Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

We pass a sign announcing a roadhouse a few dozen kilometres up the road.

‘I need to take a leak,’ I tell him. Then I close my eyes and try to shut out the world.

•

The roadhouse has been worn dull by the weather. Even the huge orange and yellow advertising sign is faded and dirty. Two trucks are parked on the other side of the road and I get ready to jump out. The driver tells me to join him in the truckies’ section of the restaurant when I finish up in the toilet.

‘Grab yourself a coffee,’ he tells me, ‘and sit next to me. If they think you’re with me you won’t have to pay for coffee.’

The toilet smells of piss and mice. I stand up for a long time before I can get any urine to flow, and when it finally comes it is a slow and puny stream. I rest my head against the cool ceramic of the cistern. Outside a wind is murmuring. I look down at my soft dick and start pulling it. I think of fucking the truck driver in the mouth and come quickly, dripping three days’ worth of semen onto the toilet lid. I wipe the lid, flush the toilet, and wash up at the sink.

Inside the restaurant, a bored young girl in a black T-shirt is smoking a cigarette at one of the laminex tables. She gets up when I come in but I shake my head and immediately she sits back down. Tina Turner is playing on the radio. A partition separates the dining room into two sections. The first section is empty. I walk past it and into the section marked TRUCK DRIVERS ONLY. Four men are sitting around a table. One of them is my driver but he fails to acknowledge my wave. I blush as I shuffle towards the coffee urn, conscious of my slender weak limbs, of the heaviness of my T-shirt, dark jeans and runners. The broad-shouldered men around the table are all in singlets and shorts, and they all wear their masculinity easily. So easily that their brutish physicality seems effortless, almost elegant. I sit down awkwardly next to them, pulling a chair from another table and placing it a little off to one side of the main group. No one bothers with introductions.

The coffee is scalding and tastes awful. I put it down and wait for it to cool. One of the men is talking about the blackfellas claiming back ancestral land. He too has skin marked by sun and wind, but the tight curls of his blond hair and the metallic grey of his eyes temper the erosion of his body. A delicate weave of blond hair creeps up his arms and his singlet fits tightly around a firm roll of flab and a well-muscled chest. He leans forward as he tells his story and I take in his aroma over the burnt fumes of the coffee.

‘You know who’s paying for them?’

‘The government,’ answers my truck driver.

The blond man looks exasperated. ‘Fuck, mate, of course, but who else?’

The other men wait for the answer.

‘The Jews, of course, and all the other fat businessmen they have in their back pockets. They’re all in it.’

‘They’re in what?’ My question booms around the circle and they all turn towards me. The blond man tilts his head at my truck driver, who gives him a slow nod.

‘Arming the bloody boongs,’ he replies.

It takes a moment for the words to sink in. ‘Arm them for what?’

‘The war.’

I fight back the urge to laugh in his face.

He shifts his chair closer to me. ‘Some of us have already started storing away guns, started building a militia. The fucking politicians are in the pocket of the black man. We can’t depend on them.’ He leans back and smiles at one of his friends. ‘At least there ain’t too many of the pricks left, eh, Davo? With enough warning we should be able to kill the fuckers off in a few days.’ He turns quickly back to me. ‘As long as we’re all in it together, right, mate?’

I release some sort of pathetic squeak, pretending to myself that it can pass for dissent.

He cocks a finger to my head. ‘Yep, that’s right. Bang bang. I can’t wait.’

•

At first I thought he was asleep. Then I noticed the syringe still sticking out of his arm, and the vomit coating the front of his T-shirt. I sat down next to him and I am embarrassed to admit that the first thought in my head was whether I should run away, leave someone else to find the corpse. That thought didn’t last for long though, just long enough that I’ll never forget it. I sat next to him and gently pulled out the syringe and took off his T-shirt, wiping away the vomit from around his mouth and chin.

I cried, but I’m still not sure if it was for him or for myself. I had not yet got to know this man who was still so very much a boy. I had been up his arse, I had sucked on his cock, but I knew very little about him. I knew that there was someone I should call: the police? the ambulance? When my crying had been exhausted, I got up and made my way to the kitchen where I boiled some water over a small electric stove. Then I went back into his room and went through the pockets of his jeans. I found nothing and began to panic. No, it wasn’t even panic, just a shortness of breath, a quickening in the beating of my heart, but I knew that if I did not find what I was searching for soon then the anxiety would escalate to full-blown hysteria. I searched through all his pockets, in his shoes, hoping to spy the dull sheen of aluminium foil. When I couldn’t find a thing, after scouring every inch of carpet, going through every item of clothing in the wardrobe, I sank exhausted onto the mattress. My panic, laced with desperation, turned into anger at the dead man beside me. But I refused to look into his face, as if even with his eyes shut forever, my shame would still be reflected back at me in the clear black surface of his skin. After another bout of crying, I slowly dug my hand under his thighs and found a metallic object with my finger and edged it out from under him. I opened the foil and sniffed at the powder.

I used his fit to shoot up. If there had been more heroin I may have taken the whole lot and willed myself into a narcotic death. I knew so little about him that I did not know if by injecting drops of his blood into my body I would be infecting myself with disease. At that moment I did not care. When the euphoric wave of the rush swept over me I was able to lie back on the bed and grasp at sanity. I smoked a cigarette and went to call the ambulance.

•

They asked me his name. I could give them that. They asked me his next of kin. That I could not answer. The smack was good, very good, and I wondered if he had touched heaven when he died.

They asked me if I knew his friends, a relative, someone who could vouch for his past. I shook my head. The ambulance men gave me twin looks of disgust as they dismissed me and put him on a stretcher. Outside, the neighbours had gathered to bear witness to his death.

‘What happened?’ a young woman holding a baby asked me.

‘He OD’d.’

She clicked her tongue in distaste and wandered back to her house.

I thought I heard one of the ambulance men say that ‘picking up after these black bastards is a waste of time’. I might have been mistaken. But the thought was definitely in the air.

•

I fall in and out of sleep watching the endless straight road, half dreaming of Led Zeppelin. When I awake the road is still stretched out before me but now darkness has fallen on the plain. Melodic country and western is playing on the stereo. I stretch, yawn and reach for my pack of fags.

The driver chuckles and turns to me. ‘Good sleep, mate?’

I nod and light my cigarette. The air blowing in my window is now cold and uncomfortable and I reach into my backpack to pull out a jumper. The driver, wired on speed and lack of sleep, is impervious to the cold in his singlet and shorts.

The shapes in the desert are now dark shadows suggesting bush phantoms, but I am aware that these are only fantasies drawn by my imagination and that what lies before me is the same flat earth that I have already spent an age watching. The only object which I can be sure of is the road. Lit by the high beams of the headlights, the straight narrow chasm across the continent appears to be leading us towards infinity.