He repeated that he was coming down with a bug, though he had no fever and no outward symptoms of debilitation. How Larissa wished she hadn’t snooped on the letter to Muriel. She didn’t want Kai to say he didn’t want to stay here. After Paranaque, Jindabyne had suddenly acquired a mystical appeal. The lake was beautiful. The weather was beautiful. The snow-capped mountains surrounding Crackenback and Jindabyne were beautiful. The trees, the hills, the friendly people,
everything
was beautiful. Hoping for a crack in the bad mood, she kept asking Kai every night if he wanted to go to dinner with Bart and Bianca, and he kept saying no. Do you want to go for a drink with Patrick? No. You don’t want to go to Balcony Bar and hang out?
No.
And worse than that: the refusals kept coming even when she asked him to go shopping with her for their business.
“Kai,” she said, “we need two new tents; the old ones ripped. We need eight fishing lines. We need two more blankets, four flasks, a new cooler, disposable cameras, a cell phone.”
“We have a cell phone.” He waved it at her. “I reactivated our service in Pooncarie, knowing we’d be needing it.” Because no one went upstream without having even a weak signal in case of dire emergency.
“You reactivated our service in Pooncarie?” Larissa asked quietly, her brows knitting together.
“What’s the big deal?”
“And didn’t write to let me know so I could call you?”
“I just had it done! I didn’t do it two months ago but last week because I knew we’d be needing it in Jindabyne. Geez, Larissa. What is this?”
“Okay, scratch cell phone,” she said after a few moments of digesting his words. “But our first-aid kit is down. It needs restocking. And the season starts in a week.”
“I know.” He sighed.
“Do you want me to go get these items myself?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“We have to do something,” she beseeched him. “We already have the first tour set up.” They got the reservations and the deposits through the Thredbo Valley Tourism and Visitors Association website. They had always used the site to advertise their guided bushwalk and got quite a lot of international business that way. “What do you want to do, cancel it? We’d have to return all the deposits.”
“No, we shouldn’t cancel it.” He just sat strumming the strings, seven minor sevens in a row, like a broken blues scale.
She perched close to him on the balcony, leaning against the little tea table for support. “Is everything okay, Kai?”
“Of course. It’s fine.”
“Well, we need the tents. Otherwise four of our clients are
going to be sleeping on the rocks by the Murray with salmon under their heads.”
“You’re right,” he said finally, not looking at her, staring out onto the lake. “We’ll go get the stuff we need. Do you want to shower first?”
Larissa went first. At least something was happening.
When she came out, still wet, Kai was frantically pacing around the living room. It wasn’t the same Kai who had just twenty minutes earlier been sitting on the balcony like a slumping lump, like inert matter. “Plans have changed slightly,” he said, twitching. “I just got a call from Billy-O.”
“Oh.” She was towel-drying her hair. “I didn’t hear the phone ring.”
He stopped moving to glare at her. “You were in the shower,” he said. “It’s a little trill. How could you have heard?”
“That’s true.” She didn’t want a fight. “What did he want?”
“Actually, he needs a huge favor from me.” Kai resumed his caged walk across the hotel room. “He’s out on a brumbie run—you know he’s a rover, he goes out into the bush for the feral horses, brings them back, sells them, or keeps them, but he’s starting his new trail ride business in a week and he just realized he hasn’t planned his course, and unfortunately he has to submit the guided tour route to the Broken Hill Tourism Board and Review so they can approve it and post it on their website, but he’s away and can’t do it. He begged me to come and mark the trails for him. Because otherwise the deadline will pass and he won’t be able to do the trail rides till next year and he’s counting on the income as a major part of his new business model.” Kai was panting.
“I thought it was the only part of his new business model,” said Larissa.
“I told him about what we did here,” Kai continued without breaking stride, “and he is really keen on trying it but with horses.”
“I know all about his interest in the trail tour.” Larissa stopped towel-drying her hair. “When does he want you to do this?”
“Like right now.”
“As in…”
“Look, this is what we’ll do.
I’ll
go, mark the trail tomorrow, and I’ll come straight back on Thursday. You and I will go shopping on Friday, in plenty of time before the start of the season.” He smiled at her, a beaming smile, the first one of the week. “Sounds like a plan?”
“A lame one,” she said. “But I don’t understand this agitation of yours. Explain to me why you’ve been dragging your feet the last few days? You didn’t know Billy-O was going to call you for an emergency equine favor.”
“I haven’t been dragging my feet. Honest.” But Kai didn’t say anything else.
“Plus, Kai,” she added, “what do you mean,
you
go? You go what,
alone
into the desert to mark a trail ride for Billy-O? You know the first rule of ranging—you
never
go out alone. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” She patted herself dry, threw off the towel and stood naked in front of him. “I’ll come with you, of course. We’ll mark the ride together. You can show me your great amazing Pooncarie.” She smiled.
He stared at her like she had gone mad. Perhaps the world had gone mad.
“You want to come with me?” He sounded high-pitched. He was sweating. “But
why
? I’ll only be gone a day.”
“Why would I stay here by myself?” said Larissa. “At Crackenback no less, with no car, even farther from anywhere than Rainbow Drive had been.”
“Why would you want to leave?” asked Kai. “Look how beautiful it is here. The stilts of our chalet are in the lake. It’s incredible. And I’ll only be gone a couple of days.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying.” Her face was one big
confused frown. “You need someone with you. You know you can’t go out alone. You
know
this. And I don’t want to stay here alone. It’s a win-win for both of us.” She smiled questioningly. “What’s the problem?”
“There’s no problem.”
“Okay, then. Don’t you
want
to show me Pooncarie?”
“I do…but Billy-O has no room for two extra people.”
“Perfect,” said Larissa. “Because he’s not going to be there.”
“It’s really a pigsty,” Kai said. “It’s going to make you feel bad.”
“You know what’s making me feel bad?” Larissa said suddenly. “You acting like you don’t want me to come. There’s not a single reason why I shouldn’t come. For your safety I’m actually necessary. So tell me what this is really about.” Was Larissa wrong? Was this not about the graceful sentiments expressed to Muriel?
“Why wouldn’t I want you to come?” Kai asked hurriedly, wiping his forehead. “Of course I do. You’re being silly. I just thought it’d be quicker if I went by myself. It’s a long trip, thirteen hours.”
“That’s okay. I don’t mind a little drive. Now, would you like to order in or drive to the Thredbo winery for lunch?”
“Lunch?” Kai shook his head. A look of heavy-jawed resignation fell over his face. “No, if we’re going to go, we might as well go right now.” He bent to grab his ukulele off the table. “If we hurry, we can get there after nightfall. Because to go out on the horses, we’ll need to leave tomorrow morning at six or seven the latest, because by the afternoon it gets too hot in Mungo.”
“So let’s hurry,” said Larissa. “We don’t want it to get too hot.”
In the Land Cruiser, with their stuff piled inside, Kai remained animated, nervously energized. Pooncarie had obviously got
inside him, Larissa realized, and he didn’t know how to tell her this. So he told her piecemeal about the things that he kept hidden.
Was there fly fishing? Was there canoeing? Larissa asked, wanting to engage him, to keep him talking about happy things.
“Not in the summer months,” Kai told her, “because the rivers and streams are dry. But wait till you see the colors of the sediment, the deep red core of the dunes. Oh
yes
, Larissa, there are dunes in the desert.” He shook his head in wonder. “They’re called the Great Wall of China. Once there’d been a lake there, and though it evaporated, the dune residuals remain on the lake beds. The Aborigines used to fish there, ten, twenty thousand years ago, but it’s saltbush now, eroded by wind and water, all layers of desert of sand and clay.” He breathed unevenly, remembering. “If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll see a giant wombat.”
“See, I keep thinking if we’re not lucky, we’ll see one.”
He laughed and went on about the addictive nature of the 360deg horizon as they left the Jindabyne Alpines and the snow peaks, the extensive pine forest flora of the wild outdoors by the mountain valleys. Larissa had to admit she couldn’t imagine the place Kai was describing. Everything around Jindabyne was hilly and densely packed around the flowing rivers. Mungo sounded like an arid dustbowl to her, but what did she know? She hoped she was wrong. By his attraction to the area, she clearly was.
The drive on the two-lane narrow Snowy Mountain Highway was a slog. The foliage got sparse and burnt, the land leveled out, and then grew green again and sloping, but the mountains had gone; it looked more like the American prairie. Until it didn’t anymore, and was replaced by languid hills and patchy pine and eucalypt forest. They got stuck behind a car traveling leisurely and remained stuck for a hundred miles on the open road. Their cruiser was a sturdy vehicle and could
withstand all kinds of terrain, but it couldn’t overtake another car: it had no pick-up.
After a hundred and forty miles, they turned onto Stuart Highway, and around Gum Creek Larissa suddenly said, “Kai, there’s nothing here.” And there wasn’t. No trees, no birds, no rivers. Nothing. Just a narrow road, and pebbly sand as far as her eye could see. It was oddly overcast.
“But imagine what this would look like when the sun is out,” Kai said.
“I don’t need to imagine. Much like this. Nothing. With the sun beating down on it.” It was eerie, ghostly and otherworldly, peculiar and strange. There was no talking herself out of it: the barren bushland gave Larissa a stone-cold feeling, piled high on top of the other boulders that pressed down into the pit of her hungry gut. It’s not going to be like this in Pooncarie? she wanted to ask Kai, but didn’t. She couldn’t imagine it would be. After all, ten miles can separate flatlands from forested alpine mountains and wine valleys from euca-lypt jungles. Anything could change in ten miles.
But Stuart Highway proved to be an entirely different kind of travel. The only thing that changed on it after ten miles and then two hundred miles was that the barrenness that came before was nothing,
nothing
, compared to the utter desolation now. The land became flatter, emptier, the sense of being absolutely nowhere grew staggering and suffocating. And the road just went on and on and on, through the uninhabited vastness.
“How long are we on this road for?” Larissa asked in a constricted voice. As if that were the important thing. It wasn’t the road. It was where the road was taking them.
“Five hundred more miles.”
Five hundred miles! “How does anyone live here?”
“No one lives here, as you see.”
“But what if you break down?”
“Best not to.”
“No kidding. Does your cell phone have a signal?”
He looked. “No.”
Of course not. Why would it?
“The land is a blank slate,” Kai said. “You need to imagine the things you want it to have, the things that were on it a thousand years ago.”
“You mean before the sun burned them away?”
“Yeah. Imagine the water flowing into Lake Eyre, miles from here, the largest inland lake and the lowest point in Australia. Once all the rivers flowing from it were full, meandering through the abundant life.”
“Is Lake Eyre full now?”
“The lake has only filled up a few times in the last two hundred years,” Kai replied, whistling “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
Zip-a-Dee-Ay
.
“All right, Kai,” Larissa said, closing her eyes to stop seeing the bleakness. “I’ll imagine the cruise on the wetlands, the flightless birds, the giant marsupials.” Bushriding through the scrub. How much longer? Maude…Yanga…
Yanga was slightly more vegetated, and she became optimistic, but ten miles later by Benanee, it was back to the nothingness. Larissa glanced at Kai, to see if he could see what she could see. But he was tapping on the steering wheel, humming “Give a Little Whistle,” eyes single-mindedly focused on the road. He didn’t see.
In Monak, the earth acquired a red hue; “That’s the red sand,” Kai exclaimed. “Ain’t it something?”
“Sure. Is there anywhere to stop?”
When they alighted for gas and an early dinner, he continued to regale her about the sunsets. The more cruel the heat, the more spectacular the sunsets, he said. Always something given, something lost. Larissa was so hot, too, on top of everything. There was no respite. Was something being lost now? In that
case, what was being given? Oh, she thought, please let it not be wisdom—by the awful grace of God.
“You don’t think it will be cooler in Pooncarie?” She wiped her soaked face. She didn’t eat; she had no appetite.
“Twenty degrees hotter, I told you. It’s in the basin.”
Ah, basin. As opposed to this, an elevated butte perhaps, or a vista-like winding passage through the Alleghenys. She already missed the Alpine afternoon breeze of Jindabyne. She missed summer leaves that weren’t brown. She missed noise and good music from young men and singing from the country girls, fueled by fermenting hops and darkness. She missed the things that were rampantly missing here. She was afraid of Pooncarie and couldn’t say why. She hadn’t been afraid of Paranaque.
Was this common to all human beings? No matter what you had, you always wished for what you didn’t have? Every landscape, every season, the leaves, the views, the white moldings, the cool cold windows. The ice, the snow, the ocean. Saltbush, desert, bluebush, devegetated dunes. She felt a little bit like the last.