About face
on't work," Ezra said, shaking his head. "Wastin' yer time."
He ambled over to the old tractor tyre lying under the tree nearby and sat, pushing his hat to the back of his head, and revealing the receding hairline below it. The miserly eucalypt shade left dapples of sun across his figure, as he sat, radiating a sort of calm air of doom.
"It sure as hell won't work with you sittin' on yer arse doin' bugger all."
Gary, a fit and impatient twenty-six year-old hunk of a man, kicked at the ground, raising dust. Ezra looked at him without expression.
"Stuff it," said Gary. "I'm gonna have a shit."
He strode off towards some scrub a little way off.
"Mind where yer stick yer arse," Ezra called after him. "You don't wanna get bit by a snake or anythin'."
Gary came back a few minutes later.
"I'm not just gunna sit here and look like a dork when the others come back. We're gonna bloody look like bloody idiots. We've gotta get it out.
'It' was about eight feet of a brownish coloured snake with red eyes and a big square head, and it was curled up on the front seat of their old Land Rover. It seemed quite happy, dozing in the warm shady spot.
The Landrover was axle-deep in red bulldust, the fine-grained red dust that rose like a cloud behind every footstep. Vehicles travelling across the bush could be tracked from many miles away by the plume of red dust rising in their wake. Mostly, the old four-wheel drives could just plug along in it. It was not ideal stuff to park in though, but when Ezra and Gary had suddenly discovered their passenger, the priority had been to abandon ship. They were not bogged - as long as they got the thing started they could chug their way out again. All they needed was access. Gary was not going to be thwarted by some stupid snake, whatever Ezra said.
Ezra was not worried. This was a purler of an excuse to bludge the rest of the day. He was happy enough dozing under the old gum tree. Checking for dead rabbits wasn't all that exciting, and they'd still be there tomorrow. Calicivirus was just like the old myxo, and they weren't all going to hop to their feet and wander off. He pictured zombie rabbits, all hopping jerkily towards Gary, that fixed stare on their silly faces, growing fangs like a vampire and all leaping on him and tearing him to shreds. Impatient young bugger, that Gary. Just as long as he didn't do anything really stupid and get himself on the business end of real fangs.
Gary had tried bashing the snake with a stick, despite Ezra's advice to leave it alone. He couldn't get enough leverage through the window flap, and it hadn't worked. What he wanted to try was for Ezra to fling the door open so that he could get in and give it a good thump before it realised what was going on. Ezra tried to talk some sense into Gary.
"That," he said, "is a bloody taipan and we are not gunna piss it off. It's big, it's fast, it's bad-tempered, and if it bites yer, yer dead. Get the picture?"
Gary tried banging on the outside of the vehicle and yelling, in the hopes the snake would crawl back out the way it had come in. It didn't. Then Gary thought they could try to make a loop out of grass or something and slip it over the snake's head like he'd seen in the movies.
"You have to make a noose for that, and there ain't anythin' around here strong enough," Ezra told him. "That is a big strong beastie and I can see from here it doesn't like the looks of you."
Then Gary had his next great idea. They would use two Y-shaped sticks, sneak them either side of the snake's big head, and push them together, trapping it.
"I am not gettin' my hand in striking distance of a bloody taipan and that's flat, Ezra said, now serious. "You just don't do anythin' stupid, Gaz. You get bit an' I ain't givin' you none o' that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It wouldn't do any good anyway. If we didn't get to some anti-venom quick-smart, you'd be stuffed. We're out of phone range, we've got no bloody radio and if the Flying bloody Doctor took off from Charleville now you'd still be dead before they got here."
"Come on, Ez, we can't just bloody sit here."
"Yes we bloody can. Otherwise we can get dead. Try to use the brains you were born with, son. Do you realise that one decent bite from that thing could kill a million mice. And i'm not makin' it up. It isn't worth it, dammit. Rudi and Pete will be back this way in four hours, so what's your panic?"
Ezra knew before he opened his mouth that it would do no good and he was right. Gary was determined to win. With great care, Gary reached in through the window flap, trying to get the snake's neck jammed into the space between the two forks in the sticks. The snake struck savagely at the stick. "Shit!" Gary yelled, leaping back and dropping the sticks. "Shit!" The snake, clearly no lover of bad language, disappeared under the seat. "Told yer." Ezra went back to sit under his tree.
Ezra was sitting in the Hotel Tully Falls, the 'highest pub in Queensland', savouring a quiet lager with his old mates Blue and Arthur Drummond, remembering the good old days when they'd go down the coast and really lay one on. Remember the year there was that big flood at Rocky? There was that girl. What was her name? She taught me a few things that's for sure. Pity we never made it back. You were pretty keen on that girl from that place on the Johnstone River, weren't you Artie. Ezra's mind drifted back. He was over the West the next year. That didn't work out too good. Just as well these two other ratbags looked out for him when he came back. Still, that girl, Ellie, was it? Wished he'd caught up with her again. Hard when you're on the move all the time. Something gentle touched his face. He smiled and opened his eyes, but it was only a dry leaf, spiralling down from the tree above, and he was fifty-seven years old, tired, and stuck out in the bush with a young tyro who couldn't sit still for five bloody minutes. He looked around. Where the hell was he?
"Where the hell are yer now, you young maniac?" Ezra called out.
A dirty, sweating Gary appeared out of the red Queensland dust behind the Landrover. He put his finger to his lips, and came over to the tree.
"I've got a plan."
"What now?" Ezra asked resignedly. "Rudi and Pete will be back in a couple of hours."
"Come over here. Look at this."
Gary was in the process of digging a trench on the far side of the vehicle. It ran the length of the Landrover, and was about two feet wide and two feet deep, a U-shaped depression with the dirt piled far enough away not to fall back into the hole. Ezra looked at Gary in awe.
"You are out of your tiny bloody mind," he said. "I don't s'pose you're tired at all?"
"Well I don't reckon you'd be," Gary responded, "since you've been snorin' away for the last hour and a half."
"Gazza," Ezra said, "I take me hat off to yer. You might be bloody crazy, but you sure are one determined crazy bastard. Just one thing. What in God's name is it for?"
"Geez, that'd be obvious wouldn't it?" Gary said disparagingly. "I'm goin' to open the door, tip the car over into the hole and shake the bloody snake out!"
Ezra stood, silent, looking at the younger man. He blinked and opened his mouth to say something, then though better of it. He hawked and spat.
"Any water left?"
Gary said, Yair," on a rising note. "Yair, I left yer some."
"Well young Gary, this is what I'm gunna do. I'm gunna have a drink of water. I'm gunna have myself a smoke, and I'm gunna sit under that tree and wait till the others come past here. You, young feller, can do what yer like."
With that, Ezra got himself a swig of water and went back to the tractor tyre. He shut his eyes and waited in hope that daydreams would take him away.
When he woke up, it was quiet. He looked around immediately to see where his mate was, and found him sitting on the other side of the tyre. He sat with legs apart, elbows on his thighs and hands together in front of him. He was looking down at the ground.
"Give up did yer?" Ezra asked.
"Nah."
"Couldn't get it out?"
"Yair. Snake's gone."
"Really. So what's the problem now, or were you just waitin' for me to wake up?"
"No. I wasn't waitin' for yer to wake up, you silly old bastard."
"Oh," said Ezra. "Temper, temper. So you gonna tell me or what?"
"Bloody Landrover's upside down and there's no way to move it."
Ezra looked over to where the Landrover lay on its back with its wheels in the air.
"Pity," he said. "Guess we'll have to wait till Rudi and Pete come."
He leaned back on the tyre and drifted quietly off to sleep again.
