“How long’ve you been there?”
“Not very.”
“I’ll be in soon. Now shoo.”
She went, and that was that. Natural, I guess.
Sunsets in Australia are as good as anywhere else. Not better, but as good. I was in a chair leaning back on two legs against the shed that had become my home in mid-October as I watched the sun burn its way down into the land in a blaze of orange and rose. It was getting toward the end of February. I’d been in Borroloola almost four and a half months. Stars would be out and bright before the temperature dropped into the eighties.
The shed used to hold garden stuff. It was eight by ten feet. I had a bed in there now and a small chest of drawers and a tiny bookcase holding a dozen worn paperbacks. The place was sixty feet from the main house and stood beneath four gum trees. It had a wooden floor with a threadbare rug on it that Kate had given me. Good enough.
Kate came up the path from the house. “Hi, Steve,” she said.
“Hi, yourself.”
“Mind if I sit awhile?”
“Nope.”
She pulled up a second chair and leaned back on two legs like I was doing, tucked her feet into the rungs, and watched the sky go purple and gray with me.
“Long day,” she said after a while.
“Aren’t they all?”
Another minute went by, then she said, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“You’d get by.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve needed that fence for years. Jase bought all those posts and was fixing to do it when . . .”
She fell silent and the night settled around us. An hour ago I’d eaten dinner at the house. Fish this time, a change from lamb chops, mutton stew, all the things you can do with sheep. Sally’s bread was good. Better than good.
Kate rapped the side of the shed. “This . . . it doesn’t seem like enough room to stay in. I mean, for anyone.” Her voice was soft in the dark. “If you want, I’m sure we could make some sort of a, well, an arrangement . . . in the house.”
“Out here suits me, Kate.”
Maybe not what she wanted to hear. This was about as close as she’d come to what might be an invitation to . . . what? Stay? Come over to the main house and share a bed? I looked out at the scorched flat earth as it gave up heat and felt Jeri, watching over me. Or maybe just watching, waiting, trying to tell me something.
“The kids really like you,” Kate said.
“They’re great. Really good kids.”
“Sally’s gettin’ older.”
“You’re gonna have your hands full in another year or two.”
After a while she looked over at me. “Why are you here?”
That was a huge leap forward. She’d asked me something like that when I’d first arrived in Borroloola, asked around, and was told Kate Hardy could probably use some help at her place, and I’d walked over, two miles south of town, asked, and she told me she couldn’t pay anyone to work on the place, and I told her I didn’t want pay, just a place to stay and hard work to do. She hadn’t mentioned it since.
“Gotta be someplace,” I said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Only one I’ve got.”
Still not what she wanted to hear. A few minutes later, she let out a little sigh and stood up. “Well, good night, Steve.”
“Night.”
She left.
I sat there another hour until the world was black and silent, then went inside and fell asleep so I could get up in the morning and dig more holes in the sun.
Six hundred forty holes. I chipped them out a fraction of an inch at a time with an iron bar that weighed sixteen pounds. One day I counted the number of times I lifted that bar and slammed it back down as I busted my way down three feet. I came up with four hundred twenty. So I’d lifted about 4.3 million pounds up two, two and a half feet, and drove it down into that hard red sonofabitchin’ earth. I’d wanted hard work and I’d gotten it.
The day after Kate’s visit I was on my third hole and it was a hundred two degrees in the shade when a Ford Explorer boiled up from the south, lifting a rooster tail of rust-red dust as it rolled past the driveway to the house and went north into Borroloola. Half an hour later, it came back and turned into the yard in front of the house. I’d never seen it before. Maybe it was special mail delivery, maybe a package, maybe Australian National Police with a warrant and I was about to take a ride, end up in France or back in the States.
I was pounding stakes into the ground, using a level to get the fence post vertical, when I looked up and saw her, a hundred yards off, walking toward me. She was blond and tall and slender and her stride was purposeful. She had an unconscious undulating sway to her hips. She wore running shoes, white shorts, a yellow sleeveless blouse that hugged her waist and accentuated her curves. A bolt of pain shot through me, as if someone had punched a hole in my chest with a railroad spike.
She stopped ten feet away and looked at me. “Hi, Mort.”
“Hi, Sarah.” I could barely speak.
“I turned twenty-five in January. I’m old now.”
“Old, hell. You barely look twenty-one.”
“The girl back there at the house said you were out here. She called you Steve, though.”
“She would. It’s on my passport.”
“What’re you doing?”
“Building a fence.”
“I see that. What’re you doing here?”
“Don’t have a good answer to that.”
“It took Ma nearly four months to track you down. She knew you were in Australia because of your passport, but she didn’t find you here in this place until the middle of this month.”
“She’s good. This’d be a hard place to find anyone.”
“She needs you. I need you. It’s time for you to come home.”
“I’ve got another hundred twenty feet of fence
