Carpentaria (39 page)

The ghostly tribe was already leaving by the time Norm pulled the boat back through the foam. One by one, they had started disappearing through the flooding bushlands, most likely following their own familiar roads back to the hilly country further inland. They had tied the end of the rope to a tree. Norm left the boy in the boat and quickly pulled it along through the watery bush, searching in the direction where the strange tribe was vanishing into the rain ahead. In his mind, he had a vague plan to gain the highest ground before nightfall. If he could reach a hill, he would climb the summit and wait for the sea to stop ploughing into the coastline.

A summit had to be found. There would be no point moving after the skies turned dark, because the people he was trying to follow would have dissolved into the bush of night. He knew as soon as night fell he would never see them again and his memory of them too would be gone.

E
ven God goes around like one thing, they say…

Too good! Even everyone sitting around nice in the Pricklebush say they knew who the maker was. Phoney talk was often spoken there:
Oh! Yes! We know him personally
. Hmm! Hmm! Just like they knew November over the flat country. Oh! Heavy heart, if you were to see miracles happen, look to the heavens in November. See him properly for yourself in those dark, stormy skies of the Wet season build-up. Look for the giant in a cloak. Brace yourself when he comes rolling through the dust storm, spreading himself red, straight across those ancient dry plains, heading for town. Watch carefully for the evaporation creeping down invisibly, right into the ignorant minds of the people living in Uptown and, you know what? He turned some of them mad too, just like all those people you see living about over there in the Pricklebush.

That’s right. The giant sugarbag man of the skies walked from horizon to horizon, carrying storms and hazes of madness, and sweat! Humidity was plain old sticky syrup falling through the atmosphere like a curse. Fools. People went for it. Went mad from it. Uptown called the sugarbag man spirit ‘seasonal rains’, or their ‘silly season’, and among them there were fatalities. Statistics rocketed in mortality for both black and white, when the air grew heavy and fat. The perpetual dampness was terrible. It lasted for weeks on end, and how sick and tired of it people became. Every day, grimacing with the glare, they gazed upwards hoping for rain, and chucking their weight around for good measure when none came. You should have heard them. Presumptuous to the core, the way they assumed so much familiarity towards the Almighty maker: Calling out in their cynical voices –
God! You never seem to end
.

Have they gone mad? Secret! Air caused madness. Sanity? Where about? Lost, like respect was, trampled in the sodden ground. The mindless buggers split: ran off to the bush. Very likely careering around dressed as feral fairies or devils, and who knows what else they thought they were, hugging trees, or hiding among spinifex like birds, and some never came back. Others turned killers without cause. Everyone, regardless of colour, had to put up with it along the shores of the Gulf, before the rains came.

Meanwhile, mould of strange-coloured greens invaded every dampened premise, person or thing. The mildew, fed on moisture-laden air steaming up from the earth, spread a magical, sealike world above water, throughout Desperance. This short-lived phenomenon was regarded as something strange, occurring outside the realm of nature, before the dust storms came to slam doors open and shut. The mould could cloud rational thought, and they (Uptown) said some funny things to each other. When hard put by the weather, they found the words to describe a multitude of flukes, and this year, when Norm never came back from the sea, was no exception.

For years it was believed that the hens of Desperance had become bewitched and purposely covered the eggs they laid in a putrid fowl-yard muck. It was like that when the build-up called into town like an enchantress whose prime motive was to saturate everything and cause creatures of domesticity to become demons. Dogs and cats became covered with infectious sores from head to tail, and sat scratching themselves all day long. The oldest children in the population of Uptown, well on the way to becoming real Aussie battlers up North of the country, were one step ahead in being more suspicious than their parents, and without a word of doubt, cautioned younger siblings at the breakfast table. They sniggered, saying how they knew a real googie-egg when they saw one, or which were imposters used by perverse parents to insult the intelligence of children. ‘Them the ones that come out of those ugly, bare bum chooks,’ they squirmed, visualising the moulting chooks down the backyard walking around in the mud. ‘If nobody moves that egg from the table I am going to vomit.’ Whispering about the foetus: ‘See, that black thing? That is the faeces of a devil.’ A sledgehammer would not have forced one of them little Uptown kids to open their mouth for an egg after that.

See! All summer long it went on like this: What to do with children of Uptown who would not eat egg? Of course nothing but those grimy eggs had to be the main topic of interest when those little Pricklebush boys, the petrol sniffers, were arrested and taken to a shimmering silver, green, gold and red tinsel-decorated jail. Tristrum Fishman. Junior Fishman Luke. Aaron Ho Kum. Three little boys. There was a roar for those three little boys, saying, ‘They got their just deserts.’ They got their just deserts? You could spend the rest of your life examining those five words, change the sound, bend them, twist them up, even change it into something like: Just deserts! They got theirs. Like eggs. Hey! There was no cause for a speck of glitter, no fortitude of spirit to waste for them three. Why had no one walked right down there to Main Street of Uptown, to bail out of jail any one of the little petrol-sniffer boys who had been accused of viciously killing Gordie, the neighbourhood watch, the night when Norm Phantom had rowed away, taking Elias’s body back to sea?

Citizens protected by the net to keep trouble away – secure citizens, living in real houses with nice graded Uptown streets – needed to talk about ways of producing clean eggs from backyard hens, so they watched their pet fowl very carefully, to add to the conversation. Vogue was what vogue was. Nobody watched for the little boys down in the jail.

The hundreds of inbreds kept strutting about, free ranging, and with the moult, appeared half plucked, while bucketloads of summer downpours rained down on them. Hours went by: beautiful linear hours. The casual prickly bush observer, either East or Westside, knew, with the kids of Uptown, inbred fowl had no brain. The town camp people never ate those eggs. The grocery shop tried to flog cheap, dollar a dozen, dollar fifty for two, in the cartons of proper eggs which came from clean farms, ‘Down South’. Same thing, people started to get scared of anything else, foodwise, Uptowners produced to eat, like vegetables, fish cakes, sponge cakes on fête day. You could never be too careful of catching something. There was no point asking for problems.

In this era of modern domesticity, where personal interest smothers the hope and joy of all of mankind, no one in Uptown ventured outside of their louvred homes where windows were tightly shut. So much caution about the colour of skin had been dragged from the past into the new millennium. They said it was to prevent all the goings-on in the street from moving inside their homes with the breeze. Outside, in the backyards, they watched, investigated and took note of fowlry shuffling around in mud-bearing ulcerated chests, and flashing red raw bums of the summer moult.

Day in, day out, nothing seemed to be happening for the boys accused of killing Gordie. They were left there, locked up in the town’s little jail, known as Truthful’s planetarium, neglected amongst the crowded foliage of the
jarrbikala
’s strappy and viney tropical indoor oasis, feeling like they were starting to rot. Nobody gave a continental that those boys were standing in the same clothes they had been arrested in. Clothes turning mouldy in the damp cell. If they had looked all sweaty-skinned from the humidity building up in the bullyman’s jail, nobody noticed. That they waited
sine die
for justice was nobody’s concern
.

‘You are going to get your just deserts for this. You are all going to pay for this, just you wait and see,’ the boys were told enough by Truthful, who, not accounting for the initial brief sideshow, when everyone in town wanted to have a look at the accused killers the day they were arrested, had increasingly become their only human contact. It often seemed to the boys, as the hours passed by, that the waiting for justice seemed to be becoming the punishment itself. They watched Truthful cleaning up around the jail building and they could see, and he wanted them to see, that he was really proud to be an active, crime-stopping policeman again.

It was obvious to the boys, watching his every move, that their jailer drove down to the pub himself to get their meals. It was not easy for E’Strange. The hotel cook, his single aide-de-camp, shook her fat permed head of stiff mauve-tinted hair in disgust, when she handed over three disposable plates of meals wrapped with alfoil. ‘Lovie, you are wasting you time,’ she warned him, as though the food was too good for those boys. The clientele watched the methodical Truthful going past by the glass windows of the public bar carrying the meals at the taxpayer’s expense, and grumbled into the bar that it was a bloody waste of taxpayers’ money and why don’t they shoot the little buggers?

The three boys, Tristrum aged ten, and his brother Luke Fishman aged twelve, and Aaron Ho Kum aged eleven, all Bob Marley look-alikes, had asked no questions, did not expect any favours, and asked for no one. Together, when they had been left alone, when sure no one was listening, they huddled in a corner spinning out in a whirl of raw-felt fear, clawing into each other, believing they were not humans. Often, they spoke about how they thought they were being kept like lizards in a zoo. Sometimes, they would hazard a guess by trying to make heads or tails out of why they were there in the first place, waiting for their ‘just deserves’. Spinning on their addiction and sudden withdrawal, they interpreted ‘just deserves’, as the impending time when Truthful would molest them.

The terrible murder of Gordie during the night of the first seasonal storm left a sour taste over little Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the Gods, some called the ceremony of thunder, on the eve of heralding all the nights of stormy weather. This particular night was the same night, coincidently, that Norm Phantom had cast off into the gloominess of the open sea under the pretext of going off fishing, and never came back. It was surely strange, given that the whole town regarded Norm with suspicion, accusing him of many unsolved crimes in the past, that no one laid a finger of blame on him for Gordie’s death. The other murders Norm had been accused of were not like Gordie’s murder at all. Those, they agreed, were only black murders. This was different and required the very best one could expect of civil action from the Australian law.

So, this was what happened. Quietly, the town celebrated Norm, the fisherman’s fisherman’s return to the sea. Years ago, before he stopped fishing, Norm’s relationship with the sea had been a beacon of light to others. His understated prowess in maritime adventures had led all nature of mature men to believe that they lived in the good company of a sea wizard in God’s own country, and once again, simply from living in close proximity to Norm’s prickly bush camp, his good luck would naturally flow onto all the others who went fishing too. The pressure imposed from the weight of seamen’s graves lifted. All negative thoughts disappeared. There was no longer an ocean full of bad omens and impending deaths. Norm made it safe for others. Everyone could go to sea now, even if only in fishy dreams of trevally-loaded seas. What other explanation could there be, for the heavy cloak of suspicion reserved for Norm Phantom to have been lifted so swiftly, and without a shadow of doubt? The nights that followed were full with a thousand elaborate dreams of seas so choking with fish, it was easier to walk over them, than take a boat.

All the brave hearts talked fish at the Fisherman’s Hotel. In calm conversation building in gentle waves, they said, ‘And why should he come back?’ It was a time for wishing and great solace was found in it. They wished that they too had no reason to come back. Everyone wished to escape paradise from time to time. Wished to slide away in the middle of the night out to the storms, throwing their fate to the sea.

So this was how it was. Ineluctable, magical moments of light-headedness flowed through town during the humidity. Somebody had been murdered, some boys had been arrested, and somebody had left town. Normal! Although many often complained about ‘the dead town with no life to it at all,’ and frequently lamented how they wanted to leave one day, it was pretty difficult to unbuckle the notions of permanence. The constricting binds strapped into their lives, strangling them with the fear of possibility. Nobody found it easy to leave their life: home, friends, parents, grandchildren. A known place to be buried in when they died.

There were not many who were prepared to take a gamble with leaving a place like Desperance. Yet, the town boasted an above average representation of professional gamblers. The leader by a long shot, was the mayor, Bruiser, regarded by some as possibly being an alien, because he knew how to brush with good luck. He sat about inside his modern lounge room with a couch bigger than anyone else had to sit on, on those stormy nights. With brown Nugget and brush, people spoke about seeing Bruiser polishing up his old bookie’s leather money bag, in readiness for the dry winter race day, to set up his bookie box outside of the pub. But Bruiser daydreamed about money traffic, where anyone passing could wager for or against Norm Phantom ever making it back to the melancholy seashores of Desperance.

When Bruiser brought the leather bag into the Fisherman’s Hotel hoping to catch what he called the ‘night swill’, word got around Desperance.
All praise to the sea. Is he our man of absolute sea fidelity? Fifty to one, he’s
not.
Very quickly, wishing became excitement and entertainment. The gambling fever overtook the town’s shock at the murder of Gordie. The pub became so congested with gamblers and arguments about seamanship, that Truthful was called in to see what he could do. The owl-faced barman, who was implicated in the murder case by being the father of one of the boys in jail, although he had never owned up to his paternity, helped Truthful to build a queue of those inside the small crowded bar, jockeying for space.

Yesterday, all of the town was up in arms about the killing. Their usually complacent faces had turned aghast, knowing something so terrible could grab your heart and violently shake you into the quick pulse of the world. It was a pulse that demanded pay-back from your knowledge of having a little bit of secure life. It asks you to deal personally with a world where children kill. Initially, so shocked were these shattered townsfolk, they cried out to each other,
What has the world come to?
It was a difficult thing to deal with, this deception in their little world of Desperance. Their lives were solid, built on generations which had through the decades guarded their net of privacy and minded their own business.