Carpentaria (52 page)

The fire spread out the back of the hangars in the dry grass, and then it came burning around to the front again, fanned by a gusting south-easterly wind. Then, the monster smelt the spilt fuel on the ground. It raced through that, quickly spreading itself over the ground weeds, until it found the fuel bowsers, then it paused, maybe the fire had thoughts of its own and could not believe its luck. The fire just sitting there was as awesome a moment you could experience for our men waiting in the hills, sneaking a glance from over the boulders they were hiding behind, peering through the black smoke, thinking maybe their luck had run out and what next.

It looked as though the fire was going to peter out. The fire was just sitting, smouldering, not knowing where to go next because the wind was not blowing strong enough to fan it in the right direction. Our men looking from the hills continued staring at the little flame flickering there, fizzing out. What could they do? It looked like defeat was imminent. And, that same old defeated look, two centuries full of it, began creeping back onto their faces. But, it was too late now, they had a taste of winning, so they projected their own sheer willpower right across that spinifex plain, calling out with no shame,
Come on, come on
, willing the little flame not to fizz, believing magic can happen even to poor buggers like themselves.

Somehow, someone started yelling, ‘Look, look, it is starting to move.’ The unbelievable miracle came flying by. A whirly wind, mind you nobody had seen one for days, just as a matter of fact sprung up from the hills themselves. It swirled straight through from behind those men, picking up their wish and plucking the baseball caps which came flying off their heads, together with all the loose balls of spinifex flying with the dust and the baseball caps, the whole lot moving towards the fire. When it passed over the open rubbish tipsters the mine had lined up along the side of the hangars, it picked up all the trash. All the cardboard boxes, newspapers lying about and oily rags, spirited the whole lot across the flat towards the line of hangars on fire.

It happened so fast when the fiery whirlwind shot into the bowsers and momentarily, lit them up like candles. Well! It might even have been the old Pizza Hut box someone had left on top of one of those bowsers that added that little bit of extra fuel, you never know, for the extra spark, or it would have happened anyway, but the wick was truly lit.

The finale was majestical. Dearo, dearie, the explosion was holy in its glory. All of it was gone. The whole mine, pride of the banana state, ended up looking like a big panorama of burnt chop suey. On a grand scale of course because our country is a very big story. Wonderment, was the ear on the ground listening to the great murmuring ancestor, and the earth shook the bodies of those ones lying flat on the ground in the hills. Then, it was dark with smoke and dust and everything turned silent for a long time.

‘You think they heard it in Desperance?’ some young lad whispered carefully through the settling dust, because he did not want to frighten anyone by making the first sound of this new beginning. It was so incomprehendingly silent he needed to speak to hear himself talk because he was thinking of his family and the noise of his memories of them was the only sound he could hear.

The sound of this young voice being the first sound was a relief for the others who had been thinking they were listening to the sound of their own deafness. However relieved and pacified they were to hear speech, everyone kept listening, listening for what else remained missing – Ah! It was the noise of the bush breathing, the wind whispering through the trees and flowing through rustling grasses. We needed to hear the birds chirping, the eaglehawk crying out something from the thermals high above, but the eery silence lingered on. The birds were nowhere to be seen or heard, not even a singing willy-wagtail lightly flittering from rock to rock wherever anyone walked, or a mynah bird haggling at your feet. We looked into the dust and smoke-darkened skies and saw no twisting green cloud of budgerigars dancing away in thin air. The wind had dropped. Silent clouds passing overhead cast gloomy shadows over the peaceful trees, while grasses and spinifex stood stock-still as though the world had become something false, almost reminiscent of a theatre setting. We men floated somewhere between the surreal stillness, and the reality of the ants, lizards and beetles and other insects moving through the rocky ground as though nothing had happened. No one spoke or answered the boy, because we guessed the explosion must have been heard on the other side of the world, let alone in Desperance.

One will never know what really happened that day. Fishman, never stopped smiling about it. He said his recipe was top secret. He was regarded with awe whenever he came into anyone’s presence because it was a privilege to know the Fishman. He was respected for what he had inside of his head. Too right! Nobody could know the highly confidential material in case someone like Mozzie had to do it all over again some day. Ignorant people would always ask,
How did you stop the mine?
And he would look at them for a long time with his steady eye, like he was making up his mind whether they were worth letting in on the secret. Finally, he would say,
I have decided to give you the truth
, and the truth was the very same words he had always used about what he would do to the mine from the day it got set up on our traditional domain. ‘I put broken glass bottles on the road to stop the buggers – that’s what I did.’ Somehow, this was the truth. Truth just needed to be interpreted by the believers who could find the answers themselves just like the Fishman had done. At the same time he offered another piece of advice, which was, a smiling man would live for a very long time. And he did.

A frenzied media from the bustling world of ‘Down South’ fuelled up, to fly back and forth over the mine in their helicopters like flies. Unlike any fly, the journalists saw the Gulf through virgin eyes. It was a place few Australians had been too, let alone those of any other country tied up with the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was a world apart from their own. Anything in this new world could be created, moulded, and placed on television like something to dream about, or a nightmare.

What stirred their souls was the pureness of silence and the intriguing sense of loneliness each had discovered on their arrival in single-engine charter planes at the aerodrome of Desperance. There, hours could go by, and the only thing happening was the sound of the weather funnel rattling against a steel pole – Twang, Twang! Twang! Under these circumstances, for the fascinated news people romancing the Gulf, no story became too big or too small, to give to the world.

Televised on-the-spot reports of the dead ore body lying across the ground like a fallen hero, filled the TV screens across the nation. Splashed into every news broadcast was a badly composed identikit picture of Will Phantom which bore no resemblance to him. A lot of people in Desperance started asking questions. They wanted to know who that person was that they saw on television every night, who was running around calling himself Will Phantom. It was a good question, because mix-ups and things like that did not help, if Desperance people felt they were complete strangers to one another, and they could not understand the truth of television. For mind you, they were still recovering from the shock of the mine. There was a thin feeling in the air. A tension. It became as though anything could snap at any moment over the very idea of life itself. Anything could fall from a loose hinge into full-blown hysteria.

The multi-million dollar mine, from infancy to its working prime, was probed, described and paraded to network viewers. Interviews and footage of scenery went jig-jogging along in soap opera intensity, before finally shifting to pan, and viewers were encouraged to dissect what had become of this showcase of the nation. They watched forensic scientists fully covered in white protective clothing, risking their lives, hunting through the rubble. Who could even breathe while watching these brave men and women slowly prod through each piece of debris in this solemn post mortem, carried out with the meticulous thoroughness of an ant? It became a televised spectacular, just like the death of an icon, woven with the interactiveness of
Nintendo.
Viewers could call up. They could hear their own voices via satellite and underground cable, coming back to them from the mine itself on television. Ordinary people living thousands of miles away, who had no former interest whatsoever in the mine or its location, joined the growing numbers of bereaved viewers gandering at the still untameable, northern hinterland.

The face of a scientist, speaking behind his glass-fronted mask with a muffled voice which had to be transcribed into English on the bottom of the television set, like the SBS channel, became the anchorman for the task that lay ahead. On the first day he reported that a fire had spread from the main transport hangars to the fuelling bowsers. It was lucky no one was killed. On day two, the wash-up at the end of the day was like at the beginning, this was a major explosion in the remote Gulf of Carpentaria at Gurfurritt, the biggest mine of its type in the world. The scientists viewed viewing what lay on the ground were trying to discover what caused the explosion. There had been no fatal casualties. And so on.

After a week of the hooded scientist, another bald, Mars-faced scientist appeared on the television screen. He was at home with a sad expression on his face which popped out of fawn-coloured clothes. He gave the scientific explanation on the news: ‘The fire at Gurfurritt mine initiated from a grassfire. Spinifex exploded and the intensity of the fire it created quickly spread to the bowsers. (Pause.) This caused a major explosion to the underground fuel tanks. I understand that this explosion spread through the underground fuel pipes up to the mine. This action quickly reached the main fuel tanks, which caused another major explosion, causing major damage to the mine and machinery.

‘The fuel line to the mine operations connected to the main fuel tanks caused further major damage to occur. The intense heat rising into the atmosphere from the initial explosions generated a chain reaction of explosions throughout the mine. (Footage to air of mass destruction.) An incidental fuel leakage running throughout the 300-kilometre pipeline to the coast caused it to be extensively damaged. (Pause.) This damage was caused by an explosion throughout the buried pipeline which was only running at a third of its capacity at the time of the incident. The force from this simultaneous explosion uncovered the entire pipeline and pieces were found many kilometres from their original site. (Pan shot: bits of pipeline sticking out of the ground and throughout the surrounding bushland like an exhibition of post-modern sculpture outside the Australian National Gallery or Tate Modern in London on the Thames.) At the end of the pipeline, there was extensive damage at the dewatering plant where storage tanks were destroyed.’

When the explosions stopped, the Fishman’s men picked themselves up from the ground. They agreed that only the greatness of the mighty ancestor had saved them. It was a miracle they were still alive after the earth shook so violently underneath them, they had thought it would go on forever. A heavy red fog of dust and smoke hung in the air as they moved away, their visibility limited to just a few metres. The fine dust fell slowly, and when it settled on those men who were trying to regain a sense of the enormity of what had happened, they took on the appearance of the earth itself. One by one, camouflaged by dust, they began spiriting themselves away, quickly, carefully, as dust covered their tracks, back to the lagoon of the dancing spirits.

The ancestral trees at the lagoon danced wildly in the ash wind around the Fishman sitting on the ground staring red-eyed from weariness in the direction of the mine. He had been sitting in that position for hours visualising what was happening at the mine, waiting for his men to return. Their return seemed to be taking forever, and those extraordinary followers watching the master, were making other rare discoveries. They were convinced that the Fishman had shrunk in front of their very eyes. They were sure he was growing smaller and smaller with every passing second of precious time. The chances were, if he continued to shrink, there would be nothing left of him by the time they would be compelled to flee. In this perilous locale, they nodded, he would become an obscure beetle left crawling around the edge of the lagoon.

It was true, Mozzie Fishman did seek obscurity. His instinctive trait was to crawl away from adversity, at least metaphorically, into invisibility and nothingness. What caused this peculiarity of his tangled personality was something that went berserk in what he called his stupid brain, whenever he had anything to do with white people. It seemed it was white people who could tug on his conscience, making him degrade himself like this. The truth was, Mozzie Fishman was shrinking, waiting for his men,
Oh! Great spirits of God, let there be no casualties
, he longed, moaning to himself. He was so full of the anxiety and shrinking up into a beetle, he could not see the young men who ran through the bush hoping to evade capture, jumping for cover as skilfully as hares.

Yet, on the other side of his mind, he fought like a rabid dog to maintain an octopus vision of himself, where all arms lead to great glory and success. In this view of the world, there was no room for doubts to interfere with the great spirits of destiny whose permanent home was etched into the land itself, in this place. No one tampered with these arms of destiny which belonged only to Mozzie, as though he had put out a single hand to catch a true stone after it was fired from a shanghai. His general mood was downhearted somewhat and forlorn, yet in spite of the world of calamity he had created, he felt calmly sated as he sat, alone in contemplation.

T
he vehicles left the lagoon in the early morning under Mozzie’s orders. He had sent Angel Day with them. Several of his men were given strict instructions to take Angel to any large city in the South where she would stay
.
‘And you must try to be happy,’ he told her as a parting gesture of goodwill, although she replied that she had no intention of being told to be happy. After the proverbial dust had settled, he told her, as she finally stepped into a waiting car, he would come by. ‘Such is life,’ she sighed. With not one tear left to fall on a soaked hankie, only a premonition that her life was to be one squalid mess of moving between overcrowded houses from this point on, she resigned herself to a flicker of hope, because Mozzie solemnly promised as soon as he thought it was safe, he would arrange for her to go home.

The whole convoy was ordered by the Fishman to take a route into a winter of nowhere. ‘Break up – as soon as you can,’ he ordered. ‘Do not go home.’ He used many words to describe their new identities. They should become anonymous reformers with the run and mill. Blend. ‘Only regroup,’ he said, when his word arrived and some day surely, it would. These were his strict instructions. More homilies followed like prayers so the men would never forget that only by following the Fishman’s word, letter for absolute letter, did any of them have a chance of invisibility.

‘Follow me,’ he warned with his one stern eye. ‘Or else cop the consequences.’

Well! That was that then. Consequences meant remembering how fish could get caught up in all kinds of nets, and you would know whose plate you were going to land on if you were regarded as being the criminal type of fish. ‘Be perfectly assured,’ his warnings kept flowing, adding reasons because he liked reasons, in the belief that a leader could not have enough reasons stored up in his brainbox.

‘I am not talking about that useless, invisible Desperance kinda net, I am talking about the real ones, just as invisible, thrown out by the police who are wanting to squash people like you, like you is merely a nuisance of a mosquito.’ He was still explaining his reasons, while one by one, the men got into their vehicles with whatever gear they owned, and drove off along the slow, difficult curvilinear road out of the valley, to the long, hard, short-cut roads into desert locations, so as to be gone from memory as though they had never existed.

At last, the Fishman caught the first glimpse of the red-dust-covered men with their red watery eyes emerging from the bush after they had travelled by foot over thirty kilometres from the mine site. One after the other they fell on the ground where he was waiting and for a while, they all lay there exhausted, breathing heavily, saying nothing at all until finally, a voice rose from the mass of dust and smoke of panting bodies to say two words, ‘Done boss.’ The Fishman simply nodded as if there was little satisfaction to be gained from his one big day on earth. He nodded, as he went around solemnly patting each man on the back. Minutes later, the young men moved away and into the ghostly grey and red-streaked lagoon waters, breaking through the thin coating of dust and ash to uncover the fresh, cool water beneath.

‘Where’s Will?’ the Fishman asked, looking around. He knew he was not there, but he completed a headcount anyway. From the water, the men looked back to the still ash-covered bush on the other side of the lagoon. It looked as though no man had ever walked through there, and it seemed unlikely anyone else would. Yet, the men were certain they had seen the two young blokes setting off to the lagoon with Will. ‘We saw the three of them going ahead before any of us, we told them boss, “Take Will up ahead in case of any trouble”. But it was useless explaining. There was so little time to lose, and they still had some burying to do.

This was what went wrong. Slowly, the report was given. A map was drawn of the location in the mud at the edge of the lagoon. Two crosses on the ground marked where the two mine men guarding Will had fallen.

‘Afterwards, after the explosions, we had to wait see, then we, a few of us, went back to find the bodies of those two.’

It was true; the men had dared to face the scorching heat where the devil had just passed. They had returned to the flat, walking through the burning spinifex, trying to locate the bodies in the heat but had to leave quickly.

‘Look boss, there was no way we could find them. We went straight to the places where we saw them go down, the bastards, and they weren’t there. They were gone. Abracadabra! Zoom. Disappeared into thin air.’

‘How could flesh and blood disappear into thin air?’ A sceptical Fishman eyeballed the tall-yarn spinners.

‘What we were saying: we thought the ground swallowed them up and they went rolling down to hell. After we heard the explosion, we looked all around the ground with one second, that’s all we had, true God. Even in that time I swear to God, we never seen anything like it. The ground started to come at us, like the skin of a wild animal rippling up and down as it is running along, with rocks jumping everywhere. Behind the ground moving, the dirt and rock went flying everywhere. Well! We had to duck for cover after that. We were flat on the ground and all we felt was movement underneath us, like the devil was coming up to the surface.

‘And he was accompanied by the sound of the devil’s orchestra playing the horrible, sizzling music of hell by thumping their own heads together – Bang! Bash! Bang! We never heard anything like it. The sound was so terrible, we knew it could only be the sound of damnation. The only thing must have happened, the explosion lifted them up first, threw them to kingdom come, and when they fell, the devil took one quick look and said, “Curry them in hell, the buggers”. Or, it could have been, they got buried themselves.’

The tellers of tall stories were given a cursory glance by Mozzie as he continued fidgeting with his hands, twiddling his thumbs in circles, as though the action would conjure the simple truth out of a gammon story. But in the scheme of things, it did not really matter who was telling the truth.
Hey! Yo! Why tempt fate? No one here was going back anyway. Wishes were the only thing left
. A simple wish was all anyone could ask: that wherever they fell, nobody would find the bodies until they were well and truly gone.
Whispering again
. Such a truthful mind running nilly-pilly, and so little control over his speech.

Mozzie turned his gaze back through the rustling tree spirits to a spot where it seemed they were beckoning him to look, and he saw another truth in the blackened landscape. It was a truth he had seen earlier, as he looked towards the mine, at what had become of normality, as a spectator of this thing they called hell, and seen the devastation over the hills. Now he saw the real immensity of what had happened in front of him, as if the only purpose of such a miracle was to brand him, small and inferior. Blown bits of rose-coloured human flesh, amidst burnt black cinders, had fallen onto the ground. At that moment, seeing what he had, he wished it undone, but the terrible truth did not yield to the wish of a simple man.

A fortune-teller’s time sped fast over the same ground where dingos, prowling in the middle of the night after he and his men had gone, were taking whatever remained of those people, scattered over the plains, before running and snivelling back to their rocky lairs inside the hills of the great spirit. A tragedy kept unfolding, and he, unable to acknowledge his culpability, wished to hide in the smallness of men. He chose. He would not see the extremity of his weakness, nor claim it straightaway: he referred time elsewhere. The Fishman felt a dull pain again, pulling his heart apart. The indecision was breaking him in two. Now, he was uncertain if he should believe in his safe vision of what had really happened. Did he need to know the truth? But the truth was, there would be no going back.

Then, while the dark clouds of the Gulf crawled by, darkening the already hazy atmosphere, and cloud bellies touched the tops of the again windy bush, the attention was drawn of a young turk with the very best eyes, and respect for all religionalities among them, who yelled out in a rasping voice like a Christian crusader, ‘In kingdom come, thy will be done. Thank the Lord, here they come!’

The Fishman peered over the rims of his sunglasses, and it was true whether from his good eye or the glass one, for the young followers were running, and others followed through the swaying branches of the spearwood trees. They were coming alright. The Rasta boys, under ash, with Will Phantom stumbling along, half dragged by the sheer willpower of the Rastafarian god men.

Privately to the Fishman, the two young men, still winded by their efforts to return to the camp, explained in his ear what had happened. ‘We come along, like you said, and we are saying, “We are bringing the Fishman’s gift of life”.’ They said they believed Will Phantom was just a man wishing to die. ‘You better off watching him. He’s got a death wish. A date with death. Can’t stop him.’

‘We should have left him there.’ The young blokes complained in a haughty manner, although suffering from smoke inhalation which hampered them from talking more, and burns. Will lay on the ground in front of them. Explaining their difficulties, they said, ‘We could have been killed a half-a-dozen times because of him.’

‘We want you to know he doesn’t listen to a fucking thing.’

Finally, they explained how he went back, they had to chase after him, while he looked for the two dead men from the mine. ‘We were nearly half baked alive, crawling on our bellies through a bloody spinifex inferno. You couldn’t breathe nothing but fire, all the while, trying to pull him out of there.’ Finally, exhausted, the two young men ceased talking. Ignoring the Fishman, and bending over with their hands on their knees, trying to catch their breathe, both cast a hostile glance over at Will.

‘Yeah! Yeah!’ The Fishman hurried them along, anxious to hear what else they had to say.

‘We found the buggers dead of course. We dragged them out of there, with clumps of spinifex exploding into flames everywhere you looked, and the bloody fire, chasing us.’

‘And!’

‘They are just over there.’ One of the lads indicated across the lagoon with a hand he barely lifted from his knee. ‘And we aren’t touching em again, neither.’ Fishman went over to Will and gave him a fatherly pat on the back. ‘Good job lad.’ He got him some water, then called some of the men to go and bring the bodies back from the bush. Soon enough, the two charred bodies were laid out at the feet of the Fishman.

‘I guess we had better bury them,’ he decided. ‘We better get to work and bury them. Over there in the bush,’ he said finally, looking back towards the road.

‘No, we are not, we are not burying them at all.’ The Fishman looked around on hearing Will speak, and saw him standing, completely covered in ash, dust and congealed blood, but there was no doubt, it was the familiar Will Phantom’s easy stance. On first glance the Fishman was reminded of Norm some thirty years ago, standing in front of him with the same ease: calling it quits to their dual leadership on the religious road.

‘You remember Elias’s boat?’ Will spoke quietly into Fishman’s ear – lest the wind heard and told the trees.

Fishman nodded, remembering the unpleasant, hot day they had found poor, old Elias, sitting out there in the middle of the lagoon, and thinking he was there fishing, but knowing that dead men don’t fish.

‘Well! What do you think, hey? If we get that boat from up the hill over there, and we leave those two there for the crows to feed on?’ Will talked on. He took no notice of the look of concern growing on the Fishman’s face.

The older man had shocked himself, when he unwittingly looked inside the charred skin of the two broken bodies that had been dragged one way or the other through hell. There, their spirits lay, unable to move, as though locked in limbo, and from their heads stared frightened eyes which jumped left and right at every rustle in the bush to which Will wanted to condemn them. Instantly, deep sorrow moved Mozzie to forget his own grievances and to make a sober decision. There was no thirst for revenge. Whatever it was, was quenched. He had no mind left for the callousness of Will. Instead, he replied, ‘We going to bury em decent. Decent. You understand me Will?’

‘No, I respect you. You are the boss, but I got to do this,’ Will replied just as determinedly. ‘They killed Elias. Left him here like he was just fish bait, and, yesterday! Yesterday they killed Hope. These bastards threw her out of the helicopter. And now, I don’t know for sure, but they might have killed Bala as well. So, I am going up there to get Elias’s boat, even if I got to do it myself, and I am going to leave them there to rot, until they are found by the people over there at the mine.’

‘Eye for an eye is it Will?’

‘Yeah! From now on it is.’

‘You know what will happen if you leave them in the boat, don’t you? Their ghosts will come haunting you whenever you are in the water. Leave them in a boat and they will come rowing over any sea and throw evil at you until they kill you. So, now I am telling you no more. You listen to me. You got to bury them decently, no matter what they did.’

‘I couldn’t care less. You will have to kill me first before you bury them in our sacred country. If they got holy country somewhere for killers, well let the mine take them there and bury them themselves. This is our own sanctified country, not theirs. They got no place here.’

‘Alright, have it your way, it’s your life. But I am warning you. You’d be better off picking your targets. Leave no tracks and biding your time. What can I tell you? I am only an old man. No use listening to me. What can I do? I got my only sons plus one other little fella I didn’t even know, to bury.’

Will looked on sympathetically while the Fishman continued talking, now that he was able to tell someone what had happened in Desperance. He recalled how the convoy had arrived at the lagoon, and while they were coming in, he was naming who came in which cars. He had been taking careful note of who was driving, their driving ability, and the condition of the car. Everyone had set up camp at the lagoon, and finally now the spirit trees knew who was there, you could see something was wrong in how they were dancing when the wind started to blow up suddenly like a telephone was ringing.