Red Dirt Heart 3 (4 page)

I left Scott with Travis and George, taking Blake and the chopper up and heading south-west to Alice. We’d cleared it with the airport and got permission to land and refuel. There was a helipad on the grounds, and it was frequently used by locals and tourists alike.

Our conversation on the flight out was different than the one coming into Sutton Station. He told me he liked what he saw, how our approach to farming was more considerate to the animal—leaving the calves with their mothers for longer than most, less stress, less time held in feedlots, more time in open paddocks—was well above industry standards. He said, “Travis started talking about using the nature of the soil out here to assist, manage, or eradicate disease control problems, or something or other.” Blake shook his head. “Don’t tell him, but he lost me on that. The beef industry, I understand. The science behind the dirt, not so much.”

I laughed, probably a little too long and loud. “That’s Travis for ya.”

“He’s a long way from home,” Blake added. “From Texas, or so he said.”

“Yep. Calls here home now, though.” I shrugged, not wanting to say much more about Travis. I wasn’t opposed to people knowing if they had to, but I wasn’t about to start blabbing unnecessarily about being gay and what that meant for business deals and proposals. Blake seemed like a fair man, but he was here to discuss business. I had no intention of bringing up his sex life, so why should I bring up mine?

I changed subjects again, pointing off to the right, showing him a line of wild camels. He just shook his head in wonder. “So weird to see them out here.”

I nodded. I guessed it was. “Been a pest out here since they built the railroad from Adelaide to Darwin. Afghans brought ’em here a hundred and fifty years ago. Couldn’t take ’em home, so they just left ’em, I guess.”

“Pests, huh?” he said with a good-natured smile. “Kinda like your little wombat.”

I snorted and shook my head. “First it was a kangaroo, now it’s a wombat. We’ll be a wildlife sanctuary before too long.”

“I might be getting a little ahead of myself here,” he said, and his voice sounded hesitant in my ears through the chopper headset. “I can’t promise anything, and this ain’t no guarantee.”

I waited for him to get the words right. Wishing and hoping he was about to say what I thought he was about to say.

“Nothing’s for sure until our vets do an inspection for themselves,” he said. “I just want you to know that.”

“Fair enough.”

“But I was thinking…” he hedged nervously, “that, gee, my wife would love to see this place.”

I barked out a laugh. “Anytime.”

* * * *

By the time I landed the chopper down on Sutton soil, it was getting on close to dinner time and my mind was frayed. It’d been a big day. Nothing physical, more mental, and spending that long in the chopper, concentrating and navigating, was draining.

I was met by a grinning Travis, who brought with him a hundred questions about how it went. “Pretty good, I think” was about all I said. “Can we talk about it later? I’m beat.”

No sooner was I inside than Nugget was shoved into my arms for a feed. At dinner, a full table of leftovers and fresh breads, I told everyone about my conversation with Blake and then fed the bloody wombat again, one more time before bed. I was yawning and my eyelids were heavy, so when Travis led me to our room, I didn’t protest.

Not that I ever did.

He held my face and kissed me, softly, soundly, sighing as he pulled his lips from mine.

“I have three hours before I’m on feeding duty again,” I mumbled.

Travis lifted my chin. He smiled, dark-eyed and husky-voiced. “I can think of plenty to do in three hours.”

As he was peeling my shirt off, I asked, “Is sleep a part of that?”

He shook his head and pulled at the button on my jeans, opening them. “Get on the bed, Charlie,” he murmured.

I fell back on the soft, soft cloud-like doona, and Travis grinned as he grabbed my jeans at my ankles and pulled them off me. Then he proceeded to nudge his nose up every inch of my body, followed by a scruffy chin and soft lips. He made sure I didn’t miss a minute of the next three hours.

* * * *

After all the incessant thumping I could stand, I walked outside. Well, it was more like stomped outside, the slamming screen door punctuating my lack of sleep and patience perfectly. I looked up at where Travis was on the roof. “Could you bang any fucking louder?”

Travis looked down at me and grinned. “Yep. Gimme a sec.” He held his hand out to Bacon. “Pass me the bigger hammer.”

I grumbled. Or growled, or maybe a bit of both. He was re-sheeting the iron roof. Typical Travis, needed something to do and with the still cool weather, he must have figured now was as good a time as any. Of course he didn’t want my help. I had an assessment due and financial figures to look over, so he’d barred me from helping, and he had Bacon up there helping instead. They were both smiling now.

“You’re not funny.”

Travis laughed. “You want me to bang out a tune? What about ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’?”

I glared at him. “What about ‘Shut the Fuck Up’? You heard that tune?”

From somewhere in the house, Ma chipped me for swearing, and Travis threw his head back and laughed. I stomped back inside to my office and ignored him for a while longer, and eventually the thumping stopped.

Only then did Travis call out, “Charlie? Charlie, you need to come see this.”

Two cardboard boxes sat on the kitchen table.

Old, dusty, forgotten.

I had no clue what was in them, and I was almost too scared to look. Obviously put in the roof cavity for safekeeping—or so no one could find them—these boxes hadn’t been touched in years.

My name and date of birth in my father’s handwriting on the side of them was what stopped me.

Scared me.

“Charlie,” Travis said quietly. He was beside me, as was Ma. Bacon, who had helped retrieve them, was now gone. “Did you want to open them?”

I nodded, then shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to,” he whispered. “I can put them in the shed until you’re ready.”

I thought I was past this. I thought I’d come to terms with my father, his hurtful, no-toleratin’ words, his disappointed stare. I thought I’d accepted my past and moved on. Hell, I’d even acknowledged I was as stubborn as my father—even proud of it. I’d dealt with the homophobic comments and stares exactly how
he
would have dealt with someone who didn’t agree with him.

I knew that streak of no-bullshit front-foot-leading arrogance came direct from my old man, and I was okay with it.

And yet whatever he kept hidden in these two boxes rendered me back to square one. I was a scared kid again waiting for his words to hurt me.

“I thought he’d said all he could say,” I heard myself say. I’m not sure I meant to say it out loud. Trav put his hand on my back, and I looked at him. “What if there’s just more ‘you’re such a disappointment’ in there.”

Trav lifted his chin, as though the thought offended him. “Charlie, his words can’t hurt you anymore,” he said. I think he’d said that before. “You know that, right? You have the power over whatever is in these boxes. You decide, not him.”

I found myself staring at him. He was exactly right. “How’d you get so smart?” I asked.

“I’m not that smart. I just know how your mind works. I knew exactly what you were thinking, Charlie.” He kissed the side of my head. “Did you want to open them?”

I nodded and looked over to Ma, who was smiling at Travis. “You okay, Ma?” I asked.

She still looked tired, but she turned her gentle smile to me as she sat down at the table. “I’m fine,” she said. “I just worry when you worry, that’s all.”

I pulled out a seat, but rested my knee on it instead of sitting down, and pulled the first box over. Without being asked, Travis sat a cup of tea in front of Ma, and they both waited for me to open the first box.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe letters, legal documents, maybe even financial documents we hadn’t found when we cleared out his room.

What I found made me both smile and frown.

I reached into the box and pulled out the first thing. It was a teddy bear. Old, faded, a bit worn, and it looked like it’d been dropped in the mud. I didn’t recognise it.

“Oh, that was yours,” Ma said quietly. “Up until you were three, you carried it everywhere.”

“I don’t remember it,” I said, putting it on the table.

Ma picked it up and looked the bear over. “Your father took it off you after your third birthday. Said you were too old to be carrying ’round a stuffed toy.”

I shrugged. That didn’t surprise me. Not one bit.

“Now this I remember,” I said, pulling out a sawn-off plaster cast. It was dirt-brown, frayed and smaller than I remembered. “My first broken arm,” I said with a laugh. “Remember, Ma? I came off my motorbike.”

Ma glared at me. “Of course I remember. How could I forget?”

Travis took it and looked it over. “That’s disgusting. Has it aged, or is that the state you got it in.”

Ma huffed. “He wore it in the mud, the dirt, the creek. Then his father ended up cutting it off here, because it stunk so bad.”

I snorted. “Yeah, it smelt like roadkill.”

Travis looked over the jagged cut down the length of the cast. “Your dad cut it off?”

“Yep, with a pair of shears.”

“Dear Lord,” Travis mumbled.

I laughed at his expression. “And look, here’s the throttle grip to the bike I was riding when I came off,” I said, pulling out a motorbike throttle grip that used to fit my peewee fifty. It was black, the rubber now degraded and crumbling. It was an unusual keepsake. “Why the hell did he keep that?”

“Because it was your first,” Ma said with a shrug. “And you loved it.”

I thought about what that meant. My father hadn’t really kept these things for himself. He’d kept them for me.

I didn’t know what to make of that.

Next I pulled out an array of things, from a small jar with my first tooth, first pair of baby boots, an old Bunnykins plate and a matching plastic, now cracked cup.

Toward the bottom of the box were books: a scrapbook, a baby book and a photo album. I pulled them out and set them aside and reached in for the last few things in the bottom. It was some laminated certificates from my home-schoolin’ days and a plastic bag with folded newspapers.

I moved the first empty box to the floor and looked at all the things covering the table. My childhood mementos. It was shocking and wonderful that my father had kept these things. I ran my hand over my face and tried to collect my thoughts. Still too scattered to put into words, I sighed instead.

But I was smiling.

“Wow,” I finally said, sitting down. “I had no idea.”

Travis ruffled my hair, then kissed the top of my head before sitting down beside me. He seemed just about to burst. Whether that was out of relief or happiness for me, I didn’t dare guess. It didn’t matter.

I slid the baby book over first. It was blue, small and had aged yellow. I opened the first page, where in fluid handwriting I didn’t recognise was my full name, date of birth, weight, length, hair colour, and also a small square photo of a baby’s crying face, presumably mine.

“You haven’t changed,” Travis joked.

I could only laugh. The next page was recorded dates with weights, heights, milestones. I got my first tooth when I was seven months old, apparently. And it was written very plainly, underlined and everything, that I did
not
like oatmeal.

Ma snorted out a laugh. “Now
that
hasn’t changed.”

I laughed with her, but the next page made my smile die right there.

There I was, all of maybe two years old, sitting on my father’s knee. He was laughing at something, his face all lit up, looking at someone or something the camera didn’t show.

He looked so much younger than the man I remembered. Happier, too. He looked so happy. The clothes we wore were indicative of the times—late eighties—the photo itself a Polaroid, yellowed with age.

Travis’s hand on my knee made me look at him. “You okay?”

I nodded. “I am.” And I was. This wasn’t what I was expecting, to find these things from my childhood, and a reminder that my father hadn’t always been so angry. I turned back to the photo and absently traced over the picture with my finger. “He looks so happy.”

I could feel Ma’s eyes on me, and when I looked up at her, she stared at me for a long while. “He
was
happy, love.”

“I must remember him differently,” I mumbled.

Ma sighed. “He wasn’t always so…” She seemed to struggle for the right word.

“Angry?” I suggested. “Bitter?”

“Lonely,” she finished.

I didn’t have an answer to that. I let it settle over me instead, like a heavy blanket of regret. “I was too busy being a brat to see that,” I admitted.

Ma smiled warmly. “You were a teenager, love. You can’t be blamed for not seeing, especially when he’d say things he didn’t mean.” She sighed then and looked as tired as I think I’d ever seen her. “He was a good man, Charlie, up until your mother left. He was never the same after that. Too proud, I think, to admit he wished things were different.”

It was quiet then, and I turned the next page. It had tear marks where a photo had once been, but was later ripped out. As did the next page, and the one after that.

I assumed those were of my mother.

The last entry was a picture of me, probably four years old, holding a fish that was half my size, wearing too-big riding boots. I was grinning like the happiest kid on the planet. A kid that didn’t know his world was about to be forever changed.

Trav put his hand at the back of my neck and leaned in, not to look at the picture, but to be closer to me. “Do you remember that?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Nope.” Then I looked at the photo again. “I think I remember those boots, though.”

Travis laughed. “Yep. You’re gay alright.”

I nudged him with my elbow but chuckled. Next was the scrapbook. It was the same age, pages yellowed and dusty. Pasted inside were newspaper clippings, some photos of me, some just mentions. “You used to do bull riding?” Travis asked.