Carpentaria (14 page)

‘Kevin? You got to be joking!’ The works supervisor was a straight-up-and-down kind of man who grew up with Kevin’s older brothers and uncles. ‘The Council has no call for Kevin.’ Everyone in the town and down to the Pricklebush knew that Kevin, the fidget, would be useless on a job on the road. Over on Westside, Kevin’s hands had already destroyed thousands of dollars worth of torches, electric appliances, motors. He must have had a little devil inside his head telling him to take other people’s precious things apart. Even though the whole world could accept the fact that a table must have four legs, if you left Kevin alone, it would be on its side with three
. Kevin! Kevin! Why did you do that?
Unguarded machinery, instruments strung, screwed or balanced, or anything that operated on fuel, electricity or battery, was no place for Kevin. It would kill Kevin. Kevin would injure himself. But Kevin went down the mine for the money and the bosses took him on because how would they know? They did not even pretend to know who fronted up for work from Pricklebush.

Inso and Donny were the two oldest Phantom brothers. Everybody in town said these boys did nothing for anybody except for money. They worked in the mine from day one. They were both hulkily built men who liked a boxing match and dreamt of becoming professional. Once the pub tried to raise money to send them to the State championships. In a ring, drawn in sand on the saltpan, Inso and Donny trained local kids to stay six rounds. They fought anything from Eastside that walked in sight of them for stealing their land. ‘I saw you.’ ‘No you didn’t you weren’t even there.’ ‘Yes I was and I heard you.’

White boys, singled out for making racist remarks years before, were flogged. Boxing matches were a menace to everyone. Gangs of youths formed from Eastside and Westside and Uptown with an arsenal of weapons. On their way home from the pub, you could hear them laughing as they roared by in their four-wheel drives, up through the muddy road, stopping only to attack anyone standing in their way, or out of their way, or whenever they smelt trouble. Well! Enough was enough. The town did not need any of their money. The elders struck when Norm was out at sea.
Get out and don’t come back.
They took to those drunken boys with iron bars, sticks and weapons, causing a bit of a mess in Norm’s place.

But still, the family had Kevin, the beautiful last child who had inherited all the brains, who Norm believed would never survive the world in which he was born. ‘Why did God give us this child for?’ Norm would despair as he watched Kevin grow. ‘He could have been smarter, if he had had better teachers who knew how to teach someone like Kevin,’ Norm accused the school when the accident happened
.

What was he going down the mine for?
Inso and Donny came home to accuse Norm, and whenever they came home and saw Kevin, they said openly they could not comprehend how anyone could let him go to work in a mine of all places. But asking questions around Norm did not help. Questions about Kevin caused arguments
.
‘What you want to come here picking fights for?’ Norm challenged Inso and Donny. ‘We are not picking fights.’ ‘You are always picking fights.’ ‘If anybody’s picking a fight it’s you.’ What a story! Inso and Donny banged their way out the door of the Number One house, got into their cars, and shot straight back up the road to the Fisherman’s Hotel. My! My! It was astonishing how cold beer rolled down their necks. Hot heads cooled. They checked their gold wristwatches to decide if this particular visit home had lasted – what? five minutes or less.

So nobody came to terms with what happened to Kevin, and they just kept on saying how brainy he used to be. Who, anyone might well ask themselves, would have given a skinny lad with not one single physical attribute to show for himself, a job in an underground mine? It only took one day. He went down the mine on the day he got the job and came out burnt and broken like barbecued spare ribs. He heard the ancestor’s voice when an explosion with fiery rocks went flying at him – left, right and centre. The boy they dragged out of the crush had been rendered an idiot and it was plain as day no prayers would undo the damage.

Even after the last scab healed nothing could put out the fire in his brains. Call it God’s will, or call it facing the ancestor in the face, or call it someone like Kevin knowing darn well that what was in that hole would come looking for him, but he went in anyway. Call it coming face to face with yourself and asking – who are you? Call it trouble too. Uptown people said it was a tragic accident that should never have happened. Norm Phantom took his son home and blamed the Shire Council because they had refused to extend the net to cover his place.

Thinking about trouble always made Norm think of Kevin, and thinking of Kevin made him think of fear, and then he would think of his grandfather’s stories to the bird. Kevin was one you would not bother yourself telling the family’s history to anymore. More! More! And the bird, true to his word, as if he could read Norm Phantom’s mind, had heard more trouble on the way. Now, Norm could hear Kevin coming along the twisting corridor, not only disturbed in the mind, but drunk too, and it was only seven o’clock in the morning.

Norm heard him first, dragging something along the corrugated tin walls of the twisted corridor heading towards the kitchen, then finally, saw Kevin running at him, flashing his knife through the air and screaming like a wounded animal. On this occasion Kevin was wearing a torn T-shirt covered with fat swastikas painted in blood. The T-shirt was the first thing to hit Norm in the eye and the sight of it shocked him more than anything else, even the departure of Elias whom he had just finished watching.

‘Get that thing off,’ Norm barked, ‘before I rip it off of you.’ Norm thought he could get used to anything new in the strange world of Kevin, but this was too much, because if Norm said he hated anything, he hated what the Nazis did to the Jewish people. He had always said it, and Kevin should have known better. Kevin stopped in his tracks with the knife still pointed towards his father’s face, but he looked as though he had received a mortal wound. ‘Why? You ever saw what happened in Germany or Europe? How would you know?’

‘Jesus! You take the bloody cake,’ said Norm, ‘Get that thing off – I am warning you.’

Norm roared out to his household in his booming voice. You could hear him down the road, even Uptown heard him, calling out the names of his daughters, ‘Hey! Girlie, all of you girls. Come out here!’

Norm started to move from the table where he had been sitting with his bird. He wanted the whole house to see Kevin, see what was happening in this day and age, right there in his own home.

‘Come and have a look at your brother. Have you seen anyone dressed like that before, like a bloody Nazi?’

‘You! You!’ Kevin’s spit spluttered everywhere as he looked Norm straight back in the eye, trying to block him with his emaciated body from going back into the house to find his sisters.

‘You’re fucking nothing to me.’ Kevin felt hatred for pity, for pity was what pity gets. He felt betrayed by the family whose honour only he had had the guts to defend. It had been one hell of a night fighting the ‘enemies’. An incident that had begun out on the claypans with a spilt drink, a piece of broken glass picked up and thrust through someone’s hand; a fight that had extended through the bush with spotlights, and the pursuers hunting for the chase, and him escaping like an animal. It had ended outside of the family’s house in the wee hours of three o’clock in the morning.

Why was it that the reputation of homes in Desperance were built on other people’s judgements? Norm asked his family to answer this question. Any passerby could say this or that house was nice because of the way it looked, from out on the road, and be plain wrong about what happens on the inside. Or, they could say the house next door was full of trouble, or that house across the street was full of no-hopers, and no wonder just look at the place. But Norm knew a house made its own life, regardless of the family who chose to live within its walls. Why was it? Ever since the day his house grew to be an eyesore on the landscape, the place felt as though it was always ready for a fight.

Even that night when the white town was trying to intellectualise the behaviour of the local demons and blamed it all on Elias, wondering if he was a harmless bream, or a town-eating piranha, the outsiders in the Pricklebush were making do with their lot in life and attending to family vendettas. And you know what? Their houses never slept. It was not long before the Phantom house pricked up it ears and let out an enormous – ‘What’s that?’ Waking households of mothers and kids on Westside who were sleeping on top of each other, fell back onto their sleeping heaps, when they heard who it was. Only the Phantom household’s ears stayed pricked to listen to the sound of Kevin screaming, running and falling up the road from his pursuers. The men doing the chasing were the self-acclaimed tough guys gang, from the other side of town. Now, they were on Westside territory, hanging out of their mud-encased Toyota Hilux, and staying teasingly on the heels of their victim.

‘Left! Left!’

‘Now Right! Riiiight! Hold that fucking thing still, you moron.’ The yellow beam from the kangaroo spotter jerked all over the countryside, picking up images of Kevin staccato, then in slow motion.

‘What are we going to do with him boys?’ Over and over again they repeated the question.

They almost ran him over but somehow, the part of his brain which deals with flight functioned sufficiently enough to steer him out of the way.

Then, suddenly, someone shouted – ‘Feed him to Abilene.’

This loaded thought caused momentary silence.

‘Yeah! Let’s feed his bony little arse to Abiiiilene.’

As soon as they reached hearing distance of Norm Phantom’s house, they started wolf-whistling and shouting to each other, ‘Noooorm. Say sweet dreams to Kevin and Abiiilene. Oink! Oink!’ They laughed at the silliness of each other’s jokes.

Panic set in – Kevin dreaded the name Abilene. They knew, he knew, that everybody in Number One house knew about Abilene. Abilene was more than a nightmare. She haunted the eroded riverbank eating herring, where the river runs out to the sea. A true, live wild pig whose grossly overgrown, black hairy body and a head filled with brown, rotting teeth, roamed with her legend across the whole length and breadth of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Abilene was a merciless killer, hunting down local men fishing on the riverbank. The story was told to little boys by their grannies to make them be good, how the animal lived forever, and was everywhere, grunting, stalking and hunting down the local men on a pitch-black night.

The story continued to be told. Even if it was hearsay. It also had a reality, since living people had actually seen her, amidst the stark, naked proof of flattened grass where carcasses of cattle were found, or half submerged in the running water. Nearby, fencing was destroyed and witnessed:
Ever seen the wire stacked up neat on the side of the road like that before?

There was talk that Norm Phantom was the only person alive who had really seen her, although he never said so. But why would he? Rumours spread from Eastside accused Norm of having trained the pig to kill people. Joseph Midnight said Norm Phantom used the pig to attack people he disliked. Like! Norm never liked Uncle, who owned that Hilux those young men were now driving after Kevin. When he was killed, the Toyota was found in the bush with the car radio playing country and western music for the mess and what have you of poor Uncle’s remains spread all over the place. Made you sick to see it. Joseph started these rumours even though he and Norm were equally related to Uncle. ‘Nobody can prove it, but one day, Norm Phantom, people are going to see you for what you are. You are the devil incarnate. A very bad man. You just wait and see.’ This was Uncle’s Aunty. When she became a widow, she went bustling down to Westside, throwing her weight around in traumatic grief. She told Norm Phantom off – to his face.

The Toyota sat in Joseph Midnight’s backyard for months, even after it was smoked. Nobody wanted to touch it again. For a long time, nobody would even look at the vehicle. Now the boys drove it around. Vendetta, vendetta, such a strange word for the Gulf.

The fracas coming off a combination of the jumbled voices of wild men pitching for trouble, making pig noises, and the Toyota’s distinctive revving, was reverberating from corrugated-iron clad wall to wall in Norm’s house, down through the long curving corridor which resembled the shape of a cochlea inside an ear.

Inside this ear the sound grew louder as it travelled, jumping the puddles of water seeping under the tin, just as Norm said it would, in the unfolding years of the house he had designed to have its own built-in alarm system. He mentioned to his wife no less than a thousand reasons justifying his security device. She called the unwieldy construction a trap for fleas, crawling around in the hair of rats, whose eggs had fallen with the dust from the ceiling. At various points along the partly roofed corridor, rooms had been erected as the need arose in the family and trashed when called for as well.

When the sounds of their brother’s terror raced through the corridor with increasing amplification like the pain of an ear infection, the Phantom sisters appeared out of total darkness, from various exit points, like witches spouting steam. They walked out to the front yard together with six or eight dogs running in all directions and barking their heads off, including Norm’s old white one called Dallas. It was showdown time. Other families gathered up their flocks, and listened while they hid in their houses.

‘Have the first shot.’

‘No you. You first bitch!’

‘No, I give it to you first. Go ahead. Have the first shot. Then I’ll kill you.’ That was Girlie, youngest of the three Phantom sisters, just three years older than Kevin, skinny as a bacon rasher, with bright yellow dyed hair in rollers and dressed in a cotton nightie, always minding how she looked, just like her Mother. Girlie was standing in the middle of the road in the middle of the night, aiming her rifle. She was blocking the Toyota, the jeaned and Bob Marley T-shirted, gammon Rasta men from the prickly bush ghettos of Eastside, their own cousins mind you, all armed with iron rods and one or two rifles aimed straight back at her.