Carpentaria (16 page)

Must be how they would like it, hey? What do you think?
Mozzie always had someone available to give a little back-up commentary.

The old wise men were astounded by the vision of white hands. Perhaps it was presumptuous for them to assume they ought to be black hands of black people when most other people believe the colour of spirits is white.

Fishman would be taken over by these visions, and would speak out very loudly, as though they were all witnessing the monumental event, like they had all been thrust into the front line of a war zone where the attack he was witnessing was deafening, and he would be shouting out the bits and pieces of information: ‘See this, see that.’ It was as though he could not hear himself speak. And Fishman? He cringed, lowering himself, and stepping back, arms wide, as if he were trying to keep everyone safe and out of the line of attack. He never liked what he saw in the visions because it was too frightening, he said. Sometimes he saw thousands of these hands at work. He could see them killing Aboriginal people. He believed the hands belonged to all kinds of white people, some dead, some still alive, and he knew because he was able to recognise hands, that some of those hands belonged to people who were still living and still sitting themselves on top of traditional Law.

‘You know what?’ Fishman asked, as he did, before explaining what he saw.

‘No!’

‘Their unconscious thoughts have been arrested in a limbo of unresolved issues which must be preventing their entire spirits from entering the afterworld. Their hands and thoughts have been left behind. They are locked up in their own injustice.’

These were the kinds of visions which made the Fishman decide on new rules. His number one rule was that the convoy was never to enter a community together. He of course never went into a community while on the road. Only a few were allowed to go into a community if the purpose served the convoy.

Frequently after his visions, Mozzie would complain of chest pains that only affected him in these empty human places. His followers would begin moving him back to his car, sighing to each other in relief as the other vehicles returned from the community, and the senior men ordered the convoy to move on. Then, turning to whatever ailing people were waiting on the roadside, Fishman would say, ‘Come with me and be released from the cages of poverty.’

On the road, Fishman picked up anybody, even if there was no room left in any of the vehicles. ‘Get out and walk,’ he emptied cars of young men. ‘Make do,’ he ordered others. ‘Catch us up.’ Fishman’s visions did not die with the distance placed between him and his men. In the following days on the road the pilgrims drove while listening to the crying of the frightened voices of the sick people, pleading not to be taken to a whitefella hospital where they would be treated rough, like they were strangers: ‘We are not taking you there, we are not going to.’ It was hard to build trust.

More times than not, the convoy would stay clear of communities they passed on the roads, because visiting was too stressful, particularly on the old people who would dream about what they had seen for days afterwards, about how they saw a whole industry of invisible hands at work on those places. By staying away from them, they felt they had won a battle because this was what Mozzie told them. His voice winning down the roads – winning he claimed, over the cold and heartless ambitions of politicians and bureaucrats who came flying in from faraway cities and capitals to destroy the lives of Aboriginal people.

They say, people in the right circles – academic people, who use their brains to talk about such things as cult movements – that there are not many religious zealots as big as the Fishman in the
Aborigine
people’s world of today. It might be true. He might be too big, or it might be equally true to say that his reputation was more dazzling and more amazing than the actual man.

Norm Phantom, a close friend of Mozzie Fishman, who was himself a big man of the contemporary times, said quite plainly he never wanted to have any part of his friend’s convoys. He said Mozzie got on his nerves. Everyone knew in the Pricklebush camps that Norm Phantom was a follower of spirits out in the sea. The Fishman, on the other hand, was a failure as a water man. Two minutes on a boat and he would be hanging over the side. But Norm could not deny Fishman his unbeaten title of water divining. The men travelling with the Fishman saw this miracle every day. He would get out of his car, sniff, and, without fail, detect in the dry air the moist smell of water coming out of wet ground and plants a hundred kilometres away, or of a hidden soakage in the flat spinifex plains. ‘He never used a forked stick either,’ the Fishman’s followers bragged in the Pricklebush contest of whose extraordinary gifts were bigger and greater, but it could have been that he simply knew the country that’s all, like the back of his hand.

‘Fishman is the most uncommonly uncommon person walking alive today.’

‘So he only used his nose then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Big nose like Pinocchio?’

‘No, not like Pinocchio.’

‘Well! How does he do it?’

‘He just sniff the air like an animal.’

Everyone had a story to tell of the Fishman this and that. But it was not all glamour on the religious road. He extracted a big price for his pilgrimages into the redneck country of small towns and vast cattlemen acreages where he and his whole shebang were considered an affront to white decency. Pure white nanny-goats running down the dry riverbeds and phone callers echoing to each other:
Can you see what I see?
Dead keen to excite each other up, those isolated white folk, any stranger to the entire continent would have thought Mozzie’s convoy carried a huge deadly chimera of a virus from the third world. Oh! Joyless one day life turned out to be in the openness of the cattleman’s kingdom, when a blot of strange-looking blacks appeared like an eyesore on the horizon. Who knew why there were
boongs
squatting down on the riverbank? the maddened men announced as they did what they normally did: defended their boggle-eyed kin with rifle fire. This was why Mozzie Fishman knew he could not stay with the white people teaching them about reconciliation, and moved the convoy on. He never saw himself as a target and would never get used to the idea of being used as target practice either.

All the little country towns, dotted here and there on the back roads, hated the sight of Fishman’s convoy in the main street: dirty people and whatnot. The words about dirty people and whatnot, which travelled like wildfire, spread down the bush telegraph:
Of seeing them hordes of blacks on the road again
. The story did not go away like in the newspapers where yesterday’s story was old news.
The what was likely to happen
, a question of huge proportions and consequences, grew up into big talk, which must be big talk when town people were talking about killing the black hordes.

So, there was no bringing out a Red Roses box of Australian chocolates to share around but instead, there were gawking people wherever there were shabby cars full of black men filing into a town.
All we want to do
, the residents chimed to each other behind locked doors in a mighty big hurry,
is to guard the decency of clean-living people
. They had a respectable place and there were Aboriginals travelling foot to mouth. Worse than even...? What? A bandwagon full of politicians.
Why don’t you go out and blow up the roads when you see people like that coming here?
Those tiny town shires spoke hard logic when sunshine was threatened.

No, Mozzie’s life on the road was not easy and back home at Desperance, he was expected to return.

As soon as a fair breeze blew in from the south, going straight through the Pricklebush and out over the coast to converge with the seasonal change of the Wet, there would be someone with an acute sense of smelling no one else had, who might say they could smell trouble coming up the road.
How could that be?
There was no reason. It might turn out to be true or it might be some people were born liars.
Trust nobody
was the motto.

Pricklebush waited instead for the red wall. This happened when the breeze picked up and turned into a wall of red dust spanning from left to right across the southern horizon, visible up to twenty miles away from Desperance. Then they really knew Fishman was coming home. The red wind ran through their homes and the specks of dust gathered from Mozzie’s convoy hit people right in the eyes.

Days like this stayed around like a rot, and every day the wind would start up again, as soon as the clock said eleven. The wind blew and blew until six p.m. and people with sandy blight in their eyes jumped with relief, as soon as the wind stopped. But still, no one would admit Mozzie was on his way, until one day, a red-ring-eyed person, some pea-brain person, for every creed and race has got them – an Eastside person – would start to make trouble. You ask yourself,
What’s that noise
? And it would sound like a stick being dragged along the ground. And it was a stick. The stupid person was dragging a stick around the ground, making little noughts and crosses, in a full lull of boredom on a sunny afternoon, perhaps, Sunday! When, without thinking about it, this person who you had been watching and just turned your back on what they were doing for a second, had gone and written the name Mozzie Fishman in the dirt and walked away, leaving the name in the ground behind them.

It was too late to run over and rub away what was done.
What’s that?
Some old person who could read English came along and stopped, shocked. He stared down at the ground mind you, and could not believe his eyes. Mozzie Fishman’s name written in the dirt. Soon the old person would be screaming –
Come out the stupid person who wrote that man’s name in the ground
,
who got to have a sound slap over the head
, and then he would scrub the name out with his feet before walking on. But it was far, far too late by then. The deed was done.

Ever since Mozzie set off down the south road on his first convoy, there had been many times when the Pricklebush people thought they had said their final farewell.
We hopes he never comes back
, the poor old skinny people said wholeheartedly as they waved goodbye. They were jack of him causing trouble with Uptown. He was like a dumped cat, always coming back, always claiming the people who had thrown him away.

They said they only had themselves to blame for causing their own bad luck. Awful days passed waiting for the conjurer to evoke himself into Desperance. The build-up in people’s minds was as though some spell had been cast over their brains. Up and down the Pricklebush people went, chucking around their suspicions about each other and casting aspersions around hilly-pilly with their hostile staring about what other people might be thinking, and cutting up the air into thin little ribbons. Silly people tried to excuse themselves by saying,
Oh! Jesus Christ I never meant to be bad.
But it was too late,
You idiot
. The change was on the way and one day, materialising out of thin air, Mozzie Fishman would be amongst them again.

‘You forget your troubles easily,’ Norm Phantom was forever trying to defuse the obsession created by Mozzie’s visits. He often went fishing, sat in a becalmed sea, just to get away from the talk about whether Mozzie was doing this or was doing that. Calmer people often tried to persuade Mozzie to act normally when he was in Desperance – to stop his outlandish behaviour.

‘You want to stop running around town like a white man,’ Norm told Mozzie.

‘But brother, it seems to me you accuse any black man in town of being a coconut. I seduce Uptown. I get them to eat out of my hands.’

Mozzie was a wizard or some kind of magic man with a cauldron of tricks brewing inside his body. Many, many Pricklebush people went up to Uptown and cautioned him,
Be quiet about white people
. He paid you no attention.
You don’t go and tell white people anything. Not the police especially
. But no, he went right ahead walking around town saying he was like nuclei. Did anyone knows what was nuclei? No. People in the Pricklebush talked about killing Mozzie.

‘Well!’ He explained in wild talk, his cigarette bobbing up and down in the corner of his mouth, saying how, ‘Everyone had to go through me. Everyone had to because they were like negatives on a roll of film and nobody could see their picture.’ He said when he joined the negatives up with the great spirits they would turn positive, instantly like a polaroid photo. The people of Uptown were convinced something was happening when they listened to Mozzie’s speeches, because they said they felt the heat of fire burning the side of their faces.

Mozzie claimed he had the power to cause an enormous nuclear fusion which nobody on this earth had ever seen before, and goodness knows what will happen next. Whenever he spoke, using his grandiose words, he would lead people into agreeing how he could have been a great President or a Prime Minister in another life – if he had not been born in the Pricklebush. The policeman just stood there listening to Mozzie talk while his baby-blue eyes almost popped out of his head. Even with full uniform on and a cap on his head it was a waste of money paid for the power of authority. Nobody was in charge. When the policeman came down to the Pricklebush to see what Big Mozzie was up to, Mozzie told him the story about nuclei. He had the nerve to call out that story to the police, while knowing full well the law was being aided and abetted by all the governments in the whole country – state government, local government, government calling themselves Aboriginal Affairs, or whatever else coming from Canberra, because who knows by what Act of Law the white man calls himself in his many disguises. All the friends of the law were standing well behind Truthful while he was being set upon by Mozzie. They were hissing this and that advice, while being forced to breathe in Big Mozzie’s words like they were poisonous fumes of loose radicals: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, carbon tetrachloride.