Page 25 of Down the Track
Yeah, maybe Hux could deliver his questions a little less like an interrogation and a little more like the worried friend that he was. ‘Nice day for flying?’ he added.
‘Hot. Clear. The usual. I get out there and I’m standing at the pile of rocks at ten minutes to ten, listening to the cicadas go off in the scrub. I figured I wouldn’t have long to wait—Dave would have heard the chopper come over—but I was early, so I turned the engine off to have a break from the noise. I waited ten minutes, twenty. I got the shits a bit, because I’d come all this way on a Sunday morning and it wasn’t as though the bloke had anything to pack, right? Anyway, I walked a bit in the direction of the caravan, which ordinarily I wouldn’t do—leave the chopper, I mean—’
The rule of the outback. Don’t leave the big shiny object that a search team can use to find you.
‘—to see what the hold-up was, but there’s a big plateau sticking up out there like Uluru that makes a great landmark, so I wasn’t too worried. But when I found the caravan, right away it was clear the place was just a rusted-out old hulk. Uninhabitable by anyone’s standards.’
‘So now we have the sketchy details on the form and the lie about where our friend Dave was actually going.’
Charlie frowned. ‘That’s not what I was thinking at the time, but now … yeah.’
‘What were you thinking at the time?’
‘Well, he hadn’t actuallysaidthat caravan was where he was headed. He’d just waved at me from beside it. Perhaps there was another camp tucked up in a dry creek bed or amongst some rocks that I hadn’t seen, you know? But the bloke was lugging two ten-litre jerrycans and they’d be a bugger to move any great distance on foot on your own. There were a few boot prints in the dirt. I followed them but the ground got real rocky and there was nothing to be followed, and no noise from a genset or sounds of any sort. So I just … waited some more.’
TYSON: This is one of those subtext moments, Hux. He’s saying one thing but he’s meaning another.
Yeah, Hux had got that one loud and clear.
They could have been kids again. Hux a twelve-year-old, clueless but wary of the dazed face of his mother, the whispered conversations that escalated to slammed doors and the sounds of crying. And Charlie—usually a constant presence in the Huxtable house but suddenly, unfathomably, banned—had been older. Still a kid, mind you, way too young to deal with the shitstorm that was being thrown at him. But older. Seventeen, in fact. A seventeen-year-old who knew way, way too much about waiting in the outback for someone to walk into view through the hot shimmer of an endless horizon.
‘This is totally different,’ said Hux. But was it?
At least he understood now why Number Four had wanted him to come home. Charlie was beating himself up, the way he’d beaten himself up over Jess going missing all those years ago.
Twenty-odd years ago.
‘There’s something else,’ said Phaedra. She looked at Hux and then slid her eyes sideways to her desk, where a copy of theWestern Echosat under her coffee mug.
‘Can I have a look?’ he said.
The front page had the usual fancy writing up the top, the row of adverts along the bottom. A thin left-hand column sported an index promising more info inside about the weather, the Yakka, the downturn in tourist numbers … and then the article.
MISSING OUT PAST WOOP WOOP
By Angelique Kopp, Yr 10 Media Studies, Hughenden State School
State Emergency Service volunteers from the Hughenden District were called into action this weekend to look for a man reported missing to police by a helicopter tourism operator based in Yindi Creek. My dad is an SES volunteer and I asked him to describe what happened.
‘Acting Senior Constable Petra Clifford contacted the district SES Branch on Sunday afternoon to report a man who’d failed to appear for a scheduled pick-up from a remote spot between Yindi Creek and McKinlay. Given the current daytime temperatures and the lack of information given about the man, we knew we had to get searching as soon as possible. A police helicopter, police from Yindi Creek and Longreach, and four volunteers from the Hughenden SES rendezvoused at the place where the man was last seen to commence searching at first light on Monday morning.’
Acting Senior Constable Clifford said the search had been hampered by poor information provided by the helicopter pilot who had been supposed to collect the man. She said a statewide alert has been issued across police social media accounts for the man, known only as Dave, to come forward if he made his own way back to town.
At the time of writing this article, the man had not been found nor come forward but the search is continuing …
Hmm. The article wasn’t quite the pointing finger of blame that Dot and Ethel had made it out to be, but it wasn’t great, either. At least their business name hadn’t been included, but there was only one helicopter operator in Yindi Creek. Connecting the dots with an internet search would take about three milliseconds.
‘Have you seen this, Charlie?’ he said, showing him the cover.
‘Sal read it to me. She picked up a copy at the IGA.’
‘Aaaand … there’s something else,’ said Phaedra.
‘Well, come on then, spit it out,’ said Hux.
‘There’s extra police in town today, brought in from Longreach, I think, and they spent the morning going door to door up the main street, asking to look at everyone’s CCTV footage, and somehow or other, word’s got out that Charlie wasn’t just the pilot. He’s “involved”.’ She imbued the word with all the sketchy implications a town full of natural gossipers loved to get their knickers in a knot over. ‘I took a phone call this morning from a client asking if they’ll get their deposit back if they cancel the charters they’ve got booked next week.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Hux. ‘Since when was reporting a missing bloke being “involved”?’
