The Passenger

It’s so long down the track now that few remember his name, or how he fell from notice. I found him by the side of the road from Portsea, cold, wet and shivering, all he had on was a wetsuit with short legs and a hunted look that he tried to hide behind his eyes.

I don’t pick up people on the road, mainly at truck stops and cafes. But he was just there, in the dark and cold with no bags or even warm clothes, a black wetsuit in the black of night. I might have passed him by, except for the lily-white legs. I couldn’t just leave him there.

You can’t know these people that spend their lives alongside the highways, that live this shadowy life where no one, except the truckie that takes them wherever they go, marks their passage. You see them all the time, hunkered by the side of the road or hunched into foetal curls in the dark corners of truck stops and roadhouses, but long-haul trucking can be bloody boring and even bad company is sometimes better than no company at all.

I wondered then, when he spoke with that soft, private school accent, what he was doing out here in the rain and the road that misted into the fog and the distance; he was wet and smelled of the sea and storm-tossed seaweed, but he had his own plastic bag to sit on and sat there quietly while the ocean dripped down his legs onto the cabin floor.

“Where you goin’?” I asked.

“For the moment I don’t care. Anywhere but here.”

“How about Mars then? You been on the road long?”

“Not really, couple of minutes.”

“Lucky eh?”

“Depends on how you think about luck.”

Philosophical discussions don’t help the miles disappear under the wheels. “I don’t think about it at all. You hungry?” They’re always hungry and lost and broke.

He stared out into the dark and I could see he was shivering, or trembling. “No, I had lunch, I’ll get us something at the next stop.”

“You’ll get us something?”

“It’s the least I can do.”

“You’ve got no pockets.”

He peeled down the front of the wetsuit and water ran down his chest onto the seat, and pulled a plastic bag out of the sleeve and it was stuffed with more tenners than I’d ever seen in one place. I could see there was another in the other side. “I had to leave in something of a hurry.”

“Strewth, mate, you want be careful flashing that much dough around, there’s people out here’ll knock you over for just a bit of what’s in that bag.”

“What about you?”

“You’re safe with me. I’ve got everything I need and most of what I want; I wouldn’t know what to spend it on.”

“Are you on a tight schedule?”

“No, not really, I just need to be in Perth by Friday.”

“Perth? That’s good. It’s where I was hoping to be before long. Perhaps we might stop in a town and I’ll get some dry clothes.”

It was the perhaps we might stop and the before long that made me say it. Bums and boofheads can hardly string two words together, much less use English that way. “We’ll be in Naracoorte in a few hours. I’ve got a change in the bag back there, you can wear what’ll fit you till we get there.”

“Ah,” he said, and smiled for the first time. “That’d be good. I’m going to look like a prune if I wear this rubber for much longer.”

He struggled out of the wetsuit and there were plastic bags of money stuck all over him like the richest rash I’d seen. I didn’t ask if he’d robbed a bank or something. It was better not to know. But he was tough. He stripped down to the buff, stood out on the step and let the rain and wind wash the salt off him and stepped back in blue and goosebumped. “Sometimes you need to feel the cold on your skin to let you know the joy of being warm.”

“Okay.”

He sat and stared out the windscreen into the rain that was steady now. “I love to swim, but I hate that scratchy salt when it dries on your skin.”

“I never had time for it. Long hauls are all I know.”

He shivered and hunched down into his shoulders like a bear getting warm. “It’s not good to know too much.”

I laughed. “I wouldn’t know, never knew enough to find out.”

“After a while you’re like some kind of receptacle and they just keep coming through the doors, down the halls with their loads of papers and forms in quintuplicate and stamped according to sub-section 3, paragraph 5 of the code, most of it’s dross or pointless, some of it serious, all of it dangerous. Did you ever hear the expression some aspire to greatness, some achieve greatness, but others have it thrust upon them?”

“Can’t say I did.”

“I didn’t want any of it, you know, it just kind of fell out of the sky and there I was, Hal on the spot.”

“That your name? Hal? You didn’t want any of what?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Find out what?”

“I don’t want to sound enigmatic, but it’s probably better that you don’t know who or what I am until a couple of days down the track.”

“A couple of days?” That worried me. What if he turned out to be just another bullshit artist living some fantasy existence; it was going to be a long couple of days. But we all have this sense inside us—better in some than others—that tells us the measure of a man, the size of his heart, the depth of his bravery, and the same sense told me this was some major crisis in his life. “What are we talking about, are you a fugitive? Is it the cops?”

“You have the right to know. The police are looking for me in a way that would be very worrying for you if they ever thought that I might be here, but they never will, they’re searching where they’ll never find me.”

I could feel my bum clenching. He seemed all right, but I was buggered if I wanted to be in the middle of a search for some ex-private-school bloke plastered with money and the might of the police, with all of their accumulated stupidity and pig-headedness, on his arse. “Should I chuck you out on the road?”

“Oh yes, indeed you should, but please don’t, I’ll—” He stopped short as the news theme came softly through the radio. “Can I turn that off?”

“News about you?”

He looked at his watch. It looked as if it was worth more than the Bedford. “I’d guess they’re getting frantic about now.”

“Who?”

“Everyone, my wife, my kids, the press, the whole country, they’ll be going on about this for years.”

“Mate, you’re starting to frighten me now.”

“Even if the police found us right now, you’d only be famous—not in any trouble. I’d be the one who had the explaining to do.”

“The money?”

“No, that’s all mine.” He furrowed his brow. “Why don’t you recognise me?”

“Should I?”

“Most people would.”

“You’re a movie star or a gangster or something?”

He sat for a moment and then laughed, an open and honest laugh that came from his feet and worked its way out until it made me want to laugh with him. “Yes, probably all of those.” He stared at the puddle of sea water on the floor underneath him. “It’s because you don’t recognise me. If I told you about me and why I’m here, you’d think I was lying. If I don’t tell you about it you’ll be worried needlessly and you’re doing me a favour of such worth that it would be hard for anyone to appreciate.”

Out of the mist a sign went by. “Jesus, we’re in Naracoorte already.”

“I’ll get out here if you like, and you’ll never see me in person again. Or you can take me over the Nullarbor and let me change my life in a way I hardly thought was possible.”

“Jesus, mate, I’m just a truckie doing what I do, the best way I know how. I don’t want to be caught up in your life’s bullshit, be hunted by the wallopers, run down somewhere by crims. If you’re going anywhere with me I need to know what’s happening.”

And so he told me. We turned on the radio and listened to the news flashes, all that night and for the next two days. I saw his face on the front pages of the papers as we rolled through town after town and out onto the Nullarbor, and wondered why I hadn’t recognised him when he first got in the truck; but then, I never took much notice of the comings and goings of the upper crust.

We stopped in Coolgardie and got a bite and he phoned ahead. I could see him in the phone box smiling and talking. When he got back to the Bedford he was happy in a way I hadn’t seen in all the miles. And just before Northam, before we hit Perth, he reached across and handed me a fist full of tenners. “Take these.”

“Nah, mate, I don’t want it, you’re gonna need it all.”

“To be honest, I don’t know what I’m going to need.”

“Then you’d better keep it.”

“Just east of Northam apparently there’s a lay-by; there’s someone waiting for me there.”

“You want me to drop you off there?”

“Yes, then the best thing you can do is forget you ever saw me for about twenty years and then you can sell the story to the papers—it should be a nice little retirement nest egg.”

I stopped in the lay-by and we waited a few minutes doing the parting thing, and then there was this woman in a Morris Minor, nothing special—I’d have expected something flashier, but she just looked like someone’s missus—he got in, waved, and they drove away.

It was in the papers for weeks and still to this day they drag it out on the anniversary. One of Australia’s great mysteries with the Beaumont kids and the Wanda Beach murders. I have to smile when I see it today; he’s probably dead now, but I see him propped in front of the fire in a house somewhere in the bush beyond Northam, sleeping the sleep of the just, with nothing to do but watch the days go by. When I remember, I pull out the papers with the photo of him in that wetsuit with his flippers, going down the rocks of Cheviot Beach into the kind of surf only an idiot or a prime minister with something else on his mind would dive into.

Ray Penny has worked as a yacht builder, boatshed proprietor, bulldozer operator, chef, crayfisherman and literary critic, among other things. He now lives in Perth. An earlier version of this story appeared in the Stringybark Short Story Awards anthology No Tea Tomorrow in 2015.