Short Stories

Short stories are fun, they give the writer the chance to experiment with style, try new things or tweak old ways. They can also give the reader a small insight into the writer's head and how it works.

This story, The Greenish Finger of Fate, was a prize winner in the local annual competition. It's biographical and will, one day, end up somewhere in my biography, 'The Possibility of Roads'.

Funny, isn't it, how the smallest of events can shape people, or shape the world? What if, back in 1914, that bloke in Sarajevo had missed the Grand Duke, would the Great War have happened? And if it hadn't, what would the world have looked like now? What if Frau Hitler had had a headache? Or if ... if ... if.
Such is the stuff of history, but the 'ifs' sprinkle everyone's lives, seemingly inconsequential events can have huge consequences for even the humblest people.

Take Steve for example.

A young man just turned eighteen, barely more than a boy really. Not tall, not short, not skinny, definitely not fat, dark with a big shock of curly black hair held marginally in check by a leather headband, and a poor excuse for a beard clinging tentatively to his chin. He'd been hitch-hiking around the country for nearly a year, staying in cheap boarding houses or, more and more often, sleeping rough. He'd drifted up the east coast picking up work here and there until he reached Townsville before turning left and ending up, flat broke, in Darwin.

In Steve's time computers and mobile phones weren't even a dream yet, so to find work he had to look in a newspaper, door-knock or go to the CES, the Commonwealth Employment Service. He went to the CES the afternoon he arrived and, as luck would have it, labourers were needed on a road far out in the bush and, along with two others, he signed on. One man had a car, the other two would pay the petrol and they'd leave early the next day. He found a place to sleep that night in a 'hippy house' where travelers were welcome to throw a swag on a vacant patch of floor, and spent the evening listened to stories of the 'Hippy Trail' that ran through Asia, India, the Middle East and on to Europe. By the end of the night he had a plan—make enough money in the bush and hit that trail.

After a very long, rough and uneventful drive they arrived at a construction camp tucked under a spectacular escarpment fifty km south of Borroloola. They were allocated rooms, two men to each, shown the canteen and read the rules. The main rule seemed to be that no money was to be used in camp because it could lead to trouble and the Company tried to limit any possible causes of strife. Instead each man was given tickets for a weekly ration of beer or cigarettes, one ticket per can of beer or four per pack of smokes or tobacco and papers, twenty four tickets per week. A man could drink and smoke as much as he liked so long as he could still work, but more than the ration was marked up to be deducted from the final pay. Pays were either held back until the worker left then paid by cheque or sent to a nominated recipient—wife, mother, granny.

Every man was given three meals a day plus smokos. Steve soon found that breakfast and dinner were just palatable, but smoko and lunch were delivered on the job and were very hit-and-miss. Maggots were not unknown. Worker's conditions weren't high on the Company's agenda and work-health-and-safety was still just a Boss's nightmare. The two men Steve drove out with only lasted a couple of weeks before paying the company only three times the going rate for a tank of petrol and leaving for easier pastures, but Steve stuck with it for two months.

Until one morning as the sun climbed into a clear, blue, out-back sky, a tired worker slipped as he unloaded a pallet off a road train.

It landed with a crash a metre behind Steve who, at that moment, was hammering a nail into some concrete formwork. The crash made him jump in mid swing and hit the wrong nail, not the hard metal one but the soft one on his left forefinger.

In that instant his life changed irrevocably.

He dropped the hammer and said several unrepeatable words, picked it up again and tried to carry on, but blood spurted from the split skin and within a minutes the pulsing digit began to swell alarmingly and a passing foreman told him to see the nurse, but don't take too long, "the work won't do itself." The nurse, the only woman in the camp, displayed all the uncaring toughness she'd learned from a succession of bush camps. She looked at the finger dispassionately, wordlessly tied a small and mostly useless bandage tightly around it and told him to get back to work.

Come back tomorrow if it still hurts.

Of course it still bloody hurt! By the next morning the bandage had fallen off and beneath the crusted blood his finger was an alarming shade of purple and so swollen that the nail, now a sickly shade of green, stood perpendicular on the end of it. It might be just his left hand, but jobs were still difficult and painful so, after the usual breakfast of over crisped bacon and hard fried eggs, he trotted back to the nurse. He had to wait for her to arrive, bleary eyed and foul tempered. She looked at him, belched alcohol fumes and, without hesitation or local anaesthesia beyond the said fumes, picked up a scalpel and forced it into the nail, slicing it neatly down the middle. Blood spurted, pressure and pain eased and she rewrapped it.

"Stay away from dirty jobs. And take these," and she handed him a large bottle of multivitamins and shooed him out the door.

Stay away from dirty jobs? Yeah, right. As if he had any say in it. As luck would have it the camp's sewerage system had backed up overnight and as he passed it a foreman shouted at him for being late and told him to pick up a shovel and get over there.

"I had to go to the nurse," he said defensively and held up his bandaged finger. "She said to stay away from dirty jobs."

"Get a shovel and get over there."

He looked at the shovel, looked at the blokes calf-deep in shit, and said,

"I quit."

Now this was a Company who didn't take kindly to people quitting. Their camp was for workers, and anyone who quit or was sacked was no longer a worker and therefore not welcome and ordered out of the camp.

"Get your pay. Be out by lunch time."

Four hours grace, but he had one major problem. He had no vehicle. So there he was, no job, couldn't stay and no way of leaving. There was very little passing traffic for him to hitch a lift with and Borroloola was fifty ks away. He was already half regretting his spur-of-the-moment decision, but there was no going back, the Company didn't believe in second chances.

He walked through the near deserted camp to the office, told the young clerk behind the desk he'd quit and asked for his pay.

"Leaving?" said the clerk dismally, "Half your luck." He went to a bank of filing cabinets against the far wall of the little office and pulled Steve's details. Not much, just time sheets. Steve had no debts, he was just eighteen and not a seasoned drinker or smoker like most of the older blokes, so he'd managed to save a few coupons. In the absence of cash they were valuable camp currency.

"What'd you do to yourself?" the clerk asked when he saw the bandage. They knew each other well and often shared a beer or two, so Steve told him his saga. The clerk pulled a wry, sympathetic smile. "What now? How're you getting out?"

"Haven't worked that out yet"

"Try the truckie. Technically they're not supposed to carry people but sometimes a carton persuades them, and the bosses turn a blind eye." He filled out the details on the cheque and took it next door to be signed.

Suddenly Steve was looking forward to getting away from this shitty place and shitty job. He'd had enough of the ten-to-twelve hours a day, six days a week, five hours on Sundays. Mindlessly picking up rocks, shovelling concrete and bitumen, all the labouring jobs and always out in the full tropical sun. Thirsty and shitty work.

Literally shitty as it turned out. Their drinking water came from an old drum filled from the water truck that passed by regularly. One day Steve asked the truck's owner-driver what he'd done before this job.

"Pumped septics in Melbourne."

"With that truck?"

"Yeah."

Without asking Steve climbed onto the tanker and peered in, the scum on the water told him that it'd never been cleaned out. He felt a little ill but kept drinking the water because there was no alternative. He never said a word to anyone else, he liked the driver and knew very well that his life wouldn't be worth living if some of the others saw what he'd seen. There were some very hard men in the camp that would do serious damage with very little provocation—old bushies and men running from who knew what, men unsuited or unable to live in town who went from bush job to bush job, rarely touching on civilisation. One day the Borroloola cop came into the canteen and it almost emptied so fast that chairs clattered on the floor. Smiling, the cop got himself a beer and sat down with those that were left.

"They think I don't know about them, but I know everyone in this camp. Their real names, what they've done, and where."

"Why don't you arrest them?"

"Cost a fortune to take them to court and keep them in jail. While they're here they're productive and can't cause trouble. Some of them even send money to families, those not running from maintenance. And," he looked around the grubby canteen, "it's worse here than in prison."

The clerk handed him his cheque and Steve looked at it and whistled softly. He'd pretty much lost track of his earnings, he never saw them so they were just an abstract figure in his head. But now it was real, two months hard labour had given him more than he could have earned in eight months anywhere else.

All is forgiven. The maggots, the shit, the sewage, all of it!

He found the road-train driver in the canteen drinking coffee. He was a tall, wiry, desiccated man with skin and hair the ruddy colour of the dusty roads he drove on, his faded blue eyes wide and slightly unfocused from too many 'beans', pills popped to keep him awake and driving for days on end.

"Two slabs of VB," said the truckie without hesitating.

It seemed a reasonable demand and fortunately Steve had saved more than enough tickets to cover it. He brought the beer and a pack of tobacco and papers for himself and took the slabs to the table.

"When we leaving?"

The truckie looked at his watch and swore.

"Half an hour, I'll go without you if you're not there." and he cracked a can from the top slab before it could get warm.

Steve ran back to his room to pack his few possessions and hurried to the truck. He might not have much, even with his sleeping bag in it his pack was still only half full, but his books made his pack heavier than he'd like and he felt its weight as he slung it up and into the high cab. He climbed up behind it just as the Mack's motor started with a blast of black smoke and a noise that sent the cockies squawking into the freshly polluted air. With a good two hours left before his deadline to be out of camp elapsed they drove through the road works and onto the dusty track that styled itself as the open road.

Once clear of the works the truckie said,

"One condition to you coming along."

"What?"

"You have to keep me awake."

"How long since you slept?"

"Three days, I think. Sort of lost count."

Shit!

As they charged along the straight, featureless track in a huge cloud of dust Steve studied the driver from the corner of his eye. He looked like a hard man but he didn't look strong enough to control the huge machine. The steering was obviously heavy and the clutch took all his weight to depress it, but he managed the gear changes—a delicate dance of clutch and both hands on the two gear levers as the endless gear combinations crashed and meshed—with practiced ease. Not half-an-hour into the drive Steve saw the man's eyelids start to droop so he began talking loudly, asking questions, anything he could think of to keep the bloke with him.

"You ask a lot of questions," the truckie said.

"You want me to keep you awake? Any other idea on how I'm supposed to do that?"

He grunted. "Pass me that bottle of pills." He was already strung out so a few more wouldn't hurt. They had a long way to go to the highway.

Steve kept talking, but inevitably the motion of the truck and the endless, flat boredom of the country got to him. The next thing he knew they were ploughing through small trees, no sign of a track, just bush going down before the bull-bar.

"Shit!! Wake up!" he shouted.

"Which way's the road?" the truckie shouted back, instantly awake.

"How should I know? That way, I think!"

A long minute later the front wheels found the track again, slowed to a gentle stop and the truckie got out and meticulously checked all the tyres to make sure none had been spiked. They were lucky. Steve had never changed a tyre on a truck in his life and wasn't keen to start now. They were also lucky that the wet season rains had barely made it this far south so the ground was firm enough to hold them.

"Great job, keeping me awake. That's what I brought you for. Any reason I should keep you in the cab?"

Steve looked around at the great expanse of nothing. "If you leave me here, I'll probably die. Anyway, you got your two cartons," he said a little desperately.

The truckie grunted. "Pass me that bottle." and made no comment as Steve swung back up into the cab. Neither slept for the hour it took them to cover the hundred ks left to Daly Waters. They'd made good time despite the detour, but, as it turned out, not quite good enough.

The sun was just dipping into the bush when the road-train glided to a gentle stop at the side of the wide dust bowl that served as the town's car and truck stop. There were no cars in it, just one other truck bearing the same Alice Springs company name and emblem as theirs.

"That's Nick's rig," said the truckie without any great enthusiasm. "Bugger can talk the leg off a dingo. Stay out of sight. Don't want him seeing you."

Odd, why didn't he want Nick to see him? But before he could ask a thought occurred to the truckie as he started to open his door. Over his shoulder he asked,

"You want to come to Alice?"

"Nah. Heading for Darwin."

"I could do with the company. You might be a bit crap at keeping me awake, but that wasn't really your fault, and you're an interesting young bugger. Sure?"

"Going north. It's coming into winter down there, why would I want that? Thanks for the lift." and with that he opened the door, grabbed his pack and climbed down. The driver got out the other side and wordlessly headed for the pub to find Nick, have a feed and knock back as many beers as he could before swallowing another half bottle of pills and starting the nearly one thousand km trip home.

The road train hid Steve from view as he made for the General Store and the Bank Agency, his newly minted cheque in hand. The door was firmly locked, a notice beside it read 'Closed For Easter.' Easter? He suddenly realised that working seven days a weeks with no input from the outside world had left him with only a vague idea of what part of the year it was. His only temporal reference point was 'short Sundays' and a quick calculation told him that today was Thursday.

He was comparatively rich, but in actual spending power he had just one five cent coin in his pocket, all that was left after he'd paid his share of the petrol to get to Borroloola. Credit and debit cards were far in the future.

Bloody Easter! Four days of holidays, four days with five cents to his name. Things could get tricky, but the house in Darwin would see him through.

With a long, rueful stare at the pub he picked up his pack and started to walk back toward the highway, stopping only to top up his water-bottle at the tap beside the petrol pump. The sun had dropped behind the trees and it was rapidly getting dark, and this was the tropics where it was either day or night and not much between. The sky here left dithering twilights to more indecisive temperate regions, but smoke or storm clouds sometimes reflected the newly set sun to give an impression of a twilight. And as Steve plodded back to the highway that's what he saw—sun-lit storm clouds piling onto each other on the eastern horizon and, as the sky darkened, lightning lacing them.

First Easter, now this! The wet season had been a fizzer—the last rain he'd seen was the day he left Darwin—and the Gods chose NOW to rain?

The track took him around the old airstrip and he remembered reading somewhere that this neglected strip deep in the NT bush was Australia's first international airport, a refueling stop for airlines flying to and from Asia. 'Pity, it didn't still have flights,' he thought, 'save a lot of hassle.' He dropped his pack beside the one lane strip of tarmac laid by the Americans during the war which had become the Stuart Highway, and sat on it to gloomily watch the lightning. It was full dark now, but flashes constantly lit up the thunderheads and he realised they were coming his way.

Not good.

A couple of hours later he could hear the low grumble of thunder and he began seriously contemplating either a night in the open in an electrical storm with no shelter except his marginally water-proof sleeping bag with his head stuck in his half empty pack—that sufficed in showers, but he doubted it would do much good in a full-blown storm, and that lightning looked scary—or a retreat to the probably unwelcoming pub veranda. Then, just as a particularly bright flash lit up the landscape and thunder banged not far away, lights appeared behind him and the truck rolled to a stop.

"Sure you don't want to come to Alice?"

He didn't hesitate. He could hitch a lift north from Alice probably easier than from here and, given the choice of a dry, warm cab or a miserable and maybe dangerous night on the roadside, he slung his pack into the cab and climbed up after it. The cab reeked of alcohol and the truckie had an even more glazed look and for a moment Steve wondered if he would have been safer with the lightning, but they were moving, turning right and heading south. The first big raindrops landed on the windscreen and then—nothing. After all the flash and roar the storm was dry, but he was already in the cab and going south.

Progress was slow, the truckie pushed himself and muttered about 'needing to be home for Easter', but clearly didn't have the capacity to cope with more than fifty km per hour. Sometime around midnight he gave up the unequal fight, pulled into a truck stop and passed out.

Steve woke to the morning sun shining hotly on his face and his stomach snarling its need for food. He'd never particularly minded going to sleep hungry, but hated waking up that way. He glanced at the sleeping driver sprawled over the wheel, opened the door and climbed down to relieve himself. As he splashed his last the truckie appeared silently beside him and began to urinate into the dust, holding himself with one hand and a cold pub pie with the other. Steve reached back into the cab and got his vitamins and warm water-bottle from his pack. They both tasted bad.

They passed Three Ways where the road east branched off to The Barkly and Queensland, then shortly after passed the turn off to Tenant Creek.

"How come Tenant isn't on the highway?" he asked, not really expecting a sensible answer.

"Back when the mine was new there were a lot of tracks here. Story is that the beer truck got bogged on one of them and that's where the town started. The road, when it was built properly, went this way but the town stayed where it was. That's the story, anyway."

The low, semi-desert outside rushed by the open window quickly now, with the driver more in control. Then it slowed. Then the landscape was still.

"What?"

"Dunno. No power."

The driver climbed down and hoisted one side of the engine cowling and fiddled, then the other side, then tried to start it again. Nothing.

They sat in silence for a few moments, until Steve asked,

"What now?"

"Nick'll be along soon. I'll get a lift home and the company can pick it up" Then, as an afterthought he said, "Get out."

"What?"

"Get out. Take your gear and get away from the truck. I'm not allowed to carry passengers. If Nick sees you he'll tell everyone, can't help himself, and the boss'll hear and I'll get fired. Can't afford that, so get out. Now."

Steve looked desperately at the arid landscape outside. "I could die here!"

"Out! Now! I have no idea how far behind he is. Bugger off!"

He got slowly down and stood uncertainly, pack hitched over one shoulder.

"Get away from the truck. A long way away."

He walked a hundred metres and stopped.

"Further! Bugger off!"

"No!"

And so they stayed for two hours, until Nick roared into view and began to slow.

"Get out of sight or I'll..." Steve had known enough hard men not to test the I'll..., so he dragged his pack a few metres into the scrub and sat behind a bush until they'd gone. Then he went back onto the road and stared after them. The road was dead straight from horizon to horizon, broken only by the road-train parked, locked and abandoned. He found a bush that afforded some shade and waited. And waited. The silence was broken only by the occasional sorrowful crow's caw or the scream of a whistling kite. The afternoon dragged out and he willed himself not to panic, but people died like this. Then, about six o'clock the sound of an engine coming from the south reached him. It was the first traffic of any sort that had come by in either direction since Nick had driven off. He jumped up and stuck out his thumb.

The Kombi barreled past him without pause, but then slowed, stopped and backed up in a cloud of blue smoke and a horrible grinding noise. It was a very old Kombi, its faded paint mottled with rust. The driver reached across and shouted out the passenger window,

"Where you going?"

"Darwin."

"Sodom and Gomorrah!"

Steve had no answer to that and they stared at each other for a moment as the driver assessed him.

"Get in."

Steve opened the back sliding door and slung his pack in, then squeezed onto the front seat and the Kombi shuddered up to a steady fifty km per hour. He looked closely at the driver for the first time and saw a short man—hence the bench seat pulled so far forward that Steve's knees were hard against the dash—clean shaven, red faced and with a shock of red hair. He wore a plain white, sweat-stained t-shirt and crisply ironed slacks.

"The Lord told me to go back and pick you up. Against my better judgement, I might add," the man said, his voice somewhere between anger and resignation.

"Thank the Lord."

The man looked at him suspiciously.

"You are a Christian?"

"Yes," Steve lied, sensing that any other answer would see him back on the side of the road. The driver relaxed a little, then began mumbling quietly.

"Pardon?" Steve asked. He got a stern look in reply.

"Don't interrupt a man when he's talking to the Lord!"

"Sorry," and he slumped back and watched the endless bush reel slowly past and was asleep before it was dark, exhausted from stress and sun. He woke to the slam of a door and, before he could get himself oriented he heard the sliding door behind him open.

"I'm going to sleep. I would prefer if you remained outside," the driver grunted perfunctorily as he dropped Steve's pack on the ground. Steve uncurled, staggering slightly as the driver hopped nimbly onto a tousled bed in the back and locked the door behind him. Steve rolled out his sleeping bag, had a vitamin and a swig of old water, made a pillow out of his half empty pack and promptly went back to sleep beneath a carpet of stars packed so tightly that it was impossible to tell one twinkle from another, mercifully oblivious to his surprisingly painful stomach, his throbbing finger and the righteous, raucous snoring from the Kombi.

The smell of bacon frying woke him and he saw, silhouetted against a lovely peach pre-dawn sky, the little man crouched gnome-like on a low camp stool, staring into a pan sizzling atop a little gas ring.

'Yes!' he thought as he sat up, but when he looked closer he saw only one rasher, one egg, one plate and one mug set ready. The man looked up and said,

"The Lord has brought us a beautiful day, we must give praise," and shovelled the food onto his plate. He replaced the pan with a little pot of water for coffee, enough for one cup, and started to eat, mopping up the bacon fat and egg yolk with a piece of white bread. Steve sat and watched every mouthful like a dog at a barbeque, then he reached over and casually took a slice of white bread from the open loaf. The man looked startled, then his face darkened.

"Thou shalt not steal!" and he folded the loaf into its bag and put it in his esky.

Breakfast done and tidied, the driver emptied a jerry can of petrol off the roof rack into the Kombi and poured a jar of oil into the engine, then they pulled back onto the road and headed off into the sunrise.

'Sunrise? That can't be right," Steve thought. The sun should be shining in the driver's window, not dead ahead.
"Where are we?"

"The Barkley."

"What! I'm going to Darwin, not Queensland!"

They'd turned east while he slept.

"A town named after that godless heretic and is an abomination. The Lord told me to take you to Townsville."

And so it happened. It was Easter and they saw barely another vehicle until they reach Mt Isa, where Steve had asked to get out but the man refused to stop. He carried enough fuel in jerry cans on the roof and food in his esky for the entire trip and refused to stop at any habitation before Townsville. The whole time he kept a close guard on the food and only reluctantly allowed Steve to refill his water bottle, and then only occasionally and never full. He ate, slept and refuelled only on lonely roadsides where, with so little traffic, the risk of being stranded for days with little water was too great for Steve to stay.

They talked little, the driver spent most of his time praying and loudly singing hymns and Steve's questions, including why he was spending Easter travelling instead of in church, were roundly ignored.

They reached Townsville late on Easter Monday and wordlessly parted. Steve found a patch of bush to camp in but slept little. He'd had only one slice of white bread in nearly five days, long enough for his stomach to go beyond hurting and his finger to be on the mend, but he felt very groggy. For breakfast he had a sip of now green water to wash down his vitamin, and promptly threw up.

Shouldering his pack he walked slowly toward town, found a branch of his bank and settled onto the steps to wait for it to open. Then he found a café and ordered steak, eggs and onions with chips and salad. He started ravenously, but was appalled when he realised he was full and he'd barely touched the plate. He began picking desperately at it, but his stomach had shrunk so much that it threatened to send back the little he had eaten. As he sipped at a large mug of coffee that made his stomach rebel even more, he decided that he couldn't face the trip back over the Barkly.

Asia would still be there. One day.

If that bloke hadn't dropped that pallet Steve's life could have turned out very differently. He could have wandered from Asia to Europe, perhaps lived in a different country, made a different career, found different women, had different children, different descendants.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps not.