Dirt Music by Tim Winton Page A

he thinks, how long have I been out? The earth at his feet is tarry with blood and his brother is so gone. He can hear Sally now but not see her in the darkness of the cab. She’s just a horrible wet noise in there. Fox crabs around to the passenger’s side and on his belly and crying with pain, he burrows in through the bent hatch of the window frame. The undulating cab roof is hot and slippery beneath him. He smells shit and Juicy Fruit, gropes one-handed until he finds her wedged under the steering column, bits of metal protruding from her trunk.
    Lu?
    He feels her lips under the palm of his hand.
    It’s okay, she says, I don’t feel it. Sing, Lu.
    He feels the breath go out of her before he can pull his hand away. The hot rain of her urine sluices his face. He comes to again out on the dirt. The same night, perhaps the same minute.
    Goes searching up the track, crosses himself for relief, nursing hope.
    But he finds Bullet in the stony edge of the paddock, his head rent like a cantaloupe, still smelling of soap, pyjamas clean.
    The National in its case, right there in the ruts. The mandolin dusty. A folded rug full of burrs.
    From way back up the house the chained dog barks.
    And finally across the track in the soft dirt, luminous beneath the moon, Bird. Like a fallen kite there in her nightie, breathing, breathing but there’s no way he can lift her. His collarbone grinds like a broken joist. When he tries again her weight rends him almost in two and he falls back into the blood-varnished oats. His back goes into a fierce spasm through which he still feels the child’s breath hot along his arm. He fights to his feet and pants a while and then with his good arm he takes the small, warm foot and proceeds to drag the child along the white rut of the track, resisting the pain for several paces until the wheatbag noise of her on the dirt shames him and he relents. He knows he should never have moved her. Stepping back, he stumbles into the broken belly of a guitar which cries out, and for a few moments he makes horrible vaudeville shaking the bastard thing from his boot.
    The moon hangs above the house. He limps up the track. He creeps, he shuffles. He leaves all of them out there under 119 the moon. There is no wind now but the wire of the paddock fence sings and a hiss is abroad in the weeds. Just behind the ruined fence the heavy orange blossoms of the Christmas trees shiver in the night and beyond them the beetle backs of melons shine. At the house he takes the verandah steps in increments of pain and as his hips lock up he staggers against the doorjamb and smears someone’s blood across the timber frame.
    The verandah table is loaded with crabshells and sodden newsprint and already the ants are into it. Plates, beer bottles, a roach end. On the jarrah boards a child’s rubber thong.
    Inside the floorboards shine. The telephone has dial tone. The house smells of life, but he knows he has seen the end of the world.
    The walk back up the hill does nothing to settle his mind. Fox comes back in the dark with his whole outlook in ruins, his thoughts sprayed in all directions at once. The wry, throaty sound of her laugh. The miserable prospect of children involved and, worse, the probability of it all ending here tonight, that it could all have been merely an adventure for her. At least she won’t be stupid enough to brag about it at his expense. Nobody would be that reckless, not anybody who knows the Buckridges.
    Even the idea of them, of falling into their orbit again, makes him agitated. It’s hard to be specific about why. Big Bill is long dead, there is nothing to fear from him anymore but even he was mostly legend to the Fox boys. They understood that White Point was his town and that before the shacks were built there the coast was considered his fiefdom. Fox has never seen a burning or a 121 sinking with his own eyes and he’s never got the straight story about those Jap boys who disappeared after the war.