They liked us at the Italian Miner's Club

I walked out of the lobby of Redeka's Underground and came upon Rachael in the parking lot standing beside the driver's door of a maroon Nissan X-Trail. She looked stunned and was holding both hands up under her chin. "See if there's blood on the front," she said, gesturing at the grill, "I can't look." Then she said, "no, don't tell me." She paused, seemed to remember herself, and stepped forward and we hugged.

I crouched down to inspect the front end of the four-wheel-drive. The plastic license plate holder was broken, the license plate bent, but I could see no blood. A half hour earlier on the two-lane Stuart Highway, a sheep had suddenly gamboled out of the night and right into Rachael's speeding path. But the animal had apparently not been killed. When Rachael stopped and backed up she found it on the shoulder, off its feet but with its head up. "I should've gotten out and killed it, shouldn't I?" she asked me.

"How?" I said, appalled at the prospect.

"I don't know, with a rock or stick or something"

"What, bash its head in? I don't know. I wouldn't have."

"Maybe it recovered," she said hopefully.

"Maybe," I said.

The sheep incident colored her mood for much of the evening, and into the next day, when we passed the spot on our way north to King's Canyon. The sheep wasn't there anymore. "Maybe it didn't die," Rachael said, then paused. "Or maybe dingoes dragged it off and ate it while it was still alive."

After she put her gear in the room, we went off for a drink at a pub. A group of aboriginal men played pool in the corner, and loud techno dance music issued from the jukebox. An older, unshaven man with a big head and bad teeth sidled up to us at the bar; he opened his palm at his side. I thought he was offering us drugs, but it was two opals in a tiny baggy. "Eighty dollars," he said, and when we shook our heads he tried "four dollars!" We still declined, but Rachael asked him where he was from. He said Slovenia but then drifted off, uninterested in unremunerative conversation.

The barmaid suggested we try anothe bar, a couple blocks off the main drag, down dark streets. Outside Rachael asked a drunk aboriginal man for directions and he offered us a ride. He followed us down the street trying to get us in his van, but we walked.

The Italian Miner's Club was a local place, and the dozen or so patrons, all standing at the low bar, looked up with some surprise when we walked in. We stepped up to one end and ordered from the blond barmaid, a woman in her late sixties. She grabbed a can of beer from a refrigerator, then made Rachael a strong rum and coke, working from a kitchen table covered with bottles. The woman had a combo Australian-Central European accent, and Rachael asked where she was from (Rachael chats up everyone, which is nice). The woman said she was Czech, that she'd come to Coober Pedy forty years ago with her miner husband, had worked at the bar all that time, and had raised four kids in the town. Rachael asked her how she liked the town, and she shrugged her shoulders, as if to say it was as good as any other place.

Another woman, large and fit with big and well-worn boots, shook both our hands with a bone crushing grip. I think she was a little drunk. Another woman, dressed in a shiny blouse and jeans, said hello too. She looked like a fiftyish Liz Taylor, long brown wavy hair, crow's feet, a tan. She said we should come again the next night for the scheduled Saturday dinner and drinking party. We said maybe, then Rachael asked about the opal pendant resting on the woman's chest. Liz Taylor said that the type of opal, two inches long and tube-shaped, was called a "pipe," and it was the calcified (fossilized?) backbone (or part of it) of an ancient squid. She pointed to a man nearby, a miner, and said he'd found it. Earlier in the day I'd read somewhere that opals are a type of silica, but I didn't (and don't) know that sea creatures were involved.

The next morning we set out from Coober Pedy, north on the Stuart Highway. The land was flat and barren and ochre-colored. The shoulders were littered with kangaroo carcasses in various states of dessication. Perched atop many of these unfortunate creatures were huge wedge-tailed eagles, ripping out chunks of fur and flesh with their scary-looking beaks. Ravens and Australian magpies (big black and white birds) scavenged too. A few cows and sheep were mixed in with the roadkill. The Outback is open range; there are no fences.

In the evening we camped at King's Creek Station, what they here call a "resort" but what I'd call a campground with amenities--a snack bar, a gas station, wall tents for hire. After dark we sat around a communal fire and listened to a white Australian man from Geelong braying about his particular likes and dislikes. His name was Linsey and he had a grey chin bird and wore a stockman's jacket. Rachael whispered to me, "if he comes over here, you're going to have to talk to him, because I won't." But later she did. She had changed her mind when he described his interest in dancing. "All sorts," he said, "ballroom, salsa, rock n' roll." His stepdaughter, a fourteen-year-old girl named Jess, stood up and they demonstrated the last type, the two spinning and turning in the firelight, their hands clasping and switching, the only sound their boots scuffing in the dirt and dust.

The campground was crowded with tents and trailers, but we slept out in a swag bag under the stars and a half moon.