last man home

Sitting in my truck in the dark, on the hills behind a one-horse no-jobs town, while the sky tears the heart out of the dam we’ve been building for 4 months now. Have burned through two bourbons and about fifty smokes with the engine idling to run the heater, stereo off and the truck rocking and bucking on the wild wind around me,  headlights running into the emptiness over the bluff I’m parked on, trees behind me dancing and whipping like drunk voodoo queens, limbs sloughing of them with cracks as loud as bones, the road and everything else covered in their body parts. Remember the bloke who told me they call the big branches widow-makers, stopped him when he went to tell me why, ‘cos the 'why' is plain enough. The lightning boom-crack-smashes, lighting the valley up, but the rain is so coming down that you can’t see anything. Somewhere below me I’ve got a row of brand new earthmovers parked, yellow as Tonka-toys, lined up on their hardstand. Yesterday I was impressing myself with how much work they can do in a day. Tonight they are powerless ants, toys indeed, just more fuckin’ gear to worry about. Already know that if the rain keeps coming I’ll get a call about moving them. Already know I’ll tell him not to try.                      
                       
Sit and watch, let the rain hurl at the truck, let the truck buck, let the trees dance, drink a can of bourboun. Sit. See lights on the other ridge. Watch them for more than an hour, coming and going through the trees and murk and high and low tracks, lights dim as moth's eyes. Old Man Lewis, out checking his farm and his mortgage. I call him on the radio. Say howdy. He reckons he’ll see me in twenty. Sit. Smoke, see my reflection in the window. I look like a bloke I don’t know, serious fucker, carrying a load, four days unshaven, grey in the beard just a bit. That bloke needs to fuckin’ relax. Low-laugh into the windscreen, turn off the cabin light to kill my reflection. Sit. Wait. Live. Skin alive and prickling, wet jacket heavy on my shoulders, warm as a bed inside it, legs soaked, boots inch-caked in wet red clay as slick of bars of soap. Shit fuckin’ ground to work with.                      
                       
Get to thinking about the last job, built that one solid on the rock, a yellow ancient chunk of ground, reliable as an atheist. You’d cut it with ‘dozers, then you’d pour concrete on it. Simple as that. This job though, already know I’ll come away with photos of earthmovers big as houses stuck belly-deep in red fucking mud while the ‘dozers skull-drag ‘em free, then us going in there to cut the wet section of the dam out, re-lay, re-compact, re-test, re-fuck around with it, and the rain will come, and the rain will come. Get bored thinking about it, ‘cos its gonna happen anyway. Call Old Man Lewis again. He doesn’t answer. Figure he’s out of the cab checking farmer shit.                        
                       
I think about my old man again, his storm walks. Remember the night he made another legend of himself. It was this kinda night, a one-in-fifty sort'a storm, and the high-voltage cables that slung over our valley fell down in to the creek. Something went wrong with the power grid; the thing that should've shut the power didn’t shut the power when they fell, so those cables, thick as thumbs, danced in wild arcs like snakes from the arse of hell, slashing bolts of arc-lightning at the ground. The cows and chooks and pigs were blind for days after, and he went walking out into it to go see, to just be out in it I think now. For us it seemed like he was being swallowed into forces too cruel, too unsensing to fuck with. What happened then, that night, him deciding to walk through and under those hurling electric snake-like things, to make it to the main road just to have a look, and his face when he came back through all that again to get back to the house. He looked like he’d been fighting with the gods. All of them. Thought it then and will say it aloud now. Stupid mate. Fuckin’ stupid.                        
                       
The two-way radio cracks. Think I heard something in it. Turn it up. Speak “say again, say again”. Nothing comes back, the storm belts on around me, really cranking, the gusts getting longer and longer, harder and harder. Sit back. Look at my watch; 3:18. Smile. Love that number; the size of my hot-rod’s engine, in good old fashioned cubic inches. Think nothing more about that ‘cos the car gets her attentions other times than this. Good number though. Decide to give Old Man Lewis another 10, then I’ll drive his road myself to have a look. Know too that he’s fine. Probably just turned it off to be a hard-arse, ‘cos he’s one of those kinda blokes on his bad days. Smile for that. Love working next to farmers, even the rat-cunning ones, ‘cos even when they fuck you they do it so well sometimes that you just shake your head and say “fuck me if I didn’t just drive over to talk to the bloke and next minute I’m agreeing to build a new road for him, for nothing, and we didn’t even get to what I wanted to talk about”. Old Man Lewis aint as sharp though. I smile about that as well; could just be him fucking with me. Like I said, gotta watch a farmer.                      
                       
20 minutes later I put the truck in low range, check the front diff has engaged, switch on the flood-lights and head over across toward his farm track, staying away from the lower tracks that drop down into the valley toward the creek, now a river, swirling busting down there somewhere. ‘Round here they have floods called gully-rakers. The sky drops on some random area maybe only big as a hundred football fields, gives it 8 inches of rain in two hours, and then the local creeks leap in height from pleasing brooks to house-sized-rock rolling brown heaving torrents that you won’t beat. Strictly not to be fucked with. I try him again. Still nothing. Say ‘fuckin’ farmers’ out loud to myself but don’t mean it like that. The track narrows down into a close channel of running water between great solid walls of fat-man-thick trees, them still shedding widow-makers, me crunching over thick branches at a slow crawl, careful not to flick anything up into the engine bay, but know the truck carries a steel belly pad under it. Put it on there myself. Turn up the blues.                      
                       
Finally find him on the second ridge over, sitting at a logging site so he isn’t parked under the trees. Pull up, wind my window down and he does too. Nod, say “Trevor. You right mate?”. He says “yeah” and we get to talking. Tell what we’ve seen, what creeks are up, what the forecast is saying, what Bill from up North said a few hours back underneath the next piece of storm we are gonna get. We say nothing much about what happens after this, how many days work is coming to clean it up, what bridges and quarries might be flooded gone. We do talk about gear though. He has a tractor with a back-blade on it. I know ‘cos I’ve seen it in his shed, “you using that tractor in the next while Trev?”. He shakes his head no, tells me I can only hire it with him in the seat. I say "fair enough" and we agree a hire rate. After that we’re just getting our truck-cabs wet so I say “good man Trev” and wind my window back up. Reverse my truck up and around, lights shining back at that alley-like track in its church of trees. Drive back up the way I came, thinking of calling it a night, of going home. Trev calls over the radio, asks that I hang around another hour while he checks his farm-dam track. Say “yeah no worries” shaking my head one more time; done by a farmer again. “keep your 2-way on, Trev”.                      
                       
I decide to drive down to the earthmovers while I wait for him, crawling slow, feeling out the grip of the soap-slick earth, make sure the tyres can still bite enough to get me back out again. Not keen to get bogged on these roads, and truth is that a man who goes out on a night like this then gets himself bogged is a fool; unreliable. Gotta think of my reputation in the pub. Matters around here, too be thought of as solid, too be able to eyeball a man and talk to him straight. There is the other kind there as well, in that same pub, who would crow about you to your face, crow the bad story to everyone, let you burn under your own mistake. They're nothin’, them types, but their noise still aint useful to hear. While I’m thinking that useless shit I reach across the cab too get my smokes, then a loud 'crack' above me. I jump backwards in my seat like a wet cat and choke the steering wheel tight with both hands. Snarl/bark ‘fuck’ into the windscreen. If I thought my old man a fuckin' idiot out there that night then what the hell does that make me? I don’t bother smiling; not really the night for too much of that. Keep ploughing downward on to the dam site, open another can of bourbon, turn the heater up, decide to think nothing for a while.