Carpentaria (13 page)

The sound of the sea lapping tranquilly along the shoreline carried Norm’s thoughts out to join Elias, wading further out to sea. Norm felt the familiar pressure of pulling each step out of a metre of sucking mud. The water left trails behind him stretching over the surface like silver ribbons. ‘Keep it going,’ Norm willed Elias
,
‘keep it going, old mate.’ Soon, both men could feel the other’s presence pulling together on the wet rope, hauling
Choice
through thigh-deep water, breathing in the strong fishy smell. Seagulls hovered over the boat just as they always did when the red-eyed birds followed men to sea.

Elias stopped, eased himself into the boat and took the oars. Norm waited, but Elias never looked back. He just rowed as if the gap between their thoughts was unbridgeable. And suddenly they had parted company forever.

And when Norm had finished watching Elias become a dot that faded out of his life, he sighed, for that was that then. Except a fitting silence did not prevail, for it was no longer quiet in town. The makeshift, resurrected bell on the Council lawns started to toll loud and long, anyone would have thought it was Sunday. Car horns honked and beeped from all over town and Council vehicles headed to each corner to draw the net while the mad woman’s organ filled every ear with Handel’s
Messiah
. The blasted noise lasted for a total of ten minutes. This was how Desperance celebrated the last sight of Elias.

‘Jesus let me tell you,’ Norm shouted, ‘what no end of spite on your earth can do!’

With Elias gone, Norm thought he ought to try talking to the Council again to find out when they were going to stretch the net over his place. Westside mob in the Pricklebush said that they thought there was no reason why the safety net should be stopping short of their homes. Just because of the gap of wasteland, half a mile, called the distance of tolerance, that surrounded the town and where black people were allowed to live on the other side – all Pricklebush people were complaining that they had rights too for the same municipal goods and services as anyone else. ‘Go and be a troublemaker,’ the old people called out to Norm from his front gate, and said if he had any sense at all like his father had, he should go Uptown and tell them that.

Norm came out through the gate to speak to the old people. He told them that burning hair was what trouble smelt like because when his father was a small boy with weather-bleached hair, gone tinder dry all through winter, it went up in flames like burning spinifex when lightning struck the rivergum he had been sheltering beneath. Again, Norm repeated the story of his father, exactly how his father told it, copying his old voice, which seemed to comfort the old people, and members of his family: they stood around the front yard and listened.

‘The tree, you hear me, exploded on impact into a long streak of fire that sent hundreds of arms out in every direction, several raced towards him, in a vortex, grabbing his hair and setting it alight. Luckily, he was saved by the force of the lightning charge that threw him clear onto the soft sandy riverbed. Unluckily, it did not rain, and life resumed. Running with the smell of singed hair into the desert country, hiding in rocky hills and living without water. Running away from the men on horses, nostrils burning, sniffing the air, horses snorting, dogs racing with their noses set to the ground, the human scent of fear trapped in the scent of power.

‘In the evening twilight came powerful, strong men, heavy with rawhide coverings. He watched through a pin-sized peephole between the boulders, moving pictures of leather-skinned men dressed in leggings and jackets, moving in and out of frame as their horses danced through a heat mirage towards the foothills, searching. He caught glimpses of how they sat relaxed on leather saddles, wore leather leggings, leather boots, leather holsters for guns and leather whips. Stopping to dismount, horses sniffing the air, stopping – starting again –
in
stretto
, men rolling tobacco, part of one figure quietly smoking, checking the cartridges, spinning the barrel, nodding directions, taking a drink from the waterbag hanging on the horse’s neck, cracking the whip, never stopped cracking the whip as they moved on up the hill.

‘Paralysed with fear, dry-mouthed, his body remained stock still with his eye squashed against the rock. A pinhole view of the world collapsing in a kaleidoscope, of his parents, patches of bare body moving into view, blood spraying, men’s trouser legs dripping with blood, sunlight flashing off knife blades, death screaming in his mother’s voice, noise like thunder – bang, bang, bang, cracking sounds as the tongue of the whip flicked by. His body was a lather of sweat and he felt shocked by the feeling of coolness in the mild breeze pouring over his skin that set off the smell of his hair. Like a lizard he slid with the gravel into the dirt and rolled into a tight ball that rolled sideways like nothing alive on earth through a small opening under a rock ledge. He rolls on until he becomes lodged against the rock face at the back of a dingo’s lair. His mind fights his trembling body until he becomes still like rock, and dirt, and ancient times, and darkness, until his breathing stops and he is invisible.

‘That,’ said Norm, coming near to the end of his passionate deliberation, his ode to his parents’ memory, ‘was what trouble smelt like. And being lucky,’ he whispered to his audience, ‘was when nobody else could smell your trouble.’ Norm had a hypnotic voice, his eyes cast spells, he distilled memory like the flooding river emptying into the sea. He made people wish they were there when it really happened. He made them feel that it was better to have been alive in the times of the real people, his ancestors. What Norm could do with stories he had practised down to a fine art and glued it to surviving relics, like the still-to-be-found fire-gutted ghost gum willed by providence to the families’ memories of Westside, where the local pastoralist whipped Aboriginal men and women, the boulders with a peephole view where cartridges were as many as stones on the ground from the massacre of the local tribespeople.

Those stories of trouble never lacked lustre in Number One house. Norm often told his sad stories to his listener, an abnormally huge, white cockatoo bird, named Pirate, over their breakfast cup of tea. Just chopping wood for practice, he called it, declaring it was his natural-born right to pluck history at random from any era of the time immemorial of the black man’s existence on his own land. ‘Too true,’ rattled the bird, an enchanter inciting more to be said. The creature was unbelievable to watch. The more animated Norm’s storytelling became, with hands and arms akimbo, face, eyeballs glaring under his smooth face and straight greying black hair, the dirty sump-oil-and-meat-fat-feathered bird either sat solemn like an owl in thought, its black eyes fixed on every movement of his lips, or jumped up and down crying out like a woman, ‘Stop it! Stop it Norm!’ with people running to see who was getting murdered.

The disgusting animal usually perched on the back of a chair facing the table back to front, making it easier for him to eat what he wanted from the table. Nobody in the Westside camps was game enough to say a word against the greasy-feathered bird, which had become holy after it went with the pilgrimage to Alice Springs in the 1980s to be blessed by the Pope. To the Phantom family, the bird was more than holy. Westside claimed Pirate was extraordinary. Why? The bundle of feathers had appeared in everyone’s dreams one night and insisted it had psychic powers – so the old people declared the bird to be a prophet.

The whole of Westside came to Pirate to have their fortunes told. They held their empty cups close to the bird’s head to make it easy for him to inspect the spectacular designs made by the dregs of tea stuck together at the bottom. Sometimes, if the bird felt inclined, he might answer,
yes
,
no
, or
perhaps
, or anything else from his huge vocabulary which included questions such as –
Am I going to die?
Or,
Does anybody love me?
Without judging his merits, they considered him to be a truthful bird, even when the truth hurt. But the proof of the bird’s talents came from a large flock of resident cockatoos, thousands of them, flying over the town, screaming in a spectacular, uncoordinated chanting,
What are you doing youse bastards?
It was thought to be a miracle of the English language, that simple birds had learnt to talk English too, just like everyone else. When the birds flew around town, magic sparkled in the air, and people raced outside, looked up and waited for the birds to ask them the question. Then everyone replied,
Nothing! We are doing nothing
. It made people think that they never knew from one minute to the next what was going to happen.

‘Tut! Tut!’ the insufferable bird screamed repeatedly at the sleeping white dog Dallas, who unlike the Jimmy Dale Gilmore country and western song he was named after, had never been to Dallas on a DC9 at night. The dog was such a big fan of country and western music, it had no time to listen to Norm’s stories, as it lay with its back on the dirt floor, piebald belly belly-up, showing its fleas. The bird demanded the same story to be told again and again whenever Norm stopped talking; its hunger for the family’s history impressed Norm more than his own family’s. Openly, he praised Pirate, boasting he placed more faith on the twenty-five-year-old bird retaining the family’s memories than any one of his six children, who, he said frequently, had done nothing but let him down. There were really seven children in the family but Norm chose not to recognise his third and once favourite son Will. He was disappointed they had gone off and married the wrong people, and all were gone and had left him alone, except the three girls who had brought their broken marriages and a string of kids home, and the youngest, Kevin, who was sixteen.

Kevin could have been the brains of the family
, everyone kept making it their business of coming around and saying to Norm after the accident in the mine.

‘What kind of consolation is that for a brainy boy, being rendered a mental retard?’ Norm knew how to end a conversation about Kevin quick smart.

Well! I was only trying to help so don’t get stroppy with me.
And one by one, anyone who thought they could offer sympathy left, and stayed away.

None smarter than your Kevin
, the white people used to say all the time about Kevin. Before, schoolteachers just about wore the road away, tramping down to the Phantom’s place every other day just to make sure Kevin was alright.
Mr Phantom. You must keep on encouraging Kevin with his schoolwork now won’t you?
they would tell Norm, and he said he was starting to wonder what schoolteaching was all about
.
‘Well! What will you be doing if I have to teach him?’ Norm asked. He said the family already knew how smart Kevin was. That was the reason why he was going to school
. He has to amount to something
, the teachers wailed, biting their tongues, trying to make the family understand that Aboriginal people needed to succeed, and to succeed they needed to be educated.

Norm Phantom reiterated how proud he already was of Kevin but nobody needed to make a trophy of the boy either. ‘You do your job and I will do mine.’ By agreeing, he wanted those teachers to make sure they did their job to help, since nobody wanted more than Norm Phantom for Kevin to be able to get the hell out of Desperance, and away from the family too, for that matter
.
‘Kevin thinks he is way too smart to be tied down to school,’ Norm explained, wondering why the teachers had failed to capture his imagination by just telling him straight that, like them, he could have a good life with lots of money.

‘I don’t even feel like I belong here anymore,’ Kevin complained about why he had to sit around uselessly trying to do essays about books talking about
them
white peoples lives. He would look out the window from the kitchen table strewn with pencils, paper and books, and see his best friends enjoying the good life, standing around in the sun, preparing to go fishing down on the foreshore, talking to the teachers going fishing as well. Later, he would look up again from a pile of Tim Winton novels, to lock on a last glimpse of their boats crossing the seascape horizon, or would be just out of hearing range of their laughingly spent hours, tinkering over improvised outboard motors. He became the silent non-participant, listening to epic tales of sea journeys he kept missing out on. He was the warrior most unlikely.
Only in your dreams Kevin
. They told him of expeditions, where renowned sharks were preyed upon in nocturnal hunts. Finally, Kevin was left only to hear stories. His essay on Tim Winton scored A plus, but you tell me, who on earth cared?

Then, school days were finished for Kevin. When he left with his friends, they hung around town for months looking for something to do. At home, Kevin grew into the role of being the unchallenged brains trust of the family. He and Norm sat around for hours discussing television news, the political state of the nation, the way the country stuffed up the wool industry, who was who in the wars in countries nobody else in the family knew existed or were interested in, because they left the television for something in the fridge whenever the news came on.

But that was alright. Nobody, in any case, including Norm, expected Kevin would actually get a job. ‘No, look at Kevin,’ the brothers teased, and Norm let his eyes slip over his thin son. He was all skin and bone. ‘Aren’t he the most unco kid you ever come across?’ Norm refused to have Kevin on his boat even if he begged to be taken because he was too clumsy. All the family knew that if there was something to drop, Kevin was going to drop it.

Gradually, all of his school mates were recruited into the road gangs working on the yellow roads. Up the track for weeks at a time mending chopped-up roads after the Wet, Brahman-cross cattle for company, they drove graders and trucks for the Town Council. They joined the crew sitting on their heavy machinery on the side of the road, waving at passing traffic, waiting for the foreman to arrive. There was plenty of work. Too much work. A perpetual round of work, repairing flood-damaged roads hacked to pieces by road transports carrying heavy machinery and grinding their way up to the mine, then loaded, returning to the coast, hauling the country away to pour into ships destined for overseas refineries.