Read Red Dirt Heart 03.5 for Free Online

Trudy and Bacon’s cottage. Bacon had the casing off the air conditioning motor, which was, thankfully, on the shaded side of the house.
    “Trudy’s havin’ a kip,” I told him. “Travis is on baby-sittin’ duty, and I’m here to give you a hand.”
    “Thanks, mate,” he replied, handing me a wrench. And as we worked on the motor, just givin’ it a service and cleanin’ the dust out of everything, I thought about what he called me.
    Mate.
    It wasn’t too long ago he called me boss.
    I had to admit, I liked the difference.
    After a while of working in silence, when Bacon was cleaning out the filters, he asked, “So, Travis hasn’t clued in yet?”
    “Nope.”
    “He’s gonna hate you.”
    I laughed. “No he won’t.” Then I made a face. “Well, hopefully not for too long. He still thinks we think Christmas is no big deal.”
    “Well, this is first year it’s been different,” Bacon said. “For both of us. Been a helluva year, huh?”
    We slid the casing back over the motor and started to screw it back down. “It sure has.”
    “Whoda thought this time last year that I’d be a dad,” Bacon said. “Or that you’d…” He paused to find the right words.
    Come out? Meet Travis? Ask him to stay? Fall in love? Be happy?
    I finished his sentence for him. “Have everything I ever wanted? Certainly not me.” I sighed. “It’s all so different now.”
    “It is,” he agreed, wiping the sweat from his brow. “And I wouldn’t change a thing.”
    It was then I noticed the garden hoe leaning against the veranda. Each cottage was a two-bedroom house on piers and footings, which meant there was a good two foot clearance under each house. I bet anything you like, if I walked to the back door, there’d be a long-handled shovel or something similar there as well, and having that kinda thing by the door around here could only mean one thing. “You got a snake?”
    “Yeah, saw him this morning,” Bacon said. “Brown snake, about five foot long.”
    Shit. “You should have said something.”
    He shrugged. “Never used to worry too much. But now with Grace… Well, it’s different now.”
    I nodded. “Yeah, it is.” I picked up the hoe. “Come on, we’ll hunt it out.”
    Now if anyone else did what I did, I’d be pissed. If Travis did it, I’d be royally pissed and serve him a lecture about bein’ three hours from hospital and bein’ plain old stupid. But it was me, and I’d done this kinda thing a hundred times before. Now, I was strictly all for the conservation of animals, and this snake was truly only lookin’ for somewhere cool to sleep, but it was just like Bacon said: things were different now. Grace lived in this house, and if a newborn baby was ever bitten by a brown snake, you could forget the three hour trip to hospital. She’d probably be dead before they could run her the hundred metres to the homestead.
    So, with the longest stick I could find, I crawled on my belly under their house. It didn’t take long to find the snake, coiled up in the cool dirt by a house pier. It weren’t too happy to see me, nor me it, if I was bein’ truthful. Meeting one of the deadliest snakes on the planet, face-to-face, wasn’t how I pictured spending Christmas Eve. Pokin’ it with a stick earned me a hiss, but I could manoeuvre it to keep its head away from me. Eventually it got the message and backed off, slitherin’ out the other side of the house. “He’s comin’ your way!” I called.
    “I see him,” Bacon yelled.
    I got the hell out from under the house and raced around the back to see Bacon take a swing with the shovel. With perfect aim, he relieved the snake’s body of its head. Of course, even headless, it still squirmed and thrashed. Bacon shuddered. “Ugh. I hate how they do that.”
    “Yeah, it’s gross. Good shot by the way.”
    “Thanks.” He let out a bit of a laugh. “Thanks for going under the house for it.”
    “No worries. Just don’t tell Travis. Or Ma.”
    He