Carpentaria (29 page)

Girlie looked over at Janice. ‘Don’t worry about shutting up the windows,’ Janice said, ‘Me and Patsy will do it.’

S
ecrets…

Thousands of dry balls of lemon-coloured spinifex, uprooted by the storm, rolled into town and were swept out to sea. From the termite mounds dotting the old country the dust storm gathered up untold swarms of flying ants dizzy with the smell of rain and sent them flying with the wind. Dead birds flew past. Animals racing in frightened droves were left behind in full flight, impaled on barbed-wire spikes along the boundary fences. In the sheddings of the earth’s waste, plastic shopping bags from the rubbish dump rose up like ghosts into the troposphere of red skies to be taken for a ride, far away. Way out above the ocean, the pollution of dust and wind-ripped pieces of plastic gathered, then dropped with the salty humidity and sank in the waters far below, to become the unsightly decoration of a groper’s highway deep in the sea.

Wild weather was happening all around Norm Phantom, as he rowed through the darkness, pushing with all his strength over the breakers of the tidal surge, taking his clever thoughts with him. His mind had a certain kind of craziness of not caring what happened to him. People said that, but people were wrong, because Norm Phantom was one of the most calculating men on earth, second to none when it came to self-preservation, who normally set out to sea under the cover of a storm.

Those big pretenders sitting in their long grass camps were not in the slightest bit astonished when he told them that those who searched for his secret fishing places had failed.
Lucky! Lucky thing! Too Lucky!
They knew the names of the old white people in Desperance who had sat around miserably for many wasted years, trying to translate the secret conversations Norm had with the heavenly spirits at night.
They will never know.
Those white folk believed that if they could learn how to translate the voices of the stars, their sons would be safe at sea too. They would become invincible, like Norm. Their boats would never return empty, bringing back fish from one end of the street to the other as in the heyday. A little bit of luck was what was needed for the town to rejoice in fish once more. The old people respected Desperance custodians because they felt sorry for them. The graveyard in the sea was full of their sons.

Everybody knows that there are big groper in the Gulf of Carpentaria, but those that joined Norm Phantom on his journeys were the ones nobody else had ever seen. Norm told the old people how he could camouflage himself as a big fish, fooling the local pirates of Desperance when he disappeared over the waves. The old people said he must have sprayed the robbers with Mortein fly spray, to divert them off of his tracks.
It was a very tricky thing to do
, they claimed.

When Truthful went with Girlie Norm had remained seated at the kitchen table brooding about the possibilities of life – if only he had his way. He mumbled something about how it felt as though a foul air had departed. ‘What did you say?’ He ordered his mute tongue to speak. He willed the words jammed in his throat to come out of his mouth, roll around the kitchen, roll down into Girlie’s bedroom. He waited for the words to break through, the words saying he wanted to kill Truthful, to put his body parts into a bag and run off as quick as he could to feed him to the sharks, and that was the truth of the matter. He waited while watching his daughters run around the yard picking up what should not be blown away, closing windows and doors, preparing for the dust storm to hit. He could kill the cop, but the words stopped him from doing it.

Patsy and Janice looked once or twice in the kitchen as they ran around the house. Both knew that if they were not living at home, their father would just sit there, while the wind blew its merry way through the house, taking the lot. He let the house go when they were not around to clean it. He let his daughters sleep with a cop. He let so many things happen. Norm thought they could think whatever they wanted, for it would be a sweet day if all of them got out of his house. The truth was, when Truthful had left the kitchen with Girlie, Norm was incapable of moving. He was immobilised in the glue of his own blood, pinning him like a dead weight to his chair where he wrestled with murder, while the law of the Ten Commandments held his body captive.

Truthful had left the room mumbling something about
reality
. He knew the father played his part, second by second, with enormous intrigue and secrecy. He had watched Norm sit at the kitchen table, uninvolved, detached, immorally complicit, thinking he knew about cat-and-mouse games to outsmart a cop.

Norm’s thoughts on the other hand had been running in a different direction, sifting through the pores of the many different storehouses in his mind. First was the obvious truth of resignation. He would let the white man get what he wanted; wasn’t it always the way with Truthful, growing fat with his own greed, getting whatever he could to gorge himself with? Then, two, he sought someone to tell him it was alright to kill a white man. Where was the Fishman? He knew Mozzie was in town but he still had not come over to see him. He had been half waiting for Mozzie since he heard his cars driving around town. Even now, he was half expecting him to turn up. Mozzie knew how to get to the heart of the matter. He would tell him if he was right about what he felt he should do, play it straight, or play around the back. Well! Why doesn’t he come; he should know something’s up, Norm reasoned, tapping his cup, since he had not gone in search of Mozzie when he hit town like he normally would. Mozzie should realise something was wrong. It seemed that a man could be lying in bed half-dead, waiting for someone to turn up. He had forgotten that Mozzie never came to his place anymore.

Norm thought Elias’s body was most likely Will’s doing, since the girls would have been correct about that. Norm knew it was not his imagination why the cop, watching like a hawk, was in the house. He recaptured a past scene in the kitchen, seeing Will’s fury exploding, kicking his way out of the house, reversing at breakneck speed back down the road he had just arrived from, and screeching to a halt in a ball of dust, to yell, ‘Watch the cop, man!’ Then, with not a moment to lose, foot dead on the gas – that was Will, and the last time he was ever seen around the traps.

Will drove off, leaving the family staring at his dust trail. And somehow, maybe it was because there had been no chance to finish the argument, no resolution, no reconciliation, Norm wanted to help the cop to hunt his son down. Norm knew himself to be a naive man, and too intoxicated with his passion for the sea to abandon it at Will’s request. He believed the world would look after itself, infatuatedly, against the odds, because it always did and because the white world cared little about people like Norm Phantom
.
Norm still pictured him packing and firing his words like bullets, ‘You are wrong, man. You want to take a reality check on the situation, man.’ Norm remembered those words, very insulting, new words around these parts. He frequently had a chance to think about what Will said, so much so he often used his son’s handful of words on others, to be impressive in an argument. This was what memories are made of. Things like Will’s blue ute, left on the outskirts of town heading south. The abandoned car was still there like an ornament on the roadside. A piece of memorabilia, dedicated to the history of the Phantom family, which the father refused to tow home.

The Fishman was in town but where was he? Words were like water sweeping by, taking the memories of Will away. Well! Will was never a proper son. Norm sneered at the oncoming storm; if Girlie did not kill the cop soon, then he might just about do it himself. He pictured the two of them, he and Truthful, out at sea
.
‘Would you want to go fishing tonight son?’ It could easily happen – an accident. He had taken Truthful out enough, though not far, never too far, because he judged a man’s seaworthiness, what he was worth out there. The trips inside the shallow water line, not journeys, were far enough to get him off his back about fishing, time enough to give Girlie a chance. He could have taken Truthful twelve hours out to sea to find the body of Elias, and just as they both looked down in the water and saw the body lying on top of a shallow undersea ridge, it would be then that Truthful would stand up in the rocking boat to get a closer look, saying, ‘Where? Where? Keep it steady,’ and these would be his last words before he fell, after he had leant too far over the side, just as Norm leant across to pull him back, the boat unbalanced on Truthful’s side, just as they were floating on top of the groper’s den. Unfortunately, things happened too fast, the cop was drowning at sea, dropping quickly into the depths with the heavy force of his overweight body, fully clothed in uniform, his mouth open in the absolute shock at seeing passing pictures of himself drowning. Truthful would think someone else was holding a slide show of his death,
click, clap
, and Norm saw himself, many hours later, stricken with regret, apologising to Girlie. Norm had finally relented to the kind sea, and he was unable to reach down far enough into the water to bring Truthful back.

He opened the kitchen door again to let in the fresh air of the dust storm, so he could look at the wind flying past. He was waiting for that tall, skinny man with the untidy rat-coloured hair to come along. Gordie had inherited the tin combat hat that had once belonged to the madman Nicoli Finn, before he was found belly up and picked at by every fish in the bay, way out in the low tide. The ladies of Desperance said Nicoli died fighting like a soldier. The few witnesses attending the annual picnic day had watched Finn in his final encounter, but said afterwards, even though they had talked about what they could do, and had even decided to take a closer look, they decided to keep walking along the beach kicking the seashells out of the way so as to appear as though they were not watching his birds
.
At the wake they said:
He was
pretty particular about his birds you know
. The witnesses said Finn was fighting the hawks which kept diving at him, diving out of an ordinary blue sky, just like missiles. Someone remembered remarking at the time while Finn was doing his work:
This is what the war must have looked like
. The old maidens attending the picnic could only imagine what took place in a war, just as they wondered to which unfortunate battle in what corner of the globe their knitted socks and blankets for the national war effort had been dispatched long ago.

Officially, he was doing his own business, and the maidens said they were not to get involved in someone else’s affairs, even if they should have, for it would have been improper to interfere in a man’s work, and they had grown fearful that if they had interfered, they could have done nothing to prevent the attack, and what if the hawks started attacking them? Saving Finn was a job for the police, they remarked without offence. What was being asked of them was a job a decent wife would do if Finn had been sensible enough to acquire one. Well! He was dead now and useless to anyone.

After Finn died and Elias left, poor Gordie inherited the mantle of neighbourhood watch. Gordie was magnificent. You could watch him, always with a compass swinging around his neck, and a hammer in his hand, in case he had to tack down the net. If he did not have these things, then you would have to think something was wrong, something was out of order. Gordie forgot nothing. He was good at his job. The best. When he became the official watchman for the town he taught himself to walk fast, first by running, then gradually slowing the running until he got it down to a trot, and from a trot, to a fast walk. Had to. He had to circumnavigate the town every three hours come rain, storm or nothing. And be better than Finn, who had a background in surveillance.

With the storm under way and Truthful ensconced out of sight in a tryst with Girlie, Norm waited for the moment Gordie would appear, striding his way across the horizon. He had seen him pass earlier in the night. The cloud cover was heavy, hiding the light of the moon, but the white dog had groaned in its sleep when it heard the passerby crackle the stubble grass underfoot. More intently, Norm watched again at midnight when the clouds had lifted and the moonlight shone like a torch. He watched for Gordie’s eyes on the prowl.

Once he saw Gordie was heading back towards town again, marching on a track through the salty marshes near the beach, Norm listened for the startled sea birds squawking as he approached their nests. He quickly gathered his sea gear together. Matching the extraordinary quietness of the night bird in the blackness outside hopping past the house, he moved past the bedrooms of his sleeping family. Truthful snored peacefully. Norm paused outside Girlie’s room before continuing to the fishroom. He returned, carrying his fishing tackle, then paused once more to see Kevin, still sleeping.

Outside the house he picked up Elias, and along with his gear and fishing tackle, swung the body over his shoulder. He moved off towards where his little aluminium boat was moored in the shallows, where the murmuring sea with its incoming tide kissed the shoreline. An owl was speaking to the night. These were the only sounds. With the thought of going on a long ocean trip after being on land so long, Norm felt light-headed, but he packed the boat and was ready to leave within minutes
.
‘We’ll go together, just like old times,’ Norm told Elias, as he pushed the boat further out on the water. Repeatedly he told himself it was the right thing to do. He was not too old. He could still do the journey.

He had taken Elias to the gropers’ place in the middle of the sea before, and had been surprised that Elias already knew of it. The gropers started to rise in the water all around the boat, mingling closer and closer than they had ever done in all of the years Norm had gone on this pilgrimage. Norm had been sure that there was communication between the fish and Elias. Then, he saw the gentlest expression on Elias’s face as he looked up from the water. It was a child’s face, smiling at the look of Norm’s concern. Elias turned back and slapped his hands under the water.