Goozi

The town thermometer shows forty-one degrees centigrade, and the main street is empty. No, not quite. A family—mother, father, pram pushed by mother, and two small children walking alongside the pram, one on the roadside of the pram, the other on the shop side—and there's a tall, disheveled man walking toward them. There's a lot of space between the family and the stranger, maybe ten shops. A solitary vehicle drives past, and the tall man ponders the "Baby on Board" sign in the back window next to the "Jack Daniels" sticker. He quickens his pace, or he slows down—somehow, he seems to be doing both at once. He ponders the approaching family and wonders if he'll cross to the other side, to the path opposite, but decides it might be misinterpreted as a sign of a certain kind of avoidance and keeps his line. He doesn't want to be thought of that way, doesn't see himself as being like that. He is wearing a peaked cap at an angle so that no one can be sure if he is looking or watching the ground as he walks. His jeans are holed at the knees, the frayed cotton like gauze on wounds that's been left too long, has stuck, then frayed free—he reaches down with both hands and covers the whole as he walks and looks like a huge, gangling puppet doing tricks. He stops, adjusts his hat, then launches back into his fast-slow walk. He likes the almost empty street but is also conscious that he is less anonymous for it. He stoops as little as he strides forward, determined to make the pass, to vicariously engage ever so briefly with the family, then to disengage and move away as quickly as possible. It is so dry, the denim of his jeans crackles—he isn't sure why it crackles, as it doesn't usually. The heat, the street. A red wattlebird is carrying on in the lower branches of a giant eucalypt, the last one left near the center of town—the rest have come down so solar panels can go up because a major land owner has decided the company needs to be more environmentally conscious. The red wattlebird is squawking out the irony which the tall man thinks no one else will understand. But then one of the children, the one nearest the road, calls out, "Look at that bird kickin' up a fuss. Listen to it carry on. Uncle would have something to say about that!" The tall man slows his walk, head down, listening.

The father of the approaching family—and the tall man guesses he is the father though maybe he isn't—is in his midtwenties and wearing shorts and thongs and nothing else. He is swigging from a two-liter plastic milk container. For no reason the tall man can ascertain, the "father" yells out, "Don't tell me about it, boy, don't tell me about it!"

And then there's silence, just the sound of footsteps in thongs, the wheels of the pram irregular on the paving slabs, and a gurgle from deep within the pram. The tall man steps out onto the now carless road to go around the family and, to press the point further about no disrespect intended, does something very rare for him: he speaks without being spoken to first and says, "Hot day, aint it!"

The tall man—the stranger—has barely raised his head in saying this and has only thrown a quick sidelong glance at feet and wheels and has stepped back onto the path behind the family now, before he hears, "You're not wrong, mate." And then the boy who had spoken about the red wattlebird said, "Hey, Mister … watch out for the goozi where ya walkin' on the path a little way back—where you're headin'. It's so big the heat hasn't made it go hard yet. M' sister almost trod in it—Mum reckons some filthy bugger put it there to catch someone out." And then the boy...