Authors: Keith Yocum
He gently pushed her away. “What?”
“I’m sorry, Dennis, you’re not going to get rid of me that quickly.” She crossed her arms. “I can tolerate your disapproval, and even your anger, if it means I can help you avoid doing something that will get you lost or killed out there. You’ll die quickly in this heat, so I’ll just tag along. And there’s really only one main highway north, so you can’t outrun me, that’s for bloody sure.”
Dennis’s face hardened, but Judy was prepared for it.
“Please don’t do that,” he said sharply. “Good-bye.”
Dennis got into the LandCruiser and started it up. Judy raced back to her car, backed up several yards, and waited for him to pull out. She saw the back-up lights engage, but the vehicle’s brake lights remained on. After several seconds the back-up lights went off as the LandCruiser’s transmission moved to park. Then the engine turned off.
Judy squinted to see what Dennis was doing and was surprised to see him open the driver’s side door. He stepped out and walked over to Judy. She wound down her window.
“Just park and get in,” he said. “Hurry.”
Judy pulled into an open space, half-expecting Dennis to speed away, but he waited dutifully for her to get a small suitcase out of her back seat and put it in the LandCruiser.
Before sitting in the passenger seat, she leaned in and said, “Do you want me to drive? The left-hand drive can be tricky on those long stretches.”
“Yes,” he said, getting out of the driver’s side. “Just hurry!”
They switched seats, and she drove west down Hay Street toward the Mitchell Freeway. For the first ten minutes, Dennis said nothing. He looked at his watch several times and continued to look in the side mirror at the vehicles behind them.
“Your phone!” he said, startling her.
“My mobile phone?”
“Where is it?”
“In my purse. Why?”
“Give me your purse!”
She tossed it to him, and he rifled through until he found the phone. He flipped it open and then closed it. Without saying a word, he wound down his window and threw her phone into a line of hedges in front of an Anglican church they were passing.
“What are you doing?!” Judy said. “That’s my service phone. Are you crazy?”
“They’ll figure out eventually that we’re traveling together and home in on your phone,” he said.
“Well, you could have just turned it off, Dennis. You didn’t have to throw it out the bloody window.”
“They can ping your phone even if it’s turned off,” he said. “I left it turned on, and they’ll eventually surround that church back there, looking for us.”
Judy decided not to argue. It was the first spontaneously brazen thing she’d seen him do, and it troubled her as they drove through the northern coastal suburbs. If what he said was correct, then the phone tossing was probably the right thing to do; yet it was rash.
They continued to drive in silence while Judy tried to reconcile her decision to force herself on Dennis and his trip north. She could feel his anger but was confident he’d soften eventually. Meanwhile she concentrated on the highway snaking north.
Every now and then the throb of her toe reminded her of how much had happened in such a short time, but through it all she was certain now that she only cared about Dennis. The hell with Garder, the CIA, uranium mines, drug gangs, and former husbands; except for her family, Dennis was now the most important person in her life.
Letting him drive away by himself in Subiaco would mean she’d never see him again. This way, if even for another day or two, she would have Dennis to herself.
After nearly thirty minutes of driving, Dennis said, “I don’t think we’re being followed.”
Judy had been watching the rearview mirror and agreed that there was no obvious tail.
“What do you think they’ll do when they see that you left the hotel?” she said.
“I’m not sure. They’ll either figure out I’m heading north, or they won’t. If they send a team north, then we’ll just have to stay one step ahead. But if they do find us, Judy, promise me you won’t resist.”
“Not a chance I’ll take them on,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “They can be very rough if they get pissed off.”
“So I understand.”
***
At first he could not distinguish a difference between the suburbs northwest of Perth and those outside of many American cities. There were fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and KFC. Granted, most of the single-family homes were very close together, and the majority had red-tile roofs, but there was nothing especially alien or strange about the suburbs, and that comforted him, headed as he was to the outback.
As they crossed the Swan River at Bassendean, the landscape became decidedly rural. It reminded him of the Midwest, only more desiccated. The farmed countryside was contoured with fences and rows of brown crops or plowed furrows. Storage silos and water towers broke the dull blue sky. Huge flocks of sheep, like clots of dirty gray puffballs, appeared out of nowhere in enormous paddocks by the road.
“Dennis,” she asked at one point, driving through the expansive wheat belt northwest of Perth, “are you calm now?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not talking.”
“Sorry. I was just thinking.”
“Why don’t you let me in on your thinking?”
“I would if it made any sense. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to keep you out of this thing. I could tell them I kidnapped you.”
“No bloody way. I came of my own volition.”
“You’re not making this easy.”
“Who said I was going to make it easy?”
“God,” he said, shaking his head. “Do you have any idea what the AFP will do with you if you get caught with me?”
“I’ll figure that out later,” she said. “I admit I made an emotional decision to force myself on you, but your decision to go into the bush isn’t exactly a logical one, either.”
“Agreed, but at least it was just one person who might get in trouble. I don’t want anything to happen to you. I think you may be trivializing what these people are like. If they’re JSOC, they’re very cold, mission-driven people. It’s always the mission they’re focused on, not the people. So they don’t care who they’re dealing with.”
“You can’t scare me.”
He sighed. “You remind me of me sometimes.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Right now, it’s bad.”
They drove on in silence, the landscape a reddish smudge through the side windows.
After ten minutes, Dennis said, “Do you ever think about what he was like?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Do you ever think about what he was really like—your father?”
“My father?”
“Yes, your father. Do you ever think about him?”
“I told you, Dennis, I was born after he died. I never met him.”
“But do you think about him sometimes? Do you wonder what life would have been like if he had lived? You know, things like that?”
Judy swiveled her head and looked at Dennis.
“Where did that question come from?” she said.
“I just wondered,” he said quietly. “Not a big deal.”
She was quiet for a few seconds.
“Actually, I do think about him when I look at Mum’s photos. He looks so dashing in his uniform. I have dreams about him.”
“You do? What kind of dreams?”
“Why are you so curious?”
“I don’t know. I wonder what that must be like, to not know what your father was really like.”
“Well, in my dream—it’s a recurring dream really—he’s got his army uniform on, and he’s hugging me good-bye. In the dream, I guess I’m about five or six years old, which of course doesn’t make any sense, but in this dream he just says, ‘Good-bye, Judy. Ta.’”
“That’s all?”
“Yes. Not very interesting, is it? But in the dream I always feel so bloody sad when he says ‘Ta.’ It almost wakes me up.”
Dennis looked out the side window.
“How about your father?” Judy asked. “Is he still alive?”
“No, he’s completely dead, and the less I think about him, the better.”
“Oh.” Judy stared straight ahead at the bleached-out bitumen highway.
***
The geological changes were subtle at first—less foliage and more patches of exposed reddish-brown soil. Farm houses and sheep stations grew sparser until, almost as if a curtain had been raised on a theatrical set change, the land turned barren and unpopulated.
A thin sheen of dust covered the car, and Judy used the windshield wipers now and then to clear it. She said the Great Northern Highway ran north to the coast at Port Hedland and Darwin but warned that leaving the highway would mean traveling on dirt roads at slower speeds.
By the time they stopped in Mt. Magnet for a bathroom break and something to eat in the local pub, Dennis felt like he was driving over the surface of Mars. The ground was uniformly a dull red-ochre with sporadic clumps of forlorn bushes and white-blond grasses. Although they had the Cruiser’s air conditioner running, Dennis could feel the heat through the windshield. Stepping outside the car in the old mining town, he was assaulted by the heat and took several gulps of furnace-like hot air.
“Let’s get inside,” she said.
The pub was small but air conditioned. They sat at the bar and ordered sandwiches and soft drinks. Only one other patron, a weathered old-timer perhaps in his seventies, was in the room. The male bartender had long hair tied back in a ponytail and was garrulous to the point of being overbearing. Dennis had the feeling the bartender was starved for conversation.
Judy, to Dennis’s surprise, manufactured a story about how she and her American boyfriend were on holiday, driving to Darwin. Dennis smiled at the boyfriend part.
He ordered an egg-salad sandwich and noticed it came with the crust cut off. He grimaced at the first bite and pried it apart. Each slice of bread was covered with butter.
“What’s wrong?” Judy asked.
“It’s butter,” he said.
“Of course it is,” she said.
“Where’s the mayonnaise?”
“That’s a Yank thing,” she said. “Just eat. It’s good for you.”
And he did eat it. Judy noticed that the more abrupt and commanding she was with Dennis, the more likely he was to obey. It thrilled her in some inexplicable way to see this tough, abrasive, veteran investigator do what she told him.
While eating he took a sideways glance at her, noting how she flicked her hair over her shoulder so it wouldn’t fall in her plate. From the side he could see how ageless her face looked and how her eyes sparkled in the glare from the window.
“Dennis, what are you looking at?”
“Nothing.”
“You are such a bewildering man.”
“Of course I am.”
They left the pub, but not without scanning the parched and cracked bitumen parking lot. There was only a single ancient Toyota pick-up truck parked under a small tree, and on the other side of the parking lot underneath a gray-and-white barked eucalyptus tree milled a group of black people.
Driving back to the highway, Dennis said, “Were those Aboriginals?”
“Yes.”
“They looked poor.”
“Because they are poor.”
“What do they do out here?”
“Do?”
“Do they work? Go to school? Or just sit under that tree?”
“Well, some work, some go to school, and others just sit under a tree all day.”
“In Perth I saw a few of them near a park, but they were always just scooting by at the periphery, almost like ghosts,” he said.
“Are you making a social comment of some sort?”
“No, not really; I was just wondering. It’s just that I didn’t see a single Aboriginal working behind a counter in a coffee shop in Perth, or even shopping in a store, for that matter.”
“It’s a complicated situation,” she said.
“But do they hold jobs in offices and stores?” he asked.
“Some do. Many live in settlements far away from the city. The cultural differences are huge. And even when they do work at stations or farms, the males just take off sometimes and disappear for a while. They go walkabout.”
“Walkabout?”
“Yes, just wander off into the bush,” she said.
“What do they do on a walkabout?” he asked.
“They wander.”
“I saw a pile of empty bottles near those people back there.”
“And yes, some are alcoholics,” she said. “But I gather you Yanks didn’t do much better with your Indians.”
“We call them Native Americans. And yes, we screwed them pretty good. But at least we gave them casinos.”
“No comment.”
They drove again in silence until Dennis said, “Can they still live off the land like their ancestors?”
“Yes, some can. They can survive in the worst droughts. Amazing, really. We joke sometimes that in a hundred years, as the Earth heats up, the only people that will be able to live in Australia will be Aboriginals. God knows we white fellas can’t live here without endless supplies of fresh water and air conditioning.”
***
Judy had tired of driving, and they switched after another hour. On the long, straight highway, Judy would sometimes remind Dennis to remain on the proper side of the road.
“You’re doing it again,” she would say.
“Yep, got it,” and he would slowly inch over to the left side of the road.
The only company they had on the road was the occasional huge tandem trailer and a rogue passenger car. Dennis kept the speed at around 130 kilometers per hour, which Judy said was about eighty miles per hour. Nevertheless some cars overtook them from behind like Exocet missiles and soared past them on the right, leaving a thin trail of red dust.
The landscape became uniformly forbidding, with worn hills breaking the surface in the distance like frozen waves on a red sea.
“Who lives out here?” Dennis asked at one point.
“No one really,” she said. “To be honest, I’ve never been this far on the Northern Highway. It’s bleaker than I imagined.”
“But we haven’t even seen a house, much less a town, in the last couple of hours,” he said. “Are there really people living here?”
“Yes, of course. We should be in Meekatharra in a couple of hours. These towns serve the mining and farming interests in the area and are the seat of regional government.”