DIRTY SNOW

In the wheatbelt hospital as he fought for breath, feeling the dry heat even through the too-cold air-conditioning, looking out of the window at the burnt paddocks – the result of a lightning strike the week before that brought fire to the edge of the hospital grounds before they had even had time to evacuate, though it burnt itself out there … looking out of the window as he fought for breath, he suddenly thought back … no, he was suddenly there, there in central Ohio, in the local Walmart parking lot, waiting for his wife to return to their car, staring at a massive pile of dirty snow, heaped up by loaders and pushed to the side of the parking lot. It had been a deadly winter and power had just returned to the town, the ice storm having decided him – decided them – to return to Australia, to return to the dry, the snowlessness.

Their sons, twins, had just finished college the summer before, and would stay in America with their girlfriends, in their new jobs – of this he was sure. His wife was taking longer than usual to fully decide – she was usually so quick, so efficient. They’d always talked about life in a snowy place: the beauty of a northern winter. But after suffering the most recent storm, the near-death experience of freezing, their isolation from neighbours in the ‘farmhouse’, and the deaths from cold of the elderly reported throughout the region, the deadly and deflating reality of snow was before him. He wanted his wife and boys to understand: a filthy whiteness, a colonising lie, the oil and salt and grit scraped up with the snowflakes and compounded into a sick skyscraper that would have its day in the sun and then flood the drains.

When they discussed ‘The Return’, they did so in the wan light of their last winter’s dirty snow. The discussions weren’t overnight affairs, but long drawn-out conversations punctuated by the ups and downs of their daily lives. He had to admit, he did, certainly, that a lot of the impetus was coming from deep within him. An interior place. The boys were unhappy their parents were leaving, and made it known in every way possible. They saw it as a betrayal; they spoke disturbingly in what could only be construed or deconstructed (a term overused in the house, his wife said) as patriotic. The boys had Americanised, had connected themselves to a soil they were born on during an earlier working visit by their parents. Despite spending their childhood in Australia, they felt that American soil was the substance beneath their feet in every way.

He wouldn’t be pleased to leave his sons, though with age they were becoming more and more irritating. They ganged up on him with their mother, truth be told. And he didn’t like it. Hearing his wife, close to the twins in the living room, full of regret and lament at the prospect of living on different sides of the planet … the destabilisation, the confession … Augustinian in fury and decisiveness … that their best-laid plans had failed, he couldn’t help wondering if the dirty snow wasn’t a ploy, a reaction of the soil against a love of country he couldn’t believe.

What was it they really wanted? The swish house provided by the college, the three cars (admittedly second-hand Dodge Neons), the access to college education for peppercorn fees. Recently, he had found a copy of an Ayn Rand novel – not on his wife’s desk, where it might be cited as research, but comfy on her cabinet by the bed. This had given him pause.

He admitted that it was his decision. Really, he had decided there and then in the parking lot, and it had become an obsession and no dissensions would be tolerated. Your OCD is taking over, his wife had said. Just another example of cleanliness and tap checking. I can assure you, go on like this and there’ll be no doubt the lights have been turned well and truly off. But he pushed ahead, forged ahead, and forced the issue. Being on 0.5 contracts, they relied on each other to make it work. One leaves and the other has to leave, basically – can’t survive on half a wage. And what would it mean for the twins? He could see himself stuck there … with the twins in law school on the other side of the country, anyway … Years more of Walmart parking lots, dirty snow. Despite his decisiveness, his head was full of static, the snow of American cable television.

*

He’d been wandering out on the salt under a furious sun. An unhealthy obsession, he’d been told by his wife, his doctor, even their sons when they deigned to visit from their splendid lives as American lawyers. They had both married and divorced within two years and were looking to marry again. Unbelievably, they were marrying twins. Twin twin lawyers. They had specialised in immigration law, and were doing a raging business settling Australians into the Green Card Splendour of America. They were raging enthusiasts for everything American, including foreign policy. He wondered who they were. He was hallucinating.

His wife now lived in Perth and taught at the old sandstone university. She had been ‘taken up’, and deservedly so. She’d done the hard college yards and was now getting a little research time to herself. She had a nice flat by the river and joined him at their country property every other weekend (or so). He had taken his super and bought a block of salt. A hundred infertile and devastated acres with a shed on it. He pottered about the shed, constantly doing it up. Cold in the winter, violently hot in the summer. He had no illusions about making more of it than there was. He noted that despite the scalds and ‘nothingness’, more animals and birds were found out on the salt than elsewhere in the district because he didn’t shoot or poison them. The salt was less dirty than it seemed.

Other than to switch on the generator or turn a tap on the rainwater tank, there weren’t a lot of things to check. It was good for his OCD. But salt brought its own obsessions, and there were cleaner and dirtier parts of the block; and rain, while welcome, made the salt grow and then sullied it with the wash of alluvial dirt. It was a complex portrait of place. Place – his American college professor days ate at him, the deconstruction of dirty snow, the repercussions of language and constitution and …

And at one time, he did have distress when he got it in his head that the US military, so cosy with its Australian counterpart, might use such ‘wasteland’ as a testing site for dirty weapons. This was kind of a joke, but his wife knew that it was kind of not a joke as well.

*

He made a friend in Al, a traditional owner, whose land it really was. Al didn’t drink but liked to watch him drink. And he did drink now. Cask wine. How the mighty … this, more than anything else, upset the twins when they their mother informed them. He was becoming an embarrassment. The cabernet sauvignon and fine rieslings had gone out the door. Casks abounded and aggregated. He read conspiracy books and paraphrased them to Al, who said they made perfect sense. Very drunk one night, he’d said to Al, I don’t like you in order to legitimise my presence. Al called him a dickhead and laughed so much he vomited through his nose. Al, on recovering, added, Bloke, you should get yourself a big aerial and a television and watch the footy. He understood what Al was getting at, but started railing against the brutalities of gridiron.

When he took the old Falcon ute out onto the salt and did burnouts, hacking up the thing he loved and hated most, he rolled the vehicle on its roof. Al found him, packed him off to hospital (which was no easy thing), called the wife in the city, and consulted with the doctor. Al told the doctor that he’d always wanted to go to America and that’s why he hung around such a loser. A real paranoid pisstank, was how Al described him.

*

He’d really only made a single friend in Ohio. And it was a strange sort of friendship – one where few words counted for many. And even that friend, Gus Gantry, right from the beginning, said, You don’t belong here.

Gus was a professor of history who’d written a major book on the American Civil War, then sat back on his laurels and made a career out of it. And that’s quoting Gus back to himself. Theirs became a friendship in which Gus spoke, or lectured, and he listened. His understandings of the interior workings of the United States of America were mediated through Gus’s words and ideas.

Their first encounter was Gus in a rocking chair on the verandah of the history faculty building; he was smoking a Cuban and sticking his boots out to block the door. Who are you? he’d asked.

I’m the new professor.

You mean the new part-timer from ‘dooooon underrrrr’?

Yep, that’s me.

You drink whisky? he’d asked.

This is a liberal campus, Gus had said, but it doesn’t really like outsiders if they don’t play their role as curios. You’re a curio. I advise you to follow Ohio State in the football and choose a baseball team as quickly as possible. Don’t ramble on about cricket. Those trees? Black walnuts – they stain everything. Get leaves late and lose them early. Yes, it’s nice at this time of year but it will get humid and electrical storms will have the power out more than on. And the winters are deadly. The weather comes off the Lakes. You’ll have to dig your way out after a heavy snowfall. If you hunt, you’ll find a niche. You don’t? I recommend you buy BB guns for those twin boys of yours to save face, and not much face at that. They can work up to the real thing. A good hunting rifle will get them real cred. More hunting rifles than handguns around here. Oh, and whisper in your wife’s ear that ‘successful’ and ‘competent’ are considered desirable traits in a woman, this being a ‘with-it’ liberal arts campus, but female ambition arouses suspicion and is frowned upon. Generally, it’s pretty easygoing if the students’ parents think they’re getting their considerable money’s worth, and we fawn over them when they come in on open days. Nothing much really happens unless a drinking ritual in the woods gets out of hand and there’s a deer ritualistically killed or a sex act performed without consent, though that’s all usually got around, one way or another. Or, of course, if war breaks out. War really rouses the community. Affairs among faculty are not uncommon though a little tricky when it comes to social gatherings – potlucks are de rigueur! You won’t be judged, but your skill at handling the social situation will be. Best thing is if one of you is going for it, ensure the other has something on the horizon. It all balances out in the end. Actually, we have fewer divorces than the national average. Which takes me back to the subject of war, he drawled. War. Yes, war gets the blood roused around here …

*

The medical team decided the new patient didn’t need airlifting or even driving to Perth, and kept him in bed staring out at the residue of lightning strike. When he was well enough, a nurse turned on the television. The ex-college professor, whose accent had a suspicious American twang to it, started gasping and choking and, despite the heat, clutching at blankets and pleading for warmth. Asked what was wrong, he pointed at The Simpsons and said, The dirty snow people. They are everywhere. I know, I know … I have studied them. My sons are enslaved to them, and my wife is their agent. She is spreading the word down here. I am no longer in a position to keep an eye on her. I abdicate all responsibility – the snow has gotten into the soil and the temperature is rising. The fallout is here like an alliance, deconstructing every last one of us, even the atoms in snow, the atoms in salt, the atoms in dirt.