Pay Dirt

SEVEN

‘Leah sent me,’ Wyatt said.

The man wearing the overalls had a wedge of watermelon at his mouth. He was snatching bites from it as if Wyatt had a stopwatch on him. He spat out a pip. ‘Leah,’ he said, wiping the juice away.

‘She said you could fix me up with a bike.’

The sign outside said Jap Job. The proprietor of Jap Job gestured with the watermelon at the motorcycle parts, tools and greasy rags that surrounded him. ‘Bikes are my business,’ he said.

‘She said ask for one of your specials,’ Wyatt said.

‘Did she now?’ The proprietor snatched another bite from his watermelon. He had long, tangled hair and a drooping moustache. There was juice on his chin. He chewed for a while, then pointed the watermelon rind at Wyatt. ‘If ever your guts are crook,’ he said, ‘eat this.’ He tossed it away then, dramatically, stood stock still and brought out a liquid belch. ‘Better out than in.’

Wyatt was tired of this. ‘Let me concentrate your mind,’ he said, lighting a match and throwing it on the floor. It landed a metre away from a cut-down drum in which carburettor parts were soaking in petrol. He followed it with a second match.

The proprietor of Jap Job went white and rigid. ‘It’s concentrated, it’s concentrated.’

‘I want a bike that’s good on the open road and across country. Something strong, fast and light. I want it today, and I don’t want anything that can be traced to some semitrailer hijack.’

The man went sullen. ‘It’ll cost you.’

‘How much?’

‘Three thousand.’

Wyatt had money left over from the job that had gone sour in Melbourne, so he didn’t quibble. ‘What time?’

‘Five.’

‘Five o’clock,’ Wyatt said, and walked back onto the street.

Jap Job was a stone and corrugated iron shed in a side street behind the business centre of Gawler, a town forty minutes north of Adelaide. Wyatt walked back to the centre, found a hotel, and ate a mixed grill. It was the first mixed grill he’d eaten for five years. He’d thought they’d gone out of fashion. He asked for a glass of light beer with it. The barman managed to sneer without moving a muscle in his face. Wyatt supposed that the only light beer served in this pub was in the ladies’ lounge.

He spent the afternoon exploring. He’d gone to Adelaide by bus and to Gawler by train and he was tired of sitting down. He liked Gawler. He liked the old stone buildings and the river, the town-and-country feel about the place.

At four-thirty he retrieved the backpack he’d stashed in a station locker and by ten to five he was at the rear of Jap Job. Easy Rider had looked like the sort of man who’d call in the Hell’s Angels to sort out his grievances, but there were no strangers about.

At five o’clock Wyatt came in the front way, his hands loose at his sides. There was a motorbike in the corner that hadn’t been there before. The proprietor didn’t greet Wyatt, only said, ‘Suzuki Five Hundred. Clean as a whistle, climb Mt Everest.’

Wyatt didn’t care what sort of bike it was. He straddled it, to see how it would fit him. The engine felt warm, so he started it with the ignition key. It fired up, low and satisfying. He turned it off again.

‘You want to test her?’ the man said.

‘I’ll be back if it’s no good.’

‘I don’t know where you come from, pal, but here you won’t get far without a helmet.’

‘Throw one in,’ Wyatt said.

‘It’ll cost you.’

Wyatt paid the extra and at five-twenty he was riding out of Gawler with a black helmet on his head and the pack on his back. When he was clear of the local traffic he opened the throttle full out. He wanted to be on the back roads behind Belcowie before sunset.

The white line flashed by under him. A bike was better than a car for what he had in mind. He’d be covering rough ground. He’d need speed and manoeuvrability when he was in the open, and he needed a vehicle he could hide at a moment’s notice.

The sun was low in the sky when he reached the crossroads where the Broken Hill bus had set him down a few weeks earlier. He turned off toward Belcowie, dropping his speed because the road surface was treacherous and this was the time of day when bone-weary farmers drove home in the centre of the road in utilities with bald tyres and faulty lights.

Wyatt had a specific place in mind. He’d spent a week with the surveyor when he first started work with Brava Construction, checking sight-lines across a small range of scrubby hills. They’d gone in along dirt tracks and followed fences and seen only kangaroos and nervy sheep the whole week, but there had also been an abandoned farm in there, tucked away in a valley between two arms of the range of hills. He wouldn’t know how good the place was until he got up close, but he did know it had a north exit and a south exit and two exit lines was the first thing he demanded of any hideout.

‘Why not rent a place?’ Leah had said. ‘That way we’d get somewhere comfortable and look legitimate.’

‘Names, faces, paperwork,’ Wyatt replied. He’d said it quietly, not looking at her.

‘You’re obsessive, you know that?’ she said.

The shadows were lengthening now. Wyatt turned on the headlights, picking up a couple of rabbits and a cat on the prowl. Insects were mashing against the visor of the helmet. He came to a landmark he recognised, a roofless tin hut surrounded by pepper trees, and turned off the Belcowie road onto a smaller one. He slowed right down, steering the bike over channels that had been there since last winter or since the last time the council grader went through-and that might have been a decade ago. He was concentrating. He didn’t want to miss the track that led to the farm. He had a nylon tent in his backpack, together with a camping stove and a sleeping bag, but he’d rather sleep in a shed than at the side of the road. He didn’t want some mountain man turning a spotlight and a hunting rifle on him during the night, and he didn’t want a crop duster buzzing him in the morning.

He got to the farm gate just as the sun was setting. Next to it was a stock ramp, sealed with a tangle of barbed wire. Wild oats were growing at the base of the fence and gateposts and choking the metal grid of the ramp. The track beyond it was stony so he was unable to tell if it had been used recently. He dragged the gate open, being careful not to flatten the weeds, and wheeled the bike in.

He left the bike behind a boxthorn hedge and approached the farm buildings on foot. It was a five-minute walk. There were trees and rocky outcrops between the buildings and the road gate. Wyatt hoped that these had muted the sound of the bike; if anyone was camped at the farm they might not realise that the bike had stopped.

There was sufficient light for him to see that the first farm building was an implement shed. It was empty, facing the next building, a hayshed constructed of gum tree logs and rusty iron. The roof, of mouldy, weather-stained thatch, had collapsed. The yard around the shed and the distant farmhouse was a mess. Empty drums, tangled fencing wire, engine blocks and rusty harrows and ploughs were trapped in the stiff, dry grass. A small tree was attempting to grow through the roof of an outside toilet.

Then he examined the house. The walls were standing and most of the roof was up. That was all Wyatt needed to know about the farm-room for vehicles and a team of men.

He walked back to collect the bike.