HIGHWAY OF LOST HEARTS

(Excerpt)

Mary Anne Butler

A woman. A dog. A campervan. And 4,500klm of wide open road.

Winner, 2016 NT Chief Minister’s Book of the Year

Highway of Lost Hearts - © Copyright, Mary Anne Butler, 2012

Characters: Mot [A woman]

Set: Mot’s journey takes place on the road from Darwin to Sydney

Era: Now

MOT:  I wake up one morning to find that my heart is missing 

from my chest.  

    I can breathe, I have a pulse, but I feel… 

nothing.  

So. I decide to go and look for it. I pack up my van, hoik the dog up into the passenger seat, and head down the Highway of Lost Hearts. 

And as I reach the outskirts of this city, I realise that my heart has been missing for some time. 

Or if not missing, then at least… 

empty. 

At Katherine, I stop for provisions. I leave the dog in the car with a bowl of water and the windows open, and promise her a bone from the fresh meat section on my return. 

As I juggle my goods back to the car, a can of tomatoes falls at the feet of a woman in a wheelchair. I bend to pick up the can and offer her a small smile of apology.         She reaches out a gnarled claw at me; upturned and fused like a dead inverted crab. 

And I think: she wants money.

But no. 

She’s trying to touch me. 

And my body jerks itself backwards and I’m on my feet, walking away. 

…leaving my tomatoes lying there…

The dog greets me with a thump of her tail, and asks me where the bone is. 

I tell her she’s not eating it in the front seat. She can have it when we stop. 

…and she sulks all the way into the next town…

At Mataranka we dwell amongst a motley collection of gravestones, glowing in the heat of the day. The dog hunkers down with her bone while I wander through the plots, bringing the names of dead people back to life: 

Burkey the Builder

Ginty

Bruno Kutschki

Doogs – all 21 years of him

KW – no date, no name

Elisa Lambert; born 7.3.1892; deceased 11.3.1892

- and the shock of her five short days on this earth makes me look away. 

The slideshow starts inside my head:

Night. 

Ocean. 

A body: floating. 

Ruptured; wafting and shapeless.

There is no map for this journey.

The dog huffs at me; her jaws bloodied. I haul her 27 kilos up into the jumpseat, and she issues happy meaty farts all the way to Larrimah.

At the Daly Waters pub, a curtain of bras hangs down from the ceiling. A bearded, barefoot version of Wild Bill Hickok straddles a bar stool, a stubby of Fourex fused to his hand. ‘I Eat Pussy’ proud across his chest.  I ask him if he’s seen any hearts pass by this way, and he leans towards me like he’s got a secret: 

‘Dunno about hearts love. But you’d be wantin’ to find some mojo first, wouldntcha?’ 

He pisses himself laughing and goes back to his beer, tipping it upright and draining the last dregs before calling for another.

I go back to my van and add ‘find mojo’ to my list.

And as I drive, I think of dead people.

The weight of them in the silence of my dreams.

A ute full of young blokes passes, pig dogs in cages on the back. Rifles primed,      Khe Sahn blaring out. 

One of them checks me out as they pass, but I’m invisible: too old for desire, and too young for ridicule - so he averts his head, cracks a stubby and drinks instead to the passing tarmac. White lines like a road map, towards his next kill.

The dog picks up the scent of the pig dogs and props up, ears alert, whimpering to go on the hunt as well.

No.

Sit. 

SIT!

I teach her to drink from a plastic water bottle while we drive. It rests at her paws and she licks it when she wants a drink. I pop open the nozzle and squeeze it while she schlurps the drops. If I do it too fast, it goes up her nose and she issues a snuffle-cough, so I slow down. Gradually, we get the pace right and work together in a soft rhythm until she turns her head to one side, refusing to schlurp any more.  

As day one draws close along the Highway of Lost Hearts I stop in at Dunmarra to       camp for the night. I wait at the counter while this big bloke ambles across…

`Drivin’?’ he says. 

`No’, I say. ‘Teleporting’. 

‘Smartarse as well?’

‘Ah… fair enough. Fuel, thanks. And a stubby of Coopers Green.’ 

‘You out here all alone, are ya?’

‘No. I’ve got a dog. A big dog.’

He nods, holds out my change but won’t let it go.

‘Where ya stayin’?’ 

‘Um… Not sure.’ 

  ‘Well the next town’s Elliot. It’s a blackfella town, just so’s ya know.’

‘Well, they were there first. So yeah; I guess it is.’ 

He goes suddenly still. ‘You wanna watch it,’ he whispers. ‘A girlie could get herself in trouble talking like that, way out here.’ 

He puts my change down on the counter half way between us, so that I have to reach towards him if I want it. 

   ‘Right,’ I say. ‘Okay. Thanks for the warning.’

…and I leave my change lying there...  

Down the track me and the dog pull over to rough camp it for the night.  I hide the van behind some scrub, lock the doors, wind the windows up and keep the dog close by. 

Late in the night she lets out a long, low growl. 

…and all night long, I feel like I’m being watched… 

The energy of grief barrels me down the highway, day upon day,

and I think: I am empty. Truly empty. 

And I want to drive myself into oblivion.

Away from memory; from my own imagination. 

I want to leave myself on the side of the highway and drive on without me.

But the country’s central artery takes me straight to Tennant Creek, where I order the most expensive steak sandwich in the world and get a thin, tired piece of gristle in return - wedged between white bread sheets; sexed up with burnt onion and mounted by barbeque sauce as thin as blood.

I sit outside in the forty-degree heat; peel off the gristle and hand-feed it to the dog. The chef wanders over with scraps in a plastic bucket. 

‘M-m-mind if I f-feed the dog?’ he asks. 

I nod okay. The man is toothless and wizened and skinny as string - a rollie drooping from the corner of his mouth; fingers stained brown with the rolling of ten thousand others. He lets the dog forage into his greasy, salted palms; peels back her gums to look at her teeth and notices the two rows of missing top ones. 

`L-like me,’ he laughs. ‘T-t-toothless and g-g-gummy.’ 

He looks at my van with something like longing. 

‘You l-l-live in there?’ 

‘Me n’ her.’  

‘You want c-company?’

I shake my head. `Nah. I’m flat-out looking after myself. Don’t need anyone else to care about right now.’ 

‘I d-don’t take much c-c-care.’

‘Everyone takes care,’ I say. ‘That’s the whole problem.’ 

He nods fair enough, gives the dog’s ears a final scratch, and heads back to his kitchen. He hurls his cigarette butt onto the ground, coughs up a small piece of his lung and hawks it out from between his lips. The flywire door creaks open and slams shut, and he’s gone. 

‘You ready?’ I ask the dog. 

She grins her toothless, panting grin. I give her a leg-up and we hit the road.  

In my rear view mirror I see the chef, looking at or beyond us into his own past or future, and I think: I want to fuck this man - if only to help him get rid of his sadness.

But then I think: that’s just weird. I put Bob Dylan on loud and sing even louder and ‘Shelter From the Storm’ rings through the car like a last farewell to happiness.      

And in-between verses, a small piece of my heart leaks in through the radiator vent and snuggles back into my chest. 

The roads are paved with carrion: flat-strap roo back, paper thin on the surface,

truck tyres pounding out their currency in kilometers per hour.

McLaren Creek

Wauchope

The UFO centre of Wycliffe Well.

Barrow Creek, Population 11. The local publican leans on his bar fuelling stories of blood to the thirsty tourists:        

‘Skull Creek massacre. 1874. 91 Kaytetye slaughtered. No prisoners taken.  Named Skull Creek for the number of bleaching skulls left to rot in the earth, now there’s an interesting fact. Coniston Massacre. 1928. 70 Kaytetye slain. No prisoners taken. William George Murray, Chief Protector of Aborigines. Exonerated for his pains. ‘Nother beer there matey? 2001. Peter Falconio disappears behind a Kombi Van and hasn’t been seen since. One prisoner taken.’

I buy a juice, and ask him if any stray hearts have come through of late. 

‘Only used ones,’ he says - and the beery blokes at the bar heft up a laugh and scratch their awkward balls while the one-eyed woman behind the counter raises her dish-soaked eyebrows at me, and shakes her head slowly. 

‘No hearts here, love. Just us.’

I stand outside and drink the juice

stare at the compounded corrugations of red dirt

sand and dust

tufts of spinifex

sky which never seems to stop.

I think of a husband who left me, in search of his own dreams of youth. 

The dog coughs politely to remind me that we’re on a schedule - as much as she’d like to chase the rabbits in this three-dog town. So I lug her up into place and she props in co-pilot mode - ears alert – while I contemplate the dead straight road ahead. My Tom Tom tells me to hang a left at Winninowie in one thousand, five hundred and eleven kilometres time. Now there’s something to look forward to.

Just past the pub is a burn-off, close to the road. Smoke haze hangs low. Kite hawks and eagles circle for smoldering rodents, and the road ahead is thickly invisible.

What to do? Sit and wait for it to clear? 

The air’s still as a corpse. This could hang around for hours. 

It’s too hot to sit out here, and I’m not going back to that sad shithole. 

So.

Gear down. 

Drive into the smoke. 

Slowly does it. 

It’s… thick. 

Thicker than it looked from the outside. 

I can’t… 

…actually…

See. The road. 

Fuck! Flames! There! Fire! Fuck! That’s the fuel tank!  

Fuck! FUCK! We’ll explode! 

FUCK! The windscreen. On fire! 

Instant hot. Can’t breathe. 

Dog cowering low, whimpering. 

Sorrysorrysorry.

We’re being incinerated. I’ve killed her, she’s… 

Stifling. Can’t breathe.

What do I do? 

Think.

Back out. You back out. 

You stop and you… 

Can’t stop, I can’t stop, we’ll burn. 

Go forward. You have to go forward.

I can’t see. Where’s the road? 

What if a road train’s coming? Crush us out of the way, flat, dead. 

We’ll die. We’re gonna die. We’re gonna…

Road.

Air. 

Windows down.

Breathe. Air.

Road, dead ahead. Straight, clear road. 

One thousand, five hundred and nine kilometers of it. 

I shake. 

Fall out of the car. 

Vomit. 

Squat in the earth. The red, living earth.

Spit. 

Breathe.

Breathe.

The dog! Free the dog.

She looks behind us at the charred rodents. Thinks briefly about profiting from nature’s carnage, but eats up my vomit instead.

I check out the melted windscreen wiper blade

The black smoke scars licking up the side of my van -

just where the fuel tank is 

and the idiocy of my action hits home.  

Out here, I am nothing.  

Out here, everything is nothing.