Carpentaria (24 page)

‘You better be off you boys before I get me temper up,’ the priest snapped, and started to whistle the hymn playing on the cassette, while edging the men towards the helicopter. With the dockland instinct of perceiving every Joe Blow on the street as being out to fight you still pumping in his blood, the priest hoisted the two men into the helicopter then slammed the door of the capsule shut behind them. The helicopter blades went spinning for take-off, filling the air with sucked up bits of dry grass, turpentine scrub, plastic bags and dust, that covered Father Danny standing next to the door laughing, until it nosily lifted itself up from the ground and with an immediate swirl, all that was left was the sound of heavenly voices in a Te Deum of three massed choirs accompanying the plastic bubble darting across the sky. The priest, triumphant trumpets accompanying, rubbed his hands with the pleasantness of having just completed mass, although the words he uttered through a mouthful of dirt were Irish jewels best left lying on the little known roads of the outback.

Overhead, the heavy clouds moving their empire south began raining steadily while Will eased his way down the side of the wet hill sure-foot on slippery rock, carrying Elias over his shoulder. Father Danny, wet to the gills, was repairing his four punctured tyres as fast as his heavy weight allowed. From the side of his eye, he caught sight of movement through the rain but the strangeness of the form did not interest him as he laboured over the tyres. He kept working, lost in thought, counting the minutes of the heavier rain moving up ahead, miles away over the coast, to hit places in the claypans where he envisaged the rising waters would spill over the yellow river road and turn the whole plains country into an inland sea. Who would get through then?

‘Should have known I’d be paying for something connected with you,’ the wet, and now muddy priest mumbled nonchalantly at Will, from under the chassis, where he was lying, as he continued denouncing the car for being a useless bucket of tin. Will could hear more than he could see of the struggle under the car to keep the jack from sliding and the car from falling on top of him.

‘And if you got a problem, don’t bother me with it, or bother me with any of your futile excuses about why this happened or that happened. I’ve had a bucketful of lies already today. Look! Stay there will you? I’m not talking to you! I am talking to this bloody car here before the bloody jack slips. So what’s your problem this time? God! This used to be a safe place before you lot started arguing and mucking around with that bloody mine. And another thing, since you are here now, you want to tell me why you got a dead man hanging over your shoulder? Are you going to tell the police about it? No, don’t bother, I don’t want to know, young troublemakers! I bet you can’t even be bothered in your thick skull about going to the police. Well, I won’t be burying him if that’s what you want unless you go through the proper channels, so don’t come pestering me to do it.’

Father Danny hurled himself out from under the car with the grace and noise of a wounded elephant. Will said nothing. He never spoke much to the priest anyway, never saw eye to eye with his religion. Instead, he took the liberty of easing Elias’s body and his sacks across the back seat of the car. The priest took no notice, preferring to concentrate on removing the tyre from the wheel rim at the rear end of the car. He told Will to get a move on and help him with fixing the tyres if he wanted a lift, so they could get the hell’s name on the road or they would both be swimming to Desperance.

‘Double blast for that helicopter, hey, son?’ the priest said mockingly, in a better mood, when twenty minutes later, he threw the tools back in the boot of the car. The car was ready to go.

The car flew up the road drawn like a straight pencil line through the flood plains. The priest kept his foot flat down on the accelerator. His dexterity and control over the steering wheel belonged to an inhuman kind of power, Will observed, but it did not matter, if he succeeded in keeping the car on the road while slipping and sliding from one side of it to the other. Meanwhile, they both saw that the floodwaters, spreading across the flood plains, would soon obliterate the road.

‘Perhaps,’ the priest hissed as he lunged over beside Will’s ear, in order to be heard over the engine and rain, ‘perhaps, it’s going to take the combined force of you and me, camaraderie, my friend, an esprit de corps between two men, to get us through. What do you think, Master Will Phantom? You reckon we can trust in God to get you home?’ Will chose silence. Let the holy man talk his legs off. The land was full of spirits which might help the heavenly power of the Irish to tilt flat land and push the Valiant home. He thought of the dead man spread across the rear seat of the black car, stared ahead at rain splashing the yellow waters, feeling the cool air moving across the flood, and that was enough satisfaction, to be on the road home.

Father Danny said he felt good. Will thought the mud-caked priest was pumped, spurred by the success of getting the car back on the road, a triumph in dire conditions. The monologue rolled on and on, as Father Danny spoke with enthusiasm about the craftsmanship of the humble Valiant and the ingenuity of the lone traveller on bush roads. Will searched for the watery road across
kunbulki
– flat country. He felt the silence. The priest did not see silence by acquiescing to silence. For him, the land opened his crammed mind. ‘Out here a man can get a chance to let some of the good ideas escape into the wilderness,’ he claimed. He proceeded with a stunning commentary about the potential of bush mechanics, their ability to get through any crisis, and what he would have done if he had been travelling without this tool or that.

‘The question is, would a man cope? Would, for instance, an ordinary man, not an astronaut, someone scientifically trained, but a practical-minded ordinary man from the bush, if he became stranded on the moon, have the potential to make his way back to earth?’ It was because the potential of bush people was underrated that this kind of research was not being done.

Will, at this point, became mildly interested in the talk, linking what Father Danny was talking about with the old people’s stories of Uptown. Periodically, Uptown folk claimed they had been taken away by UFOs and had, somehow, either been placed back in their homes, or scanned their way back through the galaxies, simply by applying the cut and thrust of practical bush skills. Will said nothing and let the talking Valiant swim its way through the floods. Always sceptical of Father Danny’s theories, he would not allow himself to become a captive audience, like his parents, and all the others who listened and watched, waiting for the legs to fall off a chair.

The sound of a human voice, even if it was his own, seemed to help Father Danny’s concentration on the road. ‘Watch out
jurrbu
,
jurrbu
– hole in ground here.’ The priest spun the car, righted the outcome, and the oratory continued into a lecture about road bandits – heavy vehicles loaded with mine machinery headed for the mine, using the road, who thought they had the right to take over a man’s right of way. ‘There were laws that protected the public user of public roads,’ he said while the car slid and Will looked at Father Danny, who did not seem to notice. ‘It’s what happens when men lose sight, lose their vision, of democracy. Power, that’s what destroys democracy, education used to destroy the rights of other people. It’s gone too far this time Will, too far, this mine, using technology to control people. Very unwise. They cannot crush people just because they have the power to crush the landscape to smithereens.’

So many good words were wasted that day as Will Phantom stared past
kunbulki
and into the past itself.

It was still raining and even though still afternoon, appeared to be almost night-time when Father Danny dropped Will off with Elias’s body at the bridge on the edge of town. He roared off into the lights. The first place he was going, he told Will before they parted, was straight to the police station to tell Constable E’Strange he had a fat lot of complaints to lodge about mine staff attacking him on the road. Will thanked the priest, then set off into the darkness, camouflaged in his mud-stained clothing by the dense olive-green undergrowth of prickle bushes.

He skirted along Eastside, then passed Uptown, past others camping on Westside, staying out of sight, carrying Elias, until he reached Norm’s place, where he moved unnoticed through the shadows of prickle trees at the back of the house. The house was quiet, and Will, knowing his father was able to identify a person approaching the house from the distance of a kilometre from the sound of their movement, was pleased there had been no one around in the late afternoon. He made his way to the old man’s fish workshop which was separated from the house, although it was an extension to the fortress itself. Both buildings were joined together by the long crooked corridor constructed of corrugated iron which appeared always to be half finished by not having a roof. He laid Elias’s body and the sacks down on the dirt floor of the workshop. ‘I will have to leave you here with the old man,’ Will whispered to Elias. He knew his Father would want to look after Elias himself. It was the reason for bringing him home.

In the golden half-light Will gazed around this familiar, favourite room. Soon, without realising what it was that was happening to him, the faint odours of chemicals that had hung in the workshop forever, robbed him of the years of absence and troubles. Like autumn leaves, bad days fell away as though the genius of the room could not retain them. Will became tantalised by the seamless possibility of rushing widdershins back into boyhood habits, seeking the latest piece of magic his father was working on. It was here in the amber womb that each member of the family had come to lose themselves in their father’s world of fantasised hidden treasure, as they watched Norm intricately creating fish jewels of silver, gold and iridescent red, greens and blues.

‘We used to spend a lot of good times here, didn’t we old man?’

Will talked on, whispering to Elias while gazing around at the walls covered with fish. Norm Phantom had been given the great skill of robbing the natural function of decay, by the act of preserving all species of local fish, and the walls of the room were covered with mounted barramundi, coral trout, bream and salmon. Will studied the crowded rafters which were decorated with hundreds of butcher’s hooks, and from each hook hung preserved fish in gleaming silver attached to a strand of fishing line, three or four to a hook. The dangling fish in the workshop always appeared more alive than dead. Hours had been spent by the family watching Norm patiently scraping out the guts of fish, boning the flesh like they imagined a surgeon would have done, and they went Oh! and Ah! when eventually Norm held up the bare fish skin for inspection. There were secrets inside Norm Phantom’s head about the plants pickling in bottles lining the shelves. The liquids he brewed came from the plants he collected in night journeys in the grassland bush. He used the juices sparingly to tan the thin skin of the fish specimens given to him by all kinds of people – redneck fisherman, rich businessmen, politicians, scientists.
What do you reckon mate?
All kinds of people turned up at Norm’s rusty gate to drop off some fishy thing wrapped in newspaper.

Norm unwrapped the fish at the gate, quietly studied it, and after several minutes, he would say so if he felt he could do something with it. Even the guardian angels hovering in the skies above were in awe of Norm’s decision to return life to dead and rotting fish. Norm waited for the response as though it did not matter to him while the stranger’s money antennae shot up, eyebrows twitching with excitement, to haggle what was fair: ‘Ten dollars ought to cover it.’ World-class professionalism, Leonardo Da Vinci for a bargain
. How will we know you will finish the job?
Norm might have done the job for nothing. His mind was light-ages away, mingling with the axis of symmetry in the spirit of the dead fish. Only craftsmanship could resurrect what lay stinking in his hands. The kids, running with the men to their cars, overheard the fishermen feeling hard done by, slamming the car door behind them, grumbling as they observed the Phantom kids.
Well! You don’t want to be ripped off by them either.

Will ran his hand haphazardly through the open bag of horsehair used for stuffing his father’s fish. He loved the texture of the hair, and for a split second, an old habit wiped away the years of their disagreement, and the time returned when horsehair would be washed clean and dried by him until it shone for his father’s liking. He stood examining, inside an enamel basin, the skin of a barramundi soaking in the tanning mix. He moved by, passing his hand over bottles of preservatives, sealers and lacquers. He remembered how Norm would give him the task of patiently stitching the skin together around a mould of the horsehair. His small fingers had become so adept to using a needle and thread, he was able to make the stiches so small and tight, the seam was invisible to the naked eye. Will studied his hands now, fully grown, and wondered with light mirth, how his father’s huge hands achieved the task of an elf. Afterwards, Norm spent many hours and several days to paint the fish with painstakingly steady movements with a small paint brush.

This was the time when there was total silence in the workshop. Norm painted, and the children watched over his shoulder, at the miracle he performed restoring the original colours with paints he made from ochre and plants. These, he said, were mixed using the secret measurements of life, and pearl shell crushed into a fine powder. All his painted fish possessed a translucent gleam of under-the-sea iridescence made from the movements of sun rays running through the wind currents. God creates God’s friends. The angels helped him, the children were told. Perhaps, Will thought, viewing a glistening coral trout’s ocean-blue dots, slowly spinning at the end of a thread, children were mischievous elves, while men with big hands were angels.

From time to time Will still thought about the childhood beliefs he had of his father. Sometimes while sleeping, he felt that his father went to live under the sea in his sleep, in a world of colours that normal people would never know existed. This image he sustained, of Norm living under the sea in his dreams, was the only explanation he had of why his Father was able to paint fish so delicately and true, as though it were his second nature.