If they somehow missed Alice they would have to go another five hundred kilometers (over three hundred miles) before they could get food, water, or gas. She looked through the windows on either side of the empty highway and saw exactly nothing. The radio had been drifting in and out for the past twenty minutes but the signal, perhaps, was getting a little stronger. She could make out John Lennon singing about “old flat-top” who was “groovin’ up slowly.”
She could identify pretty much every Beatles song from just one or two bars or a snatch of lyrics. Her parents and almost everyone else on Goose Island had worshipped John Lennon, and with only intermittent TV and internet reception, music had been even more important. The song ended and a DJ began his patter. “That was ‘Come Together,’ the opening track of Abbey Road. And before that we had ‘Hey Jude.’ Can anyone tell me what album ‘Hey Jude’ was on?”
The DJ paused for his listeners to reply.
“It wasn’t on any album, it was a seven-inch single,” Heather whispered.
“Nah, don’t call in. This isn’t a competition. It’s a trick question. ‘Hey Jude’ never got released on any of the original Beatles albums, just the compilations. Well, mates, I hope you enjoyed the balmy weather at midnight where we just hit the low temperature for the day—thirty-six degrees centigrade, which for you oldsters is ninety-six point eight degrees Fahrenheit.”
Tom groaned in his sleep and she lowered the volume. He had a busy morning ahead, and every second of sleep he could get now would help him. She turned to look at the kids. They too were asleep. Although Owen had been on his phone until about a half an hour ago, hoping against hope that a Wi-Fi signal would materialize out of the desert. Olivia had conked out long before that. Heather checked that both their seat belts were still securely fastened and turned her attention back to the empty road.
She drove on.
Rattling transmission. Moths in the headlights. The drumming of the Toyota’s wheels on the blacktop.
She reflected that the Mad Max movies had been skillfully edited to erase the actual tedium of driving through outback Australia. The landscape from Uluru had all been like this. It made one long for the comparative excitement of the morning traffic jam on the West Seattle Bridge. No other vehicles at all here; just the noise of the Toyota and the radio drifting in and out. There were no people around, but at a roadwork sign she could see big khaki machines covered in dust resting by the cutoff like slumbering mastodons.
She drove on and began to worry that she had taken a wrong turn. There was no sign of a city or an airport. The GPS hadn’t updated in a long time and according to it, she was lost in a vast blank nothingness somewhere in the Northern Territory.
Her uneasiness increased as the road surface got worse. She looked for signs of life ahead or out the side windows.
Nothing.
Damn it, back at the construction site she must have taken the wrong—
A big gray kangaroo suddenly appeared in the headlights.
“Shit!”
She slammed on the brakes, and the Toyota shuddered to a stop with an alarming amount of deceleration. Tom and the kids were flung forward, then pulled back again by their seat belts.
Tom groaned. Olivia whimpered. Owen grunted. But none of them woke.
“Wow,” she said and stared at the kangaroo. It was still standing there, five feet in front of the car. Another second and they would have had a serious accident. Her hands were shaking. It was hard to breathe. She needed some air. She put the Toyota in park and, leaving the lights on, turned off the engine. She opened the door and got out. The night was warm.
“Scoot,” she said to the big kangaroo. “I can’t go on if you’re in the middle of the road.”
It didn’t move. “Scoot!” she said and clapped her hands.
It was still staring at the car. How could it not understand the universal language of scoot?
“The headlights might have blinded it. Turn ’em off,” a voice said from the darkness to her right.
Heather jumped and turned to see a man standing a few yards away from her in the desert. On learning that she was going to Australia, Carolyn had warned her about the “world’s deadliest snakes and spiders,” and when that hadn’t worked she sent her a list of movies about hitchhikers murdered in the bush by maniacs. “It’s an entire genre, Heather! It must be based on reality,” Carolyn said.
Heather had watched only one of them, Wolf Creek, but that was scary enough for her.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” the man said. Her heart was thumping, but the man’s voice was so calm, gentle, and unthreatening that she was put immediately at ease.
“Um, sorry, what was that about the lights?” she asked.
“The headlights must have blinded it. Turn ’em off and give it a minute,” the man said.
She reached into the Toyota and killed the lights. The man waited for a few moments and then walked onto the road. “Go on, big fella! Go on out of it!” he said and clapped his hands. The kangaroo turned its head, looked at both of them with seeming indifference, and then, at its own pace, hopped off into the night.
“Well, that was something. Thank you,” Heather said and offered the man her hand. He shook it. He was about five foot six, around sixty years old, with dark, curly hair. He was wearing a red sweater with jean shorts and flip-flops. They had been in Australia now for nearly a week, but this was the first Aboriginal person Heather had come across. Out here in the middle of nowhere.
“You’re not from around here, I reckon,” the man said.
“No. Not at all. I’m Heather, from Seattle. Um, in America.”
“I’m Ray. I’m not from around here either. We just come in for the show. Me mob, that is.”
“Your mob?”
“Yeah, we just come in for the show. Come in every year.”
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw now that there were a lot of people with him in the desert. In fact, it was an entire camp, maybe twenty or thirty in all. Older people and young children. Most of them were sleeping but some were sitting around the embers of a fire.
“Where are you trying to get to? Alice?” Ray asked.
“I’m trying to reach the airport. If I keep going on this road—”
“Nah, they should have signed it better. This road’ll take you on a big circle out into the bush. Just go back to where you saw the roadwork and go right. You’ll be in Alice in fifteen minutes. There won’t be any traffic.”
“Thank you.”
Ray nodded. They stood awkwardly for a moment. She found that she didn’t quite want the conversation to end. “What’s the show you’re talking about?” she asked.
“The Alice Springs show. It’s the big event of the year in these parts. The white fellas don’t like us to be around town but they can’t stop us coming in for the show.”
“What is the show? A state fair?”
Ray nodded. “Something like that, I reckon. It’s a livestock show but there’s food and music. Rides for the kids. People come in from hundreds of miles away. It’s usually in July. Having it earlier this year. Mobs from all over the territory, even some from Queensland. My mob’s been walking in for three days.”
She gazed at his “mob” again with wonder. These people—grandmothers, parents, young children—had been walking across this desert for three days?