Easy

In the morning I sat on the back patio and ate croissants and muesli with Rachael and her friend Annie. Annie had greeted me with a warm embrace and a kiss on the cheek (she has a cold); she rubbed my bearded cheek--I've not shaved for two weeks--and commented favorably. We saw each other or said goodbye repeatedly over the course of the day, and I got and came to expect an affectionate kiss and hug each time. We are becoming quite close.

After eating she rolled a cigarette, first placing a filter in the fold of the paper as well as a bit of tobacco. She took a good half hour to finish the cigarette, letting it go out repeatedly and then relighting it for a few more drags before it would go out again.

Annie has an acerbic, quick wit, and I sit next to her listening admiringly and trying to remember the surprising (to me) phrases that come fast and often from her mouth. Referring to something that would upset her girlfriend, an Irish doctor named Victoria, she said, "Vic would throw the toys from the cart." Apparently this means have a tantrum.

Annie works at Alukura Women's Center with Rachael, where she manages the nurse home visiting program. She's a nurse herself too, and carries a case load of nine families. The home visiting program is modeled on one developed by an American researcher in the late 1990s, but they've found here in Central Australia that aboriginal families are something else entirely from poor American families. Modifications have ensued, and are being developed.

Annie's program is for "first time mums," who get their first visit at six months "ante-natal," and continuing weekly visits until the child is two-years-old. The nurse checks the child's health, the mother's too, and provides "social support" as well, for domestic problems, for education needs--actually whatever the mother needs. A visit can be as short as ten minutes or last all day.

Next month Annie takes a leave of absence and goes off to Europe, first to see Victoria, then to walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain.

Mid-morning I walked into town and spent time at Outback E-Mail. I met Rachael and Annie for lunch at Tea Shrine, a small vegetarian Vietnamese restaurant. We all three had the day's special, laksa, a bowl of soup with egg noodles, tofu and hard-boiled egg. We went to a bookstore after lunch and Annie bought Kipling's Just So Stories, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, and fourth book by an Indian woman whose name I can't remember.

Later in the afternoon Rachael and I had tea at the Royal Flying Doctors Service, a museum and tea room located in a colonial-style building from the 1930s, with tin corrugated roof, tiny rooms, and shady veranda. We sat in old wicker chairs and I poured milk from a tiny silver tureen into my cup of tea.

In the midst of an ambling walk home through the east side of town, we came upon a heavy-set old man in a dirty orange t-shirt and white shorts, sitting on a wall. Rachael stopped to say hello, and the man wheezed and said it was "a bloody long walk to the shop." He held a white plastic bag with a few groceries in it in one hand, a crutch in the other. Rachael observed, "you've been through the wars." He explained his injuries, some recent, some chronic, which were evidenced by his many dressings: both knees were bandage wrapped, as were both wrists and his forearms to the elbow; one ankle was also bandaged as was a pinky finger. His brown skin (where visible) was sagging and leathery, scored with old scars. He wore atop his head a styrofoam bike helmet wrapped in gold and red foil, but he said that was from something when he was nine-years-old, he didn't say what. His crutch was also wrapped in gold foil, and peppered with Winnie-the-Pooh stickers. He had a wandering and apparently useless right eye, and an active blue tongue in a toothless mouth. Later Rachael said she thought that the blue might be a sign of diabetes, but Annie, who we told her about him and who knows the man, said, no, he's just fond of lollies (candy).

Rachael asked where he was from, and he said Puerto Rico. "I crash landed in north Queensland when I was five," he said, and I thought, that's a colorful turn of phrase, but he was being literal. "It was a drug-runners' plane," he explained, "but I'd got on thinking I was going to San Diego." Two of his uncles were aboard, but they along with the others on the plane all scattered from the crash site, leaving him alone. He managed to make it to a nearby highway, where someone picked him up and took him to Cape York, the nearest town. Soon after he was sent to Darwin, and from there Welfare planned to send him down to Adelaide. But he got taken up on the way, at Ti Tree, a road house stop a couple hours north of Alice.

The man who took charge of him was "very cruel." "And I didn't know any English, so it was hard to get a feed." He took to running away, climbing up inside the wheel wells of the huge road trains, and traveling all over Australia.

Rachael asked him if he had any family in Alice. He gestured dismissively. "Just some of my step-family. And they're only interested me for money." He smiled. "But I'm tighter than a fish's asshole"--he laughed--"and that's water-tight."

Rachael asked him his name and he said, "Easy." She said she'd say hello to him when she saw him again, and we walked on home.

Around eight o'clock, Gai and Annie came over and the four of us went out to eat at Cosa Nostra, an Italian restaurant. It's "B.Y.O.", which is apparently common here, so we stopped at a store and Gai bought a bottle of white wine, which we took in to the restaurant with us.

The place was packed with noisy people sitting at tables covered with red and white checked cloths. On almost every table were bottles of wine or beer or both. Plastic grapes hung in a line over the counter and food case, behind which the cooks made pizza and pasta. On one wall were signed photographs of Tom Selleck and Brian Brown, who had both made films in the area.

We started with a big shared salad and pizza bread, and Rachael poured out the wine. I ordered a medium vegetarian pizza. Gai asked me what I was reading, which is a question I love, and then she told several anecdotes about Henry James (who I'm not reading, but there was some connection between him and V.S. Pritchett). Later she and Annie traded anecdotes about lost opportunities to buy cheap beachfront houses in south Australia in the 1970s. Gai and her husband, who were grad students at the time, sniffed that "property is theft," and had ever since regretted their decision.

Conversation turned to the three women's shared work, and Annie told me to kick them under the table to make them stop, but I didn't. I listened, attentive for the most part.