Cut-Out
The last ewe went down the chute at twenty past four, and the whole shed let out a cheer like somebody had kicked a goal.
I was at the classing table with my hands full of fleece and I didn’t even look up. I’d been on my feet since six. My back was one long knot and my fingers were slick to the second knuckle with lanolin, and I had forty-one bales in the book and a few more to press. But I heard it, the whoop and then the handpieces cutting out one after another up the board, until the only noise left was the flies and the tin roof ticking in the heat.
Cut-out. Five weeks on Warrakilla Station, and it was done.
“Petrakis.” That voice carried the length of the shed without trying. “Put that bloody fleece down before it grows on you.”
I put it down. Mick Hollis was coming up the board toward me with a stubby in each fist, and every shearer he passed got a slap on the back that nearly put them on the floor. His singlet was stuck to him from collarbone to belt, pasted over a gut that pushed hard and round against his dungarees, and the grey mat of his chest hair was dark with sweat where it came out the top. He’d run this team fourteen seasons and shorn two hundred a day for twenty years before that, and he still swung his arms when he walked like he was about to drag a wether out of the pen one-handed. He stopped at my table and scratched his beard, which was more salt than pepper these days.
He handed me a stubby and knocked his against it.
“Forty-one bales,” I said. “Could be forty-three by the time I’ve pressed the pieces.”
“Could be you have a drink and shut up about bales for five minutes.”
I had a drink. It was cold enough to make my teeth ache, and I tipped my head back to get more of it, and when I looked down again Mick was watching me drink. He looked away first. That had been happening for about three weeks.
The cut-out went the way they always go. The cocky’s wife brought down a tray of lamb chops and a slab of VB, the shearers lit the barbecue behind the quarters, and by seven half of them were singing and the rest were arguing about the footy. Then somebody said the pub in Hawker was putting on a feed and a band, and within twenty minutes the utes were loaded and roaring off down the track in a long cloud of red dust.
I didn’t go. I told them I had the wool book to finish, which was true. The broker wanted the specs in the morning and I wasn’t going to type forty-three bales into a laptop with a hangover.
Mick didn’t go either. He said the number three handpiece had been running hot all week and he wanted to strip it before he forgot. Nobody believed him. Nobody said anything, either. Dazza gave me a look over the tailgate as they pulled out, eyebrows right up, and I gave him the finger, and he laughed all the way to the grid.
Then it was quiet, the proper quiet you only get out there, with the sun going down orange behind the ranges and the galahs screaming in the gums by the dam.
I went back to the shed. I told myself it was for the book.
He was up the far end of the board under the one light still on, sitting on an upturned wool pack with the handpiece in bits on a rag across his knees. He’d washed at the tank. His hair was wet and slicked back, and he’d put on clean dungarees and a clean blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He hadn’t done up the buttons, so it hung open over his belly. He didn’t look up when I came in.
“Thought you were doing your book,” he said.
“I am.”
“At the classing table? Down that end?” He pointed a screwdriver back down the shed, where my table sat in the dark. “You’re standing about three metres from me doing nothing, Liam.”
I stood there. The shed stank of sheep and hot tin, and five weeks in it still hadn’t got the smell out of the back of my throat. Under all that I could smell him, the soap from the tank and something warm under it.
“You didn’t go to town,” I said.
“Neither did you.”
“You’re not fixing that handpiece.”
“No.” He put the screwdriver down on the rag. He looked up at me, finally, and his eyes were very blue in that brown face and very steady. “I’m not.”
My face was burning, and it wasn’t the tin. I’d come out at twenty-two and had sixteen years of blokes since, nice enough most of them, a couple not, and not one of them had ever set me off the way Mick did from three metres away, just sitting on a wool pack with a screwdriver in his hand.
“Three weeks,” I said. “You’ve been looking at me for three weeks.”
“Longer than that.”
“You never said anything.”
“Wasn’t going to. Not with the team on.” He wiped his hands slowly on the rag. “It’s cut-out now. Team’s gone. You can tell me to get stuffed and I’ll go to bed and we’ll never speak of it, and I’ll still ring you for next season, because you’re the best classer I’ve had in ten years.”
“And if I don’t tell you to get stuffed?”
He stood up.
He was only a couple of inches taller than me but he was twice as wide, and when he stepped in close he blocked out the light. He put one hand on the side of my neck. His palm was hard as a boot sole and warm, and his thumb sat on the pulse under my jaw like he was checking how fast it was going. It was going pretty fast.
“You sure?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Say it properly.”
“I want you to kiss me, Mick. I’ve wanted it since the second week.”
He kissed me. His beard was soft, which surprised me, and his mouth wasn’t soft at all. He kissed like he shore, no wasted movement, and he walked me backwards down the length of the board while he did it, out of the light and into the dark end, until my arse hit the edge of the classing table. The table shook and a pile of fleece slid off onto the floor. Mick reached up without letting go of my mouth and yanked the cord on the old bulb over the table, and it buzzed and flickered and came on yellow.
I groaned into his mouth and got my hands inside that open shirt and onto his belly. It was hot and furred and hard as a barrel, and when I dragged my hands up to his chest he made a sound low in his throat like a bull through a fence.
“Christ,” he said against my mouth. “Your hands.”
“They’re greasy. Sorry. It’s the lanolin.”
“Don’t be bloody sorry.” He grabbed one of my wrists and pressed my palm flat to his chest, right over one thick nipple, and held it there. “Keep going. Rub it in.”
So I rubbed it in. I stood against the classing table and worked lanolin into the chest hair of a fifty-four-year-old shearing contractor while he kissed my neck and breathed heavy in my ear, and my cock was so hard in my shorts it hurt. He hauled my shirt off over my head and ran his hands all over me, rough as sandpaper.
“You’re all fur,” he said. “Didn’t know you’d be all fur.”
“Greek,” I said. “It’s genetic.”
“God bless the Greeks.” He bent his head and bit my nipple, and I yelped, and he laughed and did it again and then sucked it, hard. I grabbed the back of his wet head and held him there and ground myself against his thigh like a dog.
“Fuck, Mick. Don’t stop doing that.”
He lifted me onto the classing table. Just picked me up by the hips and sat me on it, like I weighed about what a big fleece weighs. The slats dug into my arse through my shorts. I toed my boots off and they thudded onto the board. He stood between my knees and yanked the shorts down, undies and all, and I kicked them off, and then I was sitting stark naked on the table where I’d been skirting fleeces all day, with my legs spread and my cock standing up and my face on fire.
Mick stared at me for a long time, his chest going up and down. Then he put his hands on my thighs and pushed them wider. “You’ve got no idea what you’ve looked like to me, bent over this table every day. Five weeks watching your arse in them bloody shorts.”
Then he went down on his knees on the board and took me in his mouth.
I think I shouted. The shed was so empty it came back at me off the tin. He sucked me like a man who’d been on mutton and damper for five weeks, all the way down and slow back up, with his beard scratching my balls and one big hand wrapped round the base. I leaned back on my hands and watched his head going. Mick Hollis, who’d rip a shearer to pieces for a second cut, on his knees on his own board with my cock down his throat.
“Mick. Fuck. Mick, slow down, I’m gonna.”
He pulled off. Spit ran down his chin into his beard. “Not yet you’re not.”
“Then stop doing that.”
“I’ll do what I like.” He licked a stripe up the underside and grinned when I twitched. “Lie back.”
I lay back on the table. The slats were hard and there was greasy wool caught in the gaps, and I didn’t care. He grabbed me by the backs of the knees and hauled me down to the end of the table so my arse was right on the edge, and pushed my knees up to my chest, and then I felt his beard on the inside of my thighs, and his breath, and then his tongue.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Mick.”
He ate me out like he’d been thinking about it for five weeks, which I suppose he had. He licked slow and flat and then fast, and pushed the tip of his tongue into me, and I lay there with my knees pinned to my chest by his forearms and moaned so loud the galahs outside went quiet. He’d stop and bite the cheek of my arse hard enough to leave a mark and then go back in, and I’d be gasping and reaching down for my cock, and he’d slap my hand away.
“Hands off,” he said. “That’s mine tonight.”
“Then fucking do something with it.”
He laughed into me, and I felt it all the way up my spine.
When he stood up his face was red and wet to the eyes. He reached into the back pocket of his dungarees and came out with a little bottle of lube and a foil packet, and I stared at him.
“You brought those.”
“Bought ’em in Port Augusta on the way up,” he said. “They’ve been in my swag five weeks. I’m an optimist.”
I laughed so hard I nearly fell off the table. He waited till I’d finished. Then he poured lube on his fingers and put one of them in me, and I stopped laughing.
His fingers were as thick as a normal bloke’s thumb. He went slow and watched my face the whole time, and only gave me more when I pushed down on his hand. One and then two, and then he curled them and found the spot straight off, like he’d shorn it before. My whole body jerked on the table.
“There?”
“There. Yeah. God. Right fucking there.”
“You’re tight as a drum, Petrakis.” He worked them in and out slowly, watching them go. “When were you last fucked?”
“Christmas,” I said. “And it wasn’t anything like this.”
“No,” he said. “It bloody won’t be.”
He undid his dungarees and pushed them down, and the old blue boxers underneath with them, and his cock came out and slapped up against his gut. It was short and fat, really fat, thick as my wrist near enough, with a heavy pair of balls hanging low under it in all that grey hair. I got up on my elbows to see it properly and my mouth went dry.
“That’s not going in me.”
“It is if you want it.” He rolled the rubber down it with a grunt. “Do you want it?”
“Fuck yes I want it.”
He slicked it up and stood between my legs and pressed the fat head against me, and held there, not pushing yet. “Push out, mate. Loosen up for me.”
I pushed out. He pushed in. It was like being split with a wedge. A noise came out of me, a raw bark that rang back off the tin, and I grabbed the edge of the table so hard I got a splinter. He stopped with just the head in and held my thigh and stroked it with his thumb and waited.
“Talk to me, Liam.”
“Jesus, Mick. It’s like a fucking fence post.”
“You want me out?”
“No. No. Give me a second.” I breathed. The burn went deep and hot and turned into something that made my cock jump. “Okay. More. Give me more.”
He fed it into me an inch at a time, grunting, watching it go in, until his gut was jammed hard against the backs of my legs and his balls sat heavy on my arse and there was nothing left to give. He was breathing like he’d shorn a whole run.
“That’s the lot,” he said. “Nothing left in the pen.”
“I can feel it in my guts.”
“Good.” He pulled back an inch and pushed in again, and my eyes rolled. “I want you feeling it in your guts tomorrow when you’re typing up your bloody bales.”
Then he started to fuck me.
He didn’t go fast, not at first. He went deep. Long, slow, grinding strokes that pulled almost all the way out and then sank back in till his gut slapped against me. I lay there with my knees up by my ears and my hands clutching the slats, and he held my ankles apart in his fists, and every time he bottomed out he ground his hips in a slow circle right on that spot, and I made a sound like somebody had stood on me.
“You’re loud,” he said, pleased as punch.
“There’s nobody for ten k’s.”
“Then let’s hear it.” He drove in harder. “Go on. Let the whole station hear you.”
I let the whole station hear me.
“You’re splitting me open, Mick. I’ve thought about your hands every night in my swag, every fucking night. Don’t be gentle. Bloody pound me.”
He did, and the table started walking across the board an inch at a time, legs scraping on the floorboards. The bulb swung on its cord and threw his shadow all over the tin. Sweat ran off his chest and dripped off his beard onto my stomach. He grunted with every thrust now, a deep ugly sound from the bottom of his belly, and the slap of him into me rang off the roof.
“Go on, then,” he growled. “Take the fucking lot, Petrakis.”
“Mick. Mick, I’m gonna come.”
“No hands.”
“I can’t, I need to.”
“No hands,” he said again, and he grabbed my wrists and pinned them to the table beside my head. He leaned his whole weight down on me and folded me right in half, so his gut pressed my cock flat against my own belly and dragged on it every time he moved. His face was right over mine. “You’ll come from my cock or you won’t come.”
I came from his cock. It only took about ten more of those strokes, with his belly rubbing me and his cock hammering that spot and his blue eyes about four inches from mine, watching. I shot all over my own chest and his gut in long hard ropes, and my arse gripped him so tight he roared.
“Fuck. Oh, fuck, Liam. Oh, you beauty.”
He fucked me through it, fast and ragged now. I was sobbing and oversensitive and I wrapped my legs round his back and held on and begged him.
“Come in me. Please, Mick. I want to feel you go.”
He drove in one last time as deep as he could get and held it there, shaking, and groaned into my neck while his cock jerked inside me, and I felt every pulse of it through the rubber.
We lay on the classing table for a long time. It was too small for both of us and one of my legs was hanging off and he was crushing me flat. The bulb buzzed. Outside the galahs had started up again, and somewhere down by the dam a kangaroo went thump-thump through the scrub.
“I got a splinter,” I said.
“Where?”
“My hand.”
He lifted his head and took my hand and squinted at it. Then he picked the splinter out with the tip of his thumbnail, neat as anything, and kissed the palm where it had been.
“I’ve had worse,” I said.
“Not in my shed you haven’t.”
Later we sat out on the verandah of the quarters in our jocks with the last of the VB, and the sky was so full of stars it looked spilled. My arse ached. Every time I shifted on the old bench it reminded me, and every time it reminded me I grinned like an idiot. Mick had his arm along the back of the bench behind me, not quite touching, and his bare foot pressed against mine.
“The team’ll know,” I said.
“The team’s known since week two. Dazza had a carton riding on it.” He took a swig. “Reckon he owes Tone a slab now.”
“You’re joking.”
“I never joke about beer.” He looked at me sideways. “You coming back next season?”
“You said you’d ring me.”
“I’m asking you now.”
I thought about another five weeks of dust and flies, and him walking up that board with his singlet stuck to his belly, and nobody needing to pretend anymore.
“There’s a job in Adelaide,” I said. “With the broker. Office job. Good money. They offered it to me last week.”
He didn’t say anything. His foot stayed where it was.
“I told them I’d think about it,” I said. “I’ve thought about it.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m coming back.”
He nodded once. Then he put his stubby down on the boards and turned and pulled me across the bench into his lap, and kissed me slow while the headlights of the first ute came bouncing back up the track from Hawker, still miles off, a little moving light in all that dark.
“They’ll be an hour,” he said against my mouth. “Maybe more. Tone drives like a nun.”
“That’s long enough,” I said, and reached down between us.
It was.