon light. They crunch across the red earth to the day-glo-yellow Loach.
Spike barks.
‘Yes, I’m pissed off. I had it under control. I was guaranteeing it would never happen again and then you turn up and it happened again!’
He climbs into the chopper and Spike jumps in beside him. Corey begins the process of firing up the turbine then stops, slumps back in the seat and runs a hand through his short, mouse-blonde hair. ‘Man.’
A bark.
‘Because I’m too pissed off to fly right now, is why.’ Corey watches the sun as it gently slips behind the horizon, astonished he’s reached this low point. ‘These are meant to be the best years of my life.’
But they aren’t and the reason is panting on the seat beside him. Soon after buying Spike as a pup three years before, for the not inconsiderable sum of $215, Corey realised he could speak to the animal. Now ordinarily, speaking to dogs was no big deal, people did it all the time. What set Spike apart was that he answered back.
At first Corey wasn’t sure what to make of it. No one else seemed to know what the dog was saying, yet Corey understood him perfectly. Corey thought he might have some kind of ‘brain issue’ so he went to see his doctor on Bath Street, who ran all manner of tests and took X-rays and scans, all of which came up negative. The first doctor referred him to a second, who asked him all sorts of weird and quite frankly inappropriate questions, some about his long-dead parents. After five visits the second doctor was still unable to come up with an explanation, so Corey stopped worrying about it and quit going.
He liked the dog and enjoyed the conversations. Then Cameron, one of his oldest mates, noticed what was going on and asked him about it. Corey, who always believed truth to be the best policy, explained the situation. Bad idea. Perhaps his worst ever and he’d had some shockers. His life was never the same again.
Alice Springs is a small town and Corey quickly became known as ‘that crazy dog guy’. Suddenly everyone was giving him a wide berth. He was shunned, and it was both upsetting and depressing. Then things took a turn for the worse.
Corey’s bread and butter was flying tourists around the Northern Territory. He was a safe, reliable pilot who was frequently hired by Les, who in turn was contracted by the small group of tourist operators who worked out of Alice Springs Airport. On a flight to Uluru, the big red boulder that used to be called Ayers Rock, Corey was carrying a group of four elderly Rotary Club members from Illinois. Spike wanted to see the rock so Corey decided to bring him along, for the first time on a work flight. He’d have to sit in the front and keep quiet, but it wasn’t a long trip so Corey was sure it would be fine.