What Lies Beneath the Dust

A liar always looks you in the eyes, thought Tom as he stared deeply into his father’s dark pupils. The old man took careful sips of his hot tea. “It’s going to be alright, there's no point in arguing,” he said to Tom. “This will stay open long enough for us.” The hot air stirred up willy-willies that moved across the black dirt of the open cut coal mine. They sat with sweat beading off their noses. Tom looked at his father who cast a long shadow over him. They were all liars, thought Tom, liars and cowards. The mine wasn’t profitable anymore, they had just laid off three hundred people to try and make it so, but it wouldn’t be so. Tom watched his father and his steaming drink. He loved the heat, he didn’t see a problem with it, the heat was summer and summer was a holiday but Tom didn’t see it that way. Tom was only reminded of the melanoma ads he’d seen on T.V. when he was a kid and the bushfires that were burning on the east coast. A big earth moving truck lifted another load of coal out of the mine. Its giant black tires, turning like planets, seemed unstoppable.

Tom took out his sketch pad and watercolours and started to jot down some of the shadows of the mine. He had made a dozen sketches since he had arrived. Many of the people who worked at the mine didn’t understand what was so special about it or why someone would want to paint pictures of it. It didn’t make sense to his father either, he only saw the dark marks on the paper, made with charcoal or ink, as random and messy and didn’t understand why anyone would want to look at things like that. He’d often joke to his workmates, “Tom’s working on his toilet paper again.” He thought Tom did things like this because of him. He wasn’t home much, because he was on a fly-in-fly-out job at the mine, two weeks at work and two weeks at home, and after Tom’s mother left, Tom was stuck at his grandparents place while he was at work. He thought Tom had grown up soft and too sensitive. Tom cried too much when he was a kid, he thought, and now he was out here painting pictures while the other men were working it was ridiculous, he thought.

“I’ll see you later, before you leave,” he said, leaving Tom squatting with ink all over his hands. Tom knew he wouldn’t see him again for some time.

Tom sat there for a few more hours making sketches until the sun got too much for him and he felt dizzy and hot. He had decided to travel up the coast before starting art school the following year and made it up to Northern Queensland. So he decided to visit his Dad and make drawings of the mine.

Tom sat under a tree looking up at the towering machinery and the deep cuts made into the earth. There was something about the mine, the way it eviscerated the landscape, it’s scale was so inhuman and yet so human, the way things entered and emerged from it. It was like a great eye carved into the earth, something that was opened that shouldn’t have been, something both spectacular and horrible. His father had told him, “The coal from this mine powers half of India, that’s why they can’t just shut it down,” but Tom didn’t think that was true, he didn’t think there was much truth in anything Grant said anymore, he had found that out once he was old enough to realise all the money was going to his drinking and gambling. Then, he found out that before he was born, Grant had been the father of two other families.

Tom was camping in a paddock near by. As he got back to his tent and car, the sun was setting and its golden light flooded the flat land. Nothing stood in the landscape apart from a wire fence that ran kilometres in either direction. He sat in the back of his wagon, reading and sipping a bottle of whiskey until there was complete darkness outside and his pages were only lit by the car light. He felt the whiskey’s warmth and because of the whisky, the reading got slow. So he stopped reading and just looked at pictures. He had a book on Goya and he flipped through his black paintings. He stopped on one for a while - Saturn Devouring His Children. The blackness of the background reminded him of the blackness of the mine and the night sky. He kept drinking the whiskey until he was drunk and then he drank more. “I want to look at the mine,” he said out loud.

He jumped out of the car and stumbled over himself for a moment. He found his feet, and then found his mouth with the whiskey bottle and drank whatever was left. He ran across the dry paddock with gangly limbs, through the pitch darkness. Under his feet, the earth was dry and eroded, lumps of dry grass jumped up in mounds. After decades of droving cattle through this land, the earth was barren. Hooves had slowly jackhammered the earth into its hardened state. All that remained was the coal, years of compacted dead organic matter, underneath the crusty surface.

Tom’s feet moved so fast underneath him it felt like he wasn’t controlling them. They flowed like a stream. The hot night air smothered him, he felt like he was swimming underneath the cloud covered sky. Suddenly he felt the ground disappear underneath him. Tom felt the twisting of his ankle and the pain, blunted by the whisky, throb in rhythms with his pulse. He laid on his back, feeling his head spinning from the alcohol and the pain. The intensity of his swirling vision climaxed. He rolled over on his side and let out a belly-full of hot spew splash into the dust. He laid there for a while, tasting the acidic bile in his mouth and feeling the new emptiness inside his stomach. Then he began to crawl to the top of the ditch. It wasn’t too deep but he had fallen into it like a meteor. He found his foot hurt too much to stand on after putting some pressure on it. He didn’t bother trying to find out what was wrong with it, he didn’t want to worry about it. He managed to reach the top, where he planned to crawl the rest of the way to his camp, but the night was so dark he couldn’t make out which direction it was. A tiredness crept over him. Defeated, he laid on his back not thinking about the snakes-bites or spider-bites that could happen in the night or how cold the ground was. He fell asleep on the arid soil.

He woke before the sun, shivering, with a terrible taste in his mouth. The warm light soon crept over the horizon. His camp wasn’t too far away. His leg was able to take his weight, it wasn’t broken, but he walked with a limp most of the way back over the undulating terrain, constantly rolling it, sending pangs through his body. His hangover beat around his head. When he made it back to the car, he gulped down as much water as he could but his headache still raged on. He quickly pulled the tent down, sweating in the sun and messily packing his stuff into the back of the wagon. He was keen to get out of that place as soon as he could. Once everything was packed up, he put the key in the ignition and turned it over but the car didn’t start. He tried again. All that happened was the grinding of the machine and then nothing. He opened the bonnet but he had no idea what he was looking for. The engine was steaming. He checked the oil and it was thick. Something was wrong but he didn’t know what it was. He looked over to the mine where the machinery jumped up over the horizon, wavering like a mirage in the heat. He decided to ask his father if he could help him after work.

He limped over to the mine’s office. He hobbled through the door into the air conditioned room downtrodden, wondering what the lady at the desk was making of him. “Hi, I am Grant Young’s son, Tom, do you think I could speak to him?.” The lady at the desk spent some time on her computer. “Grant Young. Let me see.” Tom stood nervously feeling out of place. “I’m sorry, Grant flew back to Sydney this morning. Did you not know?.”

“No.”

“He’s your father?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Do you know where a mechanic is?”

“We have one on site.”

“Would he be able to help me? My car has broken down.”

“He may be able to. But, he won’t be here for the next couple days.”

“When will he be back?”

“Well, it’s Saturday today,” she chuckled smugly, “So, he will be in on Monday.”

“Ok.”

“You are going to have to leave the site. You are not allowed to be in here.”

“Ok. Can I use your phone? I have no reception out here.”

“I’m sorry I can’t let you do that.”

“Ok.”

Night came and Tom sat in the back of his wagon. He looked up at the sky that was clear. He saw an aeroplane’s green wing light echo across the night sky. The green light pulsed and blended with the sky full of stars. He thought about his father and how far away he was.