White Dog

15

Into Tingaboora under steady rain, just before 11 am, passing rotting wooden houses, listing hay shelters, paddocks growing crops of old car bodies and their innards — seats, engine blocks, gearboxes, radiators, drive shafts, axles. Erosion rivulets ran down the slopes, fence pickets hung in space over gullies, and, on the flatter bits of ground, a few sheep stood, sad prisoners in their massive growths of dirty wool.

There were four streets in the town, two running parallel each way, a noughts and crosses grid. I drove up and down them, all gravel except for the main one, looking for the name and number. The two running east-west turned to mud beyond the last unstable broken-guttered weatherboard houses. A hundred metres away, across a bumpy moss-green floodplain strewn with rubbish and engraved with the deep doughnuts made by drunken hoons, a line of willows marked a creek. Two cows were tethered at the end of one street, heads together. They looked at me, gentle eyes, creatures spared the pain of wanting something else. At the end of the other street, a goat was chewing a beer carton, absorbed in the task.

No street names, no numbers I could see. I gave up and parked the Stud in the main street, a few doors down from the pub, the Balmoral, beyond the hairdressing salon and the milkbar.

I sat, tired, the back, in the neck, not keen to do anything, easy to rest my head against the door jamb, have a little sleep. A car, a swish. Minutes passed. I sat up, wiped the windscreen. A man wearing a Collingwood beanie on top of a pulled-down balaclava was approaching. Sinister, helmeted, an impoverished knight reduced to pushing a bicycle with a flat back tyre. The eyes in their apertures looked at me, the man veered from his path to get a closer look. Our eyes met. He looked away, looked again, moved along, looked back, stopped. I thought he was going to come back, knock on the window, ask me a question. He wouldn’t want anything, people didn’t beg in these towns. But he didn’t. He made a head and shoulder movement suggesting some inner shiver. Then two women came out of the pub, perhaps mother and daughter, both grown up too quickly, both in lurid pink tracksuits. The younger one was carrying a child on her hip, her arm hooked around its midriff. It screamed, drummed heels. She stuck her cigarette in her mouth, smacked the child’s face with a fluid forehand, said something to her companion, a slew of words.

I waited until they passed before getting out. It was a raw day, icy air smelling of wood fires and damp and turned earth. In the Balmoral bar, a sad place of fake wood, formica, split plastic seats extruding yellow foam, the smell was of fried onions, cigarette smoke and something chemical, carpet cleaner perhaps, sickly. There were five customers, an old woman at a table by herself, two wizened men at the bar, a man and a woman playing pool. She was shooting, leaning over the table and showing a roll of naked fat the colour of porridge above huge buttocks sausaged inside stretch pants.

I went to the bar. The barman was side-on to me, head tilted, listening to a small radio on the bottle shelf. I looked at my watch: the first race at Moe, first of four maidens, all hope and no pedigree. I didn’t bother him, turned my back and looked around, stopped short of the buttocks and came back along the photographs on the wall. Football teams.

‘Fuckin nag,’ said the barman.

The race was over. He had the long, choleric, dog-jowled face of an eighteenth-century hanging judge, all he needed was the horsehair wig to cover his moulted scalp.

‘Good-day,’ I said. ‘I’m having trouble finding street signs.’

‘Yeah?’ Eyes just red slits, weeping.

‘I’m looking for Eales Street.’

‘Yeah? Drinkin?’

‘No thanks. Just looking for help.’

‘Not the fuckin tourist bureau here, mate. Fuckin pub.’

He went off down the counter, turned right through a doorway. He had a limp.

‘Eales,’ said the nearest of the wizened men. ‘Say Eales?’

‘Yes. Eales.’

He gave me a good examination. ‘Bank,’ he said. He looked vaguely fishy, head rising to a point, no dip between forehead and broad nose, mouth lipless.

I registered. ‘No. It’s a family matter. No trouble involved.’

The man beyond him was leaning forward to look at me, alert eyes in a face like a thrashed golf ball. ‘Ballick, right?’ he said.

‘Right. Mrs Ballich.’ I said the name as he had.

The men looked at each other, nodded, pleased.

‘How did you know?’ I said.

They turned to me, Fish and Golfball.

‘The girls, not so?’ said Fish.

‘Janene,’ I said.

Golfball made a whistling sound. ‘Janene,’ he said. ‘She come in here one day, back from Melbin with this other sheila, this bloke, flash car. Big bloke, mind you. Like that Rocca.’

‘Soft,’ said Fish. ‘Soft. Wog. Had the wog look. Pissweak wogs. Wogs and Abos. No guts.’

‘Well, the wogs run, din they?’ said Golfball, eyes on me, waiting. ‘In the war.’

‘That’s possible,’ I said.

‘Like dogs,’ said Fish. ‘Bloody pathetic. Our fellas coulda shot em up the arseholes. Showed mercy they did. Up the arseholes, crawlin. Like dogs.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘Eales Street. Which one is that?’

Golfball waved to his left. ‘Last one,’ he said. ‘Last on the right. The young bitch gone off too now. Darwin, they say.’

‘Bloody good riddance,’ said Fish. ‘She’s a lowie, deadset. Pulled fellas like a bitch on heat, they come from bloody miles around, lizards damn near pokin out.’

‘All Abos and chinks,’ said Golfball. ‘Darwin. Me Uncle Ross was up there once. White man’s grave he used to say.’

‘Piss artist, your Uncle Ross,’ said Fish. ‘Still, hadda beat his liver to death with a stick.’ He eyed me. ‘Door open and engine goin, mate. Mary Ballick’s run outta roots in this town. She’d be hungry.’

The barman appeared, he’d had another drink in the back. ‘Still here?’ he said. ‘Still not fuckin drinkin?’

I took out a fifty-dollar note and put it on the counter. ‘These helpful gentlemen are a credit to your lovely town,’ I said.

He looked at the money, frowned.

I beckoned. He hesitated, came closer. I looked into his eyes of red. ‘Give them whatever they’re drinking, judge,’ I said. ‘And don’t keep the change. Clear to you?’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay.’