The Windy Season by Sam Carmody Read Free Book Online

Brown kites turning in the warm current whirling over our heads.
    We stop near Wilcannia and I head in for fuel and water and the President’s jam doughnuts while the big fella and his generals wait in the scrubby cover of desert oak at the edge of town.
    Then we ride into the afternoon past burnt-out cars and beat-up sheds. Closer to evening there are mobs of kangaroos and emus at the edge of the track. Wild goats that stare at us like we’re lost.
    It’s strange the mood when that sun starts to go and you feel its warmth go with it and the light turns blue like something in the air itself has died. At the speeds we’re going the wheel lines blur in the low light and the sandy track is pale and milky as a river and the riding gets sketchy quick. So we pull off the track some ways and set the bikes down and I get putting on some food while the two generals they watch me quiet as ghosts. They unwrap the cotton bandaging from around their heads that has gone red with dust. The faces of those two old generals they are hard to look at. Skin paper white and dried like the faces of fellas who have had their throats cut. There is no colour in their eyes from what I have ever worked out.
    The President stands on a plate of sandstone and looks around at the vanishing light and the desert and the shadows fading into the earth. His boots loud on the rock as he does half-turns. Look on his old bearded face like he can hear something far off. But I listen hard and there’s nothing. No sound. Just the thoughts in your head. Loud and strange. After a day of dust and light and screaming dirt bikes the stillness of everything can make you feel weird. Quiet enough that you sense something get turning inside yourself. It is hard to explain but it is there in your gut turning over and over. What it feels like. Like a wheel spinning.
    The sun touches down to the west. Where we’re heading. Through the guts the President says. Away from the highways that tiptoe around the centre of the continent. We’re going right through the heart of everything. To the Indian Ocean and our fortune he says. Fortune beyond imagining. He likes to say this. Beyond imagining.
    And the dark sweeps over us and soon the President is saying about as much as those two old generals. And for a fella with the President’s reputation you wouldn’t think the dark would get to him. But every evening out there when the light turns blue and the heat in your skin disappears the President gets quiet then. Doesn’t say hardly a word until he’s sleeping.

Stark
    IT WAS DARK WHEN HE WOKE AND when Paul stepped out from the hostel into the street there was no sound other than the wind in his ears and the far-off shushing of trees and the sea that he couldn’t from moment to moment distinguish between. He was unsure of the time and had no way of telling. When he’d got back to the dorm he’d found his phone in the pocket of his sodden jeans, lifeless, and when he had pressed the screen down with his thumb droplets of water had bubbled at its edges.
    He was thirsty. His mouth was dry and his nostrils were hot. His knuckles stung when he closed his fists. In the breeze he felt shivery and unsteady. It occurred to him he hadn’t had much to eat or drink since the night before.
    The roads that intersected the main street were lightless, as though abandoned. There were no cars in the yards and most blocks were concealed by corrugated asbestos fencing. Paulwalked in the middle of the road. Before he reached the shops it was clear they were closed, the muted light they gave coming from fridges and other appliances inside. Through a cafe window he read a clock on a microwave behind the counter: 9.20.
    There were lights on further around the inlet, the orange fuzz of the lamps above the jetty, and the lights from the building beside it which he remembered was the tavern. Aside from the tavern car park the jetty was the only other landmark in town that had something like a