Carpentaria (10 page)

What if he is a maniac and a menace?

What if he is a spy collecting data on our confidential capacities to defend ourselves?

What if he is an alien?

Uptown was running on hot air because everywhere else on earth was sweet:
they were changing guards at Buckingham Palace
but nobody in the world cared what happened to Desperance. Nobody could laugh at these things because aliens were a serious consideration and the town had stories about these aliens that could send a cold shiver down your spine. There were real people who could tell you the stories of how they had been taken away for weeks on metallic-disc spacecraft with red lights flashing across the sky, and who knows, they said when they came back, if aliens were invading the whole countryside. There was so much space in the Gulf, no one would ever know. Those stolen people who acted very sane when they spoke about their adventures, acted like a rabid dog the next.

It was hard to get your mind together when anything could land on the flat lands of the claypan country, and why not? The world was turning upside down, everything was coming apart when you expect to see red days, boatloads of illegal people, sea angels, unhappy spirits of dead people, stinking dead whales, even truckloads of contaminated fish, turning up on the foreshore of Desperance. Now, a man had walked in from the sea.

The man on the beach took on the appearance of the surreal. The sun had dried the mud on his skin until it curled into creamy milk-chocolate-coloured flakes. The layers of seaweed and algae flapped with the slightest breeze. Little sea mites crawled through the litter and into the blisters, fêting on his raw skin. The big-eared children listening to the adults talking about aliens were shooed off right back to the school ground.
Fetch the water bag
, they were told.
Which water bag?
the kids screamed back, stalling, trying to be clever
. The bloody water bag hanging on the school verandah.
They were told to bring it back immediately with threatening gestures,
And bring sandwiches for the man, too.

Get it yourself
, the little bullies answered back at their parents, who seemed to have forgotten it was a school holiday. They were reluctant to go in case they missed out on anything. They were ordered off again very smartly with
Git,
by fathers known to wallop a good punch. Off they went, racing each other back to town, collected food and water, and were back within minutes.

The semi-conscious man’s skin oozed with blisters and putrid flaking skin. The circle widened because he really stank. His lips were swollen and chafed. His eyes were squinting from his long exposure in the sea and from all of the smoke coming off the fires. Finn, who had been pushed to the back, even by the children, because he was the town’s idiot, felt angry about how he had been ignored. He decided he was not going to act like a mangy dog at the back. Why should he? He was the one who guarded the coastline, why should he be struggling to get a look-in? The Pricklebush mob, watching Finn, was coming alive for him, hmmm! hmmm-ing,
We want the army
, they jived, elbowing each other and grinning. Everyone wanted to call out his name –
Finn! Finn!
Call out to get the man in the uniform up front there – but they didn’t. People got to know their place.

Finn looked around at the noisy crowd. He was the only one among them who knew how to deal with the unexpected – refugees, boat people, any foreigners seeking illegal entry, how to apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to injured aliens. He was the only one who had a certificate of first-aid training for injuries received from being in a secret army camp. He pushed his way to the front, snatching the waterbag from a child.
Yes, yes
, Pricklebush cheered in their hearts for Finn. He sat down on the ground and held the half-filled bag to the man’s lips, that were cut like strands of cotton, and very slowly, tipped drops onto his tongue. After he considered that the man had drunk enough, he took small bits of mashed-up egg from a sandwich, which he placed in the man’s mouth. Everyone watched and waited, looking at their broken watches. From the corner of his eye, Finn saw Libby Valance pull Truthful aside to gee him up on how to interrogate his potential prisoner.

Truthful moved in excitedly, after all he was the cop, but reluctant anyhow, because he was thinking about how he was going to have to move all of the plants from the crowded jail. He stood with his shadow over the man’s face, and started to ask random questions, like, ‘What ship did you jump, Mister?’

‘What ship did you jump!’ Shocked, Finn repeated very slowly and loudly the question back into Truthful’s face. He muttered on and on about jumping ships, about the pointless need for that kind of realism, about silly people needing to clutch the same old straws in moments of spiritual elevation given by the Lord himself. He couldn’t stand another moment of Truthful trying to muscle in, and he shouted at him, ‘Stand out of the way, civilian.’ The crowd approved, stood well back, and let Finn take charge.

Finn gently asked the man again who he was, waited, then almost jumped out of his skin when the man smiled back and in a low voice said, he did not know who he was. He pointed weakly in the direction of the bushfires in the south, and towards the rain clouds far out at sea to the north that everyone was hoping would eventually bring in the rains to douse the fires. ‘I!’ was the only word he struggled to say into Finn’s ear now bent close to the man’s head. Those who heard, looked at each other. He got lured into a lost romance in the fish markets of Asia they whispered,
You could tell by his accent
. Finn smiled, ‘Of course,’ he kept saying for there was a communication, a very large outpouring of thoughts, flashing like torchlight into each other’s mind, a kind of osmosis that Finn understood perfectly. He suddenly remembered Saint Elias from the forgotten distant land of his own early childhood and exclaimed his annunciation out loud, ‘His name is Elias Smith.’

Oh! Light of day! It was alright to be the anointed one, the guardian, perhaps even the guardian angel of this melancholy coastal town of Desperance. Elias Smith had gotten up from the beach and survived. No matter it being a hot town with a freezer full of stored facts, local facts cherished as truths and permanently slung over all those stooped local backs of fishy-smelling people eating fried fish on Friday night in humidity-flooded homes of talking memories. Of misfortunes at sea in a storm, relived through the suffering of the surviving fishermen who moaned through rainy days that never stopped, while the landlubbers, dismayed over the cattle lost in flood or the following year’s drought, compared rain gauges like sad trophies, which was the only distraction to helplessly watching buildings destroyed by salt erosion and wind, if not, then termites, damp rot, or plagues of rats, grasshoppers or locusts. Sister! Brother! It was just calamity after calamity for Uptown. What else could a person expect before the reprieve of a lonely grave? And the manna from heaven? Schools of prawns and barramundi never where they should be. Why not then an answer to decades of prayers and religious devotion for things to be better? All for one and one for all for God’s creation in a place where the Lord’s hand was always at work in ways that often defied the comprehension of the local people. Why not then – a gift from God?

Yes, it was like God had given Elias to the town. And it was true because they said:
We prayed long and hard to the Lord for help.

And prayers were answered.

God gave us Elias.

Over the years Elias came to live in Desperance, he would tell many stories about himself that rang true with the strong local beliefs of Uptown explaining how such a person who had been given gifts of prophetic dimensions ought to behave. ‘How else?’ he asked, after trying to intellectualise his own legend of being dispatched like a letter out of heaven into a storm and surviving all the atrocities of hell. But at the end of his high-faluting pontificating, Elias Smith was just like a normal man who found it impossibly hard to believe something special should have happened to him.

‘No! No! Go away.’ Sometimes he would sulk because homage piled on homage was like cream cake. A person can only take so much. Elias vented his spleen in secret places, screaming for mercy, for normality; he thought he was going mad. Correct the Pricklebush for saying they actually saw Elias Smith standing about on the claypan in the dead of night screaming his lungs out. Correct the old people coming back from a leisurely moonlight stroll for mentioning they saw Elias out there again, gazing at the mid-winter stars.
He was a very strange white man
, they agreed. They built an identity for the one he lost. All told, they said he was a man of ancient ways who was planning his escape route from Desperance. He told the Pricklebush elders he most definitely was not
.

What were you doing out here looking like a madman then?
they asked him. He told them he was adding new stars to his collection of novas and auroras. They also sat with him to count stars. Everything was hush-hush in the Pricklebush. No one ever told Uptown a single thing of what Elias was doing out on the claypan. You learn a good lesson when you get told,
Oh! Yeah! And pigs have wings
,
huh?
Invisible things in nature made no sense to Uptown because of their savoir faire in being Australians. Once, a long time ago when they first heard Pricklebush talk like this they kept them out of town for a long, long time.
Can’t come in here if you want to talk mumbo jumbo like mad people
, Uptown said. The old people they had tactlessly taken to calling simple-minded retaliated with a hundred months worth of evil curses and sorcery. In the end, black and white were both crawling on the ground in reconciliation. Both saying that they were plain jack of each other. So, the old people said,
We have to keep it a secret
.

This was the reason no one said anything about Elias’s nocturnal flights of fancy. About seeing him lifting up his bony arms, outstretched palms level with the horizon, standing in one spot, swaying from side to side, trying to imitate the flight of a bird or fins of a fish. Whispers circulated only in the Pricklebush about how he looked like a crucifix ticking in the moonlight. And he would shrug sometimes, if anyone questioned him, as if he too found it difficult to believe in his own story.

It was always a difficult time when Elias lost faith in himself. He was melancholy about being unable to recall memories about himself, for instance, his childhood – what of it, where had it been? He became despondent knowing he was not the same as normal people. It worried the Uptown folk sick right to the pit of their stomachs on the occasions of high humidity which marked his anniversary of coming to Desperance. This was when Elias would go around spreading his arms like wings of doubt, saying he didn’t exist, or even saying things like, ‘Why me?’ In town, it was considered strangely funny for a man to be questioning his status as a celestial being.
You either are or you are not, and you are
, they told him.

In doubting himself, he also created doubts about the town’s
specialness
in being unlike any other place in the whole nation. A town unlike all the capital cities, or all the towns with radio and television broadcasters, where all the so-called lucky people had a stranglehold on the nation’s better-class goods and services. ‘Nowhere on earth had Desperance’s specialness in having acquired an angel,’ Libby Valance reminded the town at the beginning of every speech he made. ‘There’s no place that gets more privileged than that
.
’ He sang the praises of ‘This Town’.

The esteemed Finn, now highly regarded around town, had gained a reputation for his sharp sense of predicting and gauging levels of humidity in the summertime. He became expert in knowing Elias’s degrees of fretfulness. When Finn sniffed a change in the atmosphere, he would head straight up to the Council and have a small talk with Libby Valance in his office. Soon afterwards, Libby would have eagerly-beavering people rallying about his clean, cream-painted office to carry out his instructions. In town, aromas of cooking pans would filter out of every kitchen so that everyone felt hungry all day long from the wafting aromas of stews, fried fish, roast beef or corned beef and puddings all cooking at once. The normally downcast Uptown, threw off the heaviness of humidity for light-hearted excitement by throwing themselves into round-the-clock talks, meals and singsongs with saronged hula women – dragging out old favourites like ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport’, inventing solve-the-mystery games like if you took four men at sea and only three came back what happened to the one left behind, and joyfully reciting old prayers and inventing new ones in a shed that served as a chapel.

Some other people had a different reaction and gambled by the light of kerosene lanterns on the spare allotment covered in buffel grass at the back of the pub, betting the reasons why Elias was thinking the wrong way. Talk, talk and more talk, this was when the traitorous Eastside mob came into dominance. They made Westside sick looking at the way they encroached onto the spare allotment, blending in their non-stop talk with old Joseph Midnight in front leading the way.
Welcome! Welcome!
Uptown invited those crawlers in. Dogs, pussycats, a million flies, all jumped to the spare allotment for talk. Just slowly, surely, the crisis over Elias Smith passed. A little something someone said, a dull, little gem picked up by somebody else who mulled it over at home until they could see the light of day, and a solution was found to add to the endless scroll of truth about Elias.

The telling of Elias’s story as white-haired man, or night-time angel, or crustacean-covered aqua spirit just grew old until one day all anyone remembered was that he had appeared one time, out of the pale blue yonder, and built his own place by himself just like they all had to, and there was nothing unusual about that. Local stories were more reliable than what anyone had ever heard from the big shots on the radio. These were the Southern politicians who talked about themselves and what they were doing but had nothing to do with the little people of Desperance. Uptown said nothing good about these people.