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sounded unpleasant, though, so<br />
he made the five hour walk back<br />
to his beat up pickup and arrived<br />
with the sun hanging above the<br />
western horizon.<br />
Still smarting from the latest<br />
tongue-lashing he’d received<br />
from his wife two days earlier,<br />
Cam had driven back onto the<br />
Arrabury Road the next morning<br />
and then two hours south to<br />
the euphemistically named Arrabury<br />
Airport. Not surprised<br />
to find nobody there, he looked<br />
at and photographed—and felt<br />
impressed by—the two runways,<br />
then turned west and crossed<br />
into South Australia, where<br />
the road immediately became<br />
rougher and narrower.<br />
Yvonne told Cam at least<br />
twenty times a year how much<br />
she hated living with him. Afterward,<br />
she usually told him<br />
she “didn’t mean it”, but he<br />
couldn’t help wondering which<br />
were her real feelings. His latest<br />
twelve-month consulting<br />
job had stretched to eightteen<br />
months and paid more than<br />
Yvonne’s three years of teaching<br />
primary school, but still<br />
she criticized him for not going<br />
out and finding another job—<br />
not that there were any other<br />
jobs within two hundred miles.<br />
About three weeks out of every<br />
month, Yvonne found fault with<br />
almost everything about Cam.<br />
He wondered why he hadn’t<br />
grown used to to the abuse by<br />
now, and maybe he sort of had.<br />
After twenty years of Yvonne’s<br />
put-downs, name-calling, and<br />
general vilification—almost<br />
none of it justified—Cam<br />
remained in their marriage. He<br />
never wondered why about that,<br />
and it wasn’t just for the sake of<br />
the children. Although he did<br />
not like feeling under attack most<br />
of the time, Cam loved his wife.<br />
After Yvonne’s tirades, one<br />
or the other of their children—<br />
rarely both—would often come<br />
to him and sympathize, say they<br />
thought he’d been treated unfairly.<br />
That reduced but never completely<br />
eliminated the sting, and<br />
now they were no longer at home.<br />
For the past month, Yvonne<br />
had complained almost constantly<br />
about the weather—too<br />
hot—and the house they were<br />
renting—too dilapidated and<br />
too small—and always managed<br />
to make it sound as if it were all<br />
Cam’s fault. For five or six years,<br />
she had complained every summer<br />
about the heat—“It never<br />
used to get this hot,” as if Cam<br />
were singlehandedly responsible<br />
for anthropogenic climate change.<br />
36 WINDWARD REVIEW | Vol. 18
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