The Island(3)

Heather had watched only one of them, Wolf Creek, but that was scary enough for her.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” the man said. Her heart was thumping, but the man’s voice was so calm, gentle, and unthreatening that she was put immediately at ease.

“Um, sorry, what was that about the lights?” she asked.

“The headlights must have blinded it. Turn ’em off and give it a minute,” the man said.

She reached into the Toyota and killed the lights. The man waited for a few moments and then walked onto the road. “Go on, big fella! Go on out of it!” he said and clapped his hands. The kangaroo turned its head, looked at both of them with seeming indifference, and then, at its own pace, hopped off into the night.

“Well, that was something. Thank you,” Heather said and offered the man her hand. He shook it. He was about five foot six, around sixty years old, with dark, curly hair. He was wearing a red sweater with jean shorts and flip-flops. They had been in Australia now for nearly a week, but this was the first Aboriginal person Heather had come across. Out here in the middle of nowhere.

“You’re not from around here, I reckon,” the man said.

“No. Not at all. I’m Heather, from Seattle. Um, in America.”

“I’m Ray. I’m not from around here either. We just come in for the show. Me mob, that is.”

“Your mob?”

“Yeah, we just come in for the show. Come in every year.”

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw now that there were a lot of people with him in the desert. In fact, it was an entire camp, maybe twenty or thirty in all. Older people and young children. Most of them were sleeping but some were sitting around the embers of a fire.

“Where are you trying to get to? Alice?” Ray asked.

“I’m trying to reach the airport. If I keep going on this road—”

“Nah, they should have signed it better. This road’ll take you on a big circle out into the bush. Just go back to where you saw the roadwork and go right. You’ll be in Alice in fifteen minutes. There won’t be any traffic.”

“Thank you.”

Ray nodded. They stood awkwardly for a moment. She found that she didn’t quite want the conversation to end. “What’s the show you’re talking about?” she asked.

“The Alice Springs show. It’s the big event of the year in these parts. The white fellas don’t like us to be around town but they can’t stop us coming in for the show.”

“What is the show? A state fair?”

Ray nodded. “Something like that, I reckon. It’s a livestock show but there’s food and music. Rides for the kids. People come in from hundreds of miles away. It’s usually in July. Having it earlier this year. Mobs from all over the territory, even some from Queensland. My mob’s been walking in for three days.”

She gazed at his “mob” again with wonder. These people—grandmothers, parents, young children—had been walking across this desert for three days?

“None of the nippers will have met an American before. Something for them to talk about. Mind if we say a quick hello?” Ray asked.

Heather spent a few minutes meeting Ray’s family—the ones who were awake, anyway. His granddaughter Nikko, his wife, Chloe. Chloe admired her earrings and Heather begged her to take them as a thank-you gift for Ray’s helping her back on the road again. The gift was accepted but not before Ray gave Heather a small penknife he’d made himself.

“I’m selling these at the show. Jarrah hardwood and meteor iron,” he said.

“Meteor iron?”

“Yeah. From the one that came down at Wilkinkarra.”

The penknife was carved with emus and kangaroos on one side and what she took to be the Milky Way on the other. It was beautiful. She shook her head. “I can’t possibly take this! It must be worth hundreds of—”

“I’ll be lucky to get twenty bucks each. Take it. It’s fair dinkum. An exchange. The earrings for the knife. See the ring at the bottom of it? I’ve been told that if you put your keys on that and put it in the tray outside the metal detector with your phone, you can even fly with it. They just think it’s a key-fob thing.”

Ray was not to be talked out of the gift and she accepted it with good grace. She got in the Toyota, waved goodbye, and retraced her journey to the roadwork sign; this time she took the correct turn for Alice. As the town got closer, the road became more certain of itself. Houses and stores loomed out of the dark. She saw campfires with men and women gathered around them. More Indigenous people who, apparently, had all come in for the show.

The phone reacquired a GPS signal. The radio came back on. “At the next junction, take a left for Alice Springs airport,” Google Maps suddenly announced in a perky Australian accent. Heather was at the airport ten minutes later. She drove to the rental-car lot and turned the engine off. A sign said DO NOT FEED DINGOES, WILD DOGS, OR FERAL CATS above a drawing of a sad-looking dog and an indifferent cat. She made sure the doors were locked and let everyone sleep for a while longer.

“We’re here,” she said finally and gave Tom a gentle shake.

He stretched. “Oh, great. Thank you, honey. I would have driven some! You should have woken me. Any problems?”

“Not really, but there was a big kangaroo in the middle of the road,” she said, attaching the penknife to her key chain.