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  ‘You’re one very strange sheila,’ he says.

  ‘So they tell me.’

  ‘Sexy little she-dingo, though, aren’t ya?’

  ‘You better watch out. I bite, and I’m rabid.’

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Your dad didn’t warn me. Didn’t give me a clue. To tell you the truth, I was expecting someone with unshaved legs who’d be reading the Bible.’

  Jodie maintains eye contact, expressionless. Her customer fidgets with his Akubra and looks at the floor. ‘Didn’t mean to offend you,’ he says.

  ‘You’ve offended me.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I beg your pardon.’

  ‘My pardon costs,’ Jodie says.

  The man doesn’t know whether to treat this as a joke or a dare. He is increasingly nervous. ‘Well … ah … what will it cost?’

  ‘That depends.’ There is a long silence, during which the man looks at the floor and Jodie looks at the man. ‘You got any questions?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I got one. How old are you?’

  ‘Two months shy of eighteen,’ Jodie says. ‘Keep that in mind. You lay a hand on a minor, you’re in trouble. Not to mention the fact that my pa would cut off your balls.’

  The man laughs nervously. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, you are some firecracker. Just the same, hats off to your dad. Got the right idea, I reckon, and all us cattlemen and squatters are behind him. Name’s Danny.’ He extends a hand. ‘Danny O’Sullivan.’

  ‘Not all that pleased to meet you, Danny,’ Jodie says, ignoring the hand.

  ‘You not gonna give me your name?’

  ‘I thought you knew it.’

  ‘Well, I thought I did too. But now I don’t know, do I, Ruth? Or whoever you are. What do you call yourself?’

  ‘Jodie.’

  ‘Jodie. Uh-huh. OK. Why Jodie?’

  ‘Because that’s the name my mother gave me, and it’s the one on my birth certificate.’

  ‘Then why does your dad call you Ruth?’

  ‘Biblical reasons.’

  ‘You’re gonna have to explain.’

  ‘Book of Ruth. Wither thou goest, I will go. Etcetera, etcetera. Don’t know what you’re doing here or why you’ve been talking to my pa if you don’t know your Bible.’

  ‘Well,’ Danny says, embarrassed. ‘Been on a cattle station in Channel Country all my life, and never had time for those toy boys in Brisbane or Canberra. Or Sydney either, when those silly buggers try to push in. So I’m with your dad there, he can count on me, I’m all for secession. I’ve signed up for the militia, I got the flag flying, I’m a paid-up member of the Republic of Outer Barcoo. But that don’t necessarily mean I go along with … well, you know … the religious stuff, it’s just not my billy of tea. So you’re gonna have to explain the Bible bit.’

  ‘Book of Ruth. Old Testament. Ruth says to Naomi, her mother-in-law, that no matter where Naomi goes (and they’re both widows, see?) she’ll go with her. She’ll never leave. Wither thou goest, I will go. My pa wanted a Ruth for a daughter.’

  Danny turns the rim of his Akubra in his hands, round and round, as though he’s a clock gone crazy. He flicks his eyes up at Jodie then looks at the floor again. ‘I don’t get it,’ he says.

  ‘In plain English, he took for granted that I’d always tag along. To wherever. To western Queensland, to Outer Barcoo. To nowhere. To here.’

  ‘This ain’t nowhere.’

  ‘Yeah? You think?’

  ‘Outer Barcoo ain’t nowhere. But what about your mum? What does she—?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Where are you from, Jodie-Ruth?’

  ‘Before here? Texas. Before that? South Carolina. We got secession in our DNA.’

  ‘Dunno what you’re talking about, but I knew your dad was a Yank, so I knew you were too. I knew that before you even opened your mouth. You sure do talk like a Yank.’

  Jodie throws her ballpoint pen at Danny. It hits him like a feather and bounces onto the floor. ‘That’s an insult,’ she says. ‘Don’t you know better than to call a Southerner a Yankee? I don’t talk anything like a Yankee because I’m not one and nor is my pa.’

  Danny rolls his eyes and scratches his head. ‘Yanks are Yanks,’ he says.

  ‘Neither of us has ever even been north of the Mason-Dixon line.’

  ‘Dunno what you’re talking about, but a Yank is a Yank.’

  Jodie says sourly, ‘That’s like calling an Aussie a Pom. How would you like it if I said you talked like a Pommie?’

  ‘But I don’t.’

  ‘Exactly my point. Please get it into your thick head that I’m not a Yankee and I don’t sound like one. So. If you’re here to apply for a passport, here’s the form. If you’re here to sign up for the militia, there’s a different—’

  ‘I already signed up for that with your dad.’

  ‘If you are here for currency exchange, I got Aussie dollars in a locked strongbox.’

  ‘You are really something, ain’t you, Miss Not-a-Yankee Jodie-Ruth?’

  ‘You got a problem, I can put you down for an appointment with the President of the Republic.’

  ‘You mean your dad?’

  Jodie meets Danny’s gaze steadily until he drops his eyes.

  ‘Your dad’s got a bit of a reputation,’ he says, ‘when it comes to his kid.’

  ‘Trigger-happy, is that what you heard? You got that right. With a temper that’s always on the boil.’

  ‘But we understand that. It’s natural.’ Danny’s tone is subdued, respectful, peace-making. The rim of his Akubra turns faster and faster in his fingers. ‘A man’s gotta protect his girls. Women, you know, we gotta take them under our wing because they can’t look after themselves.’

  ‘The premier of Queensland,’ Jodie says tartly, ‘is a woman.’

  Danny spits on the floor of the capitol building. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘There you go. F-ing Blighty. Goes down on the toy boys, we reckon. Doesn’t it just make you sick?’

  ‘Certain things,’ Jodie says, ‘do indeed make me sick. They make me very sick indeed.’

  Danny raises his eyes to hers then nervously drops them again.

  ‘I done something to offend you?’ he asks.

  Jodie ignores this. ‘Are you here to change currency? Or for a passport?’

  ‘Both. I got to have Aussie dosh and I got to get a passport.’

  ‘What’s the passport for?’

  ‘Whad’ya think? For the usual reason.’

  ‘The usual reason is foreign travel. Outside of the Republic. Where’re you going?’

  ‘Brisbane. Don’t want to, but I got to. Family funeral.’

  Jodie nods toward the horse hitched to the verandah rail. ‘You planning to ride all the way?’

  ‘Very funny. I got a truck.’

  ‘But you don’t have a licence?’

  ‘Used to have one. State of Queensland. Expired about ten years ago, I think, and who bothers out here? Anyway, your dad says, and I’m with him, that our passports are legal ID and legal driving licences. We got rights and we got guns to back ’em up.’

  Jodie stamps Danny’s passport application with the seal of the Republic of Outer Barcoo. She empties his little drawstring bag of silver guineas, each coin embossed with the Southern Cross, legal currency of the republic. She unlocks her strongbox and changes his Barcoo guineas for Australian dollars at current rates.

  ‘Thanks,’ Danny says. He hefts up his semi-automatic. ‘Is it a killin’ offence with your dad or you if I ask you out for a date?’

  ‘You’ve got an appealing taste for risk,’ Jodie says.

  ‘Is that a yes?’

  ‘I got certain conditions.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘You got to take a shower before you come get me.’

  ‘Deal.’

  ‘You got to shave and wear clean clothes.’

  ‘Cross my heart.’

  ‘You got to come in your truck, not on a horse, and you got to
take me somewhere with tablecloths and knives and forks and flowers in a vase on the table.’

  Danny licks his index finger and crosses his heart.

  ‘So what?’ Jodie wants to know scathingly, not for one second believing. ‘Are we gonna drive all the way to Cunnamulla?’

  ‘Better than that.’

  ‘Okay, then. Where?’

  ‘My shack,’ he says. ‘I got export-quality steak in the freezer. I got a lace tablecloth that used to be my mum’s. I’m as good as the devil’s chef with the barbie.’

  Jodie eyes him balefully. ‘Oh right. Your shack. You think I’m gonna fall for that?’

  ‘Swear to God, you’ll be safe as a nun.’

  It’s a staring match and Jodie is the first to lower her eyes. ‘When?’ she says.

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Just remember, I’m gonna let my dad know, I’m underage, and I got my own gun.’

  In fact, though she knows how the entire Wirranbandi chapter will almost certainly end, Jodie does not inform her dad about Danny or about her date. She showers, applies a curling iron to her hair, sprays herself with perfume. She puts on bikini panties, tight jeans, and a soft cotton T-shirt, no bra. Since her father is still out recruiting, she goes back to the capitol building. She mists the office of the Republic of Outer Barcoo with air freshener. It’s a eucalyptus scent, all she’s got, but will have to do. She takes her diary from a desk drawer and settles into one of the pews. She thinks about whether to write another letter to her mother, but writes nothing. Instead she simply stares across the verandah at the red earth and the sky. It still shocks her, just how much sky there is, and how suddenly it goes dark. Pouf! It’s like a hurricane lantern blown out, like a blind pulled down.

  She turns on the lamp at her desk.

  Then she writes: Where are you? Are you still alive, Mama? Will you ever find me? Will I ever find you? Is it always the end of the world? Does it have to be? Can there be some other kind of ending?

  From one of the desk drawers, she lifts copies of her father’s sermons and political tracts and his Constitution for the Republic, and from underneath those she extracts her secret folder of clippings. These come from assorted newspapers, all illicit, all read furtively, all filched from airports or railway stations or newsagents or from recycling bins in various towns.

  Her folder has separator title pages, each title clipped from headlines and stuck on with cheap white glue.

  Republic of Texas.

  Republic of Canaan: a history of the secession of a Bible-based Confederate county in upstate South Carolina.

  She has made a new title page: Republic of Outer Barcoo, Queensland, Australia. She cut that headline from the Sydney Morning Herald and so far the only article in the folder came from that same issue of the Sydney paper. There is photographic documentation (fuzzy and inconclusive) and the investigative reporter claims that large caches of weapons exist on a number of cattle stations and that there are widespread rumours of sedition, of revolution, of covert intention for sabotage and for violent secession from both the State of Queensland and the Commonwealth of Australia. A spokesperson from the premier’s office says that the situation is being monitored but that no one takes too seriously the ravings of a small lunatic fringe. Yes, they are heavily armed and dangerous, but they are few. In the event of siege, they would be wiped out in a matter of hours.

  Behind the Republic of Texas title page in Jodie’s scrapbook, item one, is a New York Times piece dated 13 February 2005, filed from Overton, Texas.

  The road to the capitol, Jodie reads (though she knows this piece almost by heart), winds through a landscape of pine trees, rusting pump jacks and a few tidy churches in this East Texas town. Literature in the lobby describes how citizens can apply for passports or enlist in the interim defense forces. The building is the headquarters of the Republic of Texas, a sometimes militant organization whose members repudiate the authority of Austin and Washington and believe Texas should be a sovereign nation. The group gained notoriety eight years ago when some members took a couple hostage in the Davis Mountains of West Texas, and endured a week-long siege by more than 100 police officers, after which a follower who fled into the mountains was killed. The leader of the faction involved in the stand-off is still in prison.

  Jodie has only vague memories of the shootout since she was four at the time. This is how she remembers it: like cowboys on TV but sticky. The sticky was blood. From before that, she remembers the beat-up truck and the road that went on forever and the pillows on each side that her pa put there to stop her from sliding across the front seat of the cabin. She remembers sirens behind them and the trees rushing by very fast and the seatbelt she chewed and the way her pa kept promising, promising, promising. ‘Leave your country, your people and your father’s household,’ he kept saying, ‘and go to the land I will show you. Thus saith the Lord.’

  Is it possible she can remember the words so exactly?

  Of course not.

  She knows the words from sermon after sermon preached in Texas and in Outer Barcoo. She knows from his telling and retelling.

  She knows, all these years later, that the truck-and-pillow-and-siren memories are about the frantic flight from South Carolina, the state troopers flummoxed at the Georgia border. Somewhere between Georgia and Texas, or perhaps before Georgia, they seem to have lost her mother, but Jodie has no information on that score. Many times she has rehearsed asking what happened, but each time the words turn into vapour on her lips. They rise, she sees them float toward her father’s ears, but they have no sound. Her father is very good at staying out of prison and out of trouble. He charms people. He makes friends easily and quickly. He has (she has now figured out) friends in all the right places, oil men, cattle men, military men, born-again politicians. Everyone says her pa is a charismatic preacher. Friends become followers and then they become afraid.

  Everything seems to end in flight and a lot of bodies.

  New York Times, February 2005, quoting the chief of police of Overton, Texas:

  ‘I normally wouldn’t be alarmed by a few boys getting into a fisticuffs thing. But this is a group with a violent past … However ludicrous their beliefs might sound to you and me, we can’t forget that Jim Jones got a bunch of folks to drink Kool-Aid with him down in Guyana. You could shave one side of your head and have a loyal following around here by nightfall.’

  Chief Williams said that his officers have fined or issued arrest warrants for group members. Violations included carrying Republic of Texas passports instead of a driver’s license; driving unregistered vehicles; and redesigning license plates to show a Texas that includes significant chunks of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado and Wyoming. Group members say those areas are part of Texas, wrongly wrested away by Washington.

  Group members believe that the Texas referendum in 1845 in favor of joining the United States was illegal … They also advocate the creation of an alternative monetary system using minted silver and gold coins. One coin made of one gram of silver has a large Texas star in its center and the word ‘Overton’ emblazoned around it.

  After the conviction and imprisonment of the original leader, the new president has promised a more conciliatory future. He said his administration, unlike some splinter cells, did not base its political philosophy on Old Testament beliefs, did not oppose women’s suffrage and did not support a return to a legal system permitting slavery.

  ‘What are you reading?’ Danny asks, stepping in from the dark verandah. He is showered and shaven and smells good. ‘Hey, didn’t mean to give you a heart attack.’

  Jodie stuffs the folder back into a cardboard banker’s box and covers it. Her hands quiver so she keeps them inside the box.

  ‘Jeez,’ Danny laughs. ‘What is it? Pornography?’

  ‘What do you take me for?’

  ‘Normal. Probably. Except for the church stuff, but that don’t count. I know a heap of bible-bashers keep Hustler under their pillows, praying like crazy f
or the Lord to forgive while they jerk off, so I ain’t gonna be shocked—’

  ‘You disgust me. It’s nothing like that.’

  ‘So I disgust you. And what are you hiding in the box? What disgusts you?’

  ‘Nothing. And none of your business.’

  ‘Tell that to the crows. Who tries to hide nothing, tell me that?’

  ‘It’s the History of the Republic, if you must know. I keep a scrapbook.’

  ‘Oh that. You mean Texas and the Call? Your dad told me. Personally speaking, only kind of voodoo I believe in comes out of the last bottle of a twelve-pack. But I got a lot of time for your dad and he said for him the Call came loud and clear.’

  ‘Loud and clear,’ Jodie says, fitting the lid over the box with some force. ‘Delivered by state troopers, announced by sirens. The Lord God spake and said Go west, Mr President, as fast as you can, and here we are.’

  Danny raises his eyebrows. ‘You are good and pissed off, that’s for sure.’

  ‘I know how this ends.’

  ‘Know how what ends? You and me?’

  ‘The Republic. All this. I know how it ends. One day my pa will be freckled with bullets and that’s what he wants.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Danny says. ‘There’s not one man living wants to die, and certainly not your dad.’

  ‘Don’t you get it? He doesn’t believe he’ll stay dead. He wants martyrdom. Believe me, I know how this ends, over and over, every time.’

  Jodie covers her face with her hands.

  ‘You’re serious, aren’t ya?’ Danny is amazed and uneasy. He almost puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘What d’ya want to do then?’

  ‘I don’t want to be here when it ends.’

  ‘Well then, let’s get cracking. Truck’s waiting, and I got my passport, my tent, sleeping bags—’

  ‘Forget it,’ Jodie says, furious. ‘Is that all you can think about?’

  ‘Hey, swear to God, that’s not what I meant. I won’t lay a hand on you. We’ll just keep driving if you want. Sleep under the stars.’

  ‘I’ve never slept under the stars. Have you?’

  ‘Often. Closest to religious that I get.’