THE ROAD ahead of Jack’s truck was at first empty, since the river had subverted the highway. But as they drove across town, they did encounter other vehicles traveling slowly, hubcap-deep and all within the diamond of space Jelly had once drawn for Kate on a sheet of paper by the bar. One end the Cobar railway line, its adjacent side the highway, and then the two lines of levee. The Myambagh parallelogram in the inland sea, by a deadly river which now had ambitions to swallow the earth. Against that possibility, people rushed by in their four-wheel drives and station wagons, spraying water, anxious about the coming night, unwilling yet to sedate themselves with drink.
The showground entrance boasted of the Myambagh Annual Agricultural Show, nominating dates from the previous April, the April which had been occupied by the other Kate.
The wooden produce halls amidst which Jack steered his truck showed the same patchy yellow as the railway station. He parked by the central ring where in brave days the prize bulls and stud rams paraded and the show horses reared and competed. Now the ring was covered with a hill of sand dumped there without much design by tiptrucks. More men and women and children than you would have thought Myambagh contained filled hessian bags by shovel from these mounds, or else tied the bags with twine.
This appeared to Kate like wonderfully hard work. She advanced with Jack onto the showground and reached for one of the wet shovels which lay unclaimed on one of the lower mounds, not waiting at all—as Jack had to—to pay respects to those who required it of him amongst the organizers of the melee.
Joyful at this last Myambagh labor, Kate worked all dim afternoon, as the flesh of her hands turned soft on the downpour, as the shovel and the bag and the twine with which she tied the mouths of her sandbags began painlessly to bear away her skin. Jack came around with medical tape again and again.
—Giz a look at your hands, Kate love.
He would tie up the damaged fingers, making small regretful noises with his lips. He tried to fortify the knuckles and joints, where the flesh was most at risk, with dressings of plaster. But the work and the rain defeated all that. Adhesive, clogged with sand and water, hung like strips of flesh from everyone’s hands. The gloom grew astounding. It quenched all reflections. Kate began to shiver. An officious middle-aged man came around shouting that a new idea had been devised.
The French Revolution must have been like this, Kate thought, remembering something heard in a cool classroom in Sydney on a day of humidity. How Robespierre, shouting like this, possessed of a new plan, brought Danton to the blade.
At the transport depot, to which the man was pointing, there was a gigantic shed, a hangar. Sand was being dumped there, indoors, where volunteers could work out of the rain.
In near-darkness, under a sky choked by cloud, Kate loaded herself into a truck and sat amongst young women and high school students and beefy family men. The journey seemed to revive everyone, cause chatter and the comparing of damaged hands. Everyone was tired out, but in a feverish insomniac way. The communal efforts against water had put them in ecstasy. When they arrived under the great iron roof, they were eager to work again. They congratulated each other that the sand wasn’t as water-laden and not as heavy to shovel. The sand was in the bag, the dynamite on the verandah. Her life, ignoring the nullity of it, was under startling control. For a woman on the edge of renouncing Myambagh, she felt narcotically static, an utter citizen.
An ambulance officer, Maltese crosses on his cap and the shoulders of his shirt! He came round dressing damaged hands more competently than kind Jack. He came to Kate and asked her to stop the shoveling, and he looked down at her unloosed grip and began to weep.
—You are all trying so hard, he stuttered.
He felt she had sacrificed her hands for Myambagh. For the integrity of the polis.
Jack had by now gone somewhere, out in the dark. Building a levee of sandbags behind or on top of the earth levee. As Jelly had predicted, sandbags were essential to Myambagh.
A muscular sixteen-year-old came up with a mug of tea for her.
—You’re a tiger, he said.
He made her stop and sit down on a cable spool. She drank the sweet tea. It made her imaginative. Somewhere the bags she’d filled were holding out the water. Down by the wheat silos, along Bardia Street, beyond Lusitania Drive, and by the fences of the cemetery behind which the dead all kept their soggy graves, strict in their denominations. Resting on her cable spool and exalted with exhaustion, Kate saw Gus Schulberger make a tentative entry into the shed.
His head was bare and his black hair spiky with rain. Judging from his hunted look, the peculiar stealthy gleam of his green eyes, he had not come to fill sandbags. A young constable from Myambagh police, holding a quacking two-way radio, passed him, and Gus looked frankly furtive. The dead giveaway furtiveness of an honest man who lacks the front for deceit. He panned his face away and shaded his eyes till the boy had gone out with his barking radio into the weeping dark.
Sideways then he saw Kate and rushed across to her.
—Tough weather, Kate.
She could tell that he was very pleased to have found her. He wanted to know where Jelly was. Wearing no raincoat, he steamed like a dog, and even smelled a little like one. He had a pleasant canine musk.
Jelly was at the Palais, she told him. Taking down the names of evacuees.
She could imagine Jelly at the desk, full of all the gravity of rescue, an electoral roll open in front of him, and telephones to connect him to the Emergency Services and the police. This was not his chief task in life. It was a holiday from his chief task. If you thought about it like this, pausing, you could taste in this dense, weeping night the rumor of Jelly’s reduction to ordinariness.
Gus asked, Jesus, Kate, where’s the Palais?
She told him Wrangle Street. An old cinema and dance hall. The Pentagon of Myambagh floods.
Gus shook his wet head. Fascinated, she watched the roostery feather of wet black hair which extended from the back of his skull.
—Listen, could you show me the way?
Amongst the sandbag fillers, she had earned such credit that she had only to mention to one of the middle-aged supremos that she was going.
—I’d think you bloody well would, love. Have a few hours’ sleep, eh.
The rain had diminished in force, but could afford to now that it had gingered up the river and set waves of water moving across the plain. Kate was pleased in a light-headed way to find that Gus led her to the small furniture truck in which Chifley and Menzies had traveled to their employment with the Australian coat of arms in Wagga. In her dream catalogue of everything associated with Chifley, this truck had had its place.
Courtly in his way, Gus opened the passenger door for Kate. When he entered the cabin from his side and put his hands to the wheel, they trembled. He sat for a while, absorbing the good fortune of finding her, adjusting himself to the strain of not yet having found Jelly.
—I nearly got washed away crossing Tabramore. There’s fifty yards of bloody torrent there, Kate. And I tried it and stalled in the middle. Desperate bloody times. High center of gravity, these things. It was beginning to shift and tilt. A bloke with a tractor drove in and hauled me out. I don’t know his name. He’s my brother for life, that bugger.
She heard a clicking, pawy stirring in the back of the truck.
—Do you have the animals? she asked in hope.
—It’s all drenched in the back there.
—Is it the kangaroo?
—That’s right.
Kate turned her head to the little window which gave into the enclosed back of the truck. It was jammed however about two inches open, and could not be pushed further.
—Bloody magneto’s wet! Gus yelled as he tried again and again to start the engine.
When at last it caught he set the wipers going, though they made no difference, and drove away amongst the runny Impressionist images of showground and racecourse, past the Henry Lawson Primary School, up Dandibong Street and into Gunningbar, heading west past the Captain John Eglington High School. Kate tenderly rubbed her abraded hands. More than she expected: her dream coming back like this, smelling damp and sounding tentative, fixed in her presence by floodwater.
—So you have the kangaroo, you mean?
Gus said, Jesus!
He meant the rain and the condition of the world.
—Yes, it’s bloody Chifley.
Kate did not ask anything more. She noticed gardens awash behind their picket fences. Drowned rhododendrons. The crowns of the streets, which had been clear of water this morning, were now covered. Yet the basic geometry remained. Myambagh’s diamond of levees and embankments clearly held.
—I sold them to that bugger in Wagga, said Gus. He wasn’t the right sort of person. I kept hearing stories about treatment from people. It started with a vet I know. He called me and said the bastard was starving them, you know, to make them tractable. Get them up to the coat of arms, either side, and they’d be listless, wouldn’t hop away too quick. Bigger camera opportunity.
—Then I heard he was using the old electric prod, and he was keeping them in a garage too, separate from the animals in the open.
—Electric prod?
While she’d been having the dreams of night-bounding, Chifley had been pent up in a garage and bullied round with voltage.
—In the twentieth century, said Gus. But hang on, it gets worse. One weekend I drove down and had a snoop. It was all true. The stuff about starving them. You could tell they were in bad condition.
—Then I heard something in a pub that really made my blood boil. There’s an old Australian welterweight champion lives in Wagga, short of cash. The owner was planning a big match with Chifley and this boy. Absolutely illegal. RSPCA would spit chips. But he was doing it. A hungry bastard. He was going to have big gamblers in—some of the Chinese, some of the Greeks, fellers from Sydney. Give them a swish dinner, and then the main event … Would have put a ginger-up drug in Chifley’s tucker, to make him stand and trade blows …
Gus wagged his head and spiky hair continually while driving. The unimaginable, Dickensian motives of the park owner!
—Just verifies what I always bloody knew. No animal ought to be in captivity. It corrupts everything. The vets get corrupted. You know, like doctors in some bloody concentration camp …
Kate herself felt at once an affront to rival Gus’s. Boxing matches were a blasphemy against Chifley’s compact, bounding brain, and the electric prod a violation of his limpid eyes.
So Gus had borrowed his friend’s truck again, and gone down there and got them out last night. From the perimeter fence he watched the security guard. A lazy bugger, the guard disappeared into his shack in the end to watch some football match telecast from Europe late at night, and that was the last seen of him.
To make his entry, Gus had cut an opening large as a door in the park fence, and on leaving it with the beasts had repaired it with wire. Gus, the earnest citizen, the man of good civil manners. I take your beasts, but you’re entitled to your fence.
Gus coughed resonantly. The water had penetrated the points of his chest as well.
—This is a bloody ridiculous situation for a grown man to be in.
They passed the statue of the World War I soldier who kept his face set against the downpour, and his boots would be the last of any civic monument to go under. His companion piece, the humbler and lower statue of a merino sheep, looked hunched and ready for submersion.
—The road’s closed now, east and west, said Gus. And Menzies and Chifley … They’re a bloody inconvenient size to travel with.
Kate pointed through the windscreen: the art deco façade of the Palais. She found it hard to imagine an age in which Myambagh would have had time for such pretension. In front of it sat well-equipped four-wheel drives and police vehicles. Winches were attached and special lights, and you got a sudden hope that there was no emergency from which they could not haul people, no tragedy on which they could not shed a beam.
Gus parked some way from these opulently rigged trucks. As Kate closed the door behind her, she felt a strange phantom electricity, the negative impression of the pleasure of that efficient, bounding, marsupial breath beside which her own breath and Gus’s were cramped, permitting nothing better than doggedness.
The first refugee from flooded low ground she found inside the door, right in the lobby of what once had been Myambagh’s ritzy cinema, was Burnside the investigator, retainer and enforcer. He was altered in some way: he was wearing emergency clothing, donated stuff. Burnside in the weeds of charity.
Burnside grabbed her wrist. He seemed full of a heaving hysteric strength, and was trying for one or other of his practiced, gimcrack dignities, something to knock her flat with.
—Listen, I had a hell of a time, Mrs. Kozinski. Had to give up my rent-a-car in the middle of a crossing. Nearly got washed away as I waded out. My clothes are wrecked with stinking floodwater. What do you think of that?
—It isn’t my fault, she said.
—Lost the papers of course. They’re floating somewhere across the bloody plains. The bloody ink is running on them. So what do you think, eh?
She had his vanities at her disposal.
—I think you’ve got something really interesting to tell people about. When you get back home.
—I could have missed a child’s birthday party, he accused her.
But she knew from Paul Kozinski that he acknowledged no children, had only ex-wives.
Past Burnside, she could see the highly lit section of the hall, down there by way of the aisle, past the remaining cinema seats, in the open space below the stage. Tables and telephones as she’d imagined, and Jelly, white-and-blue in the face with tiredness and plain duty, listening to townsmen and officials discuss something urgent. Jelly looked watchful amongst them in a special way, exactly like a man with a secret strategy which wasn’t in their book of remedies.
—There he is, she told Gus, directing him onward into the lit floor-space of the Palais. But Gus was wary of the official look of some of the men. He dropped himself, in his wet clothes, in a seat three rows back. Burnside, who was helplessly stalking Kate and Gus, plumped down in his wet clothes three seats further back again. He called to Kate.
—You can’t tell me you couldn’t have signed those bloody things last night, Mrs. Kozinski! You can’t tell me that!
Gus was confused by this side argument.
—What’s this feller talking about? he wanted to know. But his attention fixed itself again on Jelly.
Kate said, Mr. Burnside, I’m sorry for your troubles. But I am entitled to take as long as I like with important documents. You’re getting hysterical.
She loved saying that. To the Burnside of the construction industry, the one who made others hysterical by dangling them from the fourteenth floor by one ankle.
What a delight to see the way his professional air had been eroded. Without that betraying flick of the head, she simply walked away from him, this man without his own clothes, his own car, without the signatures for which he would be paid commission by the Kozinskis who rightly judged her but who themselves needed weighing and sifting, who needed the sharp end of their screams turned back on themselves.
At this stage Jelly saw her and broke away from the group and advanced up the aisle amongst the aged plush of the cinema seats. Arriving, he saw Gus’s wet black hair, and the leathery Schulberger face cautiously raised to him. She believed it frightened him for a moment: all the mad people, himself counted in, in the one space.
He pretended they were all there for a routine report.
—They say there’ll be some flooding in the low parts of town. But we won’t have to move people out by helicopter unless the levees break.
Then he lowered his voice.
—See that fat fart Parkinson from Emergency Services? And old McHugh? They’ve got all the bloody first-class equipment to do it. But they aren’t bloody up to it!
It was as if he was stating these ideas for the first time, as if an amnesia related to all his earlier dry-weather canvassings of the matter in the bar of Murchison’s Railway.
—You ought to hear them. They say if the levees went, by the time you got permission from the Police Department and from the Minister of bloody Transport for the explosives experts to come in, the water would’ve subsided anyhow.
He shook his head. McHugh and Parkinson had between them, by taking this expected line against dynamite, confirmed their impotence in front of Jelly and left him stuck finally with the task. Even Gus, for all his curious problems, was shaking his head, unable to believe this, the old men’s flatulence and lack of grit.
In his yellow overalls, Jelly began to shiver. He wanted others to take the cup from him. He wanted pillars of the community to be pillars of the community.
—You can’t put your faith in levees. Nature abhors the bloody things.
—Jelly, Jelly, said Gus, trying to temper Jelly’s enthusiasm for the one big question. He led Jelly aside by the elbow. In his cinema seat, the irrelevant Burnside had begun to sleep, his knees thrust out, his legs crooked, his head abandoned on his shoulder.
When Gus finished, Jelly began whispering very calmly. Judging by Jelly’s magisterial air, all this was easily solved.
He had solemnity, and he turned to Kate, wearing an air of familiar command as if they had been companions from before the flood, not this one, but the one which instigated the messy, clamorous, arrogant business of history.
—Take Gus across to Jack’s, he said. There’s room for his stock there.
Stock. As if Gus had a truckload of cattle.
So now Kate traversed Myambagh the other way, accompanying bewildered Gus and the beasts, the stolen faunal elements of the Coat of Arms of Australia’s Commonwealth.
—The owner’ll be ropable of course, said Gus. He’ll be after me for theft and loss of earnings …
They drove straight into the backyard of the Railway by way of the half-flooded side street, swinging into the pub yard as nineteenth-century pastoralists did on their bays or black mares, or else as now the carbon dioxide cylinder truck from Wagga regularly did.
—Look there, Kate directed.
All so familiar and eternal this yard was, like the landscape of a childhood. So she behaved like a proprietor. She jumped from the truck and opened an uneven door into what had once been stables. Gus summoned all his grace and backed the truck in so exactly. The lack of any need for communication between them marked him as a desperately applied being, the way she too was desperately applied.
In one movement she closed the stable door, and the dismounted Gus opened the back door of the truck. A unison, directed by the one brain.
Gus breathed with greater ease now. The stealth had gone from his green eyes. He had a kind of hope. He hauled out planks and set them to provide walkways to the ground for Chifley and Menzies. After an interval for reflection, both animals seemed about to avail themselves.
The first to appear was the great flightless bird, Menzies. He looked austere. He exhibited a primeval stiff-kneed suspicion, intensified by the experience of entertainment-park discipline. He moved to his left, fixed Kate with an eye, and moved to the right. Then he doubled a leg into his body backward, so that it all but disappeared. Only one leg supported him, yet he implied that now at last he was content and resting.
Chifley could have dismounted with one bound. He knew he had enough flight there, packed down in his lungs. But as if his life in Wagga entitled him to it, he was lazy. He tried to creep down the board on his tail and the heels of his great hind paws, and when it looked as if he might overbalance—purely out of the easy option he’d taken, not because of any problem to do with center of gravity—he made it to the floor of the old stables in one unhandy flop.
His descent of course enchanted Kate and utterly took up her attention. Again she verified the heft of his tail and hindquarters, and by contrast the supplicant, thin forepaws folded in some mimicry of prayer above his resounding gut and his brawny chest.
Behind him, from the back of the truck, came a stench of mud and of that dirty water which, Burnside had earlier complained, ruined clothes.
—Dry, Gus addressed the beasts. You’re dry now. No more bloody complaints.
Though dealing with soundless animals, he apparently saw them as full-throated, complaining ones.
She was aware of her tiredness, and her night brain descended on her, with its nuances of easy movement and gracious air.
—I’ll sleep in the truck.
—But it’s water-fouled.
He insisted he would be warm. There was a ledge with blankets.
—Really, said Gus.
She had seen enough. She even wanted to get away from the shaggy-coated concrete Chifley, who seemed to have brought no fear or twitches with him out of his captive state, and go off to her sleep to contemplate the beast’s abstract locomotion. She got Gus some bread and black tea—it was all he wanted, he said, and so she left at last and crossed the yard, where it was raining again, and moved in under the iron roof of the back verandah which raged with rain. She felt leaden yet had a sense of anticipation. One of the Escapees emerged from the Men’s. He was drunk—he had been celebrating the goodwill he had shown in building Myambagh’s levees.
—Jesus love. We’re going to be plastering and painting this fucking town forever.
—Good, said Kate.