He tore his eyes away from the devastated front end of the car and looked at the bent sign. He reflected on the irony of hitting it directly after striking the kangaroo. Perhaps it would make a good dinner table anecdote in the future. But before I start dining out on the experience, he thought to himself, I’ve got to get the hell out of this place!
The sun had gone down half an hour earlier and it was getting darker by the second. Chaseling’s blue eyes narrowed behind heavy-framed, Clark Kent-style glasses as he scanned the landscape. No houses or other buildings. No power lines or other signs of so-called civilisation. Just large tracts of pale orange dirt, tinged a delicate shade of lavender in the afterglow of sunset. Dotted against this backdrop were the twisted, dark shapes of small mulga trees, most of them bush-sized, no taller than a person, with thin, gnarled branches and sparse, thin leaves. He walked onto the road, hoping to see the headlights of a car glimmering in the distance. But the only lights were the stars putting in an early appearance in the purple-grey sky. Soon it would be completely dark.
He heard a rustling noise coming from the scrub near the car and realised immediately what it was – the kangaroo. Following the sounds, he walked up to a knee-high patch of saltbush just beyond the bent signpost.
The kangaroo lay on the ground weakly kicking out with its back legs, both of which were splayed out at unnatural angles. As he got closer he heard the sound of the marsupial’s laboured, rasping breath. He bent down beside the stricken animal. There were pink bubbles gathered around its mouth and its undamaged eye gazed up at him with a look that seemed to say, ‘Kill me! Quickly!’
Chaseling felt a responsibility to end the animal’s pain. He returned to the car and got the tyre lever.
A minute later, his grisly work done, he put the tyre iron back in the boot. His hands were shaking, and one of them was splattered with specks of blood and brain. So were his elastic-sided boots and his bare lower legs beneath a pair of navy blue cargo shorts. There were also red droplets on the lenses of his glasses. His medical training hadn’t prepared him for killing animals with a tyre lever. His tall, lean body suddenly doubled up and he vomited.
He remained bent over, his stomach heaving as he supported himself with his hands against the car, for more than a minute. Slowly straightening up, he took a deep breath. He got a one litre water bottle from inside the car and rinsed out his mouth, then washed his hands and glasses. The front of his T-shirt, which had a Doctor Who-meets-Andy Warhol theme of nine identical but different-coloured Daleks, became a makeshift towel and lens cloth.
Chaseling put his spectacles back on, feeling much better now he was no longer observing the world through a filter of blood spots. There were still specks of blood and brain in his blonde hair. Other bits of kangaroo had become caught in his tawny brown beard. But it was good that he remained ignorant of the fact, because he probably would have used all or most of the water in the bottle trying to rinse himself clean. And in the Red Centre, a little water is a dangerous thing.
He got back into the car and tried the ignition again but got the same click as before, sounding very sluggish and definitely not the preliminary to the RAV’s engine grumbling back to life. Stepping back out, he stood and listened for an approaching vehicle. The only sounds to be heard were the buzzing of flies zeroing in on the corpse of the kangaroo and the clink-clink of cooling engine parts.
But then there was a flash of light in the distance. A car. He could hear it now. Chaseling positioned himself at the edge of the road. As the lights drew closer, he saw how there was just a single main beam on the left side of the car, with a parking light shining dimly on the right. He started waving his hands.
The car was slowing down. It was an old, battered-looking Ford Falcon which sounded like it badly needed a tune-up, or possibly even a new engine. Now it was passing him, brakes squealing. He got a glimpse of dark faces looking out.
With a crunch of wheels on stones, the Falcon pulled over onto the verge twenty metres ahead of his own car. Chaseling broke into a run. As he closed the gap with the stationary vehicle, he had a fleeting but chilling thought of outback serial killers and the film Wolf Creek.
He slowed to a walk when he reached the car and went round to the driver’s side. Looking up at him was the smiling face of an Aboriginal man, probably about the same age as Chaseling, mid to late twenties. Gazing over the driver’s shoulder was a silver-bearded man aged between fifty and sixty wearing a black cowboy hat. His face also looked friendly, definitely not serial killer material. In the back seat Chaseling saw a boy of perhaps six or seven. The youngster’s eyes were wide and apprehensive, regarding Chaseling as if he was some lizard-headed alien that just stepped off a spaceship.
‘Need some help, Kumina?’ asked the man behind the wheel, speaking in a husky, strangely-accented voice.
Chaseling nodded. ‘I hit a kangaroo. Then I hit a kangaroo warning sign.’
The cowboy-hatted elder in the passenger seat laughed and said, ‘You’re a lucky fella!’ His voice had the same accent, only stronger, and was also very throaty. Someone with synaesthesia might start smelling campfire smoke when they heard it.
‘What happened to the kangaroo?’ asked the man behind the wheel.
‘Dead,’ Chaseling said. ‘In front of my car.’
The driver said something to the older man in Pitjantjatjara, the local language, and shifted the gear stick into reverse. As the car slowly started moving backwards, Chaseling walked along beside the open driver’s window and said, ‘It was critically injured, multiple broken bones, half blind. I put it out of its misery.’
The Falcon stopped in front of the RAV and the two men got out. Both were barefoot and dressed in crumpled T-shirts and jeans. Cowboy Hat ran excitedly to the dead marsupial. ‘Malu!’ he said. He grabbed the kangaroo by its thick, long tail and dragged it to the Falcon, detouring around the place where Chaseling had vomited. The other man had the boot lid open. Together they hoisted the roo into the trunk and slammed the lid shut. ‘Good tucker,’ said Cowboy Hat, whose T-shirt bore the faded image of a loincloth-wearing Aborigine sitting cross-legged playing a didgeridoo.
The younger man turned to Chaseling and said, ‘Where you going, Kumina?’
‘Alice Springs. Starting a job there in three days.’
‘Long way from here. We can take you to our community. It’s not far.’
Chaseling was travelling light, with just a holdall and swag. He got these from his car. The bedroll had to share the boot with the kangaroo, but the holdall fitted on the back seat, Chaseling and the boy sitting on either side.
As they got under way an orange rim of light appeared on the horizon in front of them. A huge full moon the colour of an amber traffic light had begun to rise, lighting up the road ahead a lot more effectively than the single headlight beam. The driver maintained a moderate speed of no more than 70 km/h. Which meant he was able to take evasive action as a kangaroo, a grey one this time, leapt from the edge of the road and onto the blacktop – where it decided to stop, sitting back on its haunches, its eyes pinpoints of white light as it looked at the rapidly approaching car. The driver’s bare foot massaged the brake pedal while his hands gently turned the steering wheel anti-clockwise, putting the car on a course that would take them well clear of the kangaroo. ‘The trick is never drive too fast when there’s roos about,’ he said, then added an angry exclamation in Pitjantjatjara as the kangaroo suddenly did an about-turn and hopped in front of the car again.
‘They haven’t much road sense,’ Chaseling remarked as the driver brought the speed down to a near-crawl and they