Tim Winton - Cloudstreet

Earl Blunt, Egypt, said Quick.

Earl looked at him. Mason Lamb.

You still doin haulage.

You still doin nothin.

I need a bed.

I need another driver.

I’m hired.

Earl Blunt rolled his eyes and hosed pigs.

Earl and May lived in a truckshed by the road out of town. They had been married twenty years now and had no children. They were farmers as well as truckies, and they were rough as guts. Earl could feel no pain and he could not imagine it in others. The Depression had made him hard; war had beaten him flat and work had scoured all the fun from him. He was hard beyond belief, beyond admiration. On a Sunday night Quick saw him apply a blowtorch to the belly of a fallen cow before going back inside to pedal the old pianola for May. The land has done this to them, Quick thought; this could have been us.

Quick moved into a plywood caravan up on blocks behind the shed. The yard smelled of diesel and grease. It was full of rusting crank cases and radiators, butchered Leylands and Fords and fanbelts coiled about like exhausted snakes. In the mornings, Quick woke to the roar of bees out in the karri forest, and all day way beyond dark, he drove for Earl and May: loads of cattle, pigs, superphosphate, rail-sleepers, bricks, to Perth, to Robb jetty, Pinjarra, Manjimup, Bunbury, Donnybrook, all the time wrestling a bastard of a truck with stiff steering and slack brakes and keeping wide of the transport coppers and their safety rules. He rolled up to farms without stockyards and learnt to throw pigs up two storeys by hand. He wrung the tails of steers, he shovelled seven ton of super and did not whinge. Late at night, just for May, he double de-clutched on the pianola and tried to be happy. After all, it was 1957 and he had his whole life ahead of him. He was his own man.

Some Sundays he took his Dodge out to the old farm and parked on the boundary. The place looked good. He thought about climbing the fence and looking into the gash low in the old blackbutt to see if his threepenny bit was still there. But he couldn’t bear to know. There were a lot of things he just wanted to fail to remember. He didn’t mind being lonely; he was used to being sad, but he didn’t want to baulk at shadows for the rest of his life.

Still, Quick had old habits. On Sundays, he got the newspaper and cut out pictures of those less fortunate than him, and stuck them on the plywood walls of the caravan where they danced in his sleep like everything he ever wanted to avoid. He did not think of home, but home thought of him.

Tho Mine Enemies Rail

For a year or so Quick thought he had hold of himself. He could feel time passing without harm, and though his misery pictures danced on the caravan walls while he slept, they never woke him nor skipped into his dreams.

Earl and May fed him, worked him like a dog and told no one he was a Lamb. Locals still remembered those crazy Biblebashers and their fake miracles.

Winter bored on and he lived an orderly life in his slow, methodical way. He washed every day, cleaned once a week, and managed to see his awkward working hours out by thinking through the importance of every task. You could see it in the way he unlatched the tailgate as pigs pressed against it squealing, how he took his time at the weigh-bridge, how conscientiously he waved cars by him as he hugged the soft edges on narrow roads. And if you met him pulled into the rest bay beneath a stand of white gums along the Coast Road and you shared a smoke with him, he wouldn’t strike you as stupid. He’d seem overserious maybe, a little late off the mark when it came to getting a joke. You’d guess he was a bloke who hadn’t seen much but who was ageing somehow too quickly. There was nothing exceptional in him but for the fact that he could never seem to be ordinary. He had some mark on him, like a migrant or a priest. You could tell he was trying with you, trying to fit.

Quick Lamb drove without pausing. He caned himself with work and Earl and May could hardly believe their luck. He thought he was coping, but he was miserable, lost, drifting, tired and homesick as a dog. He didn’t think about it. He drove. He drove. He just drove.

That winter, some things happened, some incidents occurred.

Throttling the old bus rotten through the bends past Capel, crazy with sleeplessness, Quick lost his brakes on the hill before the rail crossing. The lights flashed red and he could hear the train’s diesel engine sounding its bullish horn down the tracks. He had nine ton of super on the back and now that it was mobile it wasn’t of a mind to stop. He went down through the gears like a man down a fire-escape, and when he hit rock bottom he could see the snout of the train flashing through the trees. All he had left was the handbrake and maybe the ditch at the roadside. The old knocker was hissing air and shrieking pads. The motor roared with quick comedown.

Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me, a bit of his brain said, Thy rod and Thy staff …

He was slowing, he knew it, he was pulling her back, but in the hundred yards that were left now he couldn’t expect a dead stop. He’d be rolling slowly, creeping right into the rush of freight cars.

The diesel snouted through, blurting and roaring, trucks nose-to-arse behind. The crossing lights flared. The lifeless bell tinged and tinged.

Quick hauled over to the scrub strip along the side of the road and felt logs and rubbish clawing underneath retarding him a little. He tried for reverse, but couldn’t get a grip on anything. And then he knew that all he had left was the angle he could hold and the fact that the last trucks were in sight.

Thy rod and Thy staff, he thought.

Now the wheels snicking along the tracks were all he heard as he dragged on the wheel and veered across the road to the other side where dirt lay in piles at the edge of the tracks. He ploughed it high and wide as the last truck came by and there was an almighty crack like the sound of a man’s neck breaking, and when he came back to knowing he was alive, he peered round to see his rearview mirror saluting him all the way down the tracks.

Yea, though I walk, he thought. Yea. Tho mine enemies rail against me.

He was bogged under nine ton of super and he could feel the paddock subsiding beneath him. Earl would not be impressed. Quick got out the shovel and started to dig. Right then he thought how sweet it would be to have Fish come rowing across the paddock to dip the gunwale of his fruitbox and haul him away from here.

Quick got Earl out of bed at four in the morning.

Geez, look at you. You bin sleepin with the pigs?

I just dug that bloody knocker out of a paddock. I want a couple of days off.

To do what?

Go fishin.

Earl yawned.

I nearly killed meself tonight.

Earl sniffed and scratched.

I nearly lost the truck.

It’s old. It’s insured.

I nearly lost nine ton of super.

Take the week. Use me boat. I’ll take it out of ya pay.

Earl’s Dory

At its mooring beneath the trees at the last bend before the river met the sea, Earl’s dory dwelt in a state of almost total submersion. It was so full of bird crap that there was less than an inch of freeboard and no gull could even so much as perch on it anymore without having the lot sink beneath the surface. That boat was crapped up to the gunwales, and it took Quick a whole Lord’s Day to bail the birdshit out, drag it up on the bank to roll over and scrape till it was clean enough to be tarred, caulked and painted. He spent the week on it, and in the afternoons he fished off the rocks with a bamboo rod and a jar of gents.