White Line Fever
by David Campbell
Equal winner short story open section.
I shake the dust of Darwin and head down the Stuart towards Adelaide. Sweet as a nut and smooth as silk, my Titan, 15 litres driving 600 horses down the hard black to a warm bed and the arms of Ginnie, my Ginnie. Her voice, soft and gentle, comes purring down the phone:
“Hey, Big Boy, you okay out there? You stay awake, you hear, don’t want you chasin’ no white lines into Never-Never Land!”
A terrified ’roo, charging out of the dark into the path of a multi-trailer road train’s four halogen lamps, dies instantly in a white-hot blaze of blood and guts. Smorgasbord for the birds of the air and the creatures of the field. Carrion take-away. Desert pizza.
And now I’m through Katherine and heading for a dip in the pool at Mataranka. Always do that… we’ve all got our funny little ways to beat the fever.
But it’s not just the fever that bothers Ginnie. “It gets lonely when you’re away, hon. All the other blokes around here come home every night, but I ain’t got nobody when you’re away.”
Down through the Alice towards South Australia and there’s nothing I can say. She’s waiting in Perth while I’m out in the middle of nowhere. Six days on the road, with nothing for company but the radio turned up loud enough to frighten the hounds of hell.
Stop for a meal and a rest in Coober Pedy. Far side of the moon, this place. Mullock heaps and people living like moles in holes.
Have to go right into Adelaide, worse luck. Turn-around pretty good though, then Port Augusta slips by in a blur and it’s out on the Eyre towards Ceduna.
This is wild country, where the track is flat and straight and mirages dance in the heat. This is where madness strikes, the rapture of the road.
I’ve seen the swaggies’ ghost out there. He came leering up to the windscreen and smeared his face all over it so I couldn’t see anything but white jelly, and that’s when I collected the roo high up on the bar and the blood spattered, so I got the red on the white and hit the brakes and started rocking all over the road before my brain kicked in and I dragged myself away from the last trip into Never-Never Land.
“Hey babe, sorry to wake you but I’ve got an attack of the heebie-jeebies and I need a bit of company. Talk to me a while.”
And she does. Lying there in our bed she tells me about her day and slowly, steadily eases me through the rough patches.
You need someone like that. If the truck breaks down there’s always somebody to call, but if you’re falling apart and a long way from home it’s not so easy. The voice in the night and someone who cares, that’s the main thing. It keeps me sane. It keeps me alive.