There was a bad smell about Kali. Gus smelt it every time he walked past her. Her breath had turned sour, and when she lifted her trunk to greet Gus, he had to turn his head away.
Doc and Cas decided she’d have to have the night off at Newman, a big mining town in the Pilbara. A good crowd turned up for the show but as soon as it was over, Doc was out with Kali again, feeding her one of his cure-all potions from a bucket.
‘Why don’t they call a vet?’ asked Gus.
‘As if a vet would know what to do with an elephant!’ scoffed Effie. ‘If we were in Perth, Doc’d call the zoo but out here – it’s not exactly elephant country, is it?’
Effie was in a bad mood again, snapping at everything Gus said. He couldn’t work out what he’d done to set her off.
‘What is it?’ he asked, cornering her as they were loading up the trucks for the next move.
‘What is what?’
‘You know. You’re pissed off with me about something.’
‘It’s nothing. Just you and your sucky sooky stuff with your mother. It makes me sick. I heard you yesterday, telling her you missed her and couldn’t wait until she got to Broome!’
‘What am I meant to say! – “Don’t come and get me, Mum. I’ve forgotten what you look like and who cares that you’re fighting cancer and want me to come home”?’
Gus didn’t wait to hear her reply. He ran across the lot and jumped into the front of Kali’s truck, a big old Dodge. No way was he getting stuck in a car with Effie, listening to her complain all the way to the next town.
From Newman they headed to Marble Bar – the hottest town in Australia. Usually they drove by night but Doc didn’t want to take 200 kilometres of unsealed road in the dark, so they set off in the early morning light. By nine in the morning, the desert was shimmering in the heat. Gus’s skin stuck to the upholstery in the cab of the truck and every time he gazed out the window he saw quivering mirages.
All the country around was a deep, rich red and the sky the palest blue. Doc told stories about the goldfields down south around Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie where his father and grandfather had performed to huge audiences of miners when the rush was on at the turn of the century. He told how when he was a boy, Zarconi’s followed the miners north to the gold rushes at Marble Bar and Nullagine. How the big top had just been one more tent in a city of tents and new arrivals slept on straw with nothing but a strip of canvas stretched above them.
‘Gold and circuses, they went together back then. Kali was there too, of course. I’ve never had a day of my life that I haven’t woken up to her,’ he mused. ‘When I was a boy, I used to ride her from town to town. Course, we didn’t bring her up this far north until we got a truck for her. But down south, when I was a really little tacker, my pa would put me up on her and I’d ride her from one town to the next. She was too heavy to put in a wagon. You know, I reckon she must be nearly seventy years old, our Kali. I’ve known her longer than anyone alive.’
As if on cue, Kali called out, an eerie cry that rose up above the roar of the engine. Doc veered off the road and leapt out of the driver’s seat. Cas pulled off the road too and the whole convoy of circus vehicles followed, coming to a stop on the roadside while everyone waited to see what was wrong.
Doc and Cas opened up the back of the elephant truck. Kali was on her knees, with her head at a weird angle to her body.
‘Let’s get her out of there,’ said Doc. ‘We’d better hose her down – maybe she’s overheated. Then we can hoist a tarp on the shady side of the truck while we rig up a sling inside it. We’ve got to get her off her feet if she can’t support her own weight. Once she lies down, it will be the end of her.’
Everyone gathered around the back of the truck as Cas and Doc stood either side of Kali’s head and tried to urge her to her feet. Doc was shouting instructions to Nance and Hannah, listing the equipment they needed to bring him.
Gus joined Stewie and Vytas, who were hitching the tarp. He helped tie a couple of guy ropes in place and watched as Kali moved slowly and painfully down the ramp. When she reached the bottom, her legs gave way again, and she crashed to the ground. A cloud of dust swirled around her. She lay on her side on the hot red earth, her trunk limp, her body a sprawling grey mass. Her breath became shallow and fast. Doc put his arms around her head and spoke to her encouragingly, but Kali had shut her eyes. Gus had to look away. He was standing only a couple of metres from her in the shadow cast by her huge body. Her side was heaving up and down. Doc was talking fast now, his voice pleading, demanding. Kali raised her head a little, struggling to bring herself to her feet again but the effort was too much. With a great sigh she slipped back. Doc pressed his face against her hard leathery hide.
Nance was the first to move.
‘Everyone, get the gear back in the trucks. We’ll stop for a smoko until we’ve sorted out what to do about Kali. Hannah, make us a cup of tea, will you, love? Gus, fetch your grandfather’s hat from the truck.’
Gus ran to the front of the Dodge and reached up into the cab for Doc’s Akubra. When he got back to where Kali lay, he felt strangely shy of Doc. Doc hadn’t moved. His face was hidden and one hand moved rhythmically back and forward, stroking Kali’s trunk. Nance came over and took the hat from Gus.
‘You go and join Effie,’ said Nance.
‘But what’s gonna happen to Kali?’
‘Never you mind that, just leave us for a bit.’
Everyone was crammed into Hannah’s caravan, drinking cordial or tea. No one said much. Gus pushed his hand against his chest. It hurt in a way he’d never felt before. He rubbed it hard to see if he could make the pain subside.
Half an hour later, the whole convoy was back on the road, heading to Marble Bar. The heat was sweltering and the corrugations in the road shook the breath out of Gus as he sat wedged between Effie and Cas.
‘How can we just leave her there like that!’
‘She’s dead, Gus,’ replied Cas, wiping the sweat and tears away from his face.
Effie said nothing. She slumped in the window seat, staring out at the spinifex and red desertscape.
‘But it’s not right to just let her rot there, like that. How can Doc do that – just drive away leaving a tatty old bit of canvas over her? Even Lily got a proper burial.’
‘Look, Gus, Doc will do what he can, but it’s not humanly possible for us to move her. If he hadn’t got her out of the truck, we could have taken her to Marble Bar with us and buried her there, but we can’t move her now – she’s just too big.’
It was early afternoon by the time they reached Marble Bar. Every truck in the convoy was coated in a thick layer of red dust. No one was keen to pitch the tent in the burning afternoon sun. Stewie sat on the steps of the bunkhouse caravan and drank beer from an eskie. Cas and Vytas sat playing cards, an electric fan between them. Hannah gave Effie and Gus the last of the icy-poles that she’d secretly been saving and they lay on the linoleum of her kitchen floor, waiting for the day to end. There would be no show that night. Gus watched as Nance helped Doc down from the Dodge and guided him across the dusty lot to their caravan. He seemed smaller than Gus had ever seen him, bowed down with an unbearable weight.
‘My chest still hurts,’ said Gus to Hannah as she poured another glass of iced tea. ‘I think there’s something wrong with me. Maybe my cracked rib is playing up or something.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with you, Gus. It is grief. It makes all of us hurt like that.’
‘But I feel like I hurt inside my bones,’ he said.
She reached down and felt his forehead and stroked the hair away from his eyes.
‘Yes, this is how I feel too. This is part of it.’
At sunset, Gus saw Doc head into town – straight down the main street to the pub. Gus felt a surge of worry rise up in him. On the odd occasion that Doc went into the pub, he usually came home and slept in the big top. Sometimes he’d sleep on the hay bales between the horse float and the elephant truck. There would be nothing but the hard desert ground for him to sleep on tonight.
In the middle of the night, Doc came crashing in through the caravan door. Gus sat straight up in bed, but Doc ignored him and lurched down to where Nance was sleeping. Gus could hear the murmur of their voices and the sound of Nance opening drawers. Ten minutes later, they tiptoed past him and opened the caravan door.
‘Nance, where are you going?’ called Gus.
She pulled the screen door open and looked at Gus in the half-light of the desert moon.
‘Get your shoes on, quick smart,’ she said, without offering any explanation.
Gus quickly pulled on a pair of cotton shorts and his battered runners. He didn’t stop to grab a windcheater.
A bright gibbous moon hung over Marble Bar. They drove through the town and waited on the far side with the engine running. Suddenly, from down a side road, Gus heard the roar of a big machine. A crane, like a giant insect in the half-light, swung out on to Highway 138.
Doc revved the truck and chased after it, overtaking just as they got out of town and onto the heavily corrugated highway. An hour later they reached the place just north of Nullagine where Kali’s body lay under the desert sky.
Even Kali’s corpse looked tiny beside the giant crane. The wheels alone were over two metres high. A couple of men leapt down from the cabin and helped Doc and Nance uncover Kali’s body. It took them nearly an hour to work the thick wire cables under her and wrap them around her huge girth. Gus stood and watched. He was freezing cold out in the desert night air and he leapt from foot to foot and slapped his arms around to keep warm.
When the elephant’s body was secure, the men winched her up with the arm of the crane. One of the operators looked at Gus shivering in the moonlight.
‘Hey, kid, why don’t you come and ride in the cabin with us?’ he said.
Gus was almost too numb to speak. The man helped him up a metal ladder into the booth of the crane and they headed back down the dirt highway.
‘Where are we taking her?’ asked Gus, warmly wedged between the two beefy men.
‘To an elephant’s graveyard,’ said one of them, grinning.
The cab of the crane was so high up that they had a perfect, sweeping view across the Pilbara. The engine hummed beneath them, it was a smoother ride than any of the circus vehicles. Winding tracks twisted their way through the moonlit spinifex on either side of the highway. The moon hung low in the western sky and small, gnarled trees cast eerie shadows across the landscape.
‘Your grandad was telling us about Kali, about having to leave her to rot out in the desert like that. Must have broke his heart,’ said the crane driver. His name was Trevor and his beer-belly pressed against the huge steering wheel of the crane. ‘The yarns he told about her! Never heard a bloke with so many yarns about an animal. So me and Nick here thought we should help out a bit – do a bit of moonlighting as elephant funeral directors. We use this little beauty to lift 200-tonne trays off the back of them trucks they use down at the open-cut mines. Picking up an elephant is nothing much for a baby of this size.’
‘But where are we taking her?’ asked Gus again.
‘Well, long time back, they used to prospect for gold around here and there’s plenty of disused mine shafts left. Poor bloody animals fall down them from time to time. Couple of kids been killed in them too. Most of them are too small for an elephant, but there’s a couple not too far north of Nullagine that should take your grandfather’s friend here.’
The crane turned off the road onto a bumpy disused track, and they reached the mine shaft just as the sun was coming up over the horizon. Gus looked out at the huge form of Kali suspended from the wires.
‘C’mon, kid, we’ll have to jump out and give Trev directions to get her centred over the shaft,’ said Nick.
There was a whooshing noise as Trev released the cables that held Kali in place and her huge body dropped down the mine shaft. Gus braced himself to hear the sickening thud of Kali’s body reaching the bottom but it never came. He imagined her falling through the dark shaft forever, falling until she reached the other side of the earth, where perhaps she would emerge as a young elephant in an exotic country – a country where she really belonged.
Doc bent down, scraped up a handful of red desert soil and sprinkled it into the mine shaft.
‘Goodbye, old friend,’ he said softly.
As they walked back to the truck, dawn was breaking and the first rays of morning sun crept over the horizon. No one spoke. Nance had brought a bunch of dried flowers and she crumpled the dry petals in her hand and scattered them across the desert.