I Do Yard Work

"Everything mechanical dies of whatever there's most of where you put it. Dust, salt, water, sun. Nothing ever dies of the rare thing."

We came up over the lip of the bank with the river still all through my clothes — the shirt wet at the front where I'd gone down on my knees to drink, water off my scalp and down the back of my neck, and the dust already finding every bit of it and settling in and going to a paste — and there was a vehicle standing in the middle of the camp.

A ute. Twin-cab, tray back. It had been white once, going by a patch of it inside the door frame, and every other surface on it was the colour of the country, with the dust packed into all the seams and gutters and drifted up along the top rail of the tray in a little ridge.

The engine had only just stopped. I could hear it ticking as it cooled, and that noise belonged to driveways and shed floors and men standing about with their hands in their pockets, and hearing it come at me across that dust took the legs out from under something I hadn't known was still standing.

Somebody had brought a motor vehicle through that hole in the wall.

I stopped where I was and worked at it while Karen went on ahead of me. Either the hole was big enough to drive a twin-cab through, or somebody had taken one to pieces and carried it over and put it back together on this side. Neither of those was an accident. Neither of those was a man opening a door and being surprised by what he found behind it. Somebody had planned the whole thing, and sat down at a table with a list, and worked their way down it, and one of the lines on that list had said ute.

Two blokes were getting out of it, and they were laughing, and that reached me a long way ahead of anything else about them.

They came down out of the cab still going, both of them, filthy from the knee down and grinning at each other over the roof of it. Somewhere in the last hour those two had been out in that country doing something they had thoroughly enjoyed. In it. Enjoying it. I had come in from the wall through the same ground and arrived on the other side of it with my hands shaking and a beetle up my sleeve, and here were two men who'd been driving about in the stuff for the fun of the thing, and I would have swapped with either of them on the spot and not asked a single question first.

"That was bloody awesome!" the smaller one said, and got his palm up, and the taller one met it.

"Apart from clogging up the engine!" The taller one laughed while he said it, but there was something underneath the laugh, and I got that as well.

He was right and he had no idea how right. That vehicle had a paper element in it somewhere behind a guard, and that element had a finite number of hours in country like this and after that it had none at all. Fine dust is the worst thing anybody ever handed a combustion engine — it got past everything, it went down into the bore and into the bearings and took the oil film off the cylinder walls, and after that the machine ate itself from the inside and there was no fixing it and no arguing with it. I'd watched a perfectly good tractor die of one summer on the Midlands trial site because a bloke clipped the filter housing on a gatepost and didn't think it worth a mention.

There was no filter for that ute within a world. There was no fuel for it either, unless somebody was bringing that through as well — and if somebody was, then it was coming in the same way as the tents had, and the same way as the boxes they'd been putting on the fire.

So I stood in the dust of that camp doing arithmetic about an air filter, because it was the only thing in front of me I understood.

"Guys!" Glenda's voice came up over the top of the pair of them, and she put a hand out toward us. "We have two new guests."

"I wouldn't call them guests." Jamie hadn't moved from the front of the big tent, and he put no weight on it at all, which somehow made it land harder. "They're not going anywhere."

Nobody had anything to put on top of that.

The taller one came over first. Thirties or thereabouts, big through the shoulders and light enough on his feet with it, and he crossed the open ground with his hand already coming up, which I liked him for.

"I'm Paul," he said.

"Chris Owen." I took it. "And this is my wife, Karen."

I gave him both names. Not one person out there had offered both names and I handed over both of mine, and I heard myself do it while it was happening, and I could not have told you why beyond this: I had gone looking about for a bit of formality to stand behind, and that was the nearest piece to hand.

"Nice to meet you, Karen," Paul said, turning to her with a proper little nod on it.

The smaller one had my hand next, before I'd got it properly back off Paul. A good deal younger — early twenties at the outside — half the frame on him and about twice the current running through it, and his grip was fast and hard and gone again before I'd closed on it.

"Kain," he said. "Jamie's nephew."

"Ahh," said Karen.

"I see you've met Jamie then." Paul put a hand out toward the tent, where Jamie was still standing with Henri laid out flat in the shade at his feet, chin down on his paws, not moving for anybody.

"We've only just met," Karen said. "But Luke told us a lot about him over the years."

"Us?"

It was out of me before I'd had a look at it. "I've never heard his name before."

"Not you, darling. Jane."

Of course. Not me.

Twice in the one morning, and both times with an audience. There had been an entire correspondence running for years — a man, and his dreams, and his partner, and the partner's dogs, and the dogs' names, and enough of it that my wife could pick a Shih Tzu out of a desert off a photograph she'd been shown once and get it right first go. And for every hour of that I had been down the far end of the house with a spirit level and a seed packet, saying something about the water table, and taking the whole arrangement for a marriage in good working order.

"Who's Jane?" said Kain.

Here it comes.

"Oh." Paul's face opened right up. "You must be one of Luke's bus friends."

"Yes," Karen said, in the voice she kept for confirming her own postcode to somebody on a phone.

"But where is Luke?" Kain said, and he said it to me.

To me. I had met the man once, on a bus, in the spring, for the twenty minutes it took to get from the stop into town, and I was now apparently the one who'd know.

"He's not here," Karen said, and I had rarely in nineteen years been more grateful to her for anything.

Paul looked across at Glenda.

"Appears this was another accident," Glenda said.

She put no weight on it whatsoever, and it was the word another that stayed with me — sitting there in the middle of an ordinary sentence with a number attached to it somewhere that nobody was saying out loud.

"Figures," said Kain, mostly into his own chest, and loud enough that every one of us had it.

Then Paul turned back and put his hands on his hips, and he had the grace to look a bit sorry about what was coming next.

"Not to be rude," he said, "but what do you actually do?"

"I'm an entomologist," Karen said.

And she stood up into it. I watched her do it. Shoulders back, chin level, and the whole exhausting morning came off her in one go, because somebody had asked her a question about her work in a place where she had not expected to be asked one ever again.

"A what?" said Paul.

"She studies bugs," said Kain, helpfully.

I got my teeth into the inside of my cheek and left them there. A day earlier I had done that on purpose, up a ladder, at some length, for the pleasure of watching what happened next. This lad had walked into it from a standing start and had no notion at all of what was about to arrive.

"Oh," said Paul.

"Insects." Karen had come right round onto him and she was not smiling. "Insects. Not bugs."

Paul's head went over on one side.

"Well," said Karen, and she stretched the word out, which was her clearing herself a run-up, and I shifted my weight onto the other foot, because we were going to be a while.

"Insects need an environment to thrive. I work with the University of Tasmania to understand how they contribute to ecosystems and work with local communities and environmental groups to petition for greater protections."

"That's great!" Paul said, and he meant it, and then he turned that same open face onto me and waited.

And I had all of it. Right at the front of my mouth, the whole lot. Thirty years of it. Soil regeneration on degraded pasture, and a thesis that four people read. The Collective. Forty metres of retaining wall at Sassafras that I rebuilt by hand through a very cold August because I'd stood about calling it not urgent for three winters. Everything I'd worked out on that bank about fall and catchment, and where the water in that river had to be coming from, and what it meant that it was carrying nothing. And in behind the whole of that, less than ten minutes old and still going in me like a struck bell — a canopy with a wind in the top of it, and birds, and contour banks with the fall taken out of them properly, and a mountain with six peaks on it.

I had spent my entire working life waiting for somebody to ask me that question somewhere the answer would matter.

Keep your mission secret.

"I do yard work," I said.

"Yard work?" Kain's eyebrows went up and stayed up, waiting on the rest of it.

There wasn't any rest of it. I'd cut the thing too thin and now there was a hole sitting in the middle of the conversation with four people standing round the edge of it looking down, and my ears had gone hot, and the only thing anywhere within reach was the ground.

I crouched and put my fingers into it.

Second time that day. The first time, my wife had poured it into my open hands and asked me to believe the place was real, and I had worked it over and found nothing in it and come away frightened of it. This time I took it up myself, in front of four strangers, and it came up warm and was already running out between my fingers before I had it clear of the dirt, and I was using it as a prop.

"It's everywhere!" Paul said.

"Yeah. I've noticed that." I let it run and watched it go, and I did not look up while I said the rest of it, because the true thing was on its way up my throat and I had to get out in front of it. "But if this is our home now, we'll find a way."

Secrecy will protect you.

And I heard it, and I stopped with the sentence half out of me, and I put it down where it stood and picked up something else instead, and what came out was this.

"Call me crazy. But I trust Luke."

It sounded exactly as strange in the air as it had felt coming up. A man I had met once. I did not trust him. I had spent the entire walk in from the wall building a case against him and then shouting it across the dust at a woman I'd known for twenty minutes.

Jamie made a noise over by the tent.

"You're definitely crazy, then."

I had nothing at all to give him back. He was right, and he was the only person standing out there who had said a true thing about me all morning, and he'd arrived at it by accident and gone straight back to looking at his dog.

Then Karen's eyes came onto mine, and there was a light on behind them that I hadn't seen since we got here.

"A beautiful masterpiece starts with a single brushstroke. This is our blank canvas. Let's create a masterpiece. Together."

My face went, and I couldn't have stopped it and wouldn't have wanted to. That was my wife. Loud, and relentless, and entirely prepared to hold a camp hostage over the correct use of the word insect — and she had just stood up in the middle of a dead world with a couple of tents in it and made the whole thing sound like a beginning, and every person out there had their eyes up on her instead of down on the ground under their feet. I had never once in my life been able to do that. I had never met anybody else who could.

Keep your mission secret.

I had known that woman since 1997, and there was now a thing sitting in me that she was not going to be told, and it had been in me for about four minutes.