Carpentaria (19 page)

In his sleep, Mozzie dreamt of the moments after the convoy headed back on the gravelly road, he was sitting in the passenger seat, just staring at the empty road ahead, and thinking about Elias, and checking in his mind, taking a mental tally, walking through the rows of groaning cars, and realising what he had originally thought, that Will Phantom had left them at the lagoon and was no longer travelling in any of the other cars. His mind slipped quietly back down the spearwood-lined track, and he stood behind a cluster of trees, surveying the landscape, until he found Will sitting alone by the lagoon looking at Elias. Mozzie crept over, his feet on padded leaves, until at last, he was able to look so closely into Will’s undetecting face, it was a wonder that Will could not feel the intrusion of someone searching into his eyes, trying to dig out his soul. Mozzie, withdrew,
just be satisfied
, he told himself. A deal was a deal, Mozzie Fishman –
You had delivered Will, as you promised, safe and sound back inside of his country
. The sound of the owl brought Mozzie back to the night, and he lay half awake, thinking of Will Phantom, who had many responsibilities for one so young.

Hours of fitful sleep passed by as Mozzie Fishman retraced the journey to and fro from the lagoon, where he again hid behind the spearwood trees with the spirits of Will’s ancestors, watching over the corpse of Elias. It occurred to Mozzie that the silent spirit men were listening to the sound of Will Phantom’s country, to the dull, monotonous clanging made by heavy machinery churning and gouging into the land. These thoughts annoyed Mozzie into wakefulness, to sigh resignedly, and again, to roll over on his other side, muttering in his half-sleep to question the night:
Was there any good carting around your malaise? Spreading it around the camp? Inflicting others? Where had it led to?
Mozzie knew he had tried, more than some people, more than Will Phantom’s own father whom he had told two years ago: ‘I am taking Will on the pilgrimage – convince him of our ways of renewing the strength of the country.’ Norm had not batted an eyelid and continued gutting fish. ‘Nothing’s changed, Norm, you win,’ Mozzie acquiesced, seeing Norm Phantom in the dead of night, gutting a wriggling fish. Will had carried a mountain with him across the desert and in the end, everyone in the convoy carried a replica of Will Phantom’s mountain.

In some ways, Mozzie recalled feeling lighter when they left Will at the lagoon, and the convoy, even though it must have motored up the steep gravelly road again like a clumsy, panting animal, had at the time felt like a breeze, floating with the dust and untangling itself from depression. How surprising had been the feeling of relief of not having Will for company anymore, although he had cherished the young man like his own son.

‘Ah! a man does not need to sleep, ain’t worth the trouble,’ Mozzie said to himself, sick of his troubled night. He sat on his bedding and dragged dead grass and sticks into the fire with the cherished long stick he used for bashing snakes over the head. He set the billy to boil. In a few hours time it would be sunrise at home for his men.

He gazed casually through the darkness, scrutinising Norm Phantom’s place, contemplating the stubborn old coot. When he saw a light on, flickering dimly through the Pricklebush, Mozzie Fishman flashed the Clint Eastwood smile
. You stupid old coot, call yourself tough, couldn’t help yourself, could you?
The light intrigued Mozzie because he realised Norm had stayed up all night too, in spite of himself. Mozzie twisted his grey beard, elated about catching someone out, even in the utmost privacy of their innermost emotions. He knew Norm would not acknowledge that he was waiting for Will.

Will was never expecting any big homecoming from his father. No one imagined Norm Phantom rushing out, carrying the fatted calf on his shoulders as soon as he got the news that his son was coming home. There was no use for some angelic child rushing to tell the patriarch,
See the prodigal son was coming, walking if you please, through the spinifex, over the rise.
‘Yep! Time will tell,’ Mozzie sarcastically quipped. ‘And pigs have wings.’ Will would reach Desperance in his own good time
,
so let the light burn in a house where a fully-grown man only had time to recognise six of his seven children. The house with a slogan:
A man gets sick of running for his kids – I run for none of the buggers now
. ‘It’s like that is it?’ Mozzie mouthed the words, remembering asking Norm when he had heard news of the rift between father and son.
What did he say back?

He just glared for a moment, then he kept on scaling the big fish he had in his hand. Was he mad? He was mad alright. Scales were flying everywhere. What did you say then?
You were a stupid man when you were young, and now, you have turned into a stupid old man
, Big Mozzie remembered cursing Norm Phantom. Cursed him easily for rejecting a son like Will. Was he not made with the same blood and bone that made a good man? Indifferent, Norm spat in exactly the same way he would at a less than perfect fish on the end of a line, a puffer fish:
Chuck it to the dogs.
What was the difference between the patriarch and the zealot who grew out of the same Pricklebush thicket? Time would tell.

Listen to this. The talk was all over town. He did not? He did. Will Phantom of all persons mind you had absconded, flown the coup, walked. Walked where? Walked to Eastside. What did Norm say, his son and all
?
He swung the axe. He was hot with fever for a week. He kept swinging the axe around. All doors were slammed shut over on Eastside. A thousand nails bashed into the coffin which parents make for themselves when they throw their children away. This incident between Norm Phantom and his son gave birth to intractability on a grand scale. Oh! Well! War was war. When you have been at war for four centuries a son cannot overrule the father even in modern times. Old Cyclone, the mastermind of the old war in present east and west hostilities, long dead as a doornail, did not change matters. ‘Enemy never die,’ Norm quipped in his first and final words on the matter when he watched Joseph Midnight’s relatives carrying Cyclone’s coffin to the cemetery. Dead and good riddance, the mob on Westside remembering the good times and the bad went
Hip! Hip! Hooray! Kudala!
when Cyclone died, but what a man!

Memory, honoured in death, incorporated blood ties. This was what Norm meant when he referred to the enemy amongst them. Then, downcast whispers spread, unbelievable whispers full of truth and what have you, stultified the air in the Pricklebush over on Westside:
Will! Oh! Dear Lord, not Will,
his father’s image in every way, walking off with his own mind, apparently gone to live even, in old Cyclone’s house
. The lad was stolen to the other side of town from under the father’s nose by the grand-daughter of a bad man:
One for you and one for me.
The nuisance haunted the living from the grave.

Cyclone was old and clever,
binjuna
Malbu
kuluwulugu
. He believed in magic and became the first person in contemporary times to turn imagination into reality. Instead of being a rain man, or weather man, like he ought to have been, he brought lies to life. One of his extraordinary stories about the ‘once upon a time’ was a fictional pig story that became a real life nightmare.

In one of his elaborate once-upon-a-time inventions there lived an illusory porker of exceptional longevity with unwholesome attitudes to Pricklebush people roaming the riverbanks. Cyclone, messing with magic in his fingers, crawled into the guts of his twentieth-century story and brought it to life. He called his creation Abilene but she came to life and left mess after mess in real nightmares. This was what happened to the Uncle from Eastside who was the original owner of the blue Toyota. Westside pricklebush people said it was a fluke of nature that Abilene only attacked members of Cyclone’s family. Cyclone had run to the police, the law, the white people when Uncle was killed. He stood around the police station in his old baggy pyjamas complaining, ‘What about all the deaths relating to only our kin?’ The new policeman pondered what he heard. ‘How come only our family is coming to this grief?’ he asked. The policeman became impatient and jumpy to use his gun. He made inquiries, made it quick smart. He called homicide up and they came up to Desperance and said: ‘It was time for some action, man!’ This was what happened when the favourite Uncle over Eastside was killed and Cyclone was running down to the police station every five minutes, and his family joined in the running after the police, until they were there all the time, jumping up and down, slapping the walls, complaining louder and louder, making threats, throwing their fish guts around and pointing their finger down Westside, over to Norm Phantom’s place.

When Norm Phantom was arrested as a murder suspect he said he had nothing to say. Proudly he walked off with the police. It would have been good if the whole world could have seen the way he just walked as though he never had any fear inside of his body. The old people reminded everyone on Westside for months afterwards what a good day it was to see someone walk like that. When the day came for him to sit in court he sat there like a rock. He said nothing to anybody. Westside folk swelled with admiration. The rallying families of the two Pricklebush factions sat on either side of the temporary courtroom set up in the lime-green Council building meeting room. Both sides were eyeballing each other. Then the whispering started. Then the all-out abuse could be heard up the street. ‘Good Lord! Thank you it wasn’t the Sabbath, because the good Lord needn’t have been in town,’ the district judge roared for silence when he made his appearance after nobody had noticed the usher had announced his entrance. He found out very fast how your ears could turn red after hearing what one of those families could say about you.

The witnesses on Norm Phantom’s side of the family said they saw no fluke there, no coincidence that the other side got the chop all of the time whilst their side didn’t. The oldest witness from Westside got up and explained that the pig was territorial and, ‘It was just going about its natural self, like Adam and Eve, pardon for using white man diction, that was why it got to hunt everything it believed belonged to itself within the precinct of its boundaries.’ The judge told the old man his story was plausible and he would consider it.

The other oldest man on Eastside, Joseph Midnight, in fact, Cyclone’s son said: ‘It was understandable why Norm Phantom was the prime suspect in matters of crime relating to Abilene.’ The judge asked him to continue his evidence even though everyone knew it was only grog talking. ‘Who knows even how close he was to the big set of gristly trotters, since, wasn’t it known how Norm Phantom could talk just plain too nicely about all matters fauna and flora in these parts?’ But the judge explained something important to old Midnight: ‘You cannot rightly accuse a man for all of them deaths just on hearsay, without hard evidence, just because he talks to the trees.’

Norm’s blood relatives testified as sober people with bent heads. They never frightened the judge or any of the Australian law because they spoke their English calmly, which they knew would not frighten white folk, who never liked black aggressors. They turned out to be reliable witnesses. Drunken people did not make good witnesses slipping around across the nice shiny, linoleum floor, running around in court with delirium tremens, not remembering who was dead or alive, disappearing for hours at a time down the pub for more heart-starter when they should have been sitting like solid citizens in the court room.

The atmosphere of the courthouse changed dramatically with a shift in emphasis on the case when Cyclone’s kinsmen came to the court full drunk, and engaged in slinging accusations at each other. The Eastside witnesses claimed Norm Phantom drove them out of their homes to live on the east side of town. They should have blamed Angel Day for that. She split the families. Then, something totally unexpected happened to the case.

The judge became impatient and sick and tired of tapping his fingers up and down on the judge’s bench as he studied it for days, figuring out the age of the pine knots and circles, in order to avoid looking at the motionless mudflats through the window, or the hawks and crows soaring in the hot thermals over towards the rubbish dump and wondering why he had not become an ornithologist instead of a judge presiding over a murder trial, while waiting for the prosecution witnesses to arrive. Suddenly, out of the blue, he snapped to the assembled law men, ‘Case Dismissed.’

Too good
, cheered the Westside gallery, as the judge jumped up from his swivelling chair like he had ants in his pants, slammed his papers and judgely possessions in his Queensland port and walked out of the courtroom. Outside, the judge demanded the car keys for the Paddy Van waiting outside to pick up the drunks loitering the footpath from the court to the snake pit. The vehicle headed out of town via the footpath. Neither the judge nor the Paddy Van were ever seen again. The old people sitting in the grass with the binoculars knew what the crazy old white man went through. No secret could be kept from their prying eyes.
Oh! Yeah, we know where the warri, warri ngabaya went to
, they claimed. In very serious tones, reserved for a senior Law person, they explained how he had gone off to Surfers Paradise. Oh! poor,
damu
ngabaya
. He had reinvented himself down there amongst the surfers, going around incognito in a refurbished surfie van, like a vagabond. They say you would not recognise him now, living in abandoned warehouses with the city pigeons crapping in his hair. Nobody from the Pricklebush ever told the policeman the story, otherwise,
damu
,
damu
ngabaya
would be facing pretty serious charges back in Desperance.

Sweet reminiscences. Dawn crawled over the eastern horizon and Big Mozzie reckoned to himself, that his second name should have been Reminisce. It felt grand to be back with the memories of the ludicrous trial, junk foods, unhealthy intrigues and other musings about what souls do in their search for truth. The truth about the pig story. What truth could be found in watching a man concentrating on scraping fish skin with his skinning knife? What price silence?