Free The river is Down by Lucy Walker Page A

'He has to have arms of an ox, judgment of an Einstein, and the guess work of a pools-winner.'
    `Is that where you have to mend the radio?'
    `That's it.' Dicey opened the car door. With one foot out he turned back to Cindie. 'You go and make friends with the fellers sitting in the shade of that grader farther along. They're having lunch-break early, and now's the hour for them to see angels dropping out of the sky. Leastwise, one angel hefting herself out of a Holden.'
    `Supposing they ?'
    `Supposing nothing. First they'll be scared, then they'll be shy. Finally they'll all but turn into Raleighs, with carpets
    to spread over the dust and under your feet. You go and try 'em, Cindie.'
    'I feel diffident—'
    `Don't.' Dicey leaned his inside elbow on the steering wheel and gave Cindie a prize-winning smile. 'You have freshness and frankness and a few other disarming features about you, Nice One. They'll know in two ups you're not going to talk down to men who work out here in the blazing wilderness building the biggest thing in Australia—bar the Snowy River set-up—just because they have dirty hands, and red dust all over their faces. Not to mention layers of it on their clothes. That's all that'll bother them—that you're not uppity.'
    Cindie opened her door and began to slide out on to the track.
    'I really would like to ask them what they do, and how they do it.'
    `You can spare the reverence. They don't want it.' They just want you, or anybody else who happens along, to know that life up here is no picnic, but they take it and live it. So long as people understand that.'
    'I very much do that ' She broke off. She had looked
    back along the track they had covered and could see a dust-cloud rolling towards them. 'Someone's coming,' she finished.
    `Let him!' Dicey was indifferent. 'They come and go all the time. I've work to do on this raking radio up above; and you've work to do learning about how to live in the north from the blokes laying-off over there. Smile, and they'll give you some tea from their billies. Real bush tea too. Better than anything you'll get down south out of a teapot.'
    Dicey shut the car door and moved over to the Euclid. He still had to crick back his neck to talk to the man leaning out of the window in the cabin.
    Cindie began to walk along the line of broken earth, then at a tangent across a stretch of trampled grass to where the men sat in the shade of their vehicles watching her with the kind of dead-pan expression customary in the north. They were waiting to see what sort of person she was.
    When she was near enough to smile at them, she knew it had to be the kind of smile that tempered pleasure with wisdom. These men working in this place, and this way, didn't want any flibbertigibbet girl charming them. They wanted common sense!
    Cindie did smile. It was an honest smile, a little reticent, and not contrived.
    'You goin' far, miss?' one asked. The others laughed.
    'Well,' said Cindie consideringly, meeting this irony with a mild version of her own, `if I went up that road, and kept going, I could come to the Kimberleys, then across to the Territory. After that it would be the Border, then Queensland cattle country
    They knew at once she understood them.
    'You like a cup of tea, miss?' one asked getting up from his seat on the ground. 'There's carton cups somewhere around. You like drinking tea out of cardboard? No china here.'
    `I'd love some tea, thank you. Is this almost frightening stretch of red earth the road? Or is it over on that track where the Euclid is standing?'
    `This is the road in the making,' a young Englishman said from his resting place against the wheel of a bulldozer. 'The Euclid shifts the dirt from the find-holes at the side on to the track, and fills it in. That's for foundation. You got to back-up north about ten miles before you see the next layer of foundation they put on the old girl.'
    The man who had first offered her tea brought Cindie a mug of steaming brown fluid