Summary
The story begins with the protagonist, Ray, sitting in traffic, which rarely exists in his small town. But developers from out of town are redoing the roads, and now there's a line of cars. Kennedy describes Ray's stalled, languished state of mind as mirroring the traffic. He thinks that if the developers were from the town, he could be working on a road crew right now; but they're not, so instead he works a part-time job and lives in his friend's shed. Seeing the road crew reminds him of the time he and his ex-girlfriend, Sharon, were driving to his sister's place for a barbecue, and they were also faced with traffic and a road crew. In the memory, a man holding a stop sign lets traffic through little by little, and Sharon comments on how the job must be the easiest out there. Ray feels like this comment is meant to be a subtle dig at him, because he used to work on a road crew. He replies by explaining how the job does, actually, have its challenges. People harass the sign holder, sometimes even run them down.
Ray then reflects on the end of their relationship. When Sharon broke up with him, he hadn't seen it coming, but to her, it was so obviously not working. In the moment, when he assumes she's moving out, "she’d rolled her eyes like he was the thickest kid in the class. ‘Not me, Ray,’ she’d said. ‘You. You’re the one moving out’" (128-129).
Ray finally rolls up to the sign-holder, acknowledges him, and drives on. The word SLOW drills into his brain as he watches the sign turn, let a few cars through, turn to stop, and turn back again. This monotonous process repeats until Ray passes through. Up ahead, he hears the loud cracks and rumbles of excavators breaking ground. He thinks he'll definitely be late for work, but he doesn't care. "So what if he was late?" Kennedy writes. "How many nested imitation terracotta pots could the public want in one morning?" (129)
Later that day, Ray finds himself at the pub with a few of his friends. They're all discussing the new development, particularly the fact that in tearing up the railroad tracks, the developers have made stacks of redgum railroad sleepers—long, wooden beams that Ray's friend Frank is sure would make fantastic firewood. The developers have cordoned off the area with orange flags, and the men in the pub agree that they're trying to salvage the wood to resell. If it were a local developer, the men are certain that they would allow residents to help themselves to the wood, but Frank has faith that people will take matters into their own hands. "You watch this town," he says. "Winter coming on and a pile of scrap wood like that. A little string of orange flags isn’t gunna stop anyone" (131). Talking about the sleepers makes Ray think about how his ex, Sharon, always wanted to do some landscaping to their house. Ray had seen yards trimmed with redgum sleepers and thought it looked quite nice, but he never saw the point in landscaping the yard of a rental home.
For weeks, Ray hears his friends and co-workers brag about how they've variously managed to take some of the redgum for themselves. They give him advice on how he should go about it. His friend, Steve, lines his yard with the sleepers, and Ray sees his handiwork at a barbecue that night. Ray admires Steve's work as Steve turns steaks on the grill. Ray feels awkward and lethargic, and Steve notices and asks him if everything is okay. Ray thinks to himself that he should probably get a blood test, exercise, diet—generally take care of himself. He can feel himself being observed by the women at the barbecue—wives and long-term girlfriends. He realizes that he's the only single one among his friends.
He reflects on earlier that evening, when he drove by Sharon's house. There was a car in her driveway, and Ray thinks it must mean that she's moved on. He thinks that he should probably move on too. That perhaps if she hears he's moved on, she'd contact him. Ray takes stock of his situation and concludes that he's not a very appealing option to the women around. They all know he's provisionally employed and that he lives in his friend's shed. The living arrangement began as a temporary thing, but slowly Ray has made the shed his home, adding a rug, furniture, and a space heater. He tells himself he's there to save money until he gets back on his feet and recovers from the breakup, but it becomes less temporary by the day.
As Ray ruminates around the barbecue, Steve's teenage son Sean calls him over. Sean is looking at the sky through a telescope, and he asks Ray to take a look. Steve calls over that it's not dark enough yet, but Ray looks anyways. Sean thinks he sees Mars through the telescope. Ray sees a blur of something in the sky. As he stands there with Steve's son, he thinks about when his father had a heart attack, "the way he'd staggered across the lounge room, his arm out, wordless" (135). Ray makes a passing commitment to calling the doctor the following day for a check-up.
After he leaves Steve's house, he considers driving past Sharon's place, where they used to live together. He imagines how she'd react to him pulling up to her driveway, and concludes that she would simply dismiss him as "just Ray" to whomever she's with. Ray then considers driving to the construction site and taking a few sleepers for himself. He imagines bringing the pile of sleepers to Sharon and building little flowerbeds with them, filling the beds with mulch to plant a garden, the way she always wanted him to when they were together.
He drives to the site and parks near the stacks of wood, get's a pair of work gloves from the bed of his ute, and loads the bed with ten sleepers. He thinks this should be more than acceptable, given the amount of wood he's heard about other people taking. After he finishes loading, he stands back to admire his work, and as he's looking at his truck full of wood, a police cruiser rolls up near him, blue lights quietly flashing. Kennedy writes, "he knew that they wouldn’t bother with their siren, because they could see that it was just him. Just Ray. They knew he’d turn around like this, and take what was coming to him" (138-140). The story concludes with the image of Ray standing down, awaiting arrest, and gazing at the pile of wood that would now be sold by the developer, instead of put to use by him.
Analysis
Although the name of the town is never mentioned, Kennedy particularly evokes a sense of what Barry Lopez calls "literature of place" in "Sleepers," which, on the surface, is the story of a man in his mid-thirties struggling to get back on his feet after his girlfriend breaks up with him and he moves into his friend's shed. From an aerial view, though, the story expresses the fighting spirit and resilience—and at times the futile resistance—of a rural Australian town against encroaching corporate developers.
The story engages in parallelism in the sense that both the town and Ray are at a transitional moment, a juncture that will, depending on how they respond to the prompts to change, determine their indefinite future. Both the town and Ray toy with the prospect of their agency. Ray passively thinks about his "bottomed-out energy, the sapped, exhausted feeling as he watched Steve turning steaks on the grill," and as a way to address this, thinks, "he'd go and have a check-up. A blood test" (132). Later on during Steve's barbecue, Steve's teenage son, Sean, calls Ray over to look at what he thinks is Mars through his telescope, and Ray's sensory encounter of the boy puts him in physical distress: "The smell of him—grass and suncscreen, sweat and energy, all of it barely contained—registered in Ray's head with a sudden painful awareness. This shortness of breath, the pressure on his chest ... He thought of his old man's heart attack, the way he'd staggered crabwise across the lounge room, his arm out, wordless. Take him five weeks to get a doctor's appointment, anyway. He'd ring tomorrow" (135).
In addition to these moments of Ray fixating on his health, we also have moments where he fixates on how his ex-girlfriend, Sharon, would receive him if he tried to get back together with her. He imagines her dismissing him, imagines his own humiliation as she downplays his existence to the new person in her life. He imagines solutions, too—similar to the blood test and phoning the doctor—in which he could steal the redgum sleepers and landscape her yard like she always wanted him to do while they were together. However, these solutions are pre-determined to fail by Ray's own imagination. The same with his concerns about his health—the notion that even if he calls, it'll take five weeks to get an appointment, and the sense that he probably won't call at all, just like his promise that living in his friend's shed would only be temporary. To top off the fatalism, Ray remembers his father's heart attack, the moment of which Kennedy portrays in subtle, but aching detail. This gesture to Ray's genetic predisposition to heart failure introduces an inevitability to his personal narrative that we can then map onto the greater inevitability of corporate development of Ray and his friends' rural Australian town.
The town's collective effort to resist total domination and disregard by the corporate interlopers by stealing the redgum sleepers is, in a sense, similar to Ray's vague promise to himself to call a doctor, or to make amends with Sharon—grand but ultimately hollow gestures. The final line of story—"He waited there for them, next to the sleepers, lowering his bare hands for comfort onto weathered, solid old redgum, hauled up and discarded but with so much life in it, still, it just broke your heart to see it go to waste" (140)—gestures literally, of course, to the redgum wood, but also both to Ray and to the small town, waiting, powerlessly, but with a defiant spirit, to be "wasted" by the forces of time and capitalism.
