A Blast From the Past

Everything about him screamed that here was a man who had let life slide right on by. He stopped his car, a 60's vintage Citroen DS at the fuel pump. It settled down as he climbed out and looked at the pumps and scratched his head. He took the 94 E10 nozzle from the bowser and looked for the doohickey that zeroed the price. As he stared at the dial, he noticed that it zeroed itself, so he stuck the nozzle into the filler and squeezed the trigger. When the flow of petrol came up the neck, it shut itself off, so he put the nozzle back in its place and replaced the filler cap.

The attendant looked at him as he walked through the door, concern on his face. In front of him stood a tall, gaunt man. A faded denim cap sat on his long, straggly grey hair. An equally straggly grey beard hid most of his face. He wore a long sleeveless jacket over what was once a brightly coloured shirt. He wore faded jeans with hand sewn patches on the knees. His feet were stuffed into sandals, the soles of which were cut from the tread of car tyres. 'Did this man have the money to pay for his fuel?' He thought to himself. "Pump 3 is it Sir?" He asked. He had no need to ask, as it was the only one that had been used, but he was told that he had to ask that question.

"I guess so."

"That'll be a hundred and fifteen dollars and twenty-five cents. Will that be cash or card?"

"Cash." He took a crumpled handful of notes from the pocket of his jacket and counted out a hundred and twenty dollars. He slid the money across the counter, stuffed the rest back into his pocket and waited for his change. The coins went into another pocket as he walked back to his car.

The venerable DS raised itself to its previous ride height before it slid out onto the main road.

This much I found out later. On the other side of town from the service station was a caravan park with en-suite cabins. He turned in and stopped by the office. The receptionist (me) looked up as he walked in. "Can I help you?"

"I would like a cabin for at least a week."

"Sure thing. Number 4 is vacant at present. It will be fifty dollars a night. How will you be paying for this?"

"Cash" He took a wad of notes and counted out three hundred dollars. I handed him the key and, walking outside, showed him his cabin.

"Thank you." He said before climbing into his old car and driving towards the cabin. I watched as he took a battered suitcase from the boot and carried it into the cabin.

I was old enough to recognise that his appearance belonged to an age that had died out decades ago. An age of drugs and communes, flower power and free love, an age that my mother told me about. I remembered her watching films of those times. Woodstock, Monterey, Sunbury and several other music festivals of the time, with artists like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and many others long departed. It all seemed so casual and free back then, not like the high-pressure world of today, with its emphasis on achieving great wealth at the expense of others.

My thoughts hovered in the background while I went about my daily routine. It was a quiet time of the year, not many tourists stopping by to enjoy life by the river. I finish for the day at five o'clock and leave the Night Manager to handle any arrivals or departures until the morning. Not that this place was high pressured, far from it, the most exciting thing that happens here is when it rains, and that's not often enough.

He walked past as I left the office. "Where's a good place to get a meal around here?" He asked. He was somehow different from when he came into town this morning, he was clean, his hair and beard had lost much of the straggle of this morning, and his clothes had changed to a pair of un-patched jeans and a clean but un-ironed shirt.

"That depends on what you are looking for. If it's cheap you want we have a Macca's, if it's expensive we have a couple of restaurants that are worth a look, but if you're looking for cheap but good, any of the pubs are okay."

"A pub sounds good, which one would you recommend?"

"The Railway it's as good as any, and I just happen to be heading in that direction, so if you want a lift, jump in." I had just unlocked my car. He walked around to the passenger side and climbed in, shutting the door after him. "You'd better put your seat belt on." He looked as if he was from before the time when belts were made compulsory, but managed to sort it out.

We arrived at the Railway Hotel and I parked in the rear car-park. I led him through the rear door into the dining room. "You order over there." I pointed to the bar. "And they'll give you a table number so that they know where to bring your order."

"Would you like to join me?"

Wow, this came as a shock and left me not knowing what to say for a second or two. "Okay, sure." I led him to the bar and he looked at the menu board. "There's a specials board, they're cheap but good."

He ignored me and ordered a steak, rare, and chips. "This will make a change from roo meat." He said as he waited for me to order. I settled on grilled Barramundi (an indigenous fish from up north) with chips. I was handed the table number and we found an empty table, placed the number on it, and headed for the salad bar.

"What would you like to drink?" I asked him.

"Would you like to share a bottle of Red?"

"Sure. Would you like me to get one for you?"

"Nah, I can manage." He went off to get the wine, and when he returned I was surprised at his selection. Here I was expecting something modestly priced, but what he had was definitely from the top shelf, a Coonawarra Cab/Sav. It was very good.

"Where are you from?" I asked by way of starting the conversation.

"Up north, Coober Pedy." He had an economy of words common to those not used to conversation.

"An opal miner were you?" I matched his economy.

"Ya could say that. I picked up a few in my time."

"How long have you been doing that, mining opals?"

"Too fucking long. Sorry about that. I was at it for about twenty-five years, I spent pretty much the entire time underground. We had to do that to survive the heat up there. The day time temperature outside hovers around fifty degrees and it's a good twenty-five degrees cooler underground. In Winter, the overnight temperature is somewhat south of freezing. That means that it's a good twenty-five degrees warmer.

Along with having to shift tonnes of rock out after you've blasted, and after you've sifted through it looking for colour, I decided it was time to chuck it in and do something different."

"Like what?"

"Dunno yet, something'll crop up. It's not as if I'm in a rush. What goes on around here?"

"Not a lot. Most of the action happens in one of the pubs, you know, a fight might break out, usually some bloke objecting to someone else hitting on his sheila that he's ignored all night."

"Like any small town pub in the middle of nowhere. I think I might stay away from them. What else goes on?"

"Most of the people are too old to get into trouble, you see the kids have all pissed off into the cities, they reckon there's nothing to keep them here."

"So there's no work to be had on the farms then?"

"You don't strike me as the type to be caught working on a farm. Anyhow, in this day of mechanisation, there's no work for labourers anymore."

"Apart from working at the motel, what do you do with your time?"

"What time? My day is one of total excitement. I get up at six in the morning, feed the cat, tidy up and jump in my car and head for work. I start at seven and work until five, sometimes longer if we're busy. Then I come home. I'm usually too tired to do much more than watch TV for an hour or so before crawling into the bed I share with my cat."

"No husband then?"

"I had one once, he was about as much use as tits on a bull. I ended up kicking him out after I caught him up to his balls in some sheila that blew into town on her way to somewhere else. Apart from the legal niceties associated with the divorce, I've had no contact with him since."

"So no good looking bloke has come to town that took your fancy?"

"You're the first bloke in I don't know how long. As for good looking, compared to what?"

He looked around at the rest of the diners. "I see what you mean, ordinary looking bunch aren't they?"

A couple of women walked over to our table. "Hi Jan, aren't you going to introduce us to your friend?"

"You've got to be kidding me, the last time I did that you stole him from me. He was lucky to survive the night. I promised that I would never make that mistake again."

"Spoilsport." They giggled there way over to the bar.

Our meals arrived and conversation dropped to almost non-existent while we munched our way through it. "This is good," I said through a mouthful of steak, "I'd just about forgotten what decent meat tasted like."

"So there's not a lot of beef up there, then?"

"Sometimes a truckie will load up a calf that he hit with his bullbar, but anything bigger than that he'd need help, so no, not a lot of beef."

"So it's camel for the carnivores then?"

"Nah, you're forgetting that there's a plague proportion of feral camels up there as well. When the trucks pass through on the way on the way to market, they'll drop a few off at the butchers. Camel isn't bad eating".

"It sounds like a pretty tough life, what made you get into it in the first place?"

"Well, I had thumbed a ride down from the Alice, (Alice Springs) and was in a pub sinking a couple of coldies, when this old bloke came over to me. "I ask you, Mister, how would you like to work for me in my opal mine?" He spoke with a heavy Eastern European accent, it turned out he was a Croatian. He was heavy set, his facial features hidden behind something that was too long for stubble and too short to be a beard.

"Sure, why not?" At this time in my travels, I was looking to do something other than hitch-hike.

He drove out of town for some ten kilometres until we came to a pile of rocks next to a hole in the ground. It looked just like a lot of other piles of rock next to a hole in the ground, but I was in for a shock. Inside was a long, gently sloping shaft leading into the ground before it levelled out. There were doorways off this shaft from time to time, but we kept going for at least a hundred metres to the work-face. Here stood a dust-covered front-end loader of indeterminate age. Just past that was an unusual machine. It had a long cylinder on which were attached grinding teeth.

"What is that?" I asked, pointing to this contraption.

"Ah, this. This I build myself. It tunnels into the rock face and the stone travels through the drum and falls to the ground behind it. As the stone comes out I sift through it looking for large pieces of colour. The smaller pieces we find when the rock is taken outside and dumped onto the mullock heap. You can find smaller pieces in the sunlight."

"How do you tell which is opal and which is just rock?"

"You lick it so," He picked up a piece of rock and licked it. His saliva cleared the dust from the rock and highlighted the colour underneath, the blues and reds really standing out from the ochre coloured dust. "Good opal." Was all he said as he placed it in a plastic container. "I will clean this up and weigh it before putting it with the others."

"He was a strange bird, Ziggy. He worked hard and kept pretty much to himself, there was not much going into town and hitting the piss, I mean booze,"

"Don't worry, I know what hitting the piss means."

"He went into town once a week for supplies, and once a month this lady would lob into town and he'd go in and pick her up. He introduced her to me as Maria, his sister, but the things that they got up to in his bedroom section of the dugout sort of suggested that this wasn't the case. He told me sometime later that she was a working girl that he had met on a trip down to Adelaide. She's retired from that profession, and now she now worked as his Courier. He gave her the opal that he had carved out during the month, and she took it to the dealer that he used."

"Wouldn't that have been taking a risk?"

"No. He would tell her exactly how much raw opal was in the bag, and she knew that if she held some back he would find out. She got paid well for the slight risk involved. It was a good system that I used after I took over the mine."

"I hope that you didn't find a convenient working girl."

"No. I made the trip myself, and put it about that I was visiting my sister in Adelaide. I left it up to them which definition was correct."

"Which one was it? No, forget I asked that, I don't need to know. How long after you started working for him did you take over the mine?"

"It was not much more than a year. He'd gone into Adelaide for his annual visit, he used to stay a week visiting her and discussing things with the dealer. It was on his last night that it happened. He suffered a massive heart attack. One minute he was going at it like a stud bull, and the next his heart just stopped. By the time that the doctor had arrived he was long gone. She arrived at the mine a couple of days later with a case of legal papers that informed me that I was the new owner of the mine. He had left a quantity of opal to Maria, but the bulk of his considerable estate, one that included, as well as opal, a substantial real estate portfolio, to his daughter."

"He must have done pretty well from his mine."

"That he did, that he did."

"Then how come there aren't a lot more mines around his?"

"Because, as far as the rest of the miners were concerned, he made just enough to cover costs and keep him interested. He didn't use the local cutters and polishers to prepare his stones for sale, he didn't sell them to the dealers that came into town, he didn't trust them to give him a good price. No-one knew just how much opal he took out of the ground."

"So I suppose that you followed his example, then?"

"I couldn't see why not, so yes."

"I guess that there's no point in me asking you how well you have done then, is there?"

"I make just enough to cover costs and keep me interested."

"And that's all that I'm going to get from you. And here I was getting my hopes up, meeting a hugely successful opal miner who has to be as randy as hell, and very likely to fall for my seduction techniques. Now I'm devastated." I caught his sharp glare at me. "Just kidding, you're way too old for me."

"Now look who's devastated. Here I was thinking that if I dropped the hint that I could be a hugely successful opal miner, who just happens to be looking for some female companionship, that I might be in with a chance. Much as I think that you are a nice, kind, and not bad looking woman, I have a very good reason not to put the hard word on you."

"What might that reason be, if you don't mind me asking?"

"I don't mind, but I can't tell you. I have to do this thing for myself."

I looked at my watch. "Shit! I need my beauty sleep, seeing as how I have to get up early to do breakfast for the guests. You know how cranky they get if their breakfast isn't on time. Come on, I'll drop you off on my way home." I left him at the entrance to the caravan park and drove home. What an interesting man, obviously intelligent from the way that he spoke. Definitely not the type that I would have associated with opal mining. There is more to this man than he is letting on, and it has nothing to do with the hinted fabulous wealth that he may have tucked away.

I saw him when I delivered his breakfast the next morning. I saw him when he was getting into his car as I collected his tray after breakfast. "Are you checking out so soon?" I asked, "You have paid for several more days."

"Nah, just heading into Adelaide for the day to talk to my dealer and deliver the last batch of opal. The mine has played out and I am too old to set up a new one. If you're lucky, I'll shout you dinner tonight, I should be able to afford it."

"Okay, I'll see you when you get back. Don't make it too late, it takes quite a long time to blot out the ravages of a hard day's work at the coal face." He smiled at the mining reference.

I had just made sure that the staff had cleaned up all of the rooms in preparation for the next influx of guests, when Mum called me into her office. "This new man that you had dinner with last night, you seem to be getting quite pally with him. Tell me about him."

"He's just come down from Coober Pedy. He had an opal mine up there and seemed to have done quite well from it. He told me this morning that it had played out and he was too old to start a new mine, so he was chucking the mining game in."

"He has told you nothing more about his life?"

"No. It almost seems as if his life before that didn't exist. All that he said was that he was hitch-hiking and had stopped at Coober Pedy, and this old Croatian miner offered him a job in his mine. He inherited the mine when the old guy died. That's pretty much it, why do you ask?"

"I checked the register, and I don't think that the name that he used is his real name."

"But he had a driver's License, that is usually good enough."

"When you see him again, tell him that I would like to meet him."

"I'll be seeing him tonight, he's invited me to have dinner with him."

"I hope that you're not thinking of taking it any further than dinner."

"I haven't thought that far ahead. I was just going to play it by ear."

"Don't."

"What if he pushes the issue."

"Don't let him."

"Now you've got me intrigued. What do you know that I don't?"

"I don't know anything for sure, but if he is who I think he is . . . Let's just leave it at that for the time being."

I found it very difficult to concentrate on my duties, few that they were. What is going on here?

I was just finishing up for the day when his car stopped outside the office. He came in through the door. "I have reservations for seven, I'll pick you up at ten to."

So, we weren't going far for dinner. There were a couple of decent restaurants within that time from here, so I was in for a good meal if nothing else.

"What were you doing before you lobbed in Coober Pedy?" I had just finished a very nice and not in-expensive main course and was wiping my mouth on the napkin.

"I can't remember."

"Can't remember, or don't want to remember. You could have even been a serial killer on the run from the cops."

"No, I can assure that I wasn't one of those. I was just drifting around the country trying to find some direction to my life."

"Sufficiently vague to tell me to mind my own business."

"I was just trying to put as much distance between my old life and the next phase of my life. Thank you for bringing it back to my attention."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry, so you can tell me to shut up. It's just that your life as you tell it intrigues me, and I find you interesting. Before you get the idea that my interest extends no more than the possibility of getting my hands on your opals, I'm not that kind of person. I have seen what having more money than you need can do to some people."

"Meaning your former husband eh?"

"Meaning my former husband, yes. It didn't matter how much money he had, and he had plenty, he always wanted more, and the methods that he used to get more I found disgusting. I also found, after he was arrested, that they most of them were illegal."

"Ouch."

"Ouch indeed. By the time that the Prosecutors and all of the legal leeches had finished, I had little more than my dignity, and I'm afraid that dignity does not pay the bills. Even selling the house was no help. So I had little alternative but to come home and work for Mum. And that leads me to a request from her. She wants to meet you."

"When and where." He didn't seem all that surprised.

"Back at the caravan park, she owns it by the way, and as soon as we've finished here."