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OPAL -- Martina Fitzgerald There is the constant search for opal. The sun a cancer, each brand of stone aching to give its dryness away; the machine bumping and laboring his body into a seizure until he is one with it, pounding at his head to break free of it altogether and work this mine alone, without any sort of hope. His eyes are pale and bleached as the desert scrub, their rims the red horizon of lava and ash burning at the end of the day. There is Opal in his thoughts, the fantasy at the end of the week, the fantasy of weekend. Her breasts are the white curves of dinosaur bone, her thighs soft diatomite, her vocabulary of moans and the only word she knows. "Opal...Opal." It is a labor to shut the machine off without getting killed, and he can't stop the shaking of diesel and metal his own flesh has taken. It is worse to count his money, already knowing how little there is. But he starts towards town anxious and dreaming, knowing that there is enough to have her until the others come pounding at the door. This is the town for the miners of Coober Peby, a petrol station hardly tended, and a store of hardwares and rations. Really, its only draw is The Trump Pub and the girl in its back room. The bar is already full of miners. Poor or poorer, they are equally drunk. When one of them makes a find, he is a fool to come here but he always does, wanting to reward himself for the good fortune he'd been paying for in this hole, building up the luck with the dust in his lungs and years burnt out of his skin, working himself into a man incompatible with anything but pain and angry persistence. The find might be small and he might come in pretending a despair equal to the rest, but these men are trained by opal, fixing their hopes to find colors and surfaces which do not exist, apostles to the slightest bend of light. When a finder comes in with a little cash, they catch his glow and he must, by rights, buy them all a round. Soon he is drunker and poorer and his search as desperate as the rest. "What are ya having, mate?" The bartender's favorite joke. With only one kind of whiskey, and one kind of beer, they all started with both. With only one woman, they all went to her eventually. There was a greater variety of liquor he could stock the bar with, and a greater variety of whores perhaps, but he was an economist, purely wholesale. His customers would buy whatever he had, without a drop of friendship or anything else. "Get yourself some grizzly now. Not many in to see her yet." Ox, with his beard and rotten teeth, comes out of the door to the back room and crosses his name off the blackboard that hung beside it. There are four names below his: "Morgan. Getty. Matilda. Buck." He gets up and writes his name at the bottom. She never welcomes, but she puts her arms around him and begins her moans the moment he touches her. She is so used that her body is a warm mud, but he is always gentle and she responds. Her surfaces are sticky and oozy. The air is sweet and acidic. She is the approximation of woman. She is better than sex. Afterwards, he sits and talks to her. "How was your day?" he says. "Mmmmmmmh." "This world is a hole." "Mmmmmmmh." "I will save you." "Opal." "I will get you out of here." "Opal." "I promise you." He looks up through the plastic window, so dirty the moon is yellow and brown-stained. It looks like a clogged toilet. "I promise. Promise that if I strike it I will get you out. You will get better. It is all I want anymore." "Opal. Opal." * * * Two days later he is out in the sun working the machine, without any money left, when he feels it grind into harder stone. This is his success. A dinosaur egg whose shape had been fossilized into a single opal the size of a football. * * * "I want to buy Opal." It was morning by the time he'd gotten there, only a few miners were left, and the owner was mopping the floor. "You find the opal." The owner kept cleaning. That is your job." "No, her, in the back room. I want to buy her." "You made a strike?" The shine of life came into his eyes. "Yes. I have the money. I want to buy her." "She is not for sale." He stopped washing. "But the bar is. She comes with the bar." "Then I will buy the bar." He showed him how to work the cash register, and the record books with the numbers for ordering booze and the various bills, all the time telling him what he would do with the money. He would go back to Sidney. He would change his life. He would find a wife and have kids. He would raise bees when the children grew up and moved out. "Come. I have to show you what to do with her." He filled a bucket with warm water, stopped outside the back room and fingered through his keys. "It's dark in there so it helps to find the right key first." In the room he unlocked a cabinet that was mounted on the wall and flipped a light switch that was on the wall inside it. Bright fluorescent tubes blazed from the ceiling. "She won't leave the room. She goes into a fit if you try to force her, so you got to leave these lights on all day, kinda like the sun." Opal didn't make a move to cover her eyes. They rolled large in her head, but they were luminous. In the light he could see she was truly beautiful but filthy, her breasts and face smeared with the usage of all these men. "She gets pretty dirty, and she doesn't take care of herself. I think she likes the filth, and the miners don't seem to care, but you have to clean her every day." He took cloths and a bottle of rubbing alcohol from the cabinet. "I use this cause it sort of disinfects, you know." Then he went to work, first wiping down the rubber mattress cover. Then he switched to the bucket of water. Once he touched her, she began her moans. "Mmmmmmmh." "She's where the money is..." "Mmmmmmmh." "...so you got to take care of her." He scrubbed her face and chest with the sponge. "Mmmmmmmh," she said. "You got to clean all of her..." "Opal..." "...some of the men like to get at her mouth." "Opal..." "And down here. They'll turn her over and go at her that way too. So you got to get in there and really clean." "Opal...Opal." |
MONEY