The Vault of Heaven
By William Parsons
Drawing by DreamStudio
Damon McCallister had definitely had his fill of this armpit of a place. The rest of the world called it Australia.
What was the big deal anyway? Okay, he’d gotten into some trouble with drugs back home. A little bit of trouble, nothing really, blown totally out of all proportion. And Mom and Dad’s solution (yeah, that was rich, Dad playing the father role all of a sudden) was to send him across the world to stay with his Uncle Alex out in the middle of absolute nowhere? We’re talking deads-ville.
Damon sat slouched down in the bench seat of the pickup, arms crossed, the dry wind roaring in the window, blowing his bangs under his felt hat in his eyes. He propped his right cowboy boot up on the cracked dashboard. Six months, he’d gotten used to this ridiculous get-up of scuffed boots, dusty jeans, flannel shirt, Akubra Snowy River hat, and threadbare denim jacket for occasions like this. He still sure as hell, though, didn’t like wearing this country shit — urban Aussies had the perfect word for people like Uncle Alex and his family: “bogans” — what back home in Virginia they called “hicks”.
Uncle Alex looked at him. “Havin’ fun?”
Damon turned up the tape player’s volume, blaring INXS even louder.
Uncle Alex tapped his finger on the steering wheel, keeping time with the beat, and returned to staring out the filthy windshield at Gunbarrel Highway. “Be there any time now!” he shouted.
Damon glared at him. “Big fucking deal, Uncle Alex!” Damon shouted back.
Alex looked across at him. “You really like that word.”
Damon threw a challenging look back at him. “Yeah, that’s right. I do.”
Alex grinned. “Good word.” He returned his attention straight ahead.
Damon huffed and slammed back against the seat and rolled his eyes. He crossed his arms even more tightly across his chest.
They were headed to someplace called Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. Uncle Alex had said something about it being some sacred sites formally handed back to the native Australians two years earlier in 1985.
An hour later, Uncle Alex hit the STOP button on the tape player.
“Hey! Goddamn it to hell, Uncle!”
“Fucking’s one thing, blaspheming’s another.” Alex squinted his eyes shut for a moment. “That came out wrong.” He pointed straight ahead.
Damon pushed himself up. He stared at Uluru glowing red in the rays of the sun sinking into the west behind them.
Alex looked across at his nephew and grinned. “So, whadya think?”
Damon shot him a look and shrugged, slouching back down against the bench seat. He pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes, and, making sure his uncle wasn’t watching, he chanced a glance forward again. He mouthed the word, ‘Wow!’
An hour and a half later, they pulled into Yulara, the resort town tucked into the sandy expanse twenty miles north of Uluru: named “Ayers Rock” by the colonists, the world’s largest free-standing rock, a sandstone monolith the top thousand feet of which jut out of the surrounding granite plain. Or so Damon learned from the pamphlet he was keeping himself busy with as his uncle checked them in.
Uncle Alex glanced at him over his shoulder. “Go check out that ‘Visitor Centre’–” He pointed across the street. “–while I pay for our room.” His uncle was holding a wad of those big, ugly Australian dollars.
Damon tossed the pamphlet back onto the counter. “S’okay,” Damon muttered. “I’m fine.” When he glanced up, he saw by the look on his uncle’s face it hadn’t been a request. “Yeah, sure, what the fuck.” He shrugged.
Uncle Alex exchanged a glance with the concierge and shrugged. “I get on him about his language, but…”
The concierge shook her head and continued to check them in.
Inside the Visitor Centre, Damon stepped up to the first of a long row of displays and exhibits on the lore and nature of Central Australia. He learned why Uluru and the neighboring Kata Tjuta glowed red in the sunrise and sunset. Feldspar permeated the sandstone monoliths, as it did the whole vast interior of the continent (hence, its moniker: “Red Centre”). More displays about geology and science followed, but he found himself attracted to the descriptions of the spiritual attachment the Mutitjulu Community of Anangu desert aboriginals felt for these two sites.
The aboriginals called the beginning of time and of all things Tjukurpa, the “Dreamtime”, when “Ancestors” emerged from the flat, featureless plain to wander the land. During this “First Journey”, these totemic beings brought forth into creation all the hills and gorges, ravines and ranges, rainforests and deserts of the Australian landscape, simply by singing their names. Damon felt an inexplicable shudder up his spine when he read how some aboriginals believed the first name to be sung had been Uluru, or “meeting place”, which to them thus made the Rock the most sacred of the countless sites there were. The Dreamtime was timeless and omnipresent. According to the scheme of the Dreamtime, each Ancestor’s “life essence” remained to this day in the feature of the land with which that Ancestor was associated. Though a man died, this essence continued forever, and therefore so did the man, for he was, depending on which “dreaming” was his, a part of a gorge or a forest or an emu or a kangaroo. Thus did the aboriginals “go walkabout”, their sudden and inscrutable disappearances into the Australian wilderness: to retrace the “songlines”, the First Journey, and rejoice in the regeneration.
Damon gulped, his eyes wide. He heard his heart pounding in his ears. Then he squinted, hating that he was finding any of this superstitious mumbo-jumbo interesting.
He glared at a lady beside him. She was holding the hand of an eight-year-old, probably her grandson. Damon growled something under his breath, then: “Big fucking deal.”
She regarded him angrily. “Why don’t you Yanks stay home?”
“Go fuck yourself, lady.” Damon pretended to find a diorama fascinating.
That night, he dreamed he walked the familiar soil of his uncle’s sheep station, Stark Haven; only this time, he journeyed beside a tall, ethereal Ancestor, who was singing such pure, palpable joy that Damon shuddered with it to his very soul. When he glanced behind them, Damon saw that great ravines and majestic mountain ranges had blossomed from the dusty red earth everywhere they had stepped. Damon smiled so wide, his cheeks hurt. He looked behind him again, wanting to see more miracles, but his smile disappeared in a flash when what he saw was the drug rehab clinic. Joy became fear; his smile turned into a mask of hate. Voices came at him: his folks, his teachers, his best friend Jim, Steve, the counselor, and Katie, the director. Get better. Feel better. Be yourself. Forgive. Let go of the pain. Let yourself off the hook.
Damon’s eyes popped open. He was shaking and covered in sweat. His eyes filled with tears, and he balled the pillow in his clenching fists as he buried his face in it and cried. He buried his face even harder into the pillow; he’d be damned if he’d let his uncle hear his blubbering.
*****
Damon met his uncle the next morning at the base of the Rock.
A park ranger walked up to them. “G-day, mate. Welcome to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park.”
Damon nodded and accepted the Aussie’s hand. “Thanks. Fuckin’ big rock.”
The ranger cocks a brow at him. “Aye, ‘tis that.” The ranger pushed his felt hat back to scratch his forehead. “A Yank. Not many of youse come ’ere this early in the season.”
Alex stepped up behind Damon and slapped his huge hands down on his shoulders; Damon staggered a little. “My nephew, staying with me on my station for a year.” He looked down at Damon and winked. “Kinda working vacation, I guess you’d say.”
The ranger nodded. “Yer a Yank yerself, and ya own a station ’ere in Australia, mate?”
Alex nodded. “Over outside Kalgoorlie.”
“Goorlie!” The ranger smiled. “Nice town, bigger’n some, but not anywhere the size of Sydney or Perth—them’s the spots for a young bloke to go for a right sport time of it.”
Damon met the man’s sympathetic glance. Damon thought to himself, this Crocodile Dundee wannabe didn’t know the half of it.
Alex nodded again. “You’re right there, pal, but, at my age, I’ll take my hideaway. Left home thirty-five years ago exactly to get away from cities. That and I fell for a Darwin girl just before the bombing.” He cleared his throat. “Sonny boy here’s had all the right sport he need for a right while, a real right while.”
Damon rolled his eyes. His teeth clenched, he growled under his breath, “Jesus Christ, Uncle Alex.”
Alex squeezed Damon’s shoulders, and Damon grimaced and squirmed.
“Well,” the ranger continued, “I hope Oz has treated ya both fine so far.” He tipped his hat to them. “I’m gonna start the tour.” He picked his way through the small crowd milling about.
“Well?” Alex prodded.
Damon shrugged. “Big — ”
Alex cut him off. “I’m rethinking what a good word that is.”
“Oh, now you want to go all parental on me.”
Alex regarded his nephew for a long moment, then leaned into him. “Stop being such a little shit for five seconds, and you might actually get something out of this.”
Damon narrowed his eyes at the man and opened his mouth.
Alex held a finger up to Damon, right in his nephew’s face. “You say what I strongly suspect you were just about to tell me to do to myself, and your whole ride home is going to be a sore one, and don’t think, boy, I won’t do it. I put your cousins over my knee well into their adulthoods.”
Damon’s chest heaved as he continued to stare narrow-eyed at his uncle, then he relented, and they both fell in step with the other tourists. The ranger told them the story of Kuniya, the python woman, whose songline they were following. He explained rock paintings, said there were paintings and sites Mutitjulu law forbade them seeing, and basically jabbered on about all things Uluru.
The tour ended at a chain heading up the Rock.
Uncle Alex looked down at him. “Wanna?”
Damon shrugged. “Something to do.”
“The winds are wicked up top,” the ranger informed them, “and don’t be fooled by the small hills and valleys. The Rock looks flat from a distance, but it ain’t really. Many a bloke’s twisted his ankle up there.”
Uncle Alex told him thanks and then stepped up to the chain, beckoning Damon, then taking his gloves out of his back pocket and slipping his hands into them. He told Damon to do the same.
Damon accepted his uncle’s offer for him to go first. Clamping his felt Akubra Snowy River hat onto his head, he grabbed the chain with both gloved hands and hefted, taking the first step up the face.
He had to admit, it was fascinating: the face felt and looked like coarse sandpaper, but it sparkled with the sun. Uluru had what he could only describe as sheets of rock hanging over the top and down the sides as if to dry. Oh crap, what a gyp! I’m already at the top. Then Damon realized it was only one of those valleys the park ranger had mentioned. He continued his climb, Uncle Alex a bit behind him.
After an hour or so, he did reach the plateau which was the Rock’s true summit. He brushed himself off and straightened. “Wow!” he gasped as he beheld the vista before him. Damon walked nearer to the edge of the great monolith. Over the wind he heard a pounding in his ears and honestly wondered if it was his own heartbeat he heard or the living pulse of this timeless place.
Up here, under the vault of heaven, sky above and a sage-green sea of scrub and desert below, all seemed clear. It was as if Nature, the Dreamtime, were speaking to him, inviting him to be part and parcel of its magnificence and continuity. It was as if it were giving him permission to feel things–anything he wanted–for the first time in a long time. For a split second, Damon thought perhaps he, too, was indeed retracing his own part of the “First Journey”.
What he felt, though, despite not wanting to, was the fear. He remembered the ropes course and the group therapy and the other experiential therapies at the clinic–he’d failed at all of it (after all, that’s why he was over here, right?). And what if he failed at this? And this was a whole lot more important, this branch of his family who had taken him into their home and offered their love, patience, and support. And what had he done for these six months? He’d thrown that love, patience, and support in their faces. All of a sudden — could it really be that easy, that straightforward? — Damon didn’t want to do that anymore, he wanted to do right by them, but that meant taking a chance. He wanted to take the chance, he did, but that necessitated permission that he just wasn’t ready to give himself–maybe this mystical place was, but he just couldn’t dig that deep inside himself–not yet. Oh, God, how much he wished he could.
Alex put his hand on his shoulder. “Now there’s a view to–”
Damon spun around and, snuffling, hugged his uncle, tears dropping down Damon’s cheeks, tears maybe of hope and forgiveness. Damon felt his uncle stiffen, and he tried to pull away, sure he was embarrassing the both of them, but Uncle Alex put his big arms around him and held him tight. After about a minute, Damon did pull away, gently.
Hesitant to meet his uncle’s gaze, he smacked at the tears, spreading the grime on his face. “Standing here, bawling like a fucking baby,” he muttered.
“It’s a free country,” Uncle Alex shrugged. “You’re entitled to cry a little if ya want.” His uncle put a finger under his nephew’s chin and made him look at him. “If you need to.”
Damon sniffed and hawked and spat, as his cousins were wont to do. He laughed along with his uncle when they noticed a nearby geezer couple shoot him a look and grimace.
“Beatcha down to the bottom, old man!” Damon sped to the edge of forever’s foundation and took the steps leading him forward two at a time.
Wonderful story! Tension, action and a satisfying, happy ending. Love it!