Illywhacker

"It's not the point about better," I said, "it's a question of where the money goes. You'd be better off with a worse car if the money stayed here."

"You're cock-eyed, man. You're a bloody hypocrite. You go around making a quid from selling the bloody things, and now you tell me I shouldn't buy one. You're making no sense," Stu sighed. "Sell me the bloody Ford before I lose my temper."

"I will not," I said. "If you give me leave I'll travel up to Melbourne and pick up a Summit and bring it down here. It's a beautiful vehicle."

"Is the Summit", Stu said slowly, "as good as a Ford?"

"The difference is not worth a pig's fart."

"A subject", my host said, "of which you would be ignorant."

I was never good with drink. I got myself too excited and I did not express myself as well as I might.

"Do you want Henry Ford", I roared, "to tell you when to get out of bed in the morning."

"Sell me the Ford," Stu roared. "Give me lessons."

"I won't."

"Sell it to me, man, or by God I'll learn you."

"Learn you! Learn you! You talk as ignorant as you think."

"Ignorant," said O'Hagen quietly, "but not so ignorant I don't know why you came here." He stood and walked unsteadily to the wood stove. I paid him no attention.

The poker crashed down on the table. It missed my hand by less than an inch.

"You silly bastard," I hollered, leaping up, and falling backwards over my chair.

And then everything was confusing. I wrestled the poker away and O'Hagen was on the floor but someone was still pummelling me.

I found Goog, in a nightshirt, punching me around the head. And then Goog was lying on the floor in the corner near the stove. A small trickle of blood came from his nose. He was whimpering.

I was sick at heart as I stumbled from the house. In my mind's eye I could see, not Goog, but a brush-tailed possum laid waste in the fallen branches of a tree.

24

I woke just before dawn. The Ford was in the middle of the saltpans and my mouth tasted disgusting. I had run off the road on the north side of the crossing and the meandering wheel marks on the saltflats had left no corresponding impression on my memory.

Rain was falling in a fine drizzle. My right shoulder was wet. The line of dwarf yellow cypress pines along Blobell's Hill was smudged by dull grey cloud and nothing else in the landscape was distinct except the particularly clear sound of a crow above the saltpans flying north towards O'Hagen's. It sounded like barbed wire.

My whole body was stiff and sore but my hands, still clamped around the wheel, were stiffer and sorer than any other part of me. The skin on my palms was torn and blistered from the axe work and had dried hard. My knuckles were bruised and broken. I felt everything that was wrong with my character in those two painful hands – the palms and knuckles always in opposition to each other.

My mouth was parched dry. My head ached. I regretted hitting the small-eared boy. I regretted wishing to put my head between Mrs O'Hagen's legs. I regretted that my actions confused people. I regretted being a big mouth, a bullshitter and a bully.

I was thirty-three years old. I turned the rear-vision mirror so that I could see my face. It teetered on the point of being old. One morning, I knew, I would look into a mirror and see rotting teeth and clouded eyes, battles not won, lies not believed.

It was then I decided to marry Phoebe.

It came to me quite simply, on the saltpans south of Balliang East. I would marry Phoebe, build the aeroplanes at Barwon Aeros, be a friend to Jack, a son to Molly.

When I stepped from the Ford I found the distance between the running board and the ground unexpectedly short. I stumbled and, stepping back, found the T Model up to its axles in the salt-crusted mud.

A crooked smile crossed my face.

"Serve you right," I said.

The Ford had been a tumour in my life. I had fought battles with it in the way another man might fight battles with alcohol or tobacco. I had walked away from it and returned to it. I had rejected it only to embrace it passionately. I admired its construction, its appearance, the skill that had produced it so economically. And these were also the things I loathed.

So on this Tuesday morning at six thirty a. m., when I walked away from a T Model in the saltpans, I felt an enormous relief, a lightness. I was finished with Fords and the dizziness, the dryness in my throat, the pain in my hands, did not stop me appreciating the beauty of this landscape with the black motor car stranded and dying like a whale.

I walked ten miles back to Geelong. I could see myself. I saw how I walked. There, on the road: a man entering the first decent chapter of his life.

25

While we waited for the pudding, Jack discoursed on flying.

"I don't want to hear it," Molly said, holding her small hands across her ears. "It makes me giddy, upon my word it does. It makes me giddy and faint."

Jack prized a hand from the side of his wife's head and placed it on his napkined lap.

"I'll fall," she said, not daring to look down at the floor.