The War of Immensities (13 page)

Padre Miguel
tackled the first man to come by, and was immediately repulsed. It
was like throwing yourself against a rock, and the man brushed him
aside with a sweep of his arm. The sisters rushed to aid Padre
Miguel, bravely overriding their fear that he too might now be
possessed. By the time he fought off their attentions and got
himself to his feet, the procession had already passed by and was
leaving the courtyard.

“Where are they
going?” he wondered aloud.

“To Hell,” an
old man on the verandah replied, and put his pipe back between his
gums.

Padre Miguel
and several of the sisters rushed after them. They were going along
the path that went nowhere really except to meander along the cliff
tops to the next village. It didn’t make sense, but then, perhaps
it wasn’t supposed to.

They passed
several exhausted and overcome women weeping at the edge of the
track but the Padre ordered the sisters to ignore them.

“Get the men,”
he was shouting. He remembered shouting it once before.

It jumped into
his mind, just for an instant, that all of these men were those
plucked unconscious from their boats three months ago. They had
lain, unhurt but unconscious, for eight days while doctors and
officials came from the other islands and the mainland to determine
what Padre Miguel already knew—that there was no reason why they
slept so deeply. Demonic possession was immediately suspected.

Then on the
eighth day, they all revived as if nothing had happened and
returned to their villages and their fishing. He remembered that
there had been a garbled telephone call from some lady doctor in
some other country who spoke no Spanish but finally got the message
across that this might happen, that she had seen something similar,
that they would probably be all right. So it was. But now this.

It was as if
the sea was calling them, its voice on the wind, screaming above
that of the women who carried on frantically, trying to restrain
their maddened men. Padre Miguel shook off his thoughts as he
caught up with the end of the crazy procession. The sounds ahead
had intensified and the screaming was on the wind as if the sea
itself was remembering its agonising death. He pressed ahead, and
the path through the jungle opened to the sky and sea beyond.

Here the cliffs
dropped five hundred feet straight onto the rocks and the surf
below and the men were disappearing there, dropping from view one
by one. The Padre almost went over himself as he reached the edge
of the crag and saw the scene below him. The men walked on,
straight over the edge and fell silently, shrugging off the women
or else taking them over with them. A dozen shattered bodies
already surged amongst the rocks down there, and two more fell
while he watched, and then three, their stiff unyielding forms in
contrast to the flapping gyrating things that were women who
refused to let go of her man until it was too late.

“Madness!
Madness!” the Padre shrieked, and rushed forward but the first man
he tried to stop almost took the father with him. The sisters
grabbed him only just in time—he remembered scrambling wildly as
stones and branches came away in his hands as his feet swinging
helplessly in space and three more men fell by him, and the more,
and more.

By the time the
sisters dragged the Padre to safety, all of the men were gone.
Those women who had survived were huddled and wailing, screaming to
God to take revenge on the sea. The Padre, the horror sweeping
nausea and bile through his body, looked down the precipice and saw
the bodies crashing together amid the rocks and the waves
intermittently spraying pink surf. Padre Miguel had again forgotten
to pray, instead he wept, and even shook his fist at the
heavens.

“Take me. Why
didn’t you take me instead?” he roared.

The sisters
subdued him, one even threatened him with a syringe but he shook
his head. And then they pointed and he looked that way. Further
around, on the cliffs of the next headland, men were walking off
the edge and falling unheedingly into the sea.

Just short of
Dimboola, Brian Carrick pulled the rig off the road and rolled to a
stop. It was all wrong but he could not understand how. There was a
wayside stop here, deep in a forest of eucalypts and nothing much
around otherwise. The starlines, or whatever it was that guided
him, had fucked up and brought him here by mistake—of that he was
certain.

Maybe he was
tired. He had been on the road three hours now after a troubled
morning in the yard—it was four in the afternoon, the sort of time
when men dozed. But it wasn’t that. He got out of the truck and
walked around, boots crunching on the gravel. The day was hot—it
was just five days before Christmas—but here in the shade of the
gums it was cool and refreshing. No, he wasn’t tired. He was in the
wrong fucking place.

At first he
wasn’t surprised that the direction had changed, even if initially
it seemed the same. The restlessness had come upon him as the
morning progressed and he moved about the yard, checking the loads
against the manifests, making jokes, ignoring his senses as long as
he could.

He was bored,
of course. Larry had been pleased to offer him the job of
dispatcher and Judy was delighted to get him out of her hair, but
he was a driver, not an office jockey. Judy talked a lot about
psychiatrists these days, and padded cells, and the relief from
that situation was a blessing in itself. But the work bored
him—like Clancy of the Overflow, he didn’t suit the office.

More and more,
since his recent strange experience—or non-experience—up Kyabram
way, he had related himself to bushmen, Lawson figures, classic
Australians, which he defined as Europeans skewed by the same
effects that the Australian landscape had worked to create
aboriginal culture. He was proud to be one of them. His suburban
life drifted further from him constantly.

The aborigines,
they said, travelled the land along the songlines, invisible
emotional navigation routes that took them from one waterhole or
hunting ground to the next. The Dreamtime was overlayed with a map
of the sacred sites and the rhythms of the bush pointed the way. By
this means, Brian felt he was being guided even if, at a more
rational level, he was rather more convinced that it had something
to do with the stars. What ever it was, they had presently brought
him to the wrong place.

He wished it
was night and he could see the stars—perhaps they would provide
some clue or confirmation. He had spent much time studying star
maps and reading astronomy books. He had thought about celestial
navigation, but it wasn’t as simple as that, if such a complex
thing could be called simple. The stars did not point the way—like
the songlines, they simply nudged and bumped him in the right
direction.

By lunchtime,
he knew he was going. He was tempted to ring Judy and tell her he
was off again, but he supposed she would figure it out soon enough.
She would protest no more or less for knowing in advance.

“Larry bent
over backwards to get you that job,” she would say. “You can’t just
walk away from it.”

He wouldn’t be
walking away. To get out, he was going to have to steal a truck.
Which simply meant that as a final gesture, he would be despatching
himself.

The lunch break
meant he had the yard to himself. He fuelled up a Kenwood that he
knew was in good order but wouldn’t be needed for the next few
days, signed it out to himself in the most formal manner, turned on
the answering machine and drove away, careful to padlock the gate
behind him. At least all that would make it plain to Judy, if not
Larry, that the nutcase was gone walkabout again.

Once more he
took the freeway toward the city, and the first inkling came when
he did not turn off at Punt Road but continued straight on, around
King’s Way and Curzon Street and out onto the Tullamarine Freeway.
Was he going to the airport? he wondered. No—he went straight on at
the Calder Highway and soon after found himself tempted by the
Melton exit. Really? He drove on, knowing there were other options
ahead.

There wasn’t
any reason why he should have expected to return to the same place,
that empty paddock near Kyabram—after all there wasn’t anything
there. As he continued toward Bendigo on the Calder Highway, his
irritation grew and at Digger’s Rest, he did turn off without the
slightest doubt in his mind. He crossed on the side roads to the
Western Highway and contentment returned to him immediately. Okay,
Ballarat, Horsham, Adelaide, Wherever—here I come.

He wondered if
maybe he had gone the wrong way on the previous expedition. Perhaps
there was nothing at Kyabram because he had failed to read the
invisible maps properly. After all, it was his first try. But he
knew that wasn’t the case. That had been the right place then, this
time he was going somewhere different. His sense of adventure
grew.

And then,
suddenly, beyond Stawell, it was all wrong again. His agitation
grew intensely and when he pulled off the road near Dimboola, it
was because he had no choice. He sat on the lower rung of the
bullbar, rolling a cigarette and allowing his sensations to flow.
Okay, he was heading west, but he needed to go north. He did not
need a map because he knew these roads. In Dim was the turn-off to
Warracknabeal—north-east really—but then on through Donald and
Charlton which was fully due east. He stood, drawing on the
cigarette, contemplated the position of the sun, facing himself
around until he was sure. Yep, and that would point him right back
at bloody Kyabram again.

His destination
had been the same place all along—he just couldn’t understand how
this long detour had happened? Perhaps he didn’t read these signs
as well as he thought. Maybe it would be better, in a couple of
hours, when the stars came out...

Where the fuck
am I now? No-wheresville, that’s for sure. Sitting out here in the
middle of nothing, squat on the suitcase, showing plenty of leg to
any passing motorist only there ain’t no motorists, and nothing
else much either.

Andromeda
Starlight, a figure of tragedy, abandoned at the side of the road.
The sun blazed down unmercifully but she at least had a big floppy
hat on her head, or else she would have been dead. Ten million
flies hung about her, but she had sprayed herself with Kelvin Kline
Exotica that kept them at bay or at least confused. The more
intrepid ones she maced.

Her Ray-Bans
were hardly a match for the glare but they spared her eyes the
sprays with which she defended herself and there was fucking
nothing to see anyway. Mulga out of sight before and behind her.
The road, potholed and straight, disappeared without deviation to
left and right. There were some low hills to the right, but no
trees at all. What in the name of all that was sacred was she doing
here?

She didn’t tell
Tierney she was going. She had a gig on Great Keppel Island and she
wouldn’t be there. He’d be furious but that was just bad luck.
She’d stolen a fistful of money out of his wallet while he slept by
the pool and so the bridges were burned. Except there weren’t any
bridges, just the ferry right there, all steamed up and ready to go
and she just hopped on and was gone.

In Rockhampton,
she went shopping, stuffing her purchases into the suitcase and
then got out on the road and thumbed it. She’d dropped a tab or two
at each stage and hardly knew that she was picked up by a salesman
in an air-conditioned Ford.

“Where are you
headed to?” he asked.

“Not to, from,”
she replied.

Far inland
anyway, to wherever she was now. When she had passed out from the
Bundaberg Rum the salesman offered her continually, he stopped the
car and tried to rape her. But she wasn’t quite as far out of it as
either of them thought and maced him and he drove off and left her.
On the whole, when she considered her present situation, rape
wasn’t such a bad option.

Far out between
the low ridgelines, she saw a cloud of dust begin to rise. Three
vehicles had already passed her by—a road train that didn’t seem to
see her, a family of tourists that stared and hurried on, and a
bunch of young bucks, probably miners, who called her ‘coon’ and
‘boong’ and offered money. Silly buggers thought she was an
aborigine—somehow she managed to know that no amount of money would
have been worth it. When one jumped out of the car, she maced him
too and they raced off, shouting abuse. There was a certain macabre
way in which she was enjoying this. It wasn’t actually that she was
developing some weird sort of morality at this late stage of
life—it was mostly because they weren’t going the way she wanted to
go.

Not that she
actually knew where she wanted to go. When they left Rocky, this
seemed the right way. Now it didn’t. Left was back to Rocky, which
was certainly wrong, but right seemed the wrong way too. It was as
if the desert had disoriented her.

Amid the
growing dust cloud down the road to the right, a speck materialised
and took shape and slowly became another road train. Another driver
popping pills and seeing nothing, she supposed. She sighed,
lighting a cigarette, and watched the approach. The big truck with
its three high trailers thundered toward her and she contemplated
getting off the road. Nar, let the bastard run over me.

The driver
blasted on his clarion as if in warning but then came the squeal of
the airbrakes and the massive rig began to slow down. The driver
had white hair and beard, all close cropped, and looked far too old
to be driving such a monster.

“Anything I can
do fer yer, luv?” he called over his elbow that seemed permanently
to protrude out the window.

“A beer would
be nice, Honey,” she smiled.