Carpentaria (49 page)

He moved on. The world he viewed shone dimly. Although his mind was racing through the possibilities, his body felt too heavy to move. It had already decided it did not want to see what lay ahead, to be told that there was a lot of ground to be covered, to establish whether Hope and Bala had come this far, and what had happened to them. He pushed himself. Go on. Leave the drums. He smiled sarcastically as he mulled over the most obvious scenario of the fishing camp. A riproaring black market trade spinning off the mines in the Gulf. Who was involved? Who knows? Who cares? What was the environmental hazard to his traditional country? Some little operation like this could be very lucrative for any of the miners wanting to make their retirement package. Nothing short of an olive plantation back in the home country for the Italian. Palaces in Europe or Asia for the management.

Will scorned the thought of transport ships now frequently moving up and down the northern coastline. The whole oceanic world seemed to be occupied in the Gulf. It was a grey painter’s palette of tankers exchanging mining equipment for mined ore that came to the coast, after the flesh of the earth had been shunted there by pipelines, tying up the country with new Dreaming tracks cutting through the old. Big ships, small ships pulled in from all over the world bringing tinkers, tailors, beggarmen, thieves. Anchored off Desperance, the ships waited for the barges to bring the ore out through the dredge tracks cut in the grey shallow waters where there were once lush green flowing seagrass meadows. How easy it would be for a ship to stop by some remote reef to pick up a bit of unofficial cargo. Uranium? Gold in lead? Will was knowledge galore, navigating his own nirvana.

The Italian continued singing to the birds and Will was moving through the bush out of view. Or was he? Yes, he remembered, he was certain, but why had he fallen asleep? His head screamed with pain. The helicopter roared in flight. He tried to remember backwards. What had happened from the moment he started edging himself away from the miner’s camp to now? All he could see was an unfathomable darkness. He lay face down on the floor of the moving sound. His legs felt as though they had been stuck together. His arms were pinned to his side. The tape he imagined, was the iridescent yellow the company used to seal the boxes and eskies carrying chemicals. The sound was deafening. Only pain hammered inside his skull. He struggled to keep together a few simple thoughts. He was on a helicopter. The spinning rotor blades and the engine exploding through his head killed any thoughts of trying to understand what had happened.

Instinctively, he moved, struggled to free himself, before realising he was better off pretending to be unconscious, but it was too late. He felt his head dragged back by his hair. At the same time, a boot was pushed into his back. The tape was ripped off his eyes. His head was jerked around to face the light. First he saw white-edged blue. Then the sun at nine o’clock, and he realised it was mid-afternoon. Down below was the ocean. He tried to turn his head to see the person who gripped his hair, but the boot sunk deeper and his head was jerked back again.

The door slammed open and a cold wind smashed against his face. He knew the feel of her body passing and now that feeling crossed over him, and Hope fell. He sees, sees her face calm, her dress blue, she liked the colour blue like the ocean and sky, and he struggled to free himself. He used every muscle in his body to slither out – to fall with her. In those moments, he slides, pushed and shoved against the force of the wind screaming, but Hope falls with her silent dress blue into everything blue, and he is recaptured by those hands gripping his hair more tightly from behind and the boot, square into his back, planting him down on the floor. The only possible moment had passed, and the door was relocked. He listened, but he never heard the ocean, or Hope, only the flying murderers screaming to each other, then he vomits. The mask has been ripped off his mouth so he does not choke. This time, when darkness descends, he feels the blow striking the back of his head.

All moments in time are the mysterious and powerful companions of fate…

The realisation is especially true for those final moments that end life. The ghostly liberators hastily pass by the living to knock your breath away. No time at all before the soul has sped from the body onto a breeze where a moth was flickering by on a day darkened by low passing, kidney-coloured clouds. Time goes on, and one thinks,
What of the living?
You do not want to believe in death. You do not want to feel the strangeness so peculiar when death has occurred suddenly. There is a terrible shock when what was ends.

Eventually, as time trickled by, Will began asking himself if he had really seen her, watched her fall, unable to prevent it from happening. It was so easy, preferable even, to begin doubting yourself. He kept asking himself – was it really Hope? Could this thing of nightmares have happened to her? How could he have been so utterly powerless? In all of his visions of the future, which he believed were in his grasp, there was no place where dreams were snapped off at the base to prevent growth. He wished he had only dreamt what he had seen. But this was not his dream.

The helicopter blades droned on through his head as he lay semi-conscious on the floor of the moving aircraft. He breathed fire from the stench of aviation fuel. He fought against his inconsolable sadness. He wiped away confusion and nausea by imagining it had to have been someone else’s limp body he had imagined going through the door a hundred times. But every time, it was Hope who came back, coming back into the open door of the helicopter smiling, then falling out again, over and over. He could not remember the look on her face as she fell, but nothing could take away the fact that it was her.

The very first time he had seen her, she was walking in the rain, and from where he was sitting on the ground, the first thing he noticed was how her bare feet slushed through the mud. Wet yellow grass blew on both sides and he had watched her from a distance, coming his way, with a dirty, sodden, royal blue doona wrapped around her. She looked like a big child amidst the smaller children who walked with her. He knew they had come from the Eastside camps to join the people he was sitting with next to the river. Everyone had been talking for hours about the mining company Gurfurritt
.
Will was listening, sizing up the mixed reactions to the mine.

Sabotage playfully plagued his mind. He listened to someone saying people were dying while they were talking. ‘We are burying people and all we do is talk.’ It was true. Even this meeting had been adjourned for a funeral. Will had come hoping to recruit helpers with his fight for land rights. The fires were getting out of hand. Half of the plains were burning. He had to be careful whom he trusted. Allegiances were changing constantly and he knew the reason why. Over many months, he had watched Gurfurritt play the game of innocence with bumbling front men who broke and won the hearts and minds of more and more of his own relatives and members of their communities, both sides of Desperance. Will did not underestimate those innocent friendly meetings where the mining representatives claimed not to know what was required from Native title claims. He believed the company knew government legislation and procedures related to Indigenous rights like the back of its hand. His mildest to wildest dreams were swamped with top silks who provided piece by piece legal advice to the supposedly ignorant Joe Blow, the local mining negotiator, from as far away as New York.

Some people were talking about the jobs they would be getting.
You very, very wrong
. They were arguing against the pro-land-rights brigade.
Whoever heard of it around here before? Land rights kind of talk. Not
going to happen here I tell you that right now
. Huuump! Some were called Uptown niggers to their face. Others were saying they wanted the mining company to give the country back. Others were opposed to having any mines on their sacred country.
Full stop
. Some people said how they would kill anybody going against country.
We can make it look like an accident. Get em when they
been drinking
.
Manslaughter kind of fighting
. They claimed murders of
somebodies
could be arranged to look like accidents.
Yah! Yah talkin air
. A nervous vein ran through the meeting whenever the strength of lawlessness was observed in their community.

Talk was always cheap. Cost nothing. And talking like Che Guevara made the huffy people’s hair on the top of their heads stand straight up on end. A chill ran right down their backs. So! Without saying a word, because the meek do not speak, they went heave-ho, in favour of chucking out wildness. Everyone who was not talking animal madness like they were hearing, was quiet. Instead, they said, without saying a single word, if it was going to be like that – okay then. No one would bother speaking anymore. Then the moment was broken by the sound of young laughter floating through the air, from this little group from along the track, breaking through the smoke of smouldering fires.

Will knew almost instinctively where the helicopter was descending, flying south, down towards a landing depot, at the mine. The helicopter pad was an isolated plateau where the wind rattled through large warehouses and hangars that had been built by the mine next to the petrol pumps. Light aircraft and survey helicopters were housed in these buildings. The complex was large enough for all repairs and maintenance to be undertaken by the mine’s well-supplied workrooms. The precinct was a self-contained entity, enclosed by cyclone fencing. Everyone on earth would agree that it had cost a bomb.

The door to the helicopter opened before the engine had wound down, and Will was thrown out onto the ground. When he landed on his side and felt the dust flying up his nostrils, he rolled over face down into the earth. Through the spiralling red dust, two sets of feet ran out of the way of the moving waves of dust. Each man demonstrated a sharp alertness which meant, Will knew, if they were involved in this kind of activity for the mine, they were most likely in peak physical fitness. He estimated both were about the same age as himself. After the helicopter lifted, he was covered red by the falling dust.

‘Are you sure?’ The Fishman sought clarity. ‘Of course we seen it, we’re sure alright.’ This was the story of the two thieves, who saw the whole thing happen as they carried out surveillance activities around the hangars, checking on what they called ‘that bloody mining operation.’ Fishman’s men, who had returned empty-handed, waved aside further communications
.
‘Wait a minute.’ Both were bent forward, with hands on the top of their knees, waiting to catch their breath. Not fit men, they had run, stumbling through fifteen kilometres of spinifex. Their legs were covered with bloody cuts. Incredulously they reported the whole darn incident to the Fishman.

‘Cut the tape on his legs,’ one of the mining men at the helicopter pad ordered the other after the dust had settled. Immediately, Will felt a knife rip between his legs. The two men reached down and dragged him to his feet. When he felt something hard pushed in his back, he had no doubt it was a gun. ‘Okay, black arsehole – get walkin.’ Fingernails cut roughly cut across his face as the tape was dragged off his eyes and left hanging in his hair. Will looked ahead. No need to capitulate to his captors, not yet. The ground picture was what he needed to know first: deal with the murderers later. He already knew they were dressed in the mine workers’ blue. Sight of the landscape confirmed what he had already guessed. He knew this country without sight, even when airborne. Once, when he was much younger and very crude in his methods, he had visited the hangar as silently as an owl one night. He had not believed how easy it was when he had poured industrial detergent into the fuel tanks, and because it was too easy, he created other havoc for the mine, then left unnoticed.

‘Get him inside –
over
the left hangar – first one,’ the man with long yellow hair, not the Italian, told the stiff red-haired one. He was obviously in charge. He lagged behind, dialling the mobile phone he had detached from his belt. In the grass, families of soft-rasping finches – white-spotted and blue, red, grey wrens, flew out of the grass, settled down ahead, then flew off again. They were quickly joined by hundreds of noisy, virginal white, feathered cockatoos with their plume of golden yellow standing straight up from their heads. Their wild screeching continued to gather momentum as they lifted straight towards the sun.

This was kingfisher country. A lone, deep-sea blue kingfisher dashed across the sky in fright. Will watched its path across to the hills. Its flight was a part of the larger ancestral map which he read fluently. He does not have to speak to ask the spirits to keep the birds away from the mine.
See! Mine waste everywhere
. The grounds were covered in contaminated rubble.
Make them go back to the river
. Will had always been puzzled why the birds flocked to the mine.

Whenever he saw so many birds around the mine, it raised a lot of questions for him. When would they realise the hazards of going there? How many evolutions would it take before the natural environment included mines in its inventory of fear? He and Old Joseph had sat in the hills and watched the water birds flock to the chemical-ridden tailings dams, where the water was highly concentrated with lead. Afterwards, when the birds flew back to the spring-fed river, where the water was so clear it was like looking through crystal, in amongst the water lilies and reeds, and natural waterfalls dropped between ancient towering palms and fig trees: they bred a mutation. The old prophet Joseph predicted mutated birds would drop out of the sky. No one knew what would happen to the migratory flocks anymore. Will surveyed the distant barbed-wire-crowned cyclone fencing. An impenetrable wall three and a half metres high, surrounding the mine complex to at least six kilometres in diameter. And the birds danced over it while wild animals clawed their way underneath.