Dirt Music by Tim Winton

Perth without getting rid of the boat and that means taking her home first. She’s leaving an eighty-thousand- dollar Tojo by the roadside. So maybe it’s stolen. She’s in a hurry after all. Looks kind of strung out. And here’s me with a shitload of illegal seafood.
    Look, I’m really sorry, she says. You look busy.
    No, no, I’ve just been fishin. Day off.
    Get any?
    Oh, this and that. Nothin you’d brag about.
    It’s hot, eh.
    Fox smiles. The weather, yeah. Listen, I gotta go into Perth as it happens.
    You’re not from the city, then?
    Fox looks at her, wondering if that’s a smile fading off her face or a twitch caused by the flies.
    No, he murmurs. I’m from down the highway a few minutes. Gotta unhook the boat and stuff but I guess I can take you after that.
    She sighs. That’d be brilliant. Thank you. I’ll just get my bag.
    Fox stands there in the murdering sun while she leans into the Landcruiser and grabs things. He feels sick at the idea of taking her home. He hasn’t even tried to start this woman’s engine but he’ll look like a prick if he doesn’t take her at her word. He’ll need to think how to get the catch from the boat 66 and onto the truck without her twigging to anything. She doesn’t look like Fisheries. Sunglasses not polarized. Silly straw hat she’s pulling out. But that’s a dive watch on her wrist. She hoists a Qantas bag out and a linen jacket.
    Right, then.
    You gunna lock it?
    Oh. Yeah. She points a gadget at the 4;84 and the lights flash.
    Well, she murmurs, that much of it works.
    Get off her, dog. Sorry, he’s a bit familiar.
    Oh, we’re old mates, she says. He’s a friendly dog.
    He’s bloody craybait, thinks Fox, firewalking back to the Ford.
    Georgie sat in the withering dogfunk of the shamateur’s cab and tried not to smirk at the irony of it. God knows she was glad he stopped but, given his situation, had the shoe been on the other foot, she’d be blowing on down the road and to hell with simple decency. She couldn’t believe he’d take the risk. He hadn’t the least idea who she was, who she lived with. She had to be, through no fault of her own, his living, breathing nightmare. Was he cocky or just soft in the head?
    She stared at the crushed beercan sprouting from the mouth of the cassette player. It was the sole trashy touch in a truck so clean and shipshape. No crap on the floor, no classic mire of tools and receipts and wrappers rolling across the dash. He was fastidious.
    There was no conversation. The shamateur looked too mortified and she had a headache that felt like a trepanning.
    Ten minutes passed, fifteen. She couldn’t work up the effort to shove the dog’s head from her lap.
    Eventually they slowed at the skeleton of an old fruit stand which seemed dimly familiar from all those roadtrips to the city; and turned up a dirt drive through the lumpy paddocks of some sunblasted farm. It wasn’t much: bellying fences, uncut hay, a few olive trees. As they bumped down the ruts, you could feel his discomfort intensify like an ear-popping change in altitude.
    Georgie took a look at him while the dog rose and made a fuss. He was tall, lean, brown from the sun. His hair was short and light brown but bleached by weather at the ends. He had small ears and a boyish face with blue eyes. The outdoors had taken the shine off him but he still had his child’s face. What a wide-eyed thing he must once have been.
    He drove to a wide sandy yard surrounded by casuarinas and junked machines, and as he wheeled about to reverse the boat toward an open shed, she saw the unpainted weather-board house that hunkered on its stumps in a parched field of melons. The dog raked her with its claws on its way through the window and the shamateur got out without a word.
    Georgie sat there a moment, uncertain as to how to proceed.
    The heat was killing. A tap creaked and there was the sudden blurt of an outboard. Bugger this, she thought, getting out.
    Before she even got into