Trucksong (5 page)

Darkness gathered and the crowd gathered thicker too. They were tanked up and ready for the show, jostling and straining for a better view of the screen. Smoov knowed how to play it. He let it build and build until the right moment and then he motioned me and I hit the light and the screen lit bright white and then circles of colour swirled and swirled with the shadows of the insects humming in the air. Smoov came forwards from out of the gloom, head downcast and full of the Wotcher’s trancemission. The gabbling crowd went silent. Isa sat behind soaking it all up, seeing how Smoov did it. He flowed his jacket behind him and sat down at the decks and slotted one of the dead drives we harvested, using a slaved truckmind saved from the muck to randomise the pictures like trucks did with wavey trucksounds, mixing traces and trances, the light spreading out in waves from the screen until we could see a bloke’s face forming in the patterns. The Rider. A face hard and worn. He was riding up a rig painted blue, the Blue Mule that belched black smoke from its chrome smoke stacks and high up in the rider’s cab he sat, so tight with that rig you wouldn’t know there was a space between them. The brown desert landscape flowed past. This was a well known clip but then there was a jump and a new piece of picture formed up on the screen. You could sense the feelings of the crowd as they hushed even further and were sucked in to the new piece of the puzzle. The Rider was out of the cab and chained up and he was beaten by blokes with sticks and then the new part of the trancemission finished in a funnel of snow and dust and specks caught in a beam of light. Smoov remixed the clip, looping it back in with other splices, cuts dug deep from the ground, but the folks was there to see the latest Wotcher clip. Sometimes the new ones fit with what had come before, working up a whole picture of the Blue Mule show beamed down from on high and mixed with truck rumbling sound and static snow to trip the heads of the camp folk.

Smoov played the decks, swirling pixelfire ash from the crying sky until there were only the images from the Wotcher burning into everyone’s eyes, and into their hearts as well. That big Blue Mule gunned itself over rises and through the highways of the world with its Rider in tune. Though the Rider didn’t have no linkmaker, he didn’t need one because them who had come before could channel their rigs without even a freek, just the power of their thoughts. The folks were watching, mouths open and silent in front of the screen. Truckdream haze and cactusflower grog worked through their systems and jacked their eyes and ears to the view from the time when all the gigacities worked and the world’s machines were neat and orderly on the slavegrid with no droans nor brumbies roaming the lands. Smoov cranked up the pace, bringing the sounds and pictures up loud and letting them drop away again before the big finish. The camp folks were there with him, they started to get to their feet and move in time with the sounds, swaying with the rhythm of the dancing pictures. Right at the peak of it in the smoke from the fires and the dust risin from the stamping of the feet, the madness came to take hold and Smoov took up the mike. He started his chanting rant.

‘Camps folk and show followers, I’m callin, I’m tellin so youse can hear the message of the Wotcher that passes by and the pictures I’m gunna put together for you to see different ways of bein and new changes comin down the pipeline from on high.’

The crowd swelled, calling back into the starry night, dusty moon shining through moths flying round the lamp of the picture beam. The words rose up from the people: ‘Tell it.’

Now it were my turn to roll. I cranked a sheet into the typewriter and started to follow Smoov’s flow. I couldn’t get it all down, of course I couldn’t, but I did me best to catch it as Smoov went on. I saved all the sheets neatly in the typewriter case so Smoov could look back on his telling later and puzzle over the meaning of it.

‘When the Wotcher passes and beams its message, it’s tryin to show what the past was like from the other side of the screen. It’s dark when the Wotcher passes into darkness and it’s dark up there in the high of the sky. So we can’t see in the clear light of the screen, we’ve only got pieces of it. We’re puttin the pieces together to make a whole picture. But we gotta be patient and wait for the right time. Like the Rider who’s gettin beaten in this new scene, we gotta be tough and cop that beatin, we gotta keep our beliefs intact and whole in these times. It’s always darkest right before the sun rises. We’re gunna get back to where things come easy and everythin could be dug up from the ground and floated on the air, before all the changes started and brought the gigacities down, before there was bigdog robos and droans and flapples. There’s a pure time, a real time, and the Wotcher’s got the way of it if youse’ve got the steadiness and the insight to listen it and see it. If youse is faifull to the Wotcher’s messages, an if youse can bear the witness of its showin, youse can find a way through the backroads deserts to the time before when things worked right like they should an there weren’t no poison in the groun. I ain’t gunna lie. I can’t promise youse it’ll be easy. I can’t promise a Wotcher what can come on down to the groun in the dirt of the backroads to lift youse all up to its own size. But if youse’ve got the ticker to grind it out and do things right with each other, the Wotcher’s gunna show how to be free from the fears of flapple an bigdog an brumby droan.’

He hit the heights as the campfires burned up and the smoke choked and sounds swirled and the flickering images flashed in the frenzy of the moving of the bodies of the people and I saw Isa, her eyes shining in the light and she gave me a smile and I tried to take her hand but she walked off into the smoke, leaving me to stash the show gear.

I came out of the dream of the show, that mist of faces streaming, crying eyes, broken teeth, red cheeks, smoke ringing the lights, moths and insects flying around. All of a sudden I didn’t feel right, like the people there didn’t wish us well. The faces in the camp firelight and bright showstream, the press of all those bodies and all their thoughts was weighing on me, and thoughts have presence, they have weight. I looked for Isa, she was gone. Smoov’d got five or six blokes around him giving him the backslap, telling him it was a awesome show, he was the best showman around, but then there were others on the margins with sly smiles and whispers behind hands and glances that Smoov never seen.

I stumbled out of there, looking for Isa. I couldn’t find her nowhere. I searched through those faces, some friendly, some hating, most just empty and caught in their own thoughts, not even noticing what was going on around or trying not to see. I walked through the camp, crooked dusty track and pathway laid out with no thought or plan, tangled rope and tin and tarp. Blokes and women sitting on stumps and sitting on the ground outside shacks and shanties, tarps and tents, humpy and lean to. All the chooks were either roosted or roasted on sticks but there were dogs, bright eyes shining in the edges of the light. Brawling and crawling, smoking and drinking and the rush of haze from truckjuice alkaloid synthfac. There were babbies crying and kids mucking around and kids sitting quiet. There was singing in one place, open throat bawling, someone laughing someone crying, weeping and shouting in the dusky dark. No centre to it, it was all edge, ends folded in on themselves, a meeting of fire and smoke, light and shadow, and all the demons of the earth and sky were come there that night, to act out their tortured shows.

Then in a flash through flapping canvas I saw Isa, she was with another bloke. They were making out. I turned and I ran. What’d I seen?

Through me tears I took corners through the camp, tripping over rope, stumbling over myself. It was dark and I came to the outside fence where the action thinned out, it was quieter, I heard the rustling of a big lizard and the whoosh swoosh of nightbird wing. I cried and shook, trying to process, but I didn’t have no teraflop donk like a truckmind, just a rotten meatbrain rushing with feelings I didn’t understand nor want to know.

‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’

It was a bloke came up out of the dark.

‘If she’s gone I mays well be dead,’ I said.

‘There’s no need for cryin, thers no need for dyin. I can give yer somethin for yer ails,’ he said.

‘I don’t think so I don’t think there’s nothin for this,’ I said.

‘That’s not true. Take a little snifter of this brew.’

He held out a flask. I was so sad, I just took it from him and necked it. It burned a river of fire in me throat, it set me eyes a light and me head was scrubbed clean with a wire brush. Me thoughts were suddenly clear and I felt alive and shining.

‘That’s a good brew,’ I said.

He laughed.

‘Yeah, it’s made from truckdream haze and cactusflower. Now listen,’ he said, ‘if it’s a woman yer after, I can help. I can sing em.’

I looked at him. He were old, maybe forty maybe less, thinning hairs on his head, small white eyes too far apart, he stared, blinkless. He wore an old black coat that sucked up the gloomering firelight. He looked to me like there was roos loose in the top paddock.

‘You don’t look like you’ve had too much luck with women yerself,’ I said.

‘Looks is deceivin. Underneath the face, theres the skin and the bone, the cock and balls. That’s where the juice comes from, mate. Now, what’s yer problem?’

‘I can’t tell ya.’

‘Lemme guess, there’s someone you want that don’t want you, is that it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Lissen, I know you is with that showman. I’m guessin it’s his daughter you’ve got the hots for.’

That was a shock to hear it said, but Smoov’s show was well known in the backroads. This bloke could put the pieces together.

He said, ‘I seen her with that other bloke just now, meself. So I’m puttin two by two. You’re a young bloke, I’m sure you’re well hung and fulla cum. You just want somethin to ease the chill of the night, somethin to put out the fire that’s took hold of yer brain—’

‘Orright, you got me number,’ I said. ‘There’s fuck all I can do about it.’

‘You know one way that this could pan out, me old digger,’ he said, ‘is if Smoov was not around. If Smoov was out of the picture. Then she would be showman. That’s what she wants, you can tell just by lookin.’

‘Mate I don’t think it’s so simple.’

‘Oh it’s simple all right. Nothin could be simpler. That showman’s standin in yer way, he’s houndin every day, keepin you in yer place, and her too, not lettin her know the secrets of the show, the secret rites of the showmans that they incantate under the lights, what is her birth right. I’ll tell you what to do. I’ll give you the word and things’ll work out for you with the girl. You never will be free till that showman’s gone.’

He dropped something in the dirt and winked at me as he turned to go. The light caught on his coat and I saw that it was made all of shredded trucktyre. I bent and picked up the thing he dropped and walked me way back through the faces to the showing place and all the time I had the knowing growing that it was Crow I’d just been talking to and I was thumbing a razored shiv that I’d picked up from the ground. Back in camp and Smoov was snoring his fucken head off. His white neck where the pulse beats was showing naked and soft in the soft firelight and me mind so full of sadness and anger. I thought I’d just let a bit of the blood out from him to see what would happen but I couldn’t do it.

Next day dawned slow and lonely like the churn of a river’s mud. Me head was swollen from Crow’s brew and me eyes caked shut. I rubbed them out and looked around and saw through the dust to the truth of things, how the pieces had fallen. Isa was with anotha bloke, and I was so caught up in me thoughts I couldn’t see past me own mumbling dumbness. It played on me mind as I set the breakfast cookfire burning, heating lard in the pan, saltpig sizzling with snake egg and weedseed damper. Boiling sandy sinkhole water and stale coffee beans ground with pestle and stone for the billy. Isa was late to rise out of the swag. I didn’t know what time she’d got in. She wasn’t there when I’d laid down. I looked in her eyes but she didn’t look back. Smoov was snoring, always the way after he’d done a show. It was another day and work to be done, hooking up the cells to the camp jenny, making things right with the show gear. And then there was the thick edge of the shiv that I kept fingering in me tote, the shiv that Crow gave me and the words he seeded that I could be free of Smoov. What was that strange Crow creature? He disappeared away like in a dream and like in a dream it hit me that it wouldn’t be the last time I saw him.

Isa scratched her scaled up arm. She moved more slowly now, the poison from the snakebite had passed out of her system, though the scales spread. She squatted to eat and when she was done noshing she scrubbed the dishes clean in the sand. Coming back, she tried to sneak a look at the notes in me typewriter case. Smoov woke up right then, grumbling and mumbling to himself, and he saw what was going on right away.

‘No you don’t, them notes are for me only.’

‘Why can’t I see them?’

‘One day when you’re showman you can, but not yet. There’s truths in there you can’t understand.’

‘What are you so afraid of?’ she said.

‘I’m not afraid of anything, but those notes are me history and they are me future as well and no one gets to look at them till I say.’

‘You trust Jon with em.’

‘He’s not the full quid. He’s never gunna show nor ride the roads. He just letters the trancecrypts.’

‘Ah, I’m sick of your bullshit secrets. I’m gunna head out into camp, see if I can trade somethin for this disc drive from Lossiters Reef.’

She went off and I didn’t say nothing. I gave Smoov his brekky and boiled another billy. When I stood up, I knocked his brew over. His eye slits were hard and saltpig lard shiny on his gingy beard, mad as a cut snake.

‘Come ere, you dickhead.’

I cringed away from his hand but right then a bloke came up through the camp to speak to Smoov. I made myself busy with packing and the cleaning, but kept an ear on them.

The bloke wore leathers and pouches and he had on proper boots. He said, ‘There’s talk of trucks raidin in the backroads. A brumby mob rainin havoc down. Things are pullin apart in the camp, folks is settin out on their own. They’re scared we can’t protect em. And there’s this new idea about the Wotcher that is a saver instead of a sayer.’