Back of Sunset. Jon Cleary

him a drink from a water-bottle. He knew it might blister his mouth, but he took it: better to suffer a few blisters than die of thirst. He moved cautiously on the ground, trying to feel if he had been burnt; he touched his shirt and it fell apart in his fingers. He raised his hand to his head; his hair was stiff and dry, but it didn’t come away on his hand. He sat up, and slowly, carefully, he ran his hands over his whole body where he could reach it; then he looked up at Billy and the other men silhouetted against the blaze of the plane.

      “I’m all right, I think. I can’t feel any burns. How’s Dr. Covici?”

      “No good,” said Billy. “You better have a look at him if you can get on your feet.”

      Steve got painfully to his feet. His skin was still too tight on his body; he felt that if he moved quickly he would split like a ripe pod. He looked down and saw the black stain on his leg and recognised it for blood; he could feel another trickle of it from a cut over his eye. He walked slowly over to the still unconscious Covici stretched out on the ground in front of a truck. He was aware of the other men following him, Billy, another white man and four aborigines in stockmen’s clothes, but he took no notice of them. He knelt down, still moving slowly and cautiously, still trying to stay within his tight and hurting skin, and looked at the huge still body, all the laughter burned out of it now.

      At last he stood up. “He’s got a broken leg. And he has second-degree burns. Where’s his bag?”

      Billy gestured. “It’s gone up with the plane. Everything, including all the emergency stuff we carry. What have you got back at the homestead, Dave?”

      Steve looked now for the first time at the white man standing in the glare of the truck’s headlamps. He was not tall, but he was almost as thick as a bullock. He seemed to bulge with muscle; even the muscles in his broad dark face seemed overdeveloped. He was standing close to Steve, and Steve could smell the liquor on his breath as he answered Billy.

      “There ain’t much back there. I been meaning to order more stuff for the chest – I’m coming into town for supplies in a week or two.”

      “You know bloody well you’re supposed to re-stock as soon as you run low on anything,” Billy snapped. “The doc was on your back about this before.”

      Keating mumbled something and looked at Steve. “You a doc? You coming in with me to look at me mate?”

      Steve looked down at Covici and as he did the latter murmured and opened his eyes. Steve knelt beside him again. “Keep still,” he said. “You’ve got a broken leg, and some second-degree burns. Do you feel anything yourself – I mean, internally?”

      Covici lay silent for a moment. “Too much fat on the outside to get hurt inside.”

      “How’s the leg?”

      “Pretty bloody.” Covici’s big round face had collapsed; there was an ugly burn on one cheek. “You’d better go in and have a look at the patient. I’ll be all right. Billy can fix a splint for my leg. He’s done it before.”

      Steve hesitated, then stood up. There was nothing he could do for Covici right now; and there might be something in the medicine chest at the Emu Downs homestead that would come in useful. He looked at Billy. “Stay here with him, Billy. I’ll go in with Mr. Keating, have a look at the patient, and come back here as soon as I can. I’ll radio back to your sister and see if she can get us another plane.”

      “Not tonight, you won’t get one.” The plane still burned, black smoke wreathing away to obscure the stars; Billy was silhouetted against the blaze of it. “It’ll have to come from Port Hedland. It’ll be daylight before it gets here.”

      “All right, I’ll tell them to make it as soon as they can.” Steve looked at Keating. “We’ll go in and have a look at your mate, Mr. Keating. See what we can do for him.”

      “He’s pretty crook,” said Keating. “I hope you’re a good doc.”

      Steve said nothing as he got into the cabin of the truck beside Keating. The man’s half-drunk, he thought, and probably worried stiff about his mate.

      Steve’s watch was still going, and he timed the seven-mile drive into the station homestead: thirty-five minutes. The pindan scrub was thick in this part of the country; Keating explained that the cattle grazed in open country south of the homestead. The red dusty track wound through the scrub almost without direction; branches grabbed at the truck as if to hold it back. Three slim boabs loomed up in the headlights like ambushing bushrangers and Keating swung the truck out of their way just in time. A mob of wild donkeys crossed their path, eyes white with fright; they drove at a branch lying across the track and it turned into a huge snake and slithered away. A bird dived at the headlights and fell to one side, a flurry of blood and feathers. They crossed two creeks, bumping slowly through a foot of water over the fords, and whirled at speed for less than a minute over an open clay-pan. Keating threaded the truck through a vast field of giant anthills, climbed a hill in low gear and said, “There she is.”

      The homestead lay below them, a single light showing from the main building and fires glowing in the blacks’ camp a hundred yards behind it. Keating took the truck slowly down the track and crossed the open space, past the yards and the sheds, to the house. As Steve got out of the truck he saw that this was no comfortable homestead, one in which its occupant took any pride. It was a galvanised iron shack of only two large rooms; a small kitchen stood off on its own at the back. Steve ducked his head as he walked in the low doorway, holding back the screen door that hung on one hinge. Slums, he thought; even out here you get them.