Shearers' Motel by Roger McDonald Read Free Book Online

down the spine. Improvising, he came at the carcase sideways, cutting out legs, loin, ribs and shoulders in slippery hunks. Meat ants raced for scraps as they fell around his boots.
    In the kitchen he worked slowly, painstakingly, with a badly sharpened knife, creating piles of chaotic, flimsy chops that he bagged in plastic and stowed away in the fridge. The time for breakfast passed while he worked. Nobody disturbed him. The time for smoko loomed. He had taken too much time with the meat. He resolved that when Bertram Junior came back he’d ask him to butcher-up the next one. Hang his pride — overseers did it for women cooks, they’d do it for him — until the day came when they’d see him streaming down from the kitchen to the meat house, chef’s knife flashing, perfect cuts of meat falling to the tray like a publicity exercise.
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    Half the night, all that day, Bertram Junior drove a thousand-kilometre round trip looking for the missing shearers. Backtracking through Wanaaring, Cobar and Wilcannia, he shepherded them in around nightfall. One lot had broken down; the others had stayed with them; a girl rouseabout fresh from Kiwi, named Pam, had collapsed in the heat from a stomach infection, and spent the night in Bourke Hospital.
    Bertram Junior had beads of sweat rolling down his forehead, and he spoke in short, puffy gasps as he staggered into the kitchen around dark, grabbed the handiest tea-towel and mopped his chest.
    â€˜Good start for you, Cookie. You’re the only one making money.’

NO SUCH PERSON AS A GOOD COOK
    Every day Bertram Junior looked at him in a sidelong fashion. He seemed to be wondering what his secret was. He had to have one. Everybody in the sheds had a reason for being there, relating to where they were from and where they were going, what hadn’t worked out for them in what they did before. With some people it was harder to tell what it was. Almost impossible.
    With this bloke it was good the way he got on with the job, and didn’t whinge or ask for extra help. He was good at what he did considering he was new to the work.
    â€˜Ah, Cookie. You sure you ain’t done this work before?’
    â€˜Never.’
    Bertram Junior reacted best to him when he let go, chewed the fat, bullshitted a little back at him. Not that he let go much. Not that he answered back all that much.
    â€˜How old’s that eldest daughter of yours, Cookie? Sixteen? Drop me outside of the high school.’
    â€˜On your head.’
    He seemed okay. But experience showed that anyone could become a problem at any time. Bertram Junior was ready for trouble from whatever direction it came. He didn’t think it would be Cookie this shed — it was morelikely to be the wool classer, but it wouldn’t do to be too sure. You had to watch out for cliques. Cookie was friendly with Davo, and Davo was married to Barb, the classer, and Barb was on the warpath from day one, intending to do her job so perfectly there was bound to be trouble given the prevailing conditions, with workers who kept getting lost or breaking down, the shed starting a day late, and some who weren’t happy about having a lady classer at all, specially not a strict one like Barb.
    Bertram Junior had to think about all this while thinking about everything else.
    It was strange where Cookie put his bed after the first night of heat — down from his room, away from the huts, twenty or thirty metres out in the middle of a circle of wheel-tracks. He said that was where it started to get cool. He said he drank in the stars like a thirsty man drank water. When extra shearers arrived they had to drive around him. Everyone except Christian T — who was afraid of snakes and centipedes, and locked himself in his room with the windows shut — put their beds on the dirt at the bottom of the steps. But the cook went that much further. He stripped off out there under the stars, smeared himself with