Larissa suspected it didn’t
always
turn to nothing, though it was certainly hard to believe that now, driving through the nothingness. Vaguely she recalled Father Emilio and the dusky subdued room where Larissa sat with him every afternoon listening in comfort to his voice telling her that she was a witness to her own life, that God would bless her emptied-out soul if it needed Him, that He would not send the women to the tomb but that He Himself would come to the poor devegetated creature sitting in front of Him in sorrow, if only she would seek the comfort. Every minute of Father Emilio’s day was given over to make heavy hearts a little lighter. She saw that on the faces of the orphans whose heads he patted as he strolled by. Well, that’s why he is a priest, and I’m not, Larissa thought. He is a saint. And she’d said to him then
that she didn’t need comfort, not really. What she needed was answers.
But now she had neither.
How is it best for me to live?
How much longer to drive? she asked Kai. It was going to get dark soon.
But Kai was telling her things and didn’t reply. “I told Billy-O he should offer different types of tours,” Kai was saying. “Half a day, a whole day, even a week-long tour all the way to Cairns or Uluru. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“To Uluru on a horse?”
“No. In a cruiser. Like this one.”
“Yeah, but,” said Larissa pointedly, “where’s Billy-O going to get a cruiser like this one?”
Kai didn’t take the bait. “I told him he could ride out from Lake Munga all the way to Lake Eyre in a ten-man jungle vehicle. Sure, it’s better if there’s water there. Fly-fishing, kayaking. But still. Even without the water, tourists love an adventure. He could do what we do, make it a camping trip, with tents. A nice campfire, a potluck dinner. We’d sing songs, tell ghost stories of Australian outback horror. Ritual burials, wombats eating dingoes, that sort of thing.” He laughed happily.
“
We
, Kai?”
“What?”
“You were talking about Billy-O, but you said
we
.”
“I meant him. I misspoke.” But after that he stopped smiling and stopped speaking.
Larissa grew irritated in the heat. “You’re telling me Munga Lake is a salt flat, all fly-fishing joy evaporated by the red blaze, no rain, no rainbow trout, and you think the hapless tourists are going to fall for that? Sounds like a whole bunch of disappointment.” She chuckled mirthlessly. “They should call it Lake Disappointment.”
“Nah. There’s already a Lake Disappointment way out west.”
“I might like to see that,” she said.
“If you wish, Larissa,” Kai said. “Though do we really need to travel that far?” He was biting in his dry reticence, like arid beds, like the river that was a dirt road the seven months of summer. And now
she
didn’t take the bait, falling quiet instead.
In Trentham Cliffs, the woods grew in patches in the sand, but by this time, Larissa felt so disconnected from civilization and all life that the trees did not impress her. She knew they were just cover to hide the emptiness. Under the trees was still desert. The road was called the Silver City Highway, which sounded romantic, almost inspirational! Silver, image of something sparkly, shiny, accessible, yet enigmatic. And city, of course, could be the shining city on a hill. Yet…after Wentworth, the Silver City Highway became unnamed. It wasn’t even the plodding Stuart Highway. Where they were going, the roads were unnamed. Good luck finding your way out. Was it any wonder that doom seeped inside her pores and settled in her aching bones?
Larissa withdrew from the conversation, detached herself from reality, which was not difficult, for reality had no landscape,
imagined herself in the kitchen in San Agustin, making
pandesal
bread, evaporated milk, egg, sugar, salt, butter, yeast, breadcrumbs, and then sitting by the tall windows waiting for the bread to rise, watching the deluvial monsoon fill up the green yard like the monastery was an ark in the floodwaters
.
Imagined herself after the afternoon rains at Blizzard Beach water park in central Florida, having the park all to themselves and running up the stairs over and over to go on the family tube ride, racing wet in their bathing suits a hundred and fifty steps to slide down in a huge round tube that bounced off the walls as it careened downward, all five of them, Larissa, Jared, Emily, Asher and Michelangelo, screeching and squealing, and finally the fifth time around, Michelangelo, who was about three, saying to her, “Go ahead, Mommy, hurry, go without me, save yourself. Because I
have no feet left.” And Larissa picking him up and carrying him up a hundred and fifty steps
.
It was dark when Kai said quietly, out of the blue, “We’re going nowhere.”
Larissa opened her eyes. Closed them. “But we’re going there together.”
7
Pooncarie
T
hey ran out of gas a mile away from Tarcoola Street at midnight. Kai thought they would have enough. Of course, his cell phone had no signal. And who would he call anyway? Billy-O was in the bush.
“Well, how did
he
call you earlier then?” Larissa said, sitting in the cruiser, belatedly realizing a logical fallacy inherent in modern technology.
“Who?”
“Billy-O.”
“What do you mean? He called on his cell.”
“Yes, I know. But he’s out in the red desert, where there isn’t a single signal tower. We know. We haven’t had signal for seven hundred miles. How in the world did he get a signal to call you?”
“I don’t know Larissa. Do I run Telstra?” He locked the cruiser. “Come on. Take your purse. We’ll come back for everything else in the morning.”
“I thought we were going into the National Park in the morning?”
“We are. Clearly I’ll have to do it before we go.”
“Gas stations open that early around here?” she asked. “Much
demand for gas at six in the morning, you think?”
He stared at her coldly from the road. “Are you coming?”
They walked one mile in silence. In the night the mile seemed like twenty. How long was it between her Bellevue house and the Summit train station? Was that also only one mile? She shuddered.
Billy-O’s house, right off the main drag of Tarcoola Street, was locked from the front. “Don’t worry,” said Kai. “He usually leaves the back door open.” But that was locked also.
“Now what?” said Larissa. “We have to be up in five hours. Can you call him? Maybe we’ll get lucky and he has a signal again in the bush.”
“He’s probably sleeping.”
“We’re doing
him
a favor,” said Larissa sharply. “Can you please call him?” She couldn’t tell what Pooncarie looked like because at the moment it was darker than ink. Kai called Billy-O with no luck.
Two blocks away on Tarcoola Street there was a gas station, which was also a hotel
and
a beer garden. The gas station part was closed for the night, and the hotel was full. Full! As in “no vacancy.” Why did Larissa find that not credible? But the beer garden was open till two, and Poon Pub was hopping, crowded like a Greenwich Village dance club on a Saturday night.
Kai didn’t want to go in, claiming sudden exhaustion, but she was thirsty and asked for a cold beer. They walked inside.
And because nothing was ever so bad that it couldn’t get
instantly
worse, the first person Larissa spotted sitting at one of the tables talking to a group of other poorly dressed young girls, was Cleo Carew, the blonde-haired chick from Balcony Bar.
The opening chasm in the stomach came first, followed by recognition.
Sinking down at a small sticky table, Larissa stared at the back of Kai’s head at the bar for the few minutes it took him
to fist-pound the bartender and to buy two beers. Slack-jawed, she watched Cleo’s face a few tables away, talking to her friends, yet raising her eyes as he turned around with the beer in his hands and acknowledging him with a nod and a smile. Kai acknowledged her with just a blink.
Larissa didn’t know what to think. They had just driven over twelve hours across thirteen hundred bone-crunching kilometers to a hole-in-the-earth town with a hundred and fifty residents in the middle of a salty playa, a silver mining town, where they went ostensibly to do an emergency solid for Billy-O, and here at a nameless bar—in Pooncarie!—was the girl that would not be named, nodding to Kai, as if to say, glad to see
you
finally arrived. Not, what are
you
doing here? Not, what a surprise. Not, I vaguely remember you from somewhere. But,
finally
. You’re here. And the girl hadn’t in any way acknowledged or greeted Larissa.
But what Kai didn’t do was what people normally do when they see a vaguely familiar face.
Oh, hi, it’s you…how you doing, what’s happening?
What they don’t do is pretend they barely know the person whose empty glass they refilled in another bar in another town.
Returning to her side, Kai passed Larissa a cold beer, which she suddenly didn’t want, and he asked her about food, which she didn’t want either, though not five minutes earlier she had complained bitterly of hunger, but now there were so many other things to complain bitterly about. The girl, surrounded by natives, looked ludicrously young, barely out of high school, though looking stupid enough perhaps never to have gone to high school. She had a vapid drop-out look about her, and too loud a laugh in a public place, a self-conscious, stare-at-me laugh. Her clothes were slightly baggier, though, than at Balcony Bar, the relaxed-fit jeans, the empire waist top falling loose from the over-exposed ludicrous breasts.
Turning her frozen gaze away from Cleo, Larissa leveled the stare into Kai’s expressionless face. He drank, sat calmly, smiled at her politely.
Larissa downed her beer in five gulps. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“Kai, what do you propose? That we sit in the bar all night till we have to go out in the morning? Let’s go back, climb through the window or something. Or try Billy-O again. Maybe he’ll pick up.”
Kai was inscrutable. “I’ll try him again. I’ll go outside so I can hear. But I’m starved,” he added. “I’m gonna get myself a sandwich. Sure you don’t want anything?”
“No, Kai. But thank you.” Always so polite. Larissa couldn’t sit anymore so she stood up and leaned against the wall, waiting for him, watching his back, the shape of his head, the crew cut of the kinky hair that had been too hot to keep long, and now he looked like a soldier with his tall reedy build, his buzzed dome. He looked like a different man. Certainly he behaved like one.
Cleo got up! She got up and toddled over to the bar, twenty feet long, ten of it unoccupied, but of course she had to stand right next to Kai, motioning to the bartender. Their heads didn’t bob or lean into each other as Larissa watched them from behind. It was noisy in the pub, sweaty and loud, and there was no tilting from them, no shoulder swaying, no recognition from their bodies. Kai was draped over the counter, beer in his hands, waiting for his sandwich, and she was standing sprightly, ordering another drink. If Larissa hadn’t been struck by her presence in the town where there were barely any people, she would’ve sworn under oath the girl and Kai were strangers, who happened to be standing at the bar at the same time ordering food and drinks from the same waiter.
And yet.
Unmistakably, the silent language of their bodies looked familiar, not foreign. They didn’t stand together like strangers. They stood together as though they were speaking without moving their heads.
Kai got his sandwich, paid, and returned to Larissa, food in hand. Their table had been taken so they stood by the wall. He offered her a bite, which she refused with arms crossed, and after he was finished, they left. In utter silence, they walked back to Billy’s place, where the doors were still locked and the lights were out.
They sat on the porch steps, waiting in darkness. But for what?
Kai called Billy again. This time the phone was picked up! The two men spoke briefly in man code. What up, dude. I’m sitting in front of your house, and I can’t get inside. He hung up the phone. “He’ll be here in a sec.”
“All the way from the outback, he’ll be here in a sec?”
“He came back with three horses. But he’s going back out again tomorrow morning.”
“So tell me,” Larissa said suddenly, “is that why you came here? For her?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Are you playing dumb with me?”
“No, I just don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Kai!”
“Larissa!”
The raised voices on someone else’s porch, in someone else’s yard. Larissa was sitting on the busted-up concrete steps, elbows on her knees. She wasn’t looking at Kai, she was looking at herself, out of her body, looking at herself, seeing the flash of dust that she was, the speck of person, sitting a thousand miles from the nearest ocean in the Southern hemisphere under the bright and clear sky on a desert island, thousands of miles away from other continents, other countries, ten thousand
miles away from the highway that led to a street named Bellevue,
a beautiful view
, a road shaped like a horseshoe for luck, staring inside her brittle emptiness.
“Why can’t you be honest with me?” she asked quietly, not shouting, her voice not her own. “Why do you act like I’m an idiot and I’ll believe anything you say? I know I want to. I don’t want to think you’re lying to me, deceiving me. But we drive this far, and you tell me that you don’t know what I’m talking about when we run into the one person we’re not supposed to ever see again?”
“Why is she the one person we’re not supposed to see again?”
“Kai, how dumb do you think I am?”
“I don’t know the answer to that question,” he returned coldly. “But how dumb do you think
I
am? You think I’d bring
you
here if I was coming for her?”
“I don’t know. Would you?”
“What do you think?”
“Why do you keep answering every question with a question?”
“Why do you keep asking so many fucking questions?”