Impossible Places Page 5

  He’d tried putting his foot down with the northern crew, only to have them go out on strike. When he threatened to fire the lot of them, they simply smiled and shrugged, as though it didn’t matter if he did or not. Any new men he hired would act exactly the same.

  The road stretched northward, a black arrow piercing the baked landscape. The National Highway. He snorted. Back home it wouldn’t pass muster as a farm road. Two narrow lanes full of potholes, with no shoulders, crumbling into dust at the edges. How eighteen-wheelers and cross-country buses managed to navigate the disintegrating course without smashing into one another was nothing short of a miracle. Back home the entire thousand miles would’ve stood a good chance of being condemned.

  It made no sense. Sure the conditions were harsh, but no more so than in Arizona or Florida. He’d ordered repeated checks of the materials, had the bitumen exhaustively analyzed. Standard paving asphalt. The road base had been properly prepared, packed and leveled. It ought not to be crumbling this fast. After several months of work he was beginning to think there might be something in the ground rather than in the asphalt that was failing.

  So he’d had the earth itself analyzed, to no avail. It was neither unusually acidic nor alkaline. It should be holding up far better than it was. Kent had shown him stretches that had been repaved only the year before. Already the edges were cracking, breaking off in big chunks, turning to gravel and dirt.

  He removed his wide-brimmed hat and wiped sweat from his forehead. Someone in the crew, sitting in the shade with his mates, waved a beer in his direction. Irritably he shook his head and looked away. Kent had been right. The beer wasn’t the problem. There was something else going on here, something he couldn’t put a finger on. But he would. It was what he was getting paid to do.

  He looked sharply to his right. There were several aborigines on the road crew. They sat with their white mates, race relations having progressed farther out in the country than in the city. One of them was clapping a pair of sticks together, beating time to an ancient unknown rhythm. His companion was playing that long tube, what was it called? A didgeridoo. Except it wasn’t an actual didgeridoo he was playing. He was cycle-breathing on a four-foot-long section of plastic PVC pipe. Remarkably, the sound was the same as that produced by the traditional wooden native instrument.

  The music hung like a fog above and around the gum trees, as if some massive fantastical creature lay sleeping just beneath the surface. Sometimes Harbison found himself hearing it at night, which bothered him. It did not sound quite like anything else he’d ever heard. It tickled his brain.

  When he’d asked Kent about it, the foreman had smiled and explained that some of the men on the road crews, isolated in the Outback, believed that the music of the didgeridoo kept away the quinka, the evil spirits of the land that snatched men’s souls from the real world.

  He stared. The white roadworkers seemed to be enjoying the music as much as their darker colleagues. It was the kind of camaraderie he’d rarely observed in the cities, where the only aborigines he’d encountered were aimless groups of drunken men and women who spent their time arguing in city centers or sprawled tiredly in public parks. Here, out in the country, on the fringes of civilization, it was different.

  He’d seen that elsewhere. In rough country there was no time for such absurdities as racial prejudice. All of them were too dependent on one another, too busy trying to survive, to worry about inconsequentialities like the color of a neighbor’s skin. You were much more interested in what kind of a mechanic he was.

  The break stretched on. Several of the blonder workers had shed their shirts in defiance of the tropical sun. They wore shorts and shoes only. Their bodies, Harbison mused. If they wanted to burn, let them burn, so long as they kept working.

  He drove himself hard. He was the first one on site in the morning and the last to leave. He meant the two-kilometer section north of Rockhampton to be an example, a demonstration of what could be achieved with American know-how and determination. It would be a real highway: four lanes with divider and paved shoulders both directions. A proper piece of interstate.

  It took longer than he’d anticipated, but once the last asphalt had been laid and smoothed, he was able to content himself with the look of it. Beautiful it was, like reflective obsidian under the relentless sunshine, a straight dark path through the gum forest. Only a dead kangaroo, hit by a car the previous night after the new section had been opened to the public, marred the ebony perfection.

  Even Kent was impressed. He stared at the roadway and nodded. “Well, I have to admit, you did it. Didn’t think you could, but you did. She’s a beaut, that’s for sure.”

  “Three years.” Harbison surveyed his work with satisfaction. “Three years and the whole highway from Brisbane to Mossman can look like this. All it needs is money and the right attitude.”

  “Maybe so,” Kent agreed. He straightened. “Care for a beer?”

  Harbison almost, but not quite, smiled. “I told you when I got here and I’ve been telling you all along, I don’t drink. Especially not that stuff you call beer. Too strong.”

  “Suit yourself.” The foreman turned toward his car. “Need a ride?”

  “No. I want to run a final check here. Then I’m moving up to Cairns. They’re still having trouble with their section up there.”

  “So I heard. They need you, Harbison.” Kent smiled admiringly and climbed into his car.

  Harbison lingered, not wanting to leave, enjoying the looks on the faces of motorists as they shot past him at a hundred kph plus. For a little while, for the first time in hundreds of kilometers, they could actually relax and enjoy driving.

  The sun was going down. He slid behind the wheel of his big Holden, almost headed off down the right side of the road before remembering where he was and correcting. On the way south he passed the striping crew, knocking off early as usual. He shook his head. It was a wonder they ever finished anything. Without him driving them, they never would have.

  The onset of evening brought with it only a slight break in the heat. The gum trees closed in tightly around him, separated only by the four-lane roadway. A brush fire burned unattended to the very edges of the road. It would be ignored, he knew, left to burn itself out. Valuable wood and forage left to burn, as though nobody cared. No doubt the members of the local fire department were already gathering at their favorite pub, he knew, and wouldn’t wish to be disturbed. Social activity in every little Outback town centered around its pubs, or the bottle shops where liquor could be purchased for takeout.

  Near the southernmost part of the new section he slowed, pulling over onto the neat, wide-paved shoulder. Frowning as he climbed out, he walked around the front of the car and knelt by the side of the road. He pushed with a hand and stared as a section of asphalt the size of his fist broke free and crumbled into powder.

  It was like that all along the shoulder, on both sides of the roadbed: big pieces breaking free, crumbling, the neatly laid edge already being taken over by eager grasses and weeds. It made no sense. This section was less than three months old. It should be solid, impervious, yet it was coming apart as though made of sand. The asphalt that had been used had been rigorously checked prior to application. The surface was designed to hold up without maintenance for a minimum of two years.

  He straightened and stared into the forest. The gum trees stood silent, their pale slick bark peeling like his workers’ skin. It was dead quiet; no birds, no insects whining in the brush. Only there; a cluster of roos, traveling noiselessly in great leaping bounds at the limits of his vision.

  He blinked. There were no roos. Quinka? Didgeridoo music drifted through his brain, hypnotic and unsettling. Suddenly conscious of the age of the land around him, of his isolation, he found himself backing toward the car, his eyes trying to focus on suspected movement in the brush. He tried to think of something else, anything else, except the inescapable fact of his aloneness in a vast and inhospitable land.

 
; It was hot, so very damn hot. The heat seemed to come not from the sun but out of the earth itself. Dust hung suspended in the air like talcum, making breathing difficult. The moan of the didgeridoo was a pounding in his temples.

  A March fly landed on his arm, and he smashed it before it could bite. It spiraled indifferently to the ground, as though its death didn’t matter even to itself.

  As he fumbled with the door handle of the car he stared wide-eyed at the road, brand new but crumbling, unable to resist something he could not fathom, could not analyze. It ran north through the fringes of the Outback, a feeble lifeline stretching from the cities of the south toward the hostile tropics. Stretched too thin?

  Bad place for a road, he decided. The problem was simple enough. It wasn’t wanted here. The country, the land, didn’t want it. Yet as he was wont to do, man persisted in trying to defy the obvious, to bend to his will a part of nature too ancient to know it had no choice in the matter.

  A growling sound made him whirl, but it was only a truck coming toward him. A dozen men rode in the open bed. As it slowed to pull over, several of them eyed him knowingly.

  “Car trouble, mate?” one of them asked.

  “No,” Harbison replied slowly. He gestured. “There’s something wrong with the road here. There shouldn’t be.”

  Several of the crew exchanged glances. One of them smiled down at him. “Don’t worry, mate. She’ll be right. You worry too much, I think.” He squinted at the silent, suggestive gum forest through the beige-tinted heat. “Can’t worry too much out here. Gets to ya.”

  “Not a good place to be standin’ about alone,” the man next to him said. “Hang about too long and a bloke’s liable to go troppo. Start seein’ things, know what I mean? This ain’t Bondi Beach.” His tone was sympathetic, understanding. “Care to join us in a beer?”

  A new image filled Harbison’s brain, shoving aside the cloying, suffocating silence that pressed tight around the intruding road. A cool dark room surrounded by thick walls that shut out the oppressive heat, the dust and the flies. Shut out the hum of the didgeridoo and hallucinated roos. Kept the quinka at bay.

  Better to drink than to think. Thinking was wasted in this place. Ambition was excess baggage. This country battled both, all the way. It always had. No wonder the aborigines had never developed much of a civilization like other primitive peoples.

  Man had spread his highways, his parking lots, his civic centers and shopping malls across the face of the planet. Everywhere the land had accepted the insult in silence. Except here. Here the land fought back, fought every incursion, every attempt to domesticate it. Not with violence, but with ennui. It wore you out, just as it wore out the roads.

  There was a reason why people here kept tight to their few cities, clung to the cool southern coasts. Up here, in the north, in the great center, the Dreamtime still held sway, still dictated the pace of life and decay, of people and of roads. It sucked the drive out of a man, and if one wasn’t careful, the life.

  He understood the drinking now, the intensity and the frequency of it. It held the land at bay, kept it out of a man’s mind, kept him from thinking too much about the vast open empty spaces. Prevented them from invading one’s spirit and taking over.

  God, he was tired.

  His shirt was soaked through. He pulled it over his head, threw it up into the truck.

  “Yeah, sure,” he mumbled, accepting a hand up. “I’d like a beer.”

  Someone could pick up the car later. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now, except getting to the pub.

  The truck drove off. Once more the shiny new section of road was silent and empty. A beetle struggled out from beneath a bush, to be snatched up by a silent, watching magpie. Already the black sheen of the newly laid asphalt was fading, turning to a tired gray.

  A foot-long crack appeared in the southbound lanes. Soon it would widen.

  BETCHA CAN’T EAT JUST ONE

  When I was growing up, two of my favorite foods were Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies. I’d put them in the fridge and eat them cold. That way, the chocolate on the cupcakes didn’t melt so fast, and the cream centers had more of the flavor and consistency of ice cream. I never gave these gustatory affectations a second thought. After all, food was food, and if your body could digest it, then how bad could it be for you? Really.

  It was only much later that I encountered the significant body of deprecation that hovers about these gooey concoctions like hard lumps of sarcasm orbiting a soft, chewy, defenseless center. I foreswore my childhood addiction and moved on to more healthful, nourishing victuals—like cappuccino mousse, super-premium ice creams, and 77 percent dark chocolate. There are times, though, when I look back fondly at lost childhood pleasures like Twinkies and Ho Hos. Innocent pleasures all.

  Aren’t they?

  “Can I help you find something, sir?”

  Moke glanced sharply at the checkout clerk. He was more nervous than usual these days, with the Study so near completion. Always having to watch his step. Never knew when they might be watching.

  “You cannot. I can find everything by myself, when I want to. I simply choose to proceed at my own pace.” He offered up a smug smile. “I’ve found a great deal already, and am in the process of finding more all the time.”

  She eyed him uncertainly. Lately, the majority of the people she found wandering in this aisle wanted to know the location of the new Adolescent Altered Killer Gerbil Cookies, the latest kid food and comic sensation. This customer was different. For one thing, he was bigger. And he seemed not so much lost as preoccupied.

  That’s when she noted the microcassette recorder he was carrying in lieu of a shopping bag. “You from the Health Department or sump’in? You want I should get the night manager?”

  “No. If I was from the Health Department I’d already have shut down this unholy establishment—and every one like it, until they agreed to change their policies. I’m not in a position to do that—yet.” The widening of his humorless grin failed to enlighten the baffled clerk. Or to reassure her.

  It was one in the morning—near closing time for this particular market. A few amnesiatic shoppers remorselessly cruised the aisles, dumping toilet tissue, canned dog food, cereals and breads and optimistically dolphin-safe tuna into their carts. Their expressions were resigned, their postures lethargic. Except when they passed through this aisle. Then cheerful gossip freshened the air like verbal Muzak.

  Everyone, absolutely everyone, bought something from Aisle Six, and luxuriated in the process.

  The clerk was reluctant to abandon her morose, angular stray. “So if you don’t mind my askin’, mister— what’s to shut down? We’re as clean as anyplace in town, an’ our inventory’s just as fresh. We ain’t violating no ordinances. We ain’t guilty of nothin’.”

  “No?” Moke’s sweeping gesture encompassed the entire aisle. “You’re like everyone else. You don’t see what’s going on here. You really don’t see it.”

  The clerk blinked at the shelves, seeking enlightenment and finding only cellophane and plastic.

  “This, all this, is garbage, young lady. Offal, swill, chromatic slops: the insidious poisoning of a people who have forgotten the nature of real food.”

  Until now emotionally becalmed, the clerk straightened. “Our stock is checked and replaced every day, sir. Everything on our shelves is fresh. If you don’t like it here, why don’t you shop someplace else?”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference. It’s the same everywhere,” Moke informed her sorrowfully. “Do not think that in my ire I have singled out your place of work for especial condemnation. The entire supermarket industry in which you are but an insignificant if courteous cog is equally culpable. All participate eagerly in the general conspiracy.” He peered intently at her.

  “Are you aware that today’s junk food contains more than a hundred times the volume and variety of chemical additives than the junk food of just twenty years ago? That the very companies that disgorge
this mountain of hyena chow on an innocent unsuspecting public have little or no idea of how the human body will react to increased consumption of their products over a reasonable period of time?”

  The checkout clerk relaxed. Everything was clear enough to her now for her even to forget that she’d been called an insignificant cog. She even managed a sly smile.

  “I know—you’re a health-food nut.”

  “And proud of it. Do you know that ever since I first unearthed the conspiracy and swore to expose it I haven’t touched any of this stuff?” He indicated the marshaled ranks of sugar-stuffed cakes, of candy-coated marshmallow, of puffed imitation cheese and fried air. “And that since then I haven’t been sick a day? Not a day! Not a cold, no flu: nothing. There has to be a connection. And I’m going to reveal it.”

  “Uh-huh.” The clerk had begun to slowly back away.

  Moke noticed the look in her eyes. “You’re the one who should be afraid of these remasticated additives; not me. My system is clean, pure. I’m a trained scientist, young lady. My specialty is nutrition chemistry. I have devoted all of my adult life to this Study, and next week I shall at last begin to publish. What I will reveal will rock the American junk food industry to its grotesquely profitable core.”

  She halted, grinning insouciantly. “I ain’t afraid of no potato chips.”

  “You should be, because I have discovered that they, in common with most other popular junk foods, contain hidden within their artificial flavorings and artificial colors and preservatives and pseudoingredients newly developed complex amino acids of extraordinary vitality and volatility. Either the food companies have been far ahead of the pharmaceutical and pesticide industries in genetic engineering or else we are witnessing sustained sequential organic mutation on an undreamt-of scale.

  “To what nefarious end the food companies are striving I have yet to discover, but rest assured that I will. Some of the molecules I have isolated within Shoo-pie Bunny Cakes, for example, are positively Byzantine. Something sinister is taking place within our groceries, and whatever it is, it’s finding its way into our children’s lunch pails.” He turned wistful.