Carpentaria (20 page)

‘They got their just deserts the pack of mongrels,’ Norm told Mozzie on the day before Mozzie took the convoy on the road again. Norm had whistled, skinning another fish, and with a twist in his face as he concentrated on the job, said, ‘Couldn’t wait for more of the bastards to go down either.’ As he listened to the dull sound of the knife scraping, Big Mozzie could not help noticing the blue guts and fish flesh spilt all over a newspaper article about killer bush pigs. Mozzie caught Norm looking at him reading the soiled newspaper. Pulling and tugging at the fish, Norm broke the silence. ‘Walking about in country, country that don’t belong to them anyway, they should be in the Territory somewhere else, am I speaking a true word or not, and that’s what happens when you do the wrong thing.’

Mozzie, not wanting to buy into the old arguments about who belongs where, said he would not know where those people should be or if there was any killing pig. Norm dropped his fish, and it went bang as it fell into a green bucket, and wiping his hands with a dirty towel, said he had more fish to catch. As he was preparing to leave, he told Mozzie he only believed what other ordinary people believed: ‘If they say there is a pig, I say the same thing. If they say he was a killer and he would kill again, I say the same thing. I am no better man than other people.’ It was no wonder you created suspicion, Mozzie thought, watching Norm Phantom walking off down the track in the tussock grasses towards his boat, ‘You bring on trouble.’

W
ill Phantom thought about many things while sitting on the side of the lagoon. It was a moment of regaining his own sense of self after living for so long in Mozzie’s shadow. The sound of the groaning mine reminded him there would be a lot of things to be done now he was back home. The dark shadows surrounding his father sung into his mind. He hoped things might be better between them, but if not – who cared? Business first, he thought, looking over at poor old Elias. A deep furrow formed between his eyebrows, just like the father’s, as he frowned at the little boat sitting in the middle of the lagoon.

There was no telling where you will find fish…

This story, Joseph Midnight said, must be told, because there were all kinds of particular people – government people, important people, money people, nuisance bugger people, anyone who can take your thoughts away on pieces of paper, just like that, and put it, wherever they like, inside white man’s technology in
whatchayougoinama
call it? Computers. Yes, that’s the one the old blackfella man had been
tinking
about, racking his brains for it: ‘It come to my head for a look around.’ Yeah! Alright. ‘They lock em up all the information inside for them own eyes only.’ That’s how he was talking now because he loved the young rebel Will Phantom who had disappeared from the Gulf after being accused by the State government, and the Federal government too, of sabotaging the development of the mining industry. A media frenzy generated by city based government, searched high and low for Will in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Well! Sweet sugary governments in the cities were not going to spend vast sums of money in a place like Desperance to find an Aboriginal. You listen to an old man’s story if you want to know how.

Every day, never miss, the white city people started to metamorphose themselves up there in Desperance, and they were asking too many questions, millions maybe, of the white neighbours. Will Phantom was that popular. A big troublemaker but nobody had a photo of him
. Got nothing to give
, for the white people – too insular. What they got to know? Got nothing. You could see they were city people who were too plain scared to go about, and come down there in the Pricklebush and ask the
Aborigine
people sitting at home in their rightful place. They looked, Oh! this side, or that side of town.
No, not going,
they must have said about the Pricklebush. Waiting and waiting instead. Those reporter types hung around town not knowing what to do, then they all looked outside of the fish and chip shop, and guess who? One old blackfella man, Joseph Midnight now, white hair jumping out everywhere from
he
head, he was sitting there. Him by himself: Uptown.

He looked over his shoulder at those city newspaper people and saw they’d even got a Southern blackfella with them. A real smart one, educated, acting as a guide. He got on a tie, clean white shirt and a nice suit. He goes up to old man and called him, ‘Uncle,’ and he says: ‘What kind of person you reckon, older man, you say Will Phantom?’ Old Midnight he looked back for awhile, and he says: ‘Who’s this?’ He was thinking now for must be two minutes before he was squinty eyes, still saying nothing, and then he speaks back, ‘Well! You, you, say, I never, and I never believe it. You say I am your Uncle, then listen to this one, boy.

‘No, this or that is ever going to happen when Will Phantom was around. No way! Ever seen a brolga dancing in a mirage? Our Will, he moves lightly through the bush to the beat of the muddied and cracked dancing feet of a million ancestors.

‘Will Phantom was not full of bad luck, always whingeing and saying,
Expect the worst
, like other sort of people. Nump! Hmm! Like the ones who in ignorance can retrospectively call up the evil spirits, turn on the switch for melodramatics, make tranquillity run amok, then cut loose all those motley-skinned bush pigs with the spiky hair – to come out to play. You hear them tearing at your brains to get through to your nightmares – you hear them saying,
Give me a three. Click, slow click, quick click, with their little trotters – up high, down low, too slow
. Then woof! Out of the night dust, they manifest themselves into wild killer boars you never believe who come out of your head in their one, two, threes, and more than likely counting non-malevolent sheep to sleep, crazed, on their little black piggy-wiggly tracks for miles around, to make your hair stand on end when you walk around in the bush here with those kind of people who bring you bad luck. Those kind of people never made you feel safe at all. Never.

‘Or, just say what could happen in the broad daylight, worse than a circus, if you were walking down the street of a loony town – Soosh! Here, but don’t tell anybody I said that – walking with someone like that. If you were just plain dumb to go walking with those kind of people, you even minding your own black person’s business – Well! Can’t be done! You still had to keep a good eye out for the nearest tree or maybe, even a jolly fence to run to and then, you got to fly up the top.

‘There are some people in existence, just one or two, who make dogs want to froth at the mouth. Then what happens to poor old you, who just happens to be out walking with them sort of people and you didn’t know?

‘Well! You gotta know all the time, just in case those pack of another people’s biting dogs – real bad buggers, are going to jump out of nowhere and ambush you. And some diseased dog isn’t going to waste his limited time on earth being discriminate about you because you come from the city, because it’s going to bite you good and proper anyhow.

‘Then, what say? You could even be out fishing, sitting with your lonesome, singing a lonely song, except that nuisance flotilla of man of wars as far as the eye could see, kept following you around all day waiting for you to make one slip so they can leave your carcass floating and bloating in the sea. But Will Phantom was a different kettle of fish. Oh! Yes! He would come along whistling some happy old song he composed about the sea, and those jelly-welly creatures just turned around and happily be on their way. Not interested in making trouble. They left his fishing waters for good. And then, what happens next? Will Phantom left you, gone, shot through, never stick around one minute. Left you sitting out there in the middle of the ocean. Must be all your bad luck come running back just like clicking your fingers, just to show you, you got no luck at all and it would be – what next? Woom! Boom! You never heard so much noise.

‘You know what? More bad luck. Your boat’s
catched
on fire. There is probably going to be an explosion. And you are that jolly well scared you are going to die in the ocean, you just about run across water to get home.

‘See! Well none of that. That never happened to Norm Phantom and he passed all of that on to Will. So! Will has a good way with nature, all of the natural things, except he is not too good with human nature. That boy was in one hell of rush to throw fuel on man-made adversaries. If it had anything to do with mankind, he had the knack to rub it hard, right up the wrong way. His father was like that too. And if you thought the falling out with his father was not a good thing – you are wrong about that. It was a blessing compared to what he had gone around accomplishing in his life to date. Oh! Poor me – What a history. This lad was writing memory with a firestick that made lightning look dull.

‘So, if you want to know what Will Phantom looked like – He looked like that.’

When Will Phantom had caught his first glimpse of the fisherman on the lagoon from Mozzie’s vehicle sliding down the gravel track through the spearwood trees, he knew it was Elias even though the emaciated shell barely resembled the man he once knew who had helped tame his childhood spirit. He knew it, as true as only water people with a natural cunning have of recognising another fisherman by sight, from a huge distance away, even across heavy seas, from the particular way he sat, stooped over a line.

He felt a tinge of guilt about not telling Mozzie at the time, but for some strange reason he knew he had to stay quiet about poor old Elias while the convoy was at the lagoon. He felt he had to respect Elias’s death and privacy. It would have been how Elias would have wanted it. He remembered a private man who shunned opportunities for the company of other people. He saw Elias, a tall, shaggy white-haired man in his fish-smelling hut stacked inside and out with fishing gear, and watched his hard-skinned fingers longing for salt water, skilfully fixing lines, fashioning a spearwood rod, mending nets, his whole existence one of a fishingman’s life. Elias, with shy downcast eyes away from the sea, said he never had time for socialising and mixing with strangers.

All of these childhood memories flooded through Will Phantom’s mind, and he accepted the gift of Elias’s spirit, who had been waiting to pass these memories of his life onto him. The stranger to others, who had taken him fishing, growing him up in the sea. The last thing Elias would have wanted would be to have strangers pawing over his remains, staring at him close up, trying to read his soul with who knows what kind of thoughts they were likely to be carrying around in their heads. But as it turned out he realised he need not have worried himself about Elias’s wish for privacy in death. Although Elias might have been a dead man for weeks or months, he still had enough life in him to protect his personal privacy. The discovery of a body had set off pandemonium amongst the convoy, and within minutes, everyone had bundled themselves back into their jalopies, and were rip-roaring up the track in a stampede to get back on the main road.

A gentle northerly breeze had started to blow through the spearwood after the last of the convoy was heard – zem, zem, crackling up the track. The breeze had come down from the sea, passing inconspicuously over the noisy motor cars on the Gulf road, touching Will in a gentle caress, as though the ocean seemed pleased to know its son had returned.

Time was a fleeting whisper for Will sitting on the edge of the lagoon that had been carved by an eternity of rushing floodwaters inside the remains of a forest that lived a million years ago, and had, after a moment of shock when drowned by high seas, petrified into rock. Time accumulates thought or vice versa and Will Phantom, in no hurry to return home after years, since he had been travelling on sacred journeys, took his time deciding what he ought to do about pulling the boat in, until he felt a cold shiver of fear running down his back. Swiftly he glanced around, and in the silence nothing moved, except where a thudding of ancestral footsteps was pounding loudly in his head, and his fear shifted, across to Elias in the lagoon.

He began to think how strange it was for Elias to be sitting out there, peculiar how someone who had never left the sea’s edge could be so far inland from the coast. His best memory of Elias was the coastal man forever staring at the seas lost from his memory. Now Will, who had spent too long following the illusions of the Dreamtime, was thrown back into the real world, where men became clowns and clowns men, which was another string of illusions altogether. How could he have come so far, particularly if he had to carry his boat over long stretches of dry land? How far would he have reached before the sheer exhaustion of the effort of carrying the boat overland had overtaken him? Surely, he would have needed at least one or two other men to help him upriver?

Will began to chart the river course from the sea that might have been how Elias had brought his boat inland. Will knew this river backward, like the palm of his hand. The river and Will Phantom had many secrets to share. So, Will mapped the journey and stalled at the many gaps in the river where Elias would have stalled too, to catch his breath and to contemplate the boat which would not have made it through the narrow causeways, prevented by the jagged, petrified remains of the ancient trees, perhaps once fig trees, that had become rock. There were places where the water was just a trickle, where only a green ant, on a floating piece of weed, would have been able to forge its way ahead. Elias would have been forced to carry the boat, not heavy, but a real burden over a long distance as he negotiated each step with the riverbank, climbing up on the side of the creeks, up along the wallaby tracks. Frequently, he would have been forced to stop, where he would have hesitated, and hoped he had taken the best of the long, slender tracks running beside the creeks.

Elias, manoeuvring the boat barefoot, would have wound his way through an obstacle course of dense prickle scrub, burrs, spinifex spikes, stomping bloodied feet through the long spear grass as he felt for the potholes, and twisting over and under a devil’s playground of hanging branches. It would be no good thinking about being somewhere else. Think if in one loose moment, and Will Phantom’s own heart slipped a beat for Elias, following the unknown river course, slipping down steep banks, where strangers could break their neck.

In the minds of local people there had always been an infallible certainty without evidence or proof of Elias’s knowledge which was said to have come from travelling the many seas of the world. It was just so, for the spirits who had stolen his memory had left him the sea. This was what happens with the magic moments – a skilful coil of a rope, a special knotted hook on the fishing line, slyly observed shrouded mysteries given a story by people who had yet to reap bounties from travelling distant seas. Yet, instinctively Will knew Elias was no river man, and in fact, could not remember one occasion of Elias ever going to the fresh waters to fish. On the other hand, Will knew this area well. He, having grown from a child with yellow spinifex hair, had walked through all these tracks,
a billygoat’s kid
, the Uncles proclaimed, and his father, the big man Norm Phantom, had joined in with the laughter, complaining with pride in his voice,
the goat’s got no schoolwork on his mind – ever
. In the happy days, following his father’s shadow all around this country, he already knew a little tin boat could not go through the steep-sided gorges on a wallaby track.