Beyond the Black Stump (4 page)

It was the middle of August before the letter from Mr. Johnson arrived. The mail reached Hazel at noon, and he found it waiting for him when he returned after a day’s fishing. “There’s a letter from New York for you, Junior,” his mother said. “Maybe it’s the one that you’ve been waiting for.”

“I guess it is,” he said. He went into the kitchen and unloaded five small trout and two rainbows on to the steel drainboard. His father came through. “That’s a good fish,” he said, pointing. “Want your letter now?”

“I’ll wash my hands first, Dad,” he said. He did so, and slit the letter open with the patent opener that stood upon his father’s desk. He stood in fishing clothes reading it in silence, while his parents watched. Then he folded the letter and put it in his pocket.

His mother asked, “Do they say where you’re going?”

“Kind of difficult, Mom,” he said thoughtfully. “They’ve given me a choice—Paraguay or Australia. I’ll have to think it over.”

Disappointed, his mother said, “There wouldn’t be a chance of a job here in the United States?”

He had explained this to her before. “Not unless I get myself married, Mom.”

She said nothing, and he went slowly to his room to park his fishing gear, unreel his line to dry, and change his clothes. Later in the evening, when they switched off after
I Love Lucy
, he said thoughtfully to his father, “You know what, Dad? I believe I’ll go to Australia.”

His mother said, “Why, Junior? It’s much further away for coming home on leave.”

“I like the sound of it better, Mom.” For half an hour he laid out the alternatives before them. In each case Topex were to function, in a sense, as exploration contractors working for a national company. In each case the assignment would be for approximately two years. In Paraguay the location would be jungle country, hot and wet and humid, and Spanish-speaking. In West Australia the location would be sheep country just above the tropic, near desert, hot, waterless, and English-speaking. “I guess the country might be somethin’ like Arabia,” he said. “Maybe not quite so bad. You couldn’t have run sheep at Abu Quaiyah.”

His mother said, “I don’t like the thought of you going back to a place like that, Junior.”

“It’s healthy enough, Mom,” he said. “I wasn’t sick a day. I’d be more scared of getting sick in Paraguay than I would back in Arabia. Marshes and flies and fevers, ’n all that.”

“I know it,” said his father. “A dry place is better, honey.”

“There’s the language, too,” the geologist said. “Two years is neither one thing nor the other. By the time you’d learned to speak well enough to get on with people, it’ld be time to come back home.” He grinned. “Not that there’d be anyone to talk to in either place.”

“What would Australians be like?” his mother asked presently. “Would they be like Canadians?”

“More like English,” his father told her. “They say tomahto instead of tomato. We had some of them at the airport, training, in the war. Didn’t you meet them?”

She shook her head. “I never did.” And then she asked, “Do they have coloured people there, like Africa?”

That perplexed them. “I saw a piece in the
National Geographic
about Australian black boys,” her husband said. “Pretty near naked, like savages. The ones I saw when they came here were white like you or me.”

“They make good soldiers,” said her son.

He took a couple of days to think it over before answering the letter. Like most young men in Hazel he was accustomed at home to doing his own laundry; ironing a couple of shirts one morning in the kitchen while his mother
prepared lunch, he said, “I just about made up my mind, Mom. I think I’ll go to Australia.”

She said, “Will it always have to be places such a long way away, son?”

“Depends how I get on,” he said. “Maybe the head office one day, if I’m good enough.”

“That would be in New York?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you want a city life, even if it means a lot of money?”

“I don’t know, Mom,” he said slowly. “I wouldn’t like living in New York.”

“A small town’s the best for small town people,” she said quietly. “Your father and I, we’ve been mighty happy here.”

He smiled. “Go easy, Mom—all small towns aren’t like Hazel. This is one of the best towns in the whole of the United States. Why, people come here from the East for their vacations!”

“I was just saying it’s a mighty good place to live, son.”

There was a long pause while he ran the iron carefully around a collar. “There’d be nothing I could do in a town like this,” he said. “I don’t know that there’s any place I’d rather live in, but you got to be practical.” He grinned. “There’s not an oil rig in five hundred miles.”

His mother said nothing, and the conversation lapsed.

He wrote next day to Mr. Johnson accepting the Australian assignment and asking if they wanted him to report back to New York on the conclusion of his leave, since in Oregon he was three thousand miles or so towards Australia. He did not get an answer for a week, and then he got a fat letter with many papers enclosed giving him preliminary information of the Topex business in Australia, a general account of the geological situation in the Hammersley Ranges, a detailed geographical report of the probable formations under a place called Laragh deduced from surface indications, and a map. The covering letter instructed him to report to the Topex agent in San Francisco on September the twentieth, who would supply him with expense money and any final instructions, and who was securing airline reservations for him. He would make his way directly to Perth in West Australia and report to the local Topex manager, Mr. Colin Spriggs, who had an office in Barrack St.

In the next fortnight he began to overhaul his kit; he would want very much the same outfit of tropical clothes that he had worn in Arabia, but many replacements were needed. In the field he usually wore U.S. Army clothing, battledress trousers and blouse of light fabric, jungle green in colour, but these suits were threadbare and in need of much replacement. He drove down to Portland in the Lincoln upon this and other matters of his kit, trading in his typewriter for a new one and buying a new electric razor, an essential in his mind for a sojourn in the desert. Water might be brackish and in short supply, and usually had been so at Abu Quaiyah, but practically every aspect of his work demanded electricity; he could not explore the strata far below the ground nor sink a bore for exploration at the point he had selected without the assistance of a considerable power station. He bought a new camp bed with a mosquito net attached and had it shipped to Perth, and stocked up his medicine chest with two years’ supply of the American drugs that he knew and was accustomed to.

All these things he distributed around his bedroom on the floor, with many others, as he started to get organised. His mother gave up all attempts to clean his room, but she paused in the open doorway one morning to watch him sewing on a button. “I’ll do that for you,” she offered.

“It’s no trouble, Mom,” he said. “It’s easy to do them as I find them.”

She looked around the room. “You taking any books along?”

“I thought maybe I’d take this one along, this time,” he said. He indicated a small Bible on the dressing table.

“That might be a good thing to do,” she observed. “You didn’t take it with you last time.”

“No,” he replied. “Guess I’m getting old.”

She did not comment, but said, “Taking any other books?”

“I don’t think so, Mom. I’d like it if you could keep sending the
Saturday Evening Post
and
Life.”

“Surely,” she said. “If you read those papers I don’t know that you want to read anything else.”

There was a pause, and then he said, “You know somethin’?”

“What’s that?”

“I’d kind of like to see the
Hazel Advertiser
now ’n then.
Not every week, just now ’n then.” He looked up and grinned at her. “See what movie’s playing at the theatre.”

She nodded. “I’ll have that mailed to you from the office. Your Dad, he sometimes cuts bits out of our copy. You want a Portland paper, say the
Sunday Oregonian
as well?”

“I dunno that I’d read it. Maybe there’ll be an Australian paper that I’ll have to read, out there. I guess if I have the
Saturday Evening Post
and
Life
and the
Hazel Advertiser
, that’s all I’ll want to read.”

“And the Bible,” said his mother.

He looked up, grinning. “Kind of makes the library complete.”

Three weeks before the end of his leave Chuck Sheraton arrived from Texas, his Chev full to the brim with wife, four children, two dogs, a pushcart, luggage, camp kit, and appurtenances. The; Sheraton home was in Lindbergh Avenue two blocks from the Laird home on 2nd St., and Stanton strolled round to visit with them the morning after they arrived. As he approached the house a boy of eleven came out of the basement garage sucking a coke through a straw, and Stanton got his shock. When he had last seen him four years previously this kid had been getting most uncomfortably like himself, and quite unlike his father or his mother. Now, at eleven, he was the very spit and image of Stanton at that age.

The geologist said, “Hi-yah, Tony. You remember me?”

The boy said, “You’re Stan Laird.”

“That’s right. Have a good ride up?”

“Gloria was sick, and Imogen was sick, and Peter was sick.
I
wasn’t sick.”

The geologist wrinkled his brows, a little dazed. “Is Imogen the baby, or is that Peter?”

The child said scornfully, “They’re dogs.”

“Oh, sure. Your Dad inside?”

“I guess so.”

He found Ruth and Chuck in the house. He had not seen Ruth for four years and probably he had not met her half a dozen times since their disgrace; he thought he had got over that, and he was surprised that she could still give his heart a little twist when she said, “Why Stan, it’s real nice to see you!” Chuck was in a clean drill summer uniform shirt and slacks, sorting out a tangled mass of baggage and kit
on the floor of the video alcove off the living-room. He said, “Hi-yah, fellow. How you doing?”

“Okay,” said Stan. “You still in one piece?”

Chuck stood up, grinning, a bulging haversack in hand. “More’n one piece. Either one or two more since I saw you—I kinda lose track of them. You better ask Ruthie. She might know.”

“It’s one more, Stan,” she said. “Gloria was born just before you went away, remember?”

“Uh-huh. This the one born last fall?”

“That’s right—Jasmine. She’s asleep right now, but she’s a lovely baby.”

Chuck said, “Sure she’s a lovely baby. Ruthie, what about a rum ’n coke?”

She went to get the bottles of coca cola from the refrigerator, and Chuck produced a half-empty bottle of rum from the haversack. Stanton said, “Not for me, pal. I don’t use the stuff.”

“Not even in Arabia?” Chuck grinned.

Stanton shook his head. “Just coke.”

“Okay, fellow. Ruthie, bring some ice along.”

They sat down, sucking cokes and rum and cokes through straws as they compared experiences. Chuck had achieved the Distinguished Flying Cross in Korea after shooting down three MIGs, and in celebration at a party in Tokio he had crashed an Army jeep, had been arrested by the military police, and had spent a night in the cooler. He was now instructing fighter pilots at an airbase near Houston, and he had developed a technique which was giving him a good deal of pleasure. In that district the railways were mostly single track. When night-flying he would cruise around until he saw a train, the engine decorated with one bright headlight. He would then retire fifteen miles ahead of it and bring his aircraft down to track level, flying towards the train with one landing light on, exactly above the track. So far no engineer had actually died of fright but he understood that several had come very near it, and that half the locomotives in Texas were progressing in a series of leaps with flats on the wheels.

Stanton told them all about Arabia, or what he knew of it; it took him about three minutes. They then turned to gossip about their schoolmates in Hazel, far more interesting
and important topics, and the prospects in the forthcoming World Series. They sat together gossiping for half an hour, and got on to the subject of the deer.

“I got to get going on September nineteenth,” the geologist said.

“Only gives us three days of the shooting season,” said Chuck. “Kind of short.”

Stanton said, “You know somethin’? I’d like to try it with the bow and arrow.”

In the Hazel National Forest the deer were strictly protected. There was a shooting season of one month in the fall, but before the shooting season it was legal to attack the deer with bows and arrows for a fortnight.

“Might do that,” said Chuck. “You got a bow?”

Stanton nodded. Before leaving for Arabia he had bought himself a fine new modern bow the like of which was never seen at Agincourt, made by the American Steel Tube Co. Inc. in Springfield, Illinois, delicately tapered and immensely powerful; he had only used this outfit once and longed to use it again. “Hank Fisher got himself a bow like mine,” he said. “He’d lend it you.”

Chuck smiled. “Go at it the hard way, like boy scouts.”

“I guess it wouldn’t do us any harm, take off a bit of weight.”

“I’ll say it wouldn’t,” said Ruth feelingly.

They started three days later, Chuck and Stanton alone. They went on horseback, Chuck riding Mrs. Eberhart’s grey mare and Stanton riding a bay gelding called Scamp that belonged to his father; they led a packhorse loaded with their sleeping bags, hobbles, and food, for they intended to stay out for a week or so. They rode in the blue riding jeans that they called levis, with thick woollen shirts and windproof jackets suitable for the high altitudes that they were bound for; they rode in saddles with saddlebags, and they carried their bows slung across their backs. All this was normal to them, as it was to most of the citizens of Hazel; they had made this sort of expedition in most of the summer vacations of their lives. They were skilled and experienced horsemen in the mountains, and their equipment was superbly good.