After sixteen hours on the road, the distant sight of the old pub was a relief. The flatness of the road meant they still had half an hour to drive but there it was ahead of them, promising cold beer, food, maybe air conditioning.
Tara knew this last would be a vain hope; rather there’d be a sluggish ceiling fan, the doors—with their ineffectual fly strips flapping—left open so the men didn’t stifle inside and the dogs could go in and out at will.
Every outback pub was the same.
It was warm inside the station wagon, even with the aircon blasting. The thermometer said outside was 45 degrees Celsius, and Tara could feel it when she put her palm on the windscreen.
They planned to spend the night at the pub, although Tara hadn’t been able to book. Hopefully there’d be rooms so they could have a night off from sleeping in the hitched caravan. They’d share a room if they had to.
“Look, Jonas!” Tara said. Her son raised his eyebrows. He was in the back seat, having driven the last stint, five hours’ worth, and was tired now and more than usually unresponsive. “I wonder if they’ll have internet. You can get in touch with your friends,” she said, a statement she instantly regretted. Dale took his hand off the wheel and patted her own, their married couple secret language for, Fucked that up, move on.
Twenty minutes later Dale pulled up in front of the pub, where half a dozen vehicles sat parked on the red dirt. Three utes, a battered Holden, a long-haul truck, and something that looked like it was made out of corrugated iron. There was plenty of room for the caravan they towed behind; they could have pulled straight in but Dale did his usual ten minute-back-the-caravan-into-position thing. By the time he was done, the veranda was crowded with men and dogs, come out to watch. They broke into applause as the O’Briens got out of their car, and Jonas went bright red.
“Nice job, mate,” one of the men said, and Tara could only be grateful she hadn’t been driving. Dale took a small bow but the men had already turned to go back inside so the joke was lost. Tara smiled, making sure he saw it.
Dale hadn’t worked since his job disappeared in a company reshuffle six months earlier, but he’d tried hard to stay positive, making little jokes, keeping things light. This holiday was almost a reward for that. A break in the routine, a change; they all needed it. He’d received an excellent severance package.
Outside the car was like a furnace; she’d stood next to bonfires with less heat to them. Tara stretched carefully but still her knees buckled when she tried to walk. When they travelled so much each day, she felt much older than forty-seven.
“Do I have to go in?” Jonas asked.
Tara had a quick look around. “There’s no shade anywhere so yeah, you have to come in.”
“The Three Musketeers!” Dale said. He was always trying to get them to call themselves that; Tara and Jonas never did.
Inside the pub, they stood for a moment, getting their bearings. “Welcome to the Digger’s Arms,” the barman called out. “What’ll it be?” He was tall and broad, with a bright red face and a shock of red hair to match. He gestured for them to come to the bar and they did, Jonas tripping over the paws of a large dog on the way. An old man sitting by himself at the counter gave them a quick glance, then went back to his beer. Nearby, a middle-aged man with a priestly collar sat with three younger men, all of them in blue sleeveless t-shirts, the table filled with empty beer glasses. Other tables were filled, too; it was Saturday evening, the big night. No other women though, Tara noted.
“G’day,” Dale said.
“What’ll it be?” the barman said again.
“What would you like to drink, Jonas?” Dale said.
“Jonas is the name, is it? They call me Bluey. Obvious reasons,” the barman said, running his fingers through his red hair.
“I’ll have a gin and lemon,” Tara told Dale. “And get Jonas a beer. Choose him something.”
She knew if they were in Victoria he’d order VB, Queensland it’d be XXXX, but they were in New South Wales so he asked for a Toohey’s for them both. He was always eager to please and didn’t understand that it held him back.
“And some beer nuts, too, on me.” It was the man with the priestly collar, standing at the bar now. He shook hands with Dale and Jonas, and bowed to Tara. “I’m Father John,” he said, “and the burning question is, what brings you here?”
The whole pub wanted to know, it seemed, because the room fell silent.
“So it turned out my job doesn’t exist anymore, so here I am out of work and at a loose end, so we decided to take a road trip,” Dale said. “We’re following in the footsteps of my wife’s family. Her great-grandad travelled around taking photos of country towns in boom years, then her grandad did it of them when they were going into decline. By the time her dad did the trip, some of the towns were waking up again. So we’re doing the next look. Taking photos, you know. And seeing where her roots are.”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing her roots,” a man from the other side of the room called. Someone had called that out every single time Dale had used the line. Father John sent a stern look in that direction.
“Good on you. Most people see more of overseas than they do their own country.”
“I don’t get a chance to travel much in my job. I’m a school photographer. So I see the inside of gyms, kids lined up, you know, Say Cheese.” Tara mimicked holding a camera to her eye and Bluey grinned broadly.
“And what do they call you, love?”
“I’m Tara.”
“Like the house in Gone with the Wind?” Bluey said. The men in the bar jeered at him. “Movie buff!” they called out, and “Smart arse!”
“It is, actually. Not many people know that.” She felt such a powerful attraction to Bluey she felt flushed, so to cover it she said, “This is my husband Dale.”
“Call me Dazza,” Dale said. He looked pale, almost see-through, compared to the sun-burnt men sitting around the room.
“We thought we’d visit some of the places my family went. Take more photos of how the towns are now,” Tara said.
“Photos of shit heaps? Can’t see much point in that,” one of the men said. “Surprisingly,” Dale said, and Tara did the hand pat thing, but it was too late, he’d said the word so he already sounded like a wanker, so rambled quickly on, “Surprisingly, many of the towns that were ghost towns in her grandfather’s day have come good. Full of people and life. We’re finding that a lot of the towns have reinvented themselves. There might be ghosts, but there are people, too.”
“Not all the towns,” Tara said. She’d already developed some of her photos along the way and thought her grandfather’s “bust” pictures were more desolate than the ones she was taking of towns entirely deserted. His were full of people who knew it was all over. Going through the motions. It was almost like they were already ghosts.
They’d visited many towns, each of them resonating with Tara in one way or another. She’d known them for most of her life, from the framed photographs in the hallway of her childhood home. She knew every building, the way the road lay, where the lone tree stood.
She loved the way her family photographs showed that everything is cyclical. From dust to boom to bust and ghost town, dust again, then recovery and renewal. Some towns feel thick with memory. Some are wiped clean. Some towns carried a great sense of emptiness, even when there were signs of past occupation. They carried a sense of absolute vacancy. Other towns seemed to writhe with unseen life.
Father John nodded at them and went back to his table with the workmen. They laughed amongst themselves and Jonas smiled with them. Tara knew he was bored on this family trip, that he missed the company of people his own age, and she imagined he wished he could be a part of that group of young men.
Bluey said quietly, “Flash lot, aren’t they?”
The workmen really were showy, standing out amongst the other men in the room, but there was something underlying, something about the way they followed the priest’s every word, that interested Tara.
“Aren’t you all?”
“Us?” Bluey threw his head back and laughed. “Yeah, nah. Most of us are just country boys in one way or another. Trying to make a living on a shit heap. Those boys have figured it out.”
The lone old man at the bar whom she’d noticed on the way in nodded, turning to face them. “Eighty years my family have been on the land.” He had the skinny legs of a long-term alcoholic, sitting high on a bar stool, his heels resting on the brass rung that ran close to the floor. “Shearing, slaughtering, whatever it takes. That lot,” here he pointed at a row of bottles along the bar, each containing layers of colorful sand. “That’s what the priest and his boys come in with. Bottles of sand. Take a look. See the little tracks in the sand? The tunnels? Imps, I reckon. Trapped for all eternity by them.” He tilted his head at the priest and the young men.
“What’dya mean, imps?” Jonas said. “Sounds like bullshit.”
“Imps. Like little demons,” the old man said.
“And they’re trapped?”
“It’s bullshit, Jonas,” Dale said. “The old fella’s having a go.” Dale struggled lately with Jonas having his own opinions. He wasn’t ready for him to become an individual. An independent man.
“Anyway, if so, you should let ’em out,” Jonas said. “Nothing should be trapped like that.” He gave a shudder.
“Tell me about it,” Tara said, and she laughed, giving Dale a gentle punch on the arm. “Tell me about being trapped.”
Bluey poured her another drink. “Ya can’t let the little mongrels out,” he said. “Otherwise they’ll jump onto your shoulder and suck the life out of you.” He whispered this last, so quietly Tara had to lean close to hear.
The priest and his men all laughed. Tara didn’t mind; the sound of it filled her with a sort of gentle joy.
“Lucky charms, they reckon,” the old man went on. “People pay a bloody fortune for them.”
“People call ’em bottle imps,” Bluey said. “They reckon they ward off bad luck. You ever read that story? Robert Louis Stevenson? Bloody terrifying. But what they are is ghosts, crawled into those bottles, like scorpions or spiders. Just wanting to rest for a bit.”
“Ghosts in bottles?” Jonas said.
“It’s bullshit,” Dale said again, although Tara knew from past experience he was a great believer in ghosts.
“Not just any bottle, though,” Bluey added. “There’s a heap of bottles, somewhere. No one knows but the priest and his mates over there.”
“You can’t find it on the map. People have gone missing trying to find the heap,” the old man cut in. “Missing till their bones are found.”
“Precious jewels, all of them,” Father John called out from across the pub. “Diamonds in the rough.”
Jonas stared at the bottles, then at the young men. Father John waved a hand at him. “Come over, Jonas. Sit with us for a bit.”
“Go on, then,” Tara said. “They might let you use their phones or something.” Dale tried to follow, but Tara put her hand on his arm. “Leave him.”
Jonas left his beer on the bar. He wasn’t like the men in her family; her grandfather had been a legendary drunk, and her father was famous for his lively drunkenness as well.
She watched Jonas amongst the men. He still looked younger than his eighteen years, with baby fat around his cheeks and a haircut that was years out of date. They tried to get him to eat well but all he liked were potato chips and orange American cheese he made her buy at Costco. Dale was handsome, though, in a fresh-faced cheerful way, and she had good cheekbones, great eyes, so she knew Jonas would come good.
She felt a deep weariness, watching him. She constantly worried about him and what he would be. Who he would be. Since Jonas had finished high school he’d been adrift. He didn’t know what to do next, and day by day it ate away at his parents, far more than it did him.
The idea was that this was their last family holiday before he was off. Started university or full time work or travel the world or . . . something. Truthfully, Tara knew none of that was likely. She was just happy to get away from her work, all the fake smiles, the “say cheese,” the poor kids who forgot it was photo day. A large part of her was happy Jonas stayed with them. There were stories . . . a friend of his from school had died overseas in a boating accident, his body never found, and Tara didn’t think she could bear that. Dale said he was in no hurry for the boy to go, joking that she’d leave him once they had an empty nest.
Here, she was desperate to talk to others after days on the road. Dale got all blokey in the company of men, a trait she found both annoying and endearing.
He ordered more drinks for them, and asked Bluey, “We’re thinking of staying for the night. I don’t suppose you’ve got any rooms?”
Bluey shook his head. “Me wife’s done a runner so I’ve got room for one of you at mine,” he said. “It’d have to be the lady, though. Blokes’ll call me a poofter otherwise.”
“Is there anywhere we can park the caravan, in that case?” Dale asked. The bar laughed, and he added, “I mean shady. Near water, maybe.”
“Shady Tree Hill, ’bout fifty K up the road. There’s a billabong there should be wet. I haven’t had a look for a while, but.”
Tara went into the bathroom. She looked flushed, and her hair was lank from the humidity, but she thought she looked all right. She’d always liked attention; she admitted that.
When she went back out, Bluey said, “Another gin and lemon?” Dale sat at the bar playing happily with the dogs. The young men and the priest left in a noisy jumble, clapping people on the back, and all of them saying, “see ya later” to Jonas. The place felt empty after they were gone, as if they took the soul of the pub with them. There was a great rattle from outside as they loaded up the empties.
“God’s gift, they are,” the old man said. “Taking away the rubbish.”
“They don’t do it for free, mate,” Bluey said. “But yeah.”
Jonas made his way slowly to the bar where his parents were. He stopped at each table along the way, collecting bottletops.
“You after a job, mate? Chuck us your resume and I’ll think about it,” Bluey said.
“He’s always been a collector,” Tara said. It was true, although in recent years this had stopped. Someone had told them the stoppage was a sign of depression so she was happy to see him stash the bottletops in his backpack.
Jonas’ eyes glittered. His lips were pressed tightly closed as if he was trying to keep a burp in. He picked up his mother’s backpack and handed it to her, indicating the door with a tilt of his head.
“I guess we’re leaving,” she said. She was too tipsy to drive so she planned to sleep while Dale took the wheel.
In the car, Jonas burst out, “I know where the bottle heap is! They told me!” He was sitting forward in his seat without his seatbelt on so Tara wished Dale would stop suddenly, throw the kid forward, teach him a lesson. She felt lightheaded, slightly queasy, from all the lemon squash she’d drunk. How many was it? Eight? Nine? She’d lost count.
“No one knows but me! We have to go!”
“We’ll stop for the night soon,” Dale said. “Sort out our itinerary tomorrow, ay?”
They all knew they’d be going to see this bottle heap.
Tara slept well that night, topped up with the scotch Dale laid out for her. She slept without her inner voice, her worrywart inner voice at her, at her, at her . . .
They were woken by a loud, then louder, rattling, the clink of thousands of empty bottles. It was the young men, the bottle collectors, in their ute, which was filled with bottles, collected from every pub they’d earlier stopped at.
They pulled up beside the caravan and Tara wished she’d changed into pajamas rather than stand here in the clothes they’d seen her in yesterday.
“Follow us if you like,” Father John said. “We’re heading for the heap.” He named the ghost town in the surrounding area; Tara recognized it as one her family had photographed.
Without speaking, Jonas climbed into the driver’s seat, and revved the car.
They only had the toilet to empty, then they took off, following a couple of hundred meters behind the ute to avoid being smothered by dust from the road.
The ute left a long shimmering tail.
“It’s the ghosts they’ve collected,” Jonas said, and he looked at her, back and forth from the road, until she agreed.
As the town loomed in the distance Tara felt the air in the car thicken, feeling it like a pain in her chest.
“Look!” Jonas said. Outside the town was the bottle heap.
At least two meters high and stretching, Tara thought, a hundred meters or more. There had to be many, many thousands of glass bottles there, brown, green, and clear. Decades of men with nothing else to do but drink, and no one wanting to pay the money to move the bottles, and to where? Now the bottle collectors brought more in, adding to the heap.
Jonas parked the station wagon and caravan head first, sitting it next to the ute. Dale sighed.
“I’m not backing it in, Dad,” Jonas said, but he smiled at his father.
The priest, his sleeves rolled up, his face a sheen of sweat in the heat, said, “Welcome to Bottletown. We’re just brewing a cuppa so your timing is perfect.”
Tara thrust a hat on to keep the worst of the rays off and they followed the priest up the main street. They’d seen two dozen or so derelict worker’s houses on the way in; here was where they’d spent their time when not working or at home. Five pubs (with a sixth burnt to the ground), a general store, a police station, a bank, and a post office, all built of galvanized iron, their red roofs dull now.
The sky was wide open all around them. The three trees she could see were spindly, long past rescuing, although by the rocks placed in a circle around each one, somebody had cared once.
The Post Office often represented the center of community in these towns and here was no different. The front yard was like an art exhibition of things left behind: children’s bikes, long bones, petrified pieces of wood, and concrete garden gnomes. Tara wondered why they were still there, why the yard hadn’t been stripped.
Inside, the tea was laid out. It was much cooler in there, almost bearable, and after the tea and dry biscuits Tara lingered, curious about what else was left behind.
Very little, she found, just the odd stamp or two and an old milk can.
The community notice board held Christmas cards from decades earlier, notices of land sales, an invitation to a wedding, death notices, obituaries, and news stories. She read about an elderly German couple whose car broke down in the outback and who were found weeks later. “They panicked and left their vehicle,” a policeman was quoted as saying. They were found far apart and that made Tara the saddest, to think of them dying alone.
She read about a father and son, drowned in a water tank fifty years earlier. The father saving the son, she was sure, something that happened often.
“They all die different,” Father John said. He was even redder than before and his shirt completely soaked. “It wasn’t always this way. Do you know the town used to be full of children? There was a school and all. Couldn’t keep them in when it rained.”
He poured a glass of water for himself and one for her and said, “Come on, love. Come have a look at what you came to have a look at. Your two fellas have stepped in to help. Good men, both of them.”
The heat coming off the heap of glass bottles was intense and the noise of it, too, a constant clinking as the bottles shifted in the red dirt or were collected by the men. Jonas was out there and Dale, too. Jonas held bottles up to the light and sorted them; Dale just gathered armsful.
“That’s a good boy you’ve got there. Very sensitive,” Father John said.
“That’s a nice way to say it,” Tara said.
“What he’s looking for are the ghost bottles. Some have ghosts, some have insects, some have both. That young man, he can tell the difference.”
“He’s always said he can see ghosts. I used to, a long time ago.”
“I can pick a believer at fifty paces. Everybody can see them. Most people though don’t believe their own eyes.”
They watched Jonas collect another bottle and hold it to the light.
“I’ve had to train the rest of them,” Father John said, “but he’s a natural. I’d like to keep him forever.”
“I think his girlfriend might have something to say about that,” Tara said, not sure why she lied about it. She walked to the edge of the heap. “It’s astonishing how many bottles there are. That’s a lot of alcohol.”
“Lots of men in lots of places over lots of years,” one of the workmen said, or the priest. She wasn’t sure; all the voices of men started to sound the same out here.
“There are a lot of stories on that heap, so many we’ll never get them all. Thirty thousand alone died in one town. Typhoid took a lot of them. And the meatworks; you’d be surprised how many of them died from eating meat thieved from there. Men were hungry back then. They’d eat anything. They’d eat the tongue out of a bullock if they had the knife to cut it.”
Tara walked to where they were sorting the bottles into size, color, contents. “The ones with the insects are worth the most,” Father John said. “All the clear ones go into that pile for sale. The green and the brown are for the church. We’ll show you the church later.”
It was so hot the ground shimmered as far as she could see. She saw images, squeezed her eyes to clear them, still saw them. People, she thought, shoulders slumped, going about their business in a town close to death.
She recognized the slump of the shoulders from her grandfather’s photos.
“The old bloke at the pub told me the bottles had imps in them.”
“What the fuck’s an imp?” the priest said. He shook his head. “All our customers take the bottles all right, take the luck, but not one of them gives a shit about the work that goes into it. Us out here in the heat, collecting these poor lost souls up.”
“So it’s ghosts, not imps?” she said, as if that made sense.
“We don’t know why they come here, but they do. From all over. Mostly country people, but we’ve got some from the city too. Maybe they’ve got family in the bush, who knows.” Father John wiped his brow. “I’d been travelling a long time, visited many towns, before I saw my first ghost.”
As they watched, a silvery shape hovered over the bottles. Tara could see a face, she thought, and perhaps limbs, but the thing was like thick, oily smoke. The ghost sank down, disappearing into the bottle. The young men raced over to the place, searching each bottle, holding it up to the light, till they found what they were looking for.
“What happens to them? Once they’re in the bottle?”
“Don’t know. But we do know they’re at peace at least.”
“Can we release them? I mean, if a family member wanted to. Could they smash the bottle and let them out?”
“Been tried. But there’s nothing inside. Nothing at all. When you smash the bottle, it’s empty. The ghost exists because the bottle does. That’s about all we know. God works in mysterious ways, all right. You can keep your loved ones the way they are. Perfect preservation. Nothing changes. It’s a way to keep a loved one close by. You’ll never lose them this way.”
Tara helped sort for an hour, then Father John asked her to help him take a load to the church. “Your station wagon is perfect,” he said. “A good afternoon’s work, then we’ll eat a feast, ay? Leon caught us a ’roo and he’ll fry the steaks in their own fat. Bit of desert fig, some finger lime, your bush tomato, and we’re eating like kings.”
They loaded up the station wagon. She adjusted the driver’s seat and started the car, saying, “Where to? Have we got far to go?”
Father John sat beside her and one of the young men sat behind. In the closed environment of the car the priest’s scent was strong. She wasn’t sure what it was. Not body odor, exactly. More like a chemical being exuded.
“You haven’t noticed?” Father John pointed at a derelict, large gray building. “Over there, behind the meatworks.”
The old meat processing plant hadn’t been in operation for decades. As she drove closer she saw enormous pieces of corroded machinery, tipped over, useless. They had the windows down and she was sure she could smell the place; it was the smell of boiled, bad meat.
“Pull in around the back,” Father John said. As she drove behind the meatworks, she saw the church and gasped.
It was maybe waist-high and stretched ten meters along. Built entirely of green and brown bottles, it seemed to shimmer as the rest of the place did, but with a more fluorescent hum.
“It is a miracle, isn’t it?” Father John said. She parked the car. The buzz increased, a thumping in her ear that could have been her blood beating. The wind was high out here, high and hot and irritating.
“How long have you been building the church?”
“A dozen years or more. It’s a lifetime job. I can’t seem to leave.” He said it quiet so the ghosts couldn’t hear. “I’m doing it to give the souls rest. Most of these poor souls, we don’t know who they are. They follow the bottles or they’re already here, they’ve already crawled inside. Sometimes, though, lucky times, a person will die nearby and we’ll know who they are. We can provide a certificate of authentication and reunite the person with their family.”
“Really?” she said, thinking he was joking, but later he showed it to her:
This is to certify that _______ died in unsuspicious circumstances
and crawled into this bottle.
“Imagine a long rope, I tell them. Each member of the family holds onto it. Each person holds a knot in the rope. If you’ve lost track of a family member, they have no knot and their part of the rope is frayed, or broken. We can weave it back together.”
“I guess they know about ropes, out here in mining country. My grandad always said, don’t go anywhere without one.”
“I guess he was right.”
The wind rose, whistling in the bottles, stinging her face with sand. “I can’t bear this wind,” she said.
“I love it. But then I was born in a cyclone,” he said.
They unloaded the bottles as Dale arrived in another full car. It was hot work in the wind, and no one seemed to have water or beer to drink.
“Why didn’t you build the church near the bottle pile?” Dale said, sounding as cross as he’d ever been.
“No shade, mate. And the water is over this way. Hard work now but worth it.”
It was burning hot in the walls of the church. Light came through bottles making scorpions and other insects seem alive. There was movement. Noise. Whispering.
She sat, mesmerized by this activity in the bottles. If she squinted, looked closely, she could see faces, imagine fingers beckoning her. “It’s beautiful at dawn,” the priest said.
After dinner, over a third and then a fourth bottle of wine, Father John asked them for a donation. He said they only survived on the kindness of supporters and the money they received from bottle collecting and sales.
“One of the boys can run you into the Big Smoke if you like. You don’t need much for yourselves, not out here.”
“We won’t be staying out here longer than a couple of days, though,” Dale said. “We’re planning to travel. So I really can’t.” He pulled out his wallet anyway, offered a twenty.
“Nah, mate, thanks, that won’t really do it,” the priest said, and he turned away. “Let’s get some sleep, ay? You two can have the Bank. Good walls in there. Jonas can bunk in with us if he wants.”
Strangely enough they made love that night, realizing how long it had been since they had a night on their own. “You see?” Tara said. “We’ll survive without him,” but Dale didn’t respond.
At dawn, Tara found herself walking the main street. She walked near the building her son was in and closed her eyes and focused until she thought she heard him breathing.
Although they’d all had too much to drink the night before, the young men seemed lively and bright. In the morning light, though, Tara thought she could see signs of damage on all of them, tears in the skin she hadn’t noticed before.
For breakfast there was coffee and eggs cooked over the coals, still hot from the night before. They’d covered the old oil drum, surrounded it with rocks, and it was good to go.
After breakfast they all went to work on the heap. Jonas greeted them first thing, bouncing on his toes, begging to stay. “They said I could help them again with the ghosts today.” Tara had never seen him so alive. “The actual ghosts. Father John reckons I’m a natural at finding them.”
“That would explain you staring off in the distance half the time,” Tara said, and there was a hand pat from Dale. So many hand pats these days.
“This place has a habit of making people forget. Doesn’t it, boys?” Father John said to the workmen. “Every last one of them has a family who has let them go. Forgotten them. This is family now, for some of us at least.”
“We could spend another day or two,” Tara said. She felt rested, as if the deserted town somehow settled her. “What do you think, Dale?”
“Two days at most, then we need to head off,” Dale said firmly. “I’m sorry none of them have families anymore,” he said to Tara quietly. “But that’s not up to us. We’ve got family. The Three Musketeers.”
She smiled at him, but was sure the pity she felt for him must seep through. He was trying to hold onto something only he couldn’t see was slipping away.
They spent the second night away from Jonas and they barely saw him all day. She couldn’t remember what he looked like. It wasn’t just the booze, but that helped; it helped forget and to keep things quiet.
“It feels a bit odd, only Two Musketeers,” Dale said as they settled into their beds.
“How about you be a Musketeer and I’ll be the Lone Ranger,” she said.
He turned away from her, curling himself into a defensive ball that made her think of Jonas when he was a child.
On the third day, Jonas stared off into the distance, his face moving as if having conversations. He and Dale had angry words, though neither would tell Tara what they’d spoken about. He loaded up the car with clear bottles. Tara thought he seemed tanned already and that he walked tall. She’d spent the morning filling bottles with sand and her hands were numb, freezing to the touch, no matter what she did.
She was entranced by the ghosts now. She watched them for hours as she sat and worked, watching them crawl into the bottles, like beaten dogs into a corner or sick cats into small spaces.
“Don’t you love it here?” Jonas asked.
“No,” Dale said. He’d hardly spoken since his argument with Jonas, and he wouldn’t answer her when she asked him about it. The men barely acknowledged his existence and he seemed to fade in Tara’s eyes, minute by minute. “We should head off today.”
“I want to stay,” Jonas said.
Dale and Tara exchanged glances. Dale didn’t want to stay a minute longer; he’d leave the caravan behind to get away. A lethargy had come over both of them which he didn’t like, an inability to make decisions for themselves. They’d fallen into the strange routine of days by the bottle heap, and they both knew it was time to move on. They’d talked about it during the night, in whispers, and Dale had snuck out to try to hook the caravan up, but he couldn’t do it alone. It was facing the wrong way. Not backed in.
“Jonas, you can’t stay here. This is not your life.”
“This is his life,” Father John said, joining them at the station wagon with another box of bottles. “You need to find the serenity to accept what you can’t change.”
“There’s a life for all three of us back home,” Dale said. “Together.”
Tara was torn. She could see how happy Jonas was here and knew he wanted to stay. He was a grown man, or close enough, and they couldn’t force him to leave. But she’d worry about him. How would he get away if he needed to? What if something happened? And truly, she imagined the hours on the road alone with Dale, and such a deep sense of boredom came across her she felt ashamed.
They were quiet then, and Dale spent the rest of the day preparing for an early morning departure.
That night they drank more heavily than ever, and before ten Tara was finding it hard to walk, hard to keep her eyes open. She felt herself weeping openly and Jonas patting her kindly, not saying anything, just giving her moments of his time.
She vaguely realized she was asleep in the caravan and wondered who had carried her there. She’d done this in the past, slept while someone was driving the car ahead, and found it very comforting.
Dale was driving, she discovered. When he stopped, hours later, she sat up, her head pounding, as he opened the caravan’s door.
“Where are we?”
“On our way.”
“I didn’t get to say good-bye,” she said. “Why’d you drive off like that?”
“It’s okay,” he said. “He’s with us in spirit.”
She joined him in the car. She offered to drive but she knew she shouldn’t, she couldn’t, so they drove in silence for another hour or so. They were smack in the middle of nowhere, atom bomb testing country, Dale called it.
She reached for water and saw a note on the floor, from Father John, thanking Dale for a donation.
“Oh, you gave them money.” She looked at the note. “Shitloads of money. I guess they’ll look after Jonas, then.”
There were scratches on his face. His arms. Blood in his hair. She thought she’d dreamt it, that they’d fought, her husband and son, she’d heard it but not seen it, yet here he was, damaged.
“Are you all right? You’re beat up! Is Jonas all right? We should go back and see. I’ll call him.”
Dale put his hand over hers. “This is my gift to you. To us,” he said. “This is the rope that binds.”
He reached into his side pocket. She saw that his ear was bloodied and he hadn’t cleaned his neck, or changed his shirt, but it wasn’t until he placed the bottle between them, sand-filled, already run through with tiny tunnels, that she understood what he had done.