The Bush Road Repeated the Same Mile Three Times

I set out late in the day because it had been too hot by noon, the dash a skillet under the sun and the flies so thick around the servo they looked like a gauze curtain. By the time I left the bitumen and took the station track, the light was long and copper, the scrub crowding in tight on both sides. Red dirt shook itself loose from the tyres and climbed the tailgate in a plume that kept pace with me like a slow ghost. It was one of those roads that goes out single-minded, not bending for what it can simply go through—low banks, shallow creeks, a fence post left leaning years ago. There were signs here and there, but not many: FLOODWAY in black on yellow at a washout, a cattle grid clanging once like a dropped pan, and then long reaches of nothing you could hang a measure of time on. The radio slipped in and out with country music, then talkback, then a hiss of distance. I had water bottles wedged under the seat, a torch, the old UHF on channel 40, the paper map creased with thumbprints where I’d circled the turn-off.

Evenings make their own weather out there. Heat lifts out of the spinifex and the last flies give up. The lane is tight and pale and the ute rides every corrugation as if it knows them; the whole cab buzzes like a loose tuning fork, and after a while you stop listening for anything else. Landmarks become the kind of thing you keep because you have to—an anthill taller than you are with a white cap dribbled down one side like paint, a rusted drum cut as a water trough, a stand of gums so far from the creek you wonder what they drink. Signage was sparse enough that you notice all of it and when the first distance post appeared—white-painted, black numbers—I clocked it automatically, let it click against whatever part of your brain is charged with counting down the dark.

I noticed the tree because there weren’t many tall ones, and it had one of those big pale ribbons of bark sloughed down the trunk like a sash. The whole trunk leaned a little right, and where a big limb had once torn away it left a dark oval scar that looked like a hook. Just past it, tucked into the scrub, something lay face-down: a yellow road sign on its back, two bolts still in the bent bracket and one corner chewed away, the paint dulled by dust. Twenty metres before the tree, a white distance post stood by the shoulder, the kind I’ve always called a mile marker whether it is or not, with a stencilled black number I registered and folded away with the rest. Marker, gum, fallen sign—three things in a line you could use to tell yourself you’d been there and gone on.

When I saw the same three in the same order again, I didn’t say anything out loud. The road had run straight for a long time and the scrub didn’t change much. There are other gums with pale bark and other old signs that leave their duties, and I’ve heard your eyes can add detail where there isn’t much. But the bark sash had the same twist to it, and the oval wound was the same size and sat at the same height, and the fallen sign showed a chewed corner that looked exactly like a dog had tried it and spat it back, leaving the same curved bite of rust. The white post’s number, when my lights snapped across it, was the number I thought I’d seen before, though I told myself I couldn’t be sure. I drove on, more deliberate with the wheel, as if the way my hands held it would make the road new.

The third time, there wasn’t much left to pretend. The bend of the trunk, the torn limb, even a little tuft of dead grass like a stiff brush caught under the fallen sign—my lights found it all where it had been the first and second time. The odometer rolled on without comment. I tapped the trip meter—still climbing, a clean run. The GPS showed my dot continuing its slow crawl, a thin breadcrumb trail stretching behind me unbroken. I zoomed in and out until I made myself carsick without moving any differently. Outside, some small thing in the perimeter of sound went missing. Talkback vanished and left a shallow breath of static that then flattened into nothing, like a door clicking shut in another room. Even the UHF went cotton-dry. The windows were cracked an inch and the night pressed in, smelling of warm dust and crushed leaves. I drove past the marker, the gum, the sign again.

I tried to reason with the curve of the world. Maybe there’d been a dog-leg and my mind ironed it flat. Maybe there was a parallel fenceline road and I’d shifted to it without noticing, chasing a smoother set of ruts and coming back to meet myself. I slowed, then sped, then kept a steady seventy because the speed became something to claw at. The engine stayed at the same agreeable hum, the needle dead centre where it should live. The sky above had torn open properly to stars, a white band so thick the spaces between felt like someone had rubbed them shut with a thumb. Shadows lay where they wanted. My hands, when I glanced down, were chalky with dust up to the wrists and there were red crescents where I’d pressed my nails.

On the next pass, when the beam picked out the white post again, something else stepped into it. Stepped is the wrong word—no motion that I could trace. A human shape in the way a scarecrow is human. Upright. Scaled to the sign. A pale shirt or skin or both, gone to grey by the light, and a darkness where a face would be. The legs set slightly apart, as if planted for a photograph. Every bit of me expected to see the reflection of eyeshine but the head soaked light without showing any back. I braked. The ute’s nose dipped and the headlights trembled on the corrugations, fattening the shadows, smearing the white post into three ghost posts for a second. I came up on the place and the figure wasn’t there. The fallen sign shifted minutely on its back and then settled as if a touch had been taken away. I didn’t get out. I eased forward like I was thieving my own movement out from under the night.

The idea of turning around grew teeth and then backed off. Which way would I be heading if I turned, and toward what repetition? I spoke aloud to lay a thread in the air, said my own name as you do when you wake alone and swallow the dark. I glanced at the dash clock. I wrote the time on my wrist with a marker, a dot first and then numbers. The only other sound was the dust drumming at the wheel arches and the occasional pop of a seed pod in the warmth. I pressed the GPS button that drops a waypoint and it blinked obligingly under the same old sky.

Again: white post with the same chipped paint at the base like someone’s thick thumbnail had picked it, the eucalyptus with its angling lean, the fallen sign with its torn corner and a faint trace of letters trapped in dust. The odometer had climbed enough to take me past them all forever, if any of this were on scales that made sense. The GPS showed a straight path drawing forward in clean ink. The radio stayed quiet, not static now, but the peculiar nothing of an unpowered line. I found myself driving in a way I drive in floodwater—steady, eyes up, no sudden inputs—as if something about me could spill.

I do not know which pass was the last. I do know the thing that broke it was small enough to feel like a change in a dream. A squeeze of the road like a muscle, where it settled into a low, concrete floodway I hadn’t remembered. A fresh fan of cattle prints crossed it, still damp at the toes where something big had stepped and dragged. The eucalyptus ahead was wrong—more limbs sprouting low, the bark all freckle and no ribbon. A yellow sign on the shoulder stood to attention: WATCH FOR STOCK in clean black, up on its post where it belonged. The radio stumbled mid-sentence into life, a woman from Wagga telling a story about a pie shop, and I laughed, a sound that rubbed my throat on the way out. I kept my hands on the wheel and didn’t look down at the clock.

The gate at the homestead showed up a long time later than it should have by the paper math I’d done. Dogs came at the ute and woke the yard, and the way the moths hit the porch light sounded like grit thrown at glass. Inside, the fridge had a high, ragged hum that made it feel like the room had a second heart. Over tea I told the manager I didn’t love that track at night. He nodded. I asked, finally, if there were a pair of gums down there that look like twins, if one has a big hook of scar on it about shoulder-high and a distance post just before it, and if a floodway sign had gone down. He stared at my hands for a second and then up at my face. “Which end?” he said, to give me somewhere to go. I made shapes in the air with my finger and told him the number on the post. He shook his head. “Council never did miles out there,” he said. “That floodway sign’s been up since the ’90s. Grader crew came through last month.”
He let me lose the rest in my own tea.

In the morning, I unrolled the map and the line I’d drawn with pencil looked like a path a child could keep on. The GPS breadcrumb was a neat thread from one corner of the window to the other. The numbers on the trip meter worked backwards to the fuel I used and none of it argued with any other. The sun turned the paddocks into heat and blew a ribbon of it up the homestead road that made the air look like it had water in it. At breakfast a young ringer stretched and said he hated the leader road after dark; the white posts, he said, trick you into thinking you haven’t moved. He grinned when he said it, eyes down at his plate. Later, a woman at the roadhouse asked if I wanted onions with my burger and told me the road can play with you when you’re tired like a deck of cards and then changed the subject to the price of coolant.

Months on I’ve tried to talk myself out of the parts that don’t stack, the way you do when you don’t want to lend the thing weight. What stays is ordinary enough to carry around. The smell of the cab’s hot vinyl, the way the dust burned the back of my throat when I laughed into the radio coming alive again. The shape of that eucalyptus when it first rose into the light and the precise glint of the fallen sign’s bolt. The way the night held my voice when I spoke into it like wool. Sometimes another road far from there puts a white post where I don’t expect it and a tree’s trunk has the same hooked wound, and before I can roll my eyes at myself my body knows absolutely what will come next: the face-down yellow, the clean white paint on the post, and the idea of a figure by it held in place by my lights until I am close enough to take it apart into dust and silence and the sound of my own car moving forward, counting to three again.