Carpentaria (15 page)

The other two sisters, more heavily built, always pregnant Janice, and always flogged Patsy, stood behind Girlie. Everyone said these two girls were deadset – just like Inso and Donny. Standing behind Girlie, in Nike shorts and Ed Simpson T-shirts, each held their iron bar gripped between both hands.

‘Come on dog, or second thought: worse than a dog. You hear what I am saying? You are worse than a fucking mangy crap dog following around sluts on heat all night long with your diseased pricks dragging through your legs on the fucking dirt. Shoot first. Go on drunken men who fuck dead women. Have the first shot because then I want to kill you dead, so I can watch the crows eat your useless body in the morning.’

The man Girlie challenged to the duel was her own womanising ex, her own cousin Noelie whom she was currently saying she was off with for good this time, in their off-again, on-again relationship. Goodness knows how they had managed to spawn four reasonable-mannered children over a decade to date. The Toyota, resurrected from Uncle’s demise, was so loaded down with the weight of Aunty’s rumours, the axles almost touched the ground.

Noelie, a tall young man with a big ego and minimal good looks lost prematurely to liquor, glared at Girlie with her rifle aimed at his temple. ‘Who you kidding Girlie,’ he yelled back up the road, still not able to work out if his Girlie wanted him back dead or alive. But what did it matter: Girlie was not the only fish biting in the sea. ‘Why don’t you come over and see your bloody kids sometimes you useless moll,’ he quipped. He bit his lip about her obsession with mickey mouse courses which had taken her mind off of his interests. All she talked about was TAFE this and TAFE that. And how she was getting herself a proper education that the useless primary school had not given her.

Girlie did not respond. She had handed over his children when he had demanded it but she was not prepared to give up her opportunities. Her ticket out of this dump of a town. Norm agreed, telling her to be done with the gene pool from what he called that scum from over there. ‘You made mistakes, more than most people Girlie, now put it behind you.’

‘Stop wasting your time and get your black ass over to my Dad’s place and do something with your kids for a change.’

Noelie had forgotten Kevin, who had run stumbling into the yard and then disappeared into the darkness. But, after a few moments, he decided Girlie didn’t look like she was in the mood for a
quick one
, which was what she was worth now he had the Hilux. He knew she wasn’t worth taking on along with her two sumo-wrestler looking sisters, not when he and his mates were cold plain sober. He liked the look of Girlie though, and thought it wouldn’t take much to get into her pants. But it could wait for another night. He would come alone, carrying a carton of grog to impress her with. ‘You win doll,’ he said and backed off, waving the others back, until they had all tumbled into the vehicle.

The Toyota threw a wheelie and a spray of mud hit the women. ‘Fuck you,’ Girlie screamed. She took aim and fired the rifle. The bullets sprayed off the sides of the vehicle. Janice and Patsy did a Chubby Checker twist then, noticing their dirtied clothes, they decided to go on the warpath. They screamed like wild women, and were soon chasing the vehicle as it swerved up the road in the slippery mud with dogs barking at the wheels. The big women slammed their iron bars on the side of the heavenly blue-painted vehicle, until it gained on them, and headed off back up the road towards town.

‘Why you sitting around, man? Why don’t you go and fight? Stick up for the family, man,’ Kevin was at the back of the house goading Norm who wanted no part of it. A man was old now. He had been sitting in the darkness enjoying the night. The cloud cover had broken and a bright new moon shone down with so much light he could see his own hand.

It had been the perfect opportunity to read the future across the entire sky. He knew if he could sit for the rest of the night, examining the constellations of stars travelling across the sky road on their journey to the spirit world which wandering souls must reach by dawn, he would be able to read and decipher the messages. But he could not concentrate. Not because of the noise around the front. It was something different that forced him to stop what he was doing. He could not bear to hear the distinctive motor of the Toyota crying of other people’s sorrows, screaming at him to come around, and have a look. He sat there, stony faced, not hearing a thing.

When Girlie heard her brother screaming loudly around the back of the house, pestering her father, her blood still pumping with the adrenalin rush from the fight on the road with Noelie, she switched. She wanted to kill Kevin now. As far as she was concerned, a strike at Noelie could just as well have been a blow at Kevin. She stomped around the back of the house, saying she wished the accident had finished him off. ‘You are nothing but a pest to the family Kevin.’ She started jabbing Kevin in his skinny back, ‘Fight me if you want to fight, you useless bastard.’

A crazy look of madness made his face twitch uncontrollably. He was not far from a convulsing fit where he would totally lose himself in a world that had overwhelmed his brain. When he reached this point in his madness, it disabled whatever skerrick of common sense he might have had even to save himself. She knew she only had to jab him hard once, to send him off into this state of paralysis. She threw herself onto his stick body, while Janice and Patsy grabbed his arms. Each of them took turns hurling him through the house until they reached his room and forced him onto his bed. Whenever he tried to get up he was knocked back onto it again. Finally, he collapsed into unconsciousness.

‘Well! He’s either asleep or dead,’ Patsy remarked, and the three nodded agreement, feeling relieved that they had restored some order to their lives. ‘Lucky we are here,’ Girlie said, and Janice grunted as she was apt to do, rather than getting involved in longwinded talking. Tiredness returned, and each went back to their separate parts of the compound to tend to the children who luckily had slept through all of the noise. The night turned quiet again except for the frogs croaking on top of a mud pile every fifty centimetres, for hundreds of kilometres, around the Gulf of Carpentaria.

F
rom out of the dust storm the Fishman drove home.

A long line of battered old cars heavily coated in the red-earth dust of the dry country crawled wearily behind him, leaving in their wake a haze of petrol fumes and dust. The red ochre spectacle belonged to Big Mozzie Fishman’s never-ending travelling cavalcade of religious zealots, which once again was heading home, bringing a major Law ceremony over the State border.

Bearers of the feared secret Law ceremony, these one hundred men were holy pilgrims of the Aboriginal world. Their convoy continued an ancient religious crusade along the spiritual travelling road of the great ancestor, whose journey continues to span the entire continent and is older than time itself. They come and go, surrounded in a red cloud of mystery, travelling along roads where the only sound is the ghostly intermittent chime of a single distant bell, ringing out of the ground, echoing throughout the bushland.

The long dusty convoy, passing through the pristine environment of the northern interior, seemed to have risen out of the earth. There it goes. A simple other-worldly in appearance crusade, that looked as though it belonged to some enchanted agelessness touched by a holy hand.

In the thirty-car procession, moving, eating, sleeping, living in second-hand Falcon sedans and Holden station wagons of 1980s vintage, travelled men of every adult age were covered with days and months of dust. They breathed so close to the earth, the night might have mistaken them for the spirits of the dead. On the spiritual road, which was indeed hard and bumpy, the life of these vehicles had been refashioned many times over. In an astonishing modern-day miracle of recycling by those spiritual men of Fishman’s convoy who had artisan hands and the minds of genius, using tools and parts found only in nature, all of these vehicles survived over thousands of kilometres of the country’s hardest rock and gravel.

Aboriginal folk living along the back roads spoke in whispers about how they had encountered the half spirits –
Men, bedraggled.
They hid from the dirt-encrusted cars with the Australian flag flying from radio aerials all along the convoy. It would be difficult to dispute that the journey undertaken by the Fishman’s convoy was as pure as the water birds of the Wet season’s Gulf country lagoons flying overhead, travelling through sky routes of ageless eons to their eternal, ancient homes. It was this sound they heard one day, coming their way, and bush folks called it the breath of the earth.

The clear day into which Mozzie Fishman’s convoy travelled was so different to yesterday on the southern edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria when a dust storm suddenly appeared in the plains country. It rolled down from the skies, darkening the land, howling like dead people in the night, and swallowed up the weight in the heavy minds of these spiritual travellers while they slept with backs against the wind, so they could be released from the bond of months, even years, on the road, dedicated to religious duty. This was the story for the journey passing through this part of the country. No one in the convoy had been surprised; the dust storm was expected to appear before they reached home.

The convoy crested spinifex-covered hills, dipped into red rock valleys, curved round the narrow bends, and created a long snake of red dust in its wake. Ahead, the road, a wound cut in the country, was as clear as a day could be for Big Mozzie, who was so happy country and western melodies sprang into his mind from a buried heyday, jumping from his soul out to the world through his steel-grey beard. Listen! He was singing his favourite songs in a full voice, loud and infectious, on the north wind travelling back down the convoy, everyone laughing. The landscape passed by in a yellow-green and red blur of enchanted spirits listening to the riotous choir of
yippee yi-ays
heading for Desperance, home of the country and western big man, fitted like a stuffed black glove in the bucket seat beside the driver of the leading car.

Not everyone on earth knew how the religious leader acquired a name like Mozzie. Some small thing that happened sixty years ago when he was born into this world can become the hardest thing to remember. His childhood was of times when big secrets grew in families. Nor did everyone know that once upon a time, his name might have been Paul, or something Old Testament like Joshua, for it was never said. It was best to remain prudent and not invite common talk about a cultural man like Mozzie. The Pricklebushers never asked how people acquired names. Instead, they preferred the jargon of deference, talking in sentences, like,
Nobody remembers any old jingalo trivia about names anymore around here.

Gasbagging talk was what other people did behind your back, whispering if they liked – for it was a free country. This is why the world never fails to astonish, no matter where people live, for there will always be some who sink so deep into the valley of dishonourable pursuits, and chatter amongst themselves about the humble beginnings of the religious and holy, like Mozzie Fishman. One poor old limpy woman and one ageing crippled-up leg of a man, who by chance of miracle, lived into modern times. So what if they had conceived a son at their age? This was what people do, they were in love; there could have been worse freaks of nature. Ten thousand fish still swam in the bay and as many birds still flew in the skies.

If it was not enough for gossip to fall like the blow of a heavy piece of lead, straight on the heads of this one poor, elderly couple, but they soon had more bad humbug to bother them. They were ruthlessly urged to move their sparse household, a dozen times a day. People were complaining endlessly about the old couple with the troublesome son who was causing half the mischief and running about, they claimed, wherever he pleased. Justice was nothing. They appealed, but seeing there was no use in talking, they would end up talking less and less, and in the end, what happened? Well! They were squatting like a pair of dogs sheltering under one prickle bush to the next, in little
yaji
nests, and going about bewildered, cowering from one nothing place to another. ‘Shameful and a thousand curses too,’ the old couple complained to the big
walakuku
humpy people. This was only muttered behind their backs, but the embittered community heard and cursed back.
Go away you people!
They called out to Mozzie and his elderly parents.
Go! You are too much more spreading diseases, if you please.

Those were the days of people rushing around mad with too many modern ideas which did not belong in their heads. Strange things were said by the
maranguji
doctors about the boy’s blood being full of boiled lollies. Some people, women in particular, who were blood relatives to the
maranguji
men and women, spoke of collision theories which they had formulated over a quarter of a century of card game talk. These women spoke of what happened to people if you had seven decades of accumulated sugar racing around in your body – like what had happened to the old couple. You could feel the irritability in the air by the way they flapped the cards, feeling the old couple must still be around somewhere, still there some place, and would have to go. Their impatience was the normal way people of the modern world of the white man went about their business, the general attitude to your fellow mankind’s acts of intolerance. Afterwards, complaining of the others who had participated in that marathon gambling and talkback event, they whinged,
Their mumbling and grumbling made you sick
. It was no wonder why the spirit of the country was raw with unkindness.

The harmless parents of Mozzie Fishman moved obligingly, repeatedly, only mentioning from time to time, ‘It was no good being so persistently nomadic in modern times for you cannot keep up with people, always jumping about the place.’ No truer word was spoken because jumpiness creates a tidal wave of problems. You have no place to call home: nowhere to send the mail. Nomadism was no longer the answer.

Wherever the old couple’s boy was seen to be in those miserable days of unkindness, the spies in the Pricklebush swore that they had seen black clouds of mosquitos swarming in his wake. Wherever the boy walked, the Pricklebush resonated with the irritating sounds made by these unusual swarms as they moved around in the air. The boy had to walk somewhere. So, everyone got the chance to see the phenomenon.

Mozzie Fishman grew out of his childhood affliction, and not a single mosquito followed him around anymore. He proudly claimed that he was conditioned by his parents to be ready to move for the benefit of other people.

Such tales were alluvium, pay dirt to the Roy Orbison sunglass-wearers who often travelled by nightfall like so many bats, with the windows of their cars wound up, so the devil-devil spirits of mosquitos could not get in and inject them with the dreaded encephalitis disease.
Aborigine
people were different now, they knew the scientify as well, like the sophisticated naming of what mosquitos carried around in their little bodies. And if mosquitos were bad, the devotees of Mozzie’s convoy would get the Mortein Plus out, like the television advertisement, and hit them hard between the eyes.

The spiritual Dreaming track of the ceremony in which they were all involved, moved along the most isolated back roads, across the landscape, through almost every desert in the continent. The convoy, which had grown with cars of all colours and descriptions, kept a wide berth from the gawking eyes of white people’s towns, Fishman called them, ‘those who just wouldn’t know even if you gave them something on a stick.’

The men in this moving mirage of battered vehicles felt they had well and truly followed the Dreaming. Travel had become
same, same
and mandatory, as the convoy moved in reptile silence over the tracks of the travelling mighty ancestor whom they worshipped through singing the story that had continued for years. The crossing of the continent to bring the ceremony north-east to the Gulf, to finish it up, was a rigorous Law, laid down piece by piece in a book of another kind covering thousands of kilometres.

‘Start em up again!’ The Fishman’s voice would ring out each morning. The men would rise from the face of the world where they slept like lizards, dreaming the essence of a spiritual renewal rotating around the earth, perhaps in clouds of stars like the Milky Way, or fog hugging the ground as it moved across every watercourse in the continent before sunrise. The convoy journeys were a slower orbit of petrol-driven vehicles travelling those thousands of kilometres each year. The pilgrims drove the roads knowing they had one aim in life. They were totally responsible for keeping the one Law strong by performing this one ceremony from thousands of creation stories for the guardians of Gondwanaland.

The feared ceremony crossed the lost dusty roads of ancient times, running across one another like vermicelli, passing through many empty communities. People in these isolated communities had simply gathered up all their sounds and left silence in their wake. The high degree of secrecy and sacredness surrounding the convoy extended in an invisible radius beaming hundreds of miles in every direction. Only an idiot would ask about it. Only a stupid person would stand in the way of the approaching convoy. Unless, they wanted to end up being drawn into the whole realm of this sacred business, for once absorbed by the snake lizard moving along the roads following the path of the great ancestor, you were hit with a ton of responsibilities that common people could not even dream about. Whole communities of hundreds of people living anywhere ahead of the convoy ran straight for the bush when they heard via the two-way radio, the morse code warning that the convoy was getting closer.
Must be nobody going to live here anymore.

People quickly came down from the skies where they were walking the tightrope of existence and armed themselves with rifles for protection against the zealot mob. Women and kids who were not allowed to see anything of the convoy on the road headed straight to the sand hills or ran into dense mulga scrub – covering up all tracks behind them. This was where everyone sat quiet as a marsupial mouse not doing a single anything, just whispering, that’s all, until word came at last that it was safe to return home. Not all men or all older boys wanted to be dragged away into a religious pilgrimage that would heave them far from their homelands for endless months, maybe even years.

As time went by, hundreds of sick people would have waited on the hot, parched road for the Fishman to come and take them away. They were the ones who said they had thought they were going through life for what it was and then, all of a sudden, some other terrible thing happened, and their life would never be the same again. Fishman would pick them up and they would go on pilgrimage to the ancestral resting places, until the end came. Fishman treated sick people with reverence. They had his respect and he buried those who died properly, in a sacred resting place. Why? Fishman explained he helped his people because there was no good whitefella government governing for
blackpella
people anywhere. And the sick pleaded to go with him.

When Fishman came across the sick people waiting beside the red dust blowing dead spinifex balls up the road, he would stand for a long time on the outskirts, just looking at their ailing communities as though he was expecting the people hiding in the bush to come back. The pilgrims would stand around their cars watching the wind blowing past the empty houses – studying the lives of ordinary people. The young men tapped their car roofs to the tune of
I got you babe
, all eager to move on, as soon as the petrol supplies were replenished. It was on these occasions, so close to the empty communities of fellow countrymen, that the Fishman felt a much stranger, frightening sensation of what was left of his own humanity. These times when he stared into space were the times when he talked to himself.

Mozzie saw visions when he drifted off with the hot temperatures or the silence and began speaking to himself. The men would overhear him saying things like ‘The skies have become a sea of hands.’ ‘There are too many, everything moving too fast and thick like a nest of worms twisting, hands turning, convulsing hands, attacking the place like missiles.’ Nobody claimed they ever saw what the Fishman was watching, while looking where he looked, following his eyes glinting in the sun. Some old wise men moved closer behind the Fishman in case, they said, ‘We might capture his line of vision.’ They were determined people the old wise men. There was also a lot of nervousness in the convoy. But the more inquisitive wanted to know what he saw. So, Fishman explained. He said it was hard to keep up with all the hands sliding everywhere, created by a special luminance caught in the fractures of light. He described how he saw hands touching everything in the community. ‘Hands too many,’ he whispered, coughing, ‘running like mice all over every dwelling, trying to reshape, push, mould, trying to make things different. White hands.’