Carpentaria (42 page)

Nevertheless, black was black. No living person could change the colour of skin. When the white father had never even bothered claiming his coloured child, even though everyone else was saying it was his, she made a horrific vow. Just as she said, she never ever went to Uptown again. Some say, it was because of the vicious rumours, that the poor woman decided to live cooped up in a little dark room with the door shut and locked. Her brother claimed she made her stand, her skin eventually turned white, just like a white woman’s. Now, he claimed, she was scared of what people would say. She was too proud to come out and face the music after all these years, and why should she, the wise brother said, explaining: ‘The world goes round and round, and it was not going to change one little bit for one moment in her lifetime, or anyone else’s who’s black around Desperance as a matter of fact.’

Never a flash man, he spoke plain about what other people only liked to think. Miscegenation was the word, he said, for interbreeding: ‘was treated as though good white sperm had been falsely procured by a lesser kind and produced a snake
.
’ The woman’s brother looked after everything the best he knew how, including being a father and a mother, right from birth, to the little troublemaker Aaron. Everyone knew he did everything, while trying to mind a herd of goats he kept on a high block, south of town. He now had two hundred goats, all kinds and colours interbred from building on fifty years of goats, living on the very same spot. Whenever the wind turned, and ran from the south, the pungent stench vaporising out of that piece of ground stank the town out. The goats’ wind it was called. The wind with no wife. The Uncle worked hard because of the goats, fed his family, fed the goats, milked the goats, made the town’s cheese, and bought freezers to store his product when the Town Council provided him with a power line. It prided Uptown to see Aaron Ho Kum’s Uncle do well with a hard life. It pleased them to watch the goat shepherd walking on foot, in weather fair or fraught, tending his flock. Only thing though, and it troubled Uptown, for they could not help thinking that Aaron was funny sort of material to be mixing up in the gene pool and all.

There were a lot of theories, but no answer.

All the country mob in the Pricklebush were shaking their heads disbelievingly, when they heard about what happened. Up and down the Pricklebush, you could see people going along to each other’s place, and asking: ‘You know why those three little petrol sniffers would want to kill Gordie in the middle of the night?’ It was a million-dollar question.

The three boys were asleep when Truthful and Bruiser found them. They were lying side by side, just like they were sardines squashed in a rusty shell, and this was what they might have looked like, when they were found inside the upside-down Holden sedan they called home. The car body was jammed into a camouflage of dense thickets of pricklebush. The dehydrated boys, awoken when dragged out of the car body by the neck, were vaguely aware in a déjà vu kind of way, that something bad was happening to them. Had they escaped one net and fallen straight into another? Only yesterday, members of the Fishman’s convoy had unsuccessfully scoured the whole countryside around Desperance searching for those naughty boys.

Angel Day told Mozzie the boys did not live with her, they moved around with relatives. She hardly saw them and that was true.

Those up-to-no-good boys hid here and hid there, even though they knew their old Daddy was looking for them. They knew how to dissolve into thin air, being nothing more than skin and bone kids. One minute they were seen, and the next minute they were gone. Each could have been a blade of grass, or a little prickly bush, they knew how to do it.

When the convoy left town, those cheeky boys came out from hiding, jubilant smiles running across their faces. ‘You are in charge Tristram.’ ‘You the power.’ ‘No you the destroyer man Aaron.’ ‘You are.’ ‘You are.’ Tumbling through fairyland, their voices rang through the grasslands, and this was young hope, the place where optimism should dwell. Finally, sitting on the roof of the old car body, feeling safe, they watched the exodus of dust heading down the south road. The last thing they wanted was discipline. Being on the road for months and months with Mozzie Fishman’s convoy was not likely to be any picnic. He had warned them: ‘Break ya leg first with a bit of wood if I ever catch ya sniffing petrol.’ They had heard all about the Fishman’s reform agenda for petrol sniffers.

It was unfortunate for them that they were incoherently high on petrol, glue, metho, or whatever cocktail had been their last meal, when Truthful and Bruiser found them. Neither of the three had any idea what was happening to them when the two men threw them into the back seat of the lime-green car and sped over to the jail building. They were dragged inside the premises of the lockup, through to the back, into the walled exercise yard, and thrown around the walled space as though they were sacks of potatoes. Like potatoes, the boys just hit the floor and stayed where they fell.

Manhandling was proving to be a pretty fruitless exercise, as Truthful was quick to discover. He suddenly stopped throwing the boys around. A cop had to remember his duty. Truthful noticed how abstract their blood looked, as it dripped down from the clean walls and onto the clean concrete floor. A sickening image of cattle being slaughtered flashed across his mind, and the first thing he understood was, he would have to clean up. With a mind trained for recording detail, he remembered the detainees were semi-comatose when apprehended. This fact would be written into his formal report. Now, he finds, they are starting to look as though they had been put through a mincing machine.

Even Truthful knew this was a dumb move. ‘Hey! Come on Bruse, this is not getting us anywhere.’ He noticed the panic in his voice. If! If! imprinted on his consciousness like a highway poster. If there was a Death in Custody. He knew the sucker who would take the rap for it. But not if he could help it, he was not going to be the fall guy. It would be Bruiser’s word against his. Quickly the pennies fell, all saying, someone needs to be smart. He realised there wouldn’t be one politician, or bureaucrat connected with the State government, who would be game enough to challenge the influential Bruiser, Mayor of Desperance in the woop woop, and get away with it. ‘Constable,’ he told himself smartly, ‘you are on your own.’

The policeman watched helplessly as Bruiser hauled up one of the boys, holding him at face level, while his spit sprayed into the boy’s face as he spoke.

‘Where were you last night, you little piece of shit?’ Bruiser demanded, his scarred face set like concrete, sweat running down from his hairy skull, over his lumpy forehead, and onto his exposed brown teeth, baring now like those of a savage dog. The boy looked dully at the man through his hooded eyelids, incapable, it crossed Truthful’s mind, of even opening his eyes in fright. The lack of response from the boy did not lessen the sport, because Bruiser read the situation as meaning only one thing, contempt.

‘You don’t want to tell me, and if you don’t tell me, you make me mad, and you know what’s going to happen if you make me mad?’ He looked into the boy’s face, which was only inches away from his own, and found it was blank. So, with his other hand rolled into a fist, he rammed it into the boy’s stomach and sent him flying. Truthful saw the boy land, slammed into the far wall, where he fell into a crumpled heap.

‘Shit! Bruiser. Enough, before you go too far.’

The big man was lost in a frenzy. His huge frame stomped from one end of the small exercise yard to the other, while kicking and dragging up one limp sack and throwing it against the wall, then picking up another and throwing it, and another. This struck Truthful in an oblique kind of way as overwhelming reverence towards the search for truth, to the point that it meant killing everyone in the increasingly bloodied yard to find it.

Truthful tried to drag Bruiser outside, but the older man was bigger, and stronger in his new-found strength. ‘Let’s go mate and see if we can round up the parents. Who knows? Maybe they can give us a clue about what happened,’ he said, trying in a last ditch vain attempt to place himself in front of Bruiser who was ducking and weaving to get past. ‘Stop it! Stop it! You want to be up on a murder charge?’ Truthful yelled at him.

Bruiser could scarcely believe his ears. Was he hearing things? Who was going to be on the murder charge around here?’ Thump! Crash! Another kid went flying past the cop. At this point, Truthful lost his temper. The idyllic country cop was dismissed with a click of the fingers, and the Valley cop re-emerged like a circus trick. Here was the set face of law and justice in a city alley after midnight. It belonged to a cop who did whatever it took to survive rort and corruption. He drew his gun. A shot went into the sky. The whole town must have heard it. The clouds paid back with thunder. He pointed the gun straight at Bruiser’s face, stood firm, following Bruiser’s movements. ‘Fucking stop fuckhead, or I’ll fucking use it.’ Bruiser looked at him for a moment, noticing the finger firmly over the trigger, and laughed. ‘Bloody Mafia,’ Bruiser blurted out over his laughter, having been reminded of scenes from
The Godfather I
or
II
, it did not matter, it was what he thought. ‘Has anyone ever told you you look like the son of a Sicilian Mafia leader?’ Truthful kept his aim with his eye fixed on the target.

‘Well! Okay. If you want to shoot me, then, come on, shoot me here,’ Bruiser pointed to his forehead. ‘Then look at them murdering scum and shoot them, put them out of their misery the dogs, you idiot!’

The moment passed and the cop put his gun away. He felt defeated. He was angry with himself now. Only a junior cop would go around pulling his gun like a cowboy. One stupid decision and he knew he had lost all the credibility he had earned, cultivated over years, to become Bruiser’s mate. Now, except for the sound of rain falling and thunder from a nearby storm, there was silence in the human corral. The cop dragged each of the boys inside to the cell and locked them in. Bruiser dusted dirt off himself, and washed his hands at the wash basin in the office, then stalked outside to wait in the car.

They drove around town through heavy rain and mud, wheels spinning in the wet clay, engine smoking, skirting the mud larks. Bruiser did not seem to care anymore about the condition of the car: forgetting how he had considered it was sacrilegious if anyone laid a finger on the shiny new paint work. To the passing stares, he sneered, ‘Wave. Captains of society wave. So wave and show some respect, even if they didn’t teach you those things where you come from.’

They arrived at Angel Day’s Uptown house first. Her house was a little grey fibro job. Nondescript really, with cracked and broken fibro louvres, sad and sorry walls. The lot thrown together sometime in the sixties on a cement slab in a big empty yard. It had one saving grace. An address that somehow stoked the fires of passion in even the hardiest of hearts, as they passed by. A house which showered cupid’s arrows on sweethearts it was thought, by those who believed it had happened to them, because of the house. A house infectious with burning lust which inspired forbidden imaginings in passing lovers. Dogs and cats on heat stopped by each evening to mate in the yard. Which goes to show, that love knoweth no obstacle, and does not discriminate.

This was the house of the long hot summer night. Mozzie Fishman had bought it for a song, when Angel had abandoned her plain old life for another; ‘simply,’ she explained, ‘to lose myself and come alive again in hot, humid caresses, for love’s sake, for the last third of my life at least.’ The wish was granted. With the lights out, it could have been a shrine of love from another time or another place, equal to the greatest loves of all times, even the Valley of the Nile, for sometimes after the devil’s dancing hour, it became so inflamed, it floated, and he could have been the Mark Antony of men, and she, the Cleopatra of women.

So far from the truth. In this house, Angel Day spent numerous months alone with her two new sons, to sing the lonely person’s lullaby,
Send me the pillow that you dream on, so, darling, I can dream on it too
. During Mozzie’s many flights of absence, she claimed to any audience whatsoever, the loneliness had caused her to collapse into temporary insanity. If the imagination could stretch the truth, then, it was just as Angel Day claimed, when she said: ‘It was the house that sullied the mind of all who looked at it.’ This was why she too thought it was a house of miracles. For goodness’ sake, from it materialised the birth of two boys at her age, and he, an old man. This twice lucky phenomenon, the whole town marvelled at, as though it had been lust that did these things, but Angel Day said sadly, as far as she knew, it was both times an immaculate conception. That Angel Day, she had no shame, and she gave those two boys the Fishman’s name, even though they were not even married.

As a matter of fact, in that very house it was rumoured she had loosened herself, by lying about in others’ arms during her lonely moments. With bated breath, the town hung in suspense for Mozzie’s return whispering,
Well! The truth will come out now
. But the miracle of Mozzie Fishman was that he forgave her from the bottom of his heart, every time.

From across the road, people heard Bruiser’s car pull up. Dolly Parton was singing loudly on the radio,
God doesn’t make honky tonk women
. Along the rooftop sat a line of seagulls looking down, staring at Bruiser and Truthful with beady eyes. Both men walked through the gap where the gate had been, in readiness to accost Angel Day, and arrest her too. What for? Neglect. The birds flew off, swooping low over the yard, just as they had done earlier, when they had flown over the exercise yard at the jail.

Of course Angel Day was not at home. The big statue of the Aboriginal Virgin Mary had been left in charge. It stood in the sparse lounge room amidst a mass of plastic flowers, as if to watch over the birds that pecked each other on the roof, and the house’s proportion of the Gulf country’s croaking frogs that sprung into silence in the grass outside as soon as they heard noise.