Chapter Three

                  The road was dusty at the driver dock. A shed with four entrances sat atop an intersection, a dusty tinwood cross. Loading bays on every side gave quick and easy access to different routes. Shazza stood in Eastern bay, fending off queer glances from packerboys who thought a picker an oddity in a dock. Shazza was just grateful for shade.

                  In the ceiling, hanging above the intersection and then again protruding from the roof was a crow’s nest, where lookerboys gazed through telescopes up the four ways of road. Northboy sighted something and pushed forward a metal switch. A buzzer sounded in West bay, and there, packerboys stood to attention. A few moments later northboy descended a ladder, into the reverse nest inside the shed, which hung like a basket of a dusty tin balloon. He leaned over the edge with a megaphone.

                  “Northways-go-West,” he boomed, “route 75, Wayne Driver.”

                  Below, a packerboy ran along an elevated platform in West bay, first selecting signs and then sliding them into a bracket. He took a rag from a railing and wiped a chalkboard clean, scrawled in a name. When he was done, the wall of the bay had “N-GO-W R75” signed and “Wayne Driver” chalked.

                  Within a moment a bulbous red truck appeared on the horizon, a skirt of dust churning in its wake. A few minutes later it was inside the driver dock, a thundering machine of chrome and smoke, its elevated wooden flatbed at the same height as West bay, a person-or-so above the road.

                  Packerboys rushed to the truck and uncoupled its side wall, five of them removing a long frame of wooded panels, and carried it to grooves in the cement behind them. When they were done it looked like they’d added a wooden fence to the dock. They set to unloading the truck by a scheme known to packerboys, leaving other crates and boxes to continue a journey. It reminded Shazza of ants taking over a glazed cherry.

                  A lookerboy rushed down the ladder and held his body over the basket.

                  “Westways-go-East,” he boomed, “route 33, Darren Driver.”

***

                  The truck rumbled about her as Shazza sat up font, watching the horizon change slower than the road was et below her. Darren Driver sat unhinged, like he was on the head of a pin, shifting glances sideways at Shazza, asking a child of the question for the umpteenth time.

                  “Why you say you wanna slay a dragon again?”

                  “Didn’t say.”

                  “Ohr yeah.”

                  The rumble returned to rattle the bottle he topped from the kettle he tattled a battle to straddle while ridin’ the road. Silence for a bit.

                  “Can ya even…”

                  “Do you like what you do?” she interrupted.

                  “Hey?”

                  “Drivin’. Do you like it?”

                  “Well, wadda ya mean?”

                  “You drive this truck every day?”

                  “Nah, Monday to Tagifday, I get weekends off.”

                  “So, on those days, Darren Driver, do you like drivin’?”

                  “Do I… like drivin?” he asked, a smile crawling across his chin like a secret falling open. For the first bit since dragon became the only talk he seemed to find an inkle in somethin’ else; an idea, taken root, in the pleasure part of Darren Driver’s thinkin’, like he could taste a new colour and it wasn’t bad.

                  “I’ll put it another way,” Shazza Picker said, and Darren readied himself for the gooey centre of another egg of wonder. “Would you rather be doin’ somethin’ else than drivin’?”

                  “Doin’ somethin’ else? If I did that it might crash the truck.”

                  “Yeahnah, not right now, generally – tomorrow.”

                  “Well, golly I uhhh – would I rather be doin’ somethin’ else? I can’t think of anythin’. I think I like drivin’. Ya know, I think I do… yeah, maybe. That’s me answer, yeah.”

                  “How do you figure?”

                  “What?”

                  “Why do you like drivin’?”

                  He chewed on the question for a bit, his lower lip seeming to juggle the one above it. His body bounced and swayed with the rhythm of the road. Comin’ outta denim were hands that saw much of mother-sun, coarse, hairy knuckled, grippin’ a wheel that wont to mind its own. An answer spoken slowly as it conjured.

                  “I see the same places… all the time, same places. They’re far, far apart sometimes, oftentimes, and in between them it’s not like it’s… distance, yeah, nah, I mean it is – course it is, I drive a lotta klicks, it’s… difference. Like, I can drive the same road two different days and everythin’ between ohrr, say here and there, wherever it is, somewhere East, I could drive this road two days and everythin’s the same, which makes all the different stuff stand out.

                  “Like, this sunset the other day, couple of hours up the road here. I’ve seen mother-sun settin’ there lots of times but the other day it was just… I dunno… different. Yeah, nah, I dunno, ya had to be there, it was somethin’ special. But then lots of it is, it’s all the same difference… ‘n yeah, so – I guess ya gotta be somewhere to see a thing, ya know?”

                  “And drivin’ lets you do that.”

                  “Ohhrr, yeh, I like drivin’.” Darren Driver said upon the rumblin’ of the road.

***

                  The visitor’s information centre was only a short walk from where he dropped her off, a log cabin with an old diner attached that closed down a great many moons ago. Rangers for the national park had taken it over.

                  Shazza went inside, tripped a bell hanging above the door. Booths with cracked leather seats were occupied by an assortment of officely things: boxes, boxes of stationery, toilet paper, boxes of toilet paper, a pyramid of pine cones, loose rock warning signs, unicorn warning signs, measurement equipment, a whiteboard with its stand squeezed into the seating but then the board itself tilted on its axel so that it created a large white hat across the booth, a cage of angry chipmunks, a cage of guns and tranquilisers, a box of case files, a box of tissues, a juke box and a ranger asleep under his hat.

                  A different ranger sat up from his island desk in the kitchen.

                  “Howyagarn? Carn on in, what can I rustle you up? Nah, I’m just playin’, this ain’t a diner no more.”

                  “Nah, yeah, good one.”

                  “What can we do yer for?”

                  The sleeping ranger unslept and looked to Shazza like she was a bright object.

                  “I’m here to slay a dragon.”

                  The kitchen ranger laughed. The other ranger wasn’t sure he’d woken.

                  “Ya… ya gonna slay a dragon? That’s what the rifle is?”

                  “Yeh.”

                  “What makes you think there’s dragons here?”

                  She pointed to the giant, glowing neon sigil for the national park, hanging on a chain in the window. It was a dragon. She pointed to the name of the national park: Dragoncrest.

                  “Ya can’t slay a dragon.”

                  “Yeah, nah,” said a raspy booth ranger, “ya can’t slay a dragon.”

                  “Is there a law against it or…”

                  They laughed. The angry chipmunks hated that.

                  “Course not, because ya can’t slay a dragon! Boots be praised, I’m with the ovens, but you’re the one who’s cooked!”

                  “Well, where would I find a dragon round here?”

                  The kitchen ranger stood up from his swivel chair and walked past his piles of critical casework that kept him up at night and limber and determined and detached and away from his wife and kids dammit ‘cause it was all for them, they’ll see, and a blender and a toaster and the scarcely penetrable soles of his hiking boots slapped cold tiles in precisely the same rhythm as his precision gait to the counter where he hovered a foot behind his tittering gray moustache and declared:

                  “Little lady, ya not gonna find a dragon.”

***

                  Shazza found a dragon about twenty minutes later in a cavern by a river. Stalagmites and stalactites glowed blue and sent light to be shattered upon jewels embedded high above in the stone ceiling. A waterfall’s water fell and stirred bioluminescence in a moon pool that chanced to sing of neon.

                  Shazza ran behind an embankment of mud and crouched. She peeked over the earth to study the mighty dragon: longer than the truck that rumbled her here and twice the height. Its underbelly was a scaley maze with the patina of a fingerprint. On its back and wings were autumnal feathers that shivered with sunset plumage and quivered like tickled goosepimpled flesh.

                  An eyelid peeled open, and an orange eye rolled to stillness, levelled at Shazza. She ducked behind the ridge. The dragon lifted its head from under a wing; its face had crystal spikes that sparkled valleys of constellations. It hovered above Shazza, dwarfing the picker.

                  “Howyagarn?” the dragon boomed. Its hefty voice caught in the cavern like trapped thunder.

                  Shazza cupped her ears and waited for the echoes to recede, then she stood up and faced her dragon.

                  “Hey… hi, hi there! I’m Shazza Picker, hi.”

                  “I… am… FO,” it roared, and the cave reacted. The stalagmites and stalactites pulsed and chucked a mirrorball tantrum to the roof. The waterfall hissed loudly, the moon pool trembled and tossed schools of semi-transparent koi into the air.

                  “Hey Fo!”

                  “Sup?”

                  “Ohr, yeah, nah, not much, I was hopin’ to slay a dragon and wonderin’ if maybe I could slay you?”

                  “Ohr, brah, righto, I mean… that’s a choice,” it boomed.

                  The glow of the cavern sagged, the koi went coy and the waterfall lost its gnash.

                  “Umm… yeah, nah, sry about that, I uuh – I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure what I expected to find here.”

                  “Right… right.”

                  “Like – how big you’d be or whether you could talk, or how angry you’d be. Are you angry, though? That I want to slay you?”

                  “Well… gee, I mean… I’m not charmed by it, brah, I can’t say I’m lovin’ the idea, it doesn’t slap. I’ve had some good ideas lately, they’re a lot better than… well, slaying me.”

                  “Ohr yeah, like what?”

                  “Well, like what if – and you can’t steal this idea.”

                  “Nah.”

                  “Promise, you have to promise you won’t steal this idea.”

                  “Yeah, nah, I won’t.”

                  “Say it. Say you promise.”

                  “Yeah, nah, I promise – I promise I won’t steal your idea.”

                  “Okay, I’m trusting you, brah. I’m trusting you with this. So, imagine a brush that had like a little moon pool that you could put essential oils in and stuff and like, you know, you could put product in it, right? And when you brushed, it helped it through your feathers, the oils and the product, helped them through. That’s a good idea, I’d be thrilled about getting one of those, that’s an idea that slaps.”

                  “You could call it a brosh!!!”

                  “Yeah… or something else, I’m sure I’ll come up with a name for it.”

                  “Yeah, nah, sry, brosh just came to me quickly, tip of the tongue and that.”

                  “Nah, no worries, no bad ideas in brainstorming. Though speaking of ideas – why shouldn’t I just eat you?”

                  “Orh, nah, you wouldn’t like me.”

                  “Naaaah, probly not. People taste like arse, and not in a good way.”

                  “Fuck, the more I think about it, that brush thing is a good idea though.”

                  “I know, right?!”

                  “It’s a heaps good idea.”

                  “Yeah, so that’s what I’m sayin’, that’s an example of a good idea, whereas slaying me or me eating you…”

                  “Nah, yeah, I see it – it’s not as good, it doesn’t slap.”

                  “It doesn’t slap. Hey… what about my friend Charlie?”

                  “Charlie?”

                  “Yeah, Charlie the dragon. Bloke’s suicidal, I reckon he’d be into it, most def!”

                  “Ya reckon?”

                  “Ohr, yeah. Word! You should hear the way dude carries on sometimes, it’s enough to make a dragon molt.”

                  “Okay, thanks, Fo, I’ll look into it, if you reckon he’d be okay with me slaying him.”

                  “Yeah, nah, if you slay him, you’re doin’ the three of us a favour.”

                  That night Shazza pitched a tent aside a mountain. She’d seen pictures of tents with campfires by cliffsides, fat and happy moons beside, and while her tent hung like a pair of chucked dacks, and her moon hung like the chomped off nail of a thumb, the eve was still and the stars were plentiful and gracious with their winks.

                  She gathered bits of forest it didn’t want of itself and built a fire, lit it, and lost hours to its cackle. She took out a tin of tuna and a satchel of macadamias and ate them in the warmth she’d called into the world, and she thought of home, and Wednesday steaknight, and Beattie drawing heinzup people on the paper of her plate.

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