Carpentaria (40 page)

Parents in this world believed in its unique position to the rest of the world. Lives could be lived in the pristine vastness of the quiet mud plains, silent saltpans and still spinifex plains, where children grew up with a sense of nature and the knowledge of how lonely the planet could be. Children in this world belonged to the thinking of fairytales which came out of books, or else, the happy life of children’s television. Theirs was the quiet world where murder was not a child’s toy.

Initially, when people of Uptown heard of Gordie’s murder, they had remained in their houses, examining their souls, never expecting to be confronted by a hideous crime committed by children. This was the sort of thing that only happened elsewhere in the mean, bad world, where the crazy people lived. They knew this because they had seen the lot on television and felt lucky, it was not Australia. Never in their wildest imagination had they expected to see the likes of downtown Desperance splashed across television, like New York, Jerusalem or Kosovo.

So, unlike the rest of the world, it was decided by the Town Council that nobody was ever to see the crying face of Desperance on television. It made a humble request to the citizens to keep their mouths shut: ‘We don’t want anyone thinking we are not decent people.’ The silent word spread the usual way by the invisible net’s strictly confidential notification system, through word of mouth. The town’s ranks closed. Even a fly found it difficult to penetrate such a closure to lay its maggoty eggs. This was truly the only place on earth where decent, lip-sealed people lived. No one would see Desperance laying its soul bare. No one would see perplexed faces stretched like fawn-coloured lino across the nation’s screens. No one would see Desperance as Desperance saw the world – static broken and lacy lines for the seven o’clock news punctured with electrical storms, until a complete blackout was achieved. This was fondly known as nature’s censorship. No one would go publicly to the world at large asking, ‘How could this happen here?’

So, poor old Gordie. The whole town cried as they rallied together one way or other to help the victim’s family. There was praying to do. The burying. They would take their part on the jury to see justice was done when the case finally came to the district court. Everybody thought mightily of their poor old Gordie. ‘He never hurt a fly,’ they said.

Initially, on that eventual morning, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the month of November, when Gordie did not play the remembrance bugle, everyone thought:
Alright! Something is astray. Something smells mightily funny to me.
Although, at first, everyone had thought very little about it. Perhaps Gordie was sick with the summer flu. Nothing to be done about that. Life went on as usual. Desperance was a normal town where even the bugle player had as much right as anyone else to get sick with influenza and stay home in bed. Normal people knew how to tell the time without depending on a clock, or a signal, and had enough decency, unlike the rest of the country, to stand for one minute’s silence in respect of the fallen on the eleventh hour, even without the bugle of the returned, to remind them. However, valiant attempts at normality could not replace the bad smell in the air. The people of Uptown, without realising it, started waiting for the bugle. A wave of uneasiness flowed through the town. They felt as though someone was playing around with their sense of security. Everyone started to look out for Gordie.
When will he come?
they complained.
He should have been by
by now.
Fair weather or naught, everyone knew Gordie walked the town, even if he had influenza, doing his job to the hour, but naught had happened and this was not good. The day was ruined because of Gordie.

Ruined more than they thought. After the rain stopped, some poor unsuspecting anyone was whimsically walking along, with thoughts only of ploughing through the mud with a useless pair of thongs on their feet, on that same path now through the bush, and minding their own business, when Gordie was found. The body was steaming like hot bread with the two o’clock sun pouring down. Well! After that, it was Lordy! Lordy! There was nothing abstract about hell breaking loose in Desperance. The town bell would not stop ringing under the flagpole where the bugler used to play the remembrance tune. Every single citizen, first-class, second-class, third-class and any other riffraff after that, had been summoned onto the Council lawns. All ears rung with the talk, talk, talk which followed on for what seemed like hours. The powerful voices of the Town Council were overwhelmed with emotion when they said to the assembled populace, that it was a miracle any of his physical remains were found at all.

The Christian connection on the Council said Gordie must have had a guardian angel, because nobody would have found him at all if he had not been covered with blowflies
. There must have been millions of the
buggers
, they said of the wet body.
They were as thick as a black cloud
. They said, those people who were at the site, that if you had moved within a certain closeness, Gordie looked like some kind of disjointed black buzzing devil letting off hot steam.

You could even see various parts of him jumping up here and there, and the rest of him – Well! Let’s say, thank God his Mother was in an institution. And two, the Council ought to start doing something about all of those camp dogs. Anybody should be allowed to shoot the bloody lot of them on first sight whenever they go up and down Main Street. Bloody nuisance they are.

The whole town began participating in an uproar about wandering dogs and petrol-sniffing kids.
Find out where they come from and get the damn lazy government in Canberra to ship the whole lot back there. Send them all to Canberra.

No, the body was not a pretty sight, and the ugly head of all of those wild pig stories resurfaced about the ghost of Abilene. Terrible memories were opened up again. The grisly bush deaths in the past two or three decades, which could be counted on one hand, very quickly became exaggerated into something else.
This sort of thing
happens all the time
, chimed some of the more disturbed townsfolk. It was the kind of talk that got everyone revved up and excitable. Volatile language was used.

There were others who had to bring the cemetery into the equation, by making one sour point after another about who was buried there. Anybody. Anything. Sometimes not even a body was even put into a grave. There should be rules about burying things over at the cemetery.

‘You want to know the truth about the cemetery?’ A loud foghorn of a voice piped up. ‘It is chock-a-block full of graves with bags full of the bits and pieces of incomplete bodies.’ Everyone knew who was talking because the foghorn man had insisted his son be buried there after he disappeared. Everyone knew he had just run away from Desperance: driven off in his Falcon after half-a-dozen send-off parties. Some day he would return, and find he had already been buried by his father.

The old people from the Pricklebush who had been picked up by Truthful, and forced to attend this meeting, were not very happy at all with this talk about the cemetery. They spat on the ground at each piece of tripe, while Uptown moved sideways in perpetual motion. It was they who saw all the dead people walking off into the afterlife. What Uptown liked to call tritaroon, quadroon, octaroon, full blood, or if speaking about themselves, friends and neighbours. Or, else, those broken parts, looking like a far cry from God’s image of a quintessential man. Imagine that. A bizarre soul hovering forever over the district, searching with the eye of an eagle into the guts of an albatross for the rest of their parts. They knew throwing stones dipped in holy water never worked miracles. Or, leaving the gizzards of a cow on the spot of the fallen. Or, throwing into the ocean, a pot of stale urine taken on the night of a full moon six months previously by a sober person from an intoxicated person. Nor any other chic, New-Age spells that people tried, to cast away the evil from invading their homes. If you were dead and still hanging around searching for parts of your body, your soul might choose a better home than the miserable one you had before.

Such was the wisdom of the elders. They said it was to be expected that people who believed only those who helped themselves got along in life, would resort to magic even in this day and age, although they never expected the Uptown mob would own up and say they were involved in it. These were serious-minded people who had escaped wars and famine from all over the world. This was why the elders were quiet at the meeting about Gordie. Anything could happen. Who knows, they whispered, what ideas Uptown would put into their heads from losing their Gordie. ‘Remember! Who bloody knows what kind of traditions people have, who say they came from nowhere and don’t believe in their own God anymore.’

Sometimes people like Norm Phantom called the community disarray of Uptown the net of irrelevance. It did not take much for ordinary Pricklebush residents, family people, to see what the elders were able to see all along. Deaths like Gordie’s gave the townsfolk the heebie
-
jeebies
.
They became hooked into a subconscious mind which was used to seeing things, particularly in those typical red-tinged cloud-covered skies of the Gulf, the
narwhal
-coloured disembowelled spectre of the supernatural. Half the town claimed, on the gospel truth, they owned extraordinary gifts of perception enabling them to see ghosts, as though it was like the purchase of a new car.

Everyone was blaming the petrol sniffers for killing the neighbourhood-watch person Gordie. But those little boys were never told why they were in jail. The three little boys did not speak or ask questions because they knew not to listen to anyone in town. They had been told,
Every time you go into that town, close your ears to those white people who might not even be human, who may be, may be not
. Uptown was a world apart, like the spiritual world, which could be imagined by children to have living there white-man spirits like fairies, goblins, elves, imps or leprechauns, or something else more sinister. What else could be true, if they had come from out of nowhere? It was hard not to listen when Uptown talked so persuasively. But little kids want to live, so they closed their ears up good.

When the town had come together on the day they found Gordie dead on the path, not many of the people who lived on the outskirts, whose houses did not qualify for the protection of the net provided by municipal services, bothered coming up to town. ‘Who cares what,’ the Phantom sisters grumbled. They agreed that they were not going anywhere near the town, if they had to stand within inches of those smelly land-thieving cunts from the other side. ‘Talk about your own business yourselves,’ Janice Phantom joked, looking towards the town, up the muddy track, as though she had the power to be heard long distance. For good measure, she held out her full left arm, with her index fingers giving her best ‘up yours’ signal, while her right hand shook the other arm up and down. ‘You wanta stop being so stupid,’ Patsy told her, and Girlie agreed.

Patsy was trying to feed a bowl of stew to Kevin with a spoon. She was annoyed with her brother because he knew he was an imposition, and by clamping his mouth shut on her, he was creating even more of a nuisance of himself. She knew he was sulking because his father had gone to sea without him, but that did not bother her, so before too long, she put her best effort towards forcing the spoon through his lips.

Girlie had just taken a shower and was feeling better after spending at least thirty minutes watching the alcohol-ridden stench of Truthful wash into the drain. There was no way any of them were going to tramp through a kilometre of muddy road just to go and listen to a bunch of rednecks. Kevin, seeing Girlie come in with just a towel wrapped around her, opened his mouth, and Patsy stuffed it with several tablespoons full of the thick mix of meat, potato and carrots. ‘Well! That’s that then,’ she said, quite satisfied with herself that the meal was finished. ‘When is that blasted bell ever going to stop ringing?’ she said. She had half the mind to go up there and bloody well kill whoever was ringing it.

The town clerk Valance, with decades of background in municipal service that had never prepared him for the likes of his position in Desperance, could not get the crime off his mind and the more he thought about it, the more he could see himself becoming twisted up in a knot about having to explain what had happened to the assembled people. The way they kept sitting around outside the Council office examining him from a distance with stern-looking faces, he thought they must have thought he had committed the murder. So, not knowing what might happen if he stopped, he kept on ringing the bell.

It looked as though the whole town had arrived to watch his baby blue eyes staring abstractly into space. His tubby body slithered up and down with the rope, pulling and sweating, as though he had been ringing that bell forever. He looked straight through the bewildered assembly who watched him very carefully, while they tried to determine if he had lost his marbles. No one felt anyone had the right to interfere with a man’s job, particularly someone they had only known for about eight years, so they sat and watched and waited, determined to let him go on ringing, at least until the law arrived.

Looking past reality, Valance saw another landscape transposed on his mind, a perfect world he had temporarily created, although it did happen. The hinterland people were saying, ‘Yes sir, listen to the bell, the angelus bell, Angelus Domini,’ and walking like pilgrims, like the holy folk would, coming into town. His efforts were especially for the town camp brethren, calling on the Holy Trinity in the storm clouds above by ringing the bell, hoping his Gods would look down on those poor unfortunates and shower them with the strength to walk to town.

Praise men of ambition who strive for newfangled ideas like reconciliation in old Australia, for Valance with his pricked conscience used every opportunity as town clerk, to make town campers feel like they were a part of the broader community. Even though Gordie was not their neighbourhood watch, Valance considered the community service was available for all folks. Yet, the longer the bell rang, the more people on both sides of the old Pricklebush wars were declaring from their respective sides of town, how they were going to destroy that bell once and for all one day, as soon as they got the chance.