Bob drove Sal out to the inlet while her car was being fixed
in town. She lay back in the passenger seat and closed her eyes, not really
listening to Bob’s fruity rambles through the week’s politics and reality
television shows. She felt pouty and bruised, her skin scoured by Crow’s
bristles. Trees flashed red black red behind her eyelids. The
red-scented memory of his flesh in her bed.
It was a strange dissociative state; a bubble that contained
only the two of them. She called
it the fugue, when they fused together as a single creature derived from pleasure, a
wild creature nurtured among the owls and the snakes and the trees.
“Bite me proper, Crow,” she says. “You have to mark me.
You go home and all I have left of you are your marks.”
She'd come home in the early hours, three or four o’clock in
the morning, with twigs threaded through her woolly hair and new marks over her
body; teeth marks, raised red mosquito bites, scratches and bruises from the
limestone ledge she’d laid upon. Her muscles ached from walking, climbing and
fucking. She'd fallen into bed and slept deeply. When she woke, alone, it was as
though their nocturnal meeting had never happened, a kind of wild dream. She
could hardly remember the events, the words or deeds. All she had left of
him were the signs on her body, the scent of him mingling with wood smoke in
her hair and the feel of the hours of words they spoke. By three in the afternoon she'd come crashing down from that most exquisite hit.
She opened her eyes as Bob changed gears and slowed past the sign
advertising cheap alcohol and fuel. He pulled into the roadhouse, where the
local agricultural rep had pasted more advertisements; water tanks, herbicides
and fertilisers. Inside, amongst the fug of meat pie and coffee smells, Sal
picked up a local newspaper and a bottle of wine and took them to the counter.
“You wanna put the fuel in with that, love?” The woman
nodded outside to Bob hunched over his jerry can for the boat.
“Yes please.”
She was a weathered, smiling woman with flowering vines and
swallows tattooed over her collarbones. She rang up the amount and Sal paid
her.
“Cops dropped this off yesterday.” She slapped a sheet of
paper on the counter. It was a photocopied image of the man whose dog had
knocked Sal down. “He’s out around here somewhere. Punched out a public
officer and took to the bush.”
Sal stared at the picture. It really was his name. He hadn't lied. Jack Bailey looked ten years younger without his
beard. “Is he considered dangerous?”
“Sounds to me like he’s just a bit of a loon. Could probably
do with taking his meds.” The woman’s attempt at toughness collapsed. “Poor
bugger. He’s getting hunted like a dog now. They think he might be out this
way so if you are camping lock up your cars I guess. If he comes in, offer him a cuppa ...
reckon he’ll need one.”
Sal smiled at her.
They passed the turn-off to Black Mountain road and climbed
into the high lands, before the country swept down into the river country. Two police
cars passed them, the occupant’s faces set and hard.
“Unusual,” Bob broke off his horror story rant about the TV show Extreme Bodies to remark. “Coppers out this way.”
Sal wondered at herself, at her new propensity for secret
keeping and protecting others. Somehow, she’d neglected to tell Crow about her cup of tea with the man
who was stealing his specimens. And now, as Bob noted the police cars, she said, “Something must
have happened out near Bremer ... a car accident maybe.”
