By Robert Carter

FAVOURITES - FICTION - 4 June 2009 - They would come.  Even to this godforsaken desert, they would come. They would somehow learn that he had found bore water – that a garden had flourished – sprung up like a promise to the betrayed. And they would come for it.  A garden of cabbage and lettuce and potato and carrots.   Like mice out of a rubbish tip they would come.  And he would cut off their tails, not with a carving knife but with a Heckler and Koch M4 assault rifle which could make thirty slices in two and a half seconds.

Was it their own fault?  He wasn’t sure.  They were told over and over to leave their fat houses in the city.  Five hundred dollars for an orange.  They believed an orange was $500, not $500 was an orange – there was a difference.  Herd animals are rarely thinkers.  The herd is the animal – clinging and crowding out thought like sheep.  Sheep that shop – the expression made him laugh.

Through the doorway of the old farmhouse, he could see a shiny white van pull up outside the iron gates at the bottom of the hill. First of the week, he considered as he plonked onto the glass table the pot of half-mashed potatoes he was holding, snatched up the chunky assault rifle and headed down the hill.

At the gates, a rabbity-looking woman stepped from the van and called to him politely through the razor wire.
“Please.. I’d like to buy some tomatoes or cabbages or whatever you’ll sell me..”
“Can’t do that,” he answered.
“Sir, I give you my word, I won’t tell anyone.. it’s not in my interest, is it?”
What did he feel?  Guilt?  Selfishness?  Did it matter to him that she was hungry?
“Wait here,” he told her. “If  you try and climb the fence, you’ll cut yourself to the bone.. the dogs will smell it.. they travel in packs..”  As he headed up the hill, he turned back to her. “You can’t dig under the fence, it’s solid sandstone.”
In the kitchen of the house he picked up the pot of half-mashed potato and a long handled wooden spoon and headed back down to the gate.   These days he liked how he did things, took action – made choices, without actually thinking directly about the issue, without actually considering pros and cons and logic and likely outcomes.  Maybe he was leaving it to his unconscious, or to chance, or fate.  Once, he would have thought that that was a stupid thing to do.
“Come up to the wire,” he told her at the gate, “ Open your mouth.”
She obeyed rapidly, nodding her head as if she were being questioned instead of ordered. He pushed the mash-loaded spoon through the wire and into her mouth.
“Mmm.. God.. thank you..” Her mouth opened again as soon as she swallowed.
“Better chew it or you’ll throw up,” he told her.
Spoon after spoon went through the wire until the pot was empty.
“I could help you,” the woman said. “I could help you garden and keep the others out..”
“Don’t need help.”
“I’m very capable.. I know you’re on your own.. I’ve watched you.”
“Here’s my helper,” he said, as he patted the stock of the assault rifle. Immediately he wished he hadn’t said it – it sounded silly.
“You must get lonely.”
“Must I?”
“I look a lot better when I’ve washed and put on some make-up.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Please, you’ve got more than enough for two people..”
“If I let you in.. word will go out and there’ll be ten of you tomorrow and twenty the next day, and in a week we’ll have a thousand..”
“So you’ll let me starve to death..?”
“No, you let you do that.”
Now she was angry. “Look.. if you don’t let me in, I’m going to drive my van through your fence..”
Without taking his eyes off her, he lifted the rifle, snapped back the bolt and ejected a cartridge into his waiting hand.  He held the cartridge up to her, erect between his thumb and first finger.
“This is why you won’t do that.”
She stared back at him with what he judged, for the first time, to be respect.
“Do you know what?  I don’t care,” she said quietly.
Without changing expression, he inserted the cartridge back into the magazine. As she stepped up into the van, she turned to him.  “Shoot straight,” she said.  He lifted the rifle to his shoulder and clicked off the safety lock.  “People will hear the shots,” she told him through the van window, as she started the engine.  “There are still police around..”
“No, they walked off months ago.. two of them tried to get in here..”  He could see her scanning his face, straining to read his expression.
She started the engine and waited for the noise to die down before leaning out the window.
“You’re going to have to kill me..”
“Okay,” he answered.
He hears the gearbox crunch and the van shudder.  He sights carefully, his left eye scrunched tight, his right eye wide open.  The van lurches forward.  He sees that she sits upright in the driver’s seat.  She could have ducked down under the dash as she accelerated, but she didn’t. Even with the rush of blood from his pounding heart, he is impressed as he pulls the trigger and holds it for two and a half seconds.
Over the gun sights, he sees the van charge towards him, the left front tyre exploding into black chunks and smoke, the vehicle plunging after it, careening left like a dog caught by a forgotten chain, glass shattering and finally a deep metal crunch as the van spears itself into the trunk of a one hundred year old eucalyptus tree.   Silence, except for a pressured hiss of steam and a rear wheel rolling stupidly in the air.

If he’d left her in the crushed cabin, the dogs would have got her, he told himself, as he carried her unconscious body into the farmhouse.  With her face relaxed from the city tensions, she was less rabbity-looking.  He could feel her bones press sharply into his outstretched arms, brittle and breakable as dry sticks – an armful of firewood.
Except for a darkening lump on her forehead, he could see no obvious injuries as he stretched her out on the couch. No blood – that was good.  Should he check the rest of her? Take her jeans and T shirt off?  He pulled out her tucked-in shirt and inspected her stomach and chest – not a mark.  He stood looking at her.  What if he’d killed her?  Would she regain consciousness?  What did he feel?  Should he have brought her inside his fence?  She was breathing – he could see her chest rise and fall.  Oh, God, he was aroused.  Jesus, what had he become?
He rolled her gently onto her stomach and pulled up her shirt.  In the small of her back, a large bruise was shaping itself in blues and purples, like Africa in an atlas.  He remembered lifting a heavy spare wheel from her back in the crushed van – it must have flown forward on impact.  She groaned, lifted her arms over her head and slowly rolled over to look up at him. He watched her blink her way towards reality.
“You shot me?” she said in a winded tone, more question than accusation.
“No, I shot your car – its steering linkage to be more accurate.”
“You tried to kill me.”
“You told me to shoot straight.”
She felt the lump on her forehead.  “My head hurts.”
“I have some painkillers..”
From the kitchen, he glanced back at her as he pumped muddy water into a glass and found the tablets.  “You’ll have to sit up.”
“I can’t.”
He put the water down and lifted under her arms, propping her up with cushions. “Oh God.. my head..”
He opened his hand with the tablets and held out the water.  “It’s bore water.. it won’t hurt you.”
She swallowed the tablets and drained the glass.  “Thank you.”
“Do you hurt anywhere else?”
“I don’t think so..”
“Good .  When you feel better, I’ll take you down to the gates..”
“But I haven’t got a car now..”
“That’s not my fault.”
“I can’t travel on foot.. you said there are packs of dogs..”
“You just have to swing a stick at them and they’ll leave you alone.”
“There’s nowhere to walk to.. there’s nowhere with any food.. the last town was five hours back.. and was empty except for some old pensioners in deck chairs too weak to leave..”
“They might have been tasty..”
“Fuck you!”
“I’ll give you some food to take with you.. if you’re careful it’ll last you seven or eight days.”
“Give me a week of life.. that gonna ease your conscience..?”
“Fine, don’t take the food.”
“Something’s wrong..”
“Really?  I thought everything was wrong.”
“I can’t move my legs..”
He leant over her, grabbed her legs and swung them off the couch and onto the floor.
“Stand up.”
“I can’t feel them.. I didn’t feel you grab them..”
“Stand up.”
“I can’t!”
“You’re lying!”
He gripped her by the shoulders, lifted her upwards onto her feet, and let her go. As she crumpled towards the floor, he quickly caught her.
“I can’t feel them,” she sobbed.
He sat her back on the couch, lifted her leg and pinched hard over her jeans into her calf muscle.  She showed no reaction.  He tore off her sandals without releasing the buckles and twisted her toes sideways and then backwards as far as he could.  Nothing.
“I don’t understand.. they’re not injured,” she said tearfully.
“You have a large bruise on your back.”
“Have I?  I can’t feel it?”
“Maybe you’ve jarred the nerves or something..”
Twisting her neck over her shoulder, she lifted her T shirt trying to see the bruise. “Where.. where is it?  He snatched a hand mirror from the sideboard and held it up for her to see Africa.
“Oh God.. look at it.. Oh God…”

Late at night, through the bathroom door he heard her – splashing and splashing the small puddle of bore water over herself in the tub. He had to carry her to the edge of the bath and leave her, aware that a bath seemed more vital than the use of her legs.
There were no hospitals operating anymore to check her out and no doctors still in practice, and anyway, he suspected she was faking paralysis so he wouldn’t force her to go. He was definitely curious about her.  Perhaps he wanted to know if he could feel anything. Was he as emotionally numb as her legs?  He might test her – unload the rifle and leave it where she could get it.  Would she shoot him if she had the chance?  Perhaps.
“Hey,” she called from the bathroom.  “Can you bring me a towel?  Please?”
He felt annoyed and a little excited at the same time.  That was something.  He selected the best towel he had – a half-worn brown cotton hotel job he traded for four carrots a year ago.  He handed it to her without looking at her in the tub.
“You’ll have to lift me out.. and put me on that chair.. and I’ll dress myself.”  The water sucked and belched its way out of the plug hole.  He listened to her drying herself. “Okay,” she said.
He bent over the tub and lifted her up – sticks wrapped in a towel, and placed her on the old wooden dining chair he used as a clothes hanger.  “Could you bring me my clothes, please,” she asked politely.  He sighed loudly, needing to appear exasperated rather than let her notice his increased pace of breathing.
From the dining room, he imagined her struggling to pull her clothes on over her dead legs – assuming they were dead legs of course.  He would make tea.  That would steady him.  He opened the flue on the stove, stuffed some twigs into the firebox and blew on the few coals still glowing on the grate. The kettle was half-full and still warm.
“Can you come and get me?” she called out.   He decided to count to ten before responding.
As he carried her, the closeness of her face made his skin hot. She was more attractive with clean hair and make-up.

From old fence palings, he hammered in place a rough seat that fitted across his dented and rusted wheelbarrow.  Her legs dangled on each side of the barrow’s rubber wheel as he ferried her around the garden.  He was surprised how much her enjoyment pleased him.
The whole north side slope of the hill was striped with perfectly straight rows of lettuce and cabbage and tomatoes and corn. He felt quite proud as he showed her but kept it to himself.  Near the house he wheeled her past two large old fruit trees scraping their branches along the roof guttering – a  quince and a fig, and in their shade she was surprised by the large netted chicken pen whose fence was lined with geraniums and azaleas and climbing red and yellow roses.   “Flowers!” she said, quite startled as she smiled at him.
“Some people say you can eat geraniums..” he said.
At night he slept cramped on the couch, fitfully twisting hour by hour as if comfort could be found if he could just find the right way to turn.
Occasionally, he would watch her through the keyhole to see if she would forget and use her legs and he was prepared to burst open the door and expose her.  He caught himself hoping she couldn’t walk and immediately wondered whether that made him selfish or mean hearted, or worse.. needy.

Over the days which lined up into weeks, neither enquired nor offered anything of their personal pasts.  He liked that, and came to believe that it wasn’t from lack of wanting to know but rather an unspoken agreement between them that things grew from beginnings, and that beginnings could have no past.
He wanted to have sex with her and he watched her closely for any sign that he could interpret that she would be receptive.  He wasn’t sure.  She smiled at him when he picked her up and when he wheeled her through the garden.  She was respectful, always asking him first whether she could pick this tomato or take that cabbage.  Once, he caught her watching him when he pulled on his long, rubber boots to tackle Cain, the rooster who got his name from killing his brother when he was half-grown, and who attacked anything and anyone that moved.  She seemed concerned when Cain flew at him, talons aimed like daggers that actually penetrated the thin rubber around his ankle and drew blood.
“Why does he do that?” she asked later that night.  “He knows you’re the one who feeds him.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably thinks he’s protecting the hens.”
“He could take your eye out..”
“He never goes high – only ankle level.  I tried to persuade him once that it was a bad idea.  I took a stick and whacked him every time he charged.  He just kept attacking and attacking and I knocked him over every time until he could hardly move.. and he would wait a little while, catch his breath and come at me again.  And then I couldn’t hit him any more.. I couldn’t swing the stick at him any more.”    He remembered her looking at him then, with no idea what she was thinking, only that he liked the look.

And then it didn’t matter. Using an old telescope he had traded for four eggs a month ago to a bald-headed man on a motorcycle, he focussed towards the eastern horizon on a vast shower of moving lights and a rising cloud – a  golden dust storm.  It was dust, all right, but not from a storm.  It was a cavalcade of people and vehicles – a convoy – a herd.
If the convoy travelled all night, which he knew they would, they would arrive about mid-morning.  He would tell her at first light, when she woke up.
At the door to the bedroom he could hear the fragile, throaty breaths she made in deep sleep.  He had become used to her sounds, he realised.  It was a full moon, he observed as he stepped into the night and walked down the hill.  He would be able to see the garden and the chickens one more time.

“Are you sure?” she asked him at sunrise.  He adjusted the eyepiece of the telescope for her to see and wheeled her up to it.  “My God, there are thousands of them!” She looked at him then, like a child, he felt.  “What are we going to do?” she asked, open mouthed.   We, he thought, what are we going to do?
“I don’t know,” he said. “There are too many to shoot.”
“How long before they get here?”
“Half an hour, perhaps less.”
“We could hide some food..  like bury it somewhere..”
“It would take a week to dig through the sandstone.”
“We could hide some vegetables in the trees..”
.
She crawled, he ran, uprooting carrots and potatoes, tossing hacked off cabbages into the barrow. He climbed the forest oaks and eucalypts as she watched anxiously from the ground reporting whether she could see the vegetables he placed in the forks of branches. Until they heard the vibration of the herd in the air.  He scrambled and slid down the trunk of the tree and ran half-toppling, face-forward down the slope to the front gates.  His breath punching his chest painfully, he unlocked the gates and flung them wide open – hoping for less damage.

The four-wheel drives came through first, churning the sand with their knobbly tyres, clawing their way up the hill.  Motorcycles, trucks, sedans, utilities followed, some spinning their wheels in the soft sand, others crunching their underbodies on jutting sandstone.
He sat alongside her barrow on the verandah, the rifle across his knees.  He imagined scything them down like corn stalks.  He had enough ammunition to shoot quite a lot of them. Could he imagine any guilt?  Perhaps. The feeling that surprised him was more like embarrassment.  Embarrassment for what?  For humanness?  He wasn’t any different to them, just better organised
Naked embarrassment.
He closed his eyes and listened as they pushed past and into the house, racing each other from room to room: whoops of victory, angry words and shouting, grunts and squeals.. human noises.. cupboard doors ripped and smashed, child-like screams, the stink of fear and desperation, the smell of unwashed bodies and violence and guilt.
“They’re driving over the vegetable beds!” She told him.  He could hear the rutting wheels in the garden.  From the house, the sound of the ceiling being torn down, floor boards levered up.. no stone unturned.  More vehicles arrived, releasing ragged and desperate bodies who spilled the wheelbarrow onto its side in their single-minded stampede.  He righted it and lifted her back onto her seat.
By late afternoon it was mostly over.  The occasional straggler drove up to the house, gingerly looked inside and then drove off.  At her request he wheeled her through the hillside where the garden used to be – not even the flowers remained.  The vegetables hidden in the trees were gone. “How could they have seen them?” She asked, over and over.
Around sunset, a harried teenage girl pulled up in front of the house in a station wagon.  She spoke to them without getting out.
“Are you the owners?” she asked.   He nodded, as she looked around, shaking her head sympathetically.  “I’m sorry,” .
“Thank you.”
“Are you married.. or partners..?” she asked.   He shook his head.  “I could use some help.” She turned her head towards the back seat of the wagon. “My two year-old has a temperature.. he keeps throwing up.. I think we ate something wrong a day ago.. if one of you wanted to drive.. I could look after him.. I’ve got a half bag of rice and some other stuff I’d be willing to share.”
From the wheelbarrow she glanced at him before turning to the girl.  “What about both of us?”
What was she thinking?   He would have given up the assault rifle to know.
“There’s not enough.. there really isn’t,” the teenager responded in a lowered voice. “But we can get to some.. I heard there’s a nest of farms about two days drive north west..”
“I don’t want to go,” he said to both women.
She turned to face him from the wheelbarrow.  “They broke the pump on the bore – drove straight over it,” she said to him.
“I’ll fix it,” he said evenly.
“How can you fix it?” She suddenly seemed angry.
“Some parts from your van.. I’m kind of good at making things do..”
“Even if you could fix the pump.. and you found some seeds.. it’ll take two months before you have anything to eat.. and anyway another mob will come..”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You want me to go?” she asked.
No, he wanted to say, I don’t want you to go.  “Do what feels right,” he said.
The teenager started the engine of the station wagon, leaned across the front seat, and opened the passenger side door.  “I’ve got to catch up with the others..”
He realised he was clutching so hard at the rifle stock that his fingernails bent white as they dug into the polished hardwood.  He saw her lean towards him from the wheelbarrow and swing her legs in a graceful arc over the rubber wheel and onto the veranda boards.  She stood up and smiled at him warmly.  He looked at her long, straight legs and smiled in return, neither of them surprised at her miracle recovery.
“I’m sorry.. about the legs,” she said
“I would have done the same thing.”
“Good luck,” she said, as she strode to the station wagon. “I mean it,” she added from the car.
“Good luck to you,” he said to her, and he knew he meant it.
He sat watching the station wagon head out the gates and off towards the north west.  For a while he followed it with the telescope as it crested each of the surrounding hills, becoming smaller and smaller until it disappeared.
Late in the night he inspected the perimeter fence – there was surprisingly little damage, nothing that couldn’t be fixed in a day or two.  Outside the gates he sat near the crushed van listening for any approaching vehicles. Nothing. The wave had come and gone, leaving a moonlit, crystalline stillness.  After half an hour, he lay on his back near the van’s rear and worked his way up underneath it, feeling with his fingertips the oily, dirt-encrusted underside of exhaust pipes and driveshaft until he found what he was looking for – packaging tape.  Opening his pocket knife he sawed through the tape, lowering the awkward weights it held in place to the ground. One, two, three.  He dragged them carefully out into the moonlight.
To stop their noise he had taped their beaks– the two best hens and Cain.  He cut away the tape around the rooster’s legs and beak and stood him on his feet to make sure he was still alive.  Cain swayed drunkenly, his wings opening to balance against the ground.  He shook his head once, twice, three times and then attacked as hard as he could, driving his spurs at the moonlit boots again and again – flinging sand into the air with his outraged feet.
As the fury struck at his ankles again and again, he did not defend himself, nor did he step away.  He stood alone in the stillness refusing to weep, hearing only the tack.. tack.. tack of claw hitting rubber.

Robert Carter has been a full-time writer since 1986 when his first book, The Sugar Factory won the Angus & Robertson Fellowship and was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award. Robert has published three other books: Prints in the Valley; The Collectors; and The Pleasure Within. He has published poetry in various literary journals and wrote and directed a feature film adapted from his own novel, The Sugar Factory, which won Best Film Award at the Hollywood Film Festival USA.  His work has been translated into several languages and won awards around the world. Robert has been a recipient of a Yaddo Fellowship (USA) and a Cite des Arts fellowship (Paris).

See details of Robert Carter’s new film, set in the Australian desert, at http://www.thirstthefilm.com/

robbycart@hotmail.com