Carpentaria (55 page)

Moments later the helicopter was gone. When the sound was far enough away, he went through to the dingoes’ lair. Straightaway the animals gave him a startled look, stopped whimpering, then shot out the entrance and into the bush. He saw the helicopter heading east, change directions, completing a search grid from north to south, and heading further east to turn, before repeating the pattern.

‘Jee-sus! They are onto us already.’ Mozzie’s men were now assembled on the side of the hill, watching the helicopter making its progress in the distance.

‘How did they know we were here?’

‘I don’t think they knew anything,’ Will said thoughtfully. ‘I think they just landed for a piss in the bush,’ he said, pointing to some turpentine scrub nearby still dripping urine into the wet ground. ‘It was just coincidence that’s all.’

‘They could have been tracking us,’ Fishman added, trashing the bush with the stick.

‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t think they would have been able to get anyone local to help them. In any case, I covered our tracks coming here. There’s nothing any two-bit tracker from miles around would be able to pick up from us.’

‘Are you sure?’ There was a persistence in the Fishman’s voice. He was thinking about his own tracks, and the trail he had made, swishing with his staff. It was a good sign for Will. Fishman was back on board with the living, thank goodness, covering all corners. Finally, he had pushed back his preoccupations of grief. The men openly smiled their relief.

What remained of Mozzie’s convoy stayed in the vicinity of the cave for the rest of the day. They slept soundly. Their dreams proved good. This was how it should be, Mozzie gave his men dreams of youth, good marriages and many children.

Afterwards, when the evening sky was full of storm clouds fiery-blue from the red sun setting low on the horizon, several of the men ventured out into the hills to hunt. The first to return said he had gone through the spinifex ground, and nearly collided with a large female red kangaroo nibbling fresh spinifex shoots. He explained in detail how close he was able to get to the creature, and how he was about to spear it in the heart, when the animal turned and looked at him with eyes like the softest creature on earth, and he felt sorry for it and let it go. Ahhh! Kangaroo meat was good and they were very hungry: but if one must starve for love of an animal, this was understood.

The second hunter returned from the rocky hills and he said he had seen a large red female sitting on a rock ledge, cleaning its paws. Ahhh! No. ‘I looked, and this kangaroo was not cleaning itself at all. It had its paws together because it was praying, and on its left shoulder it had a big scar in the shape of a cross.’ He said he followed it for a long time because he was hungry, but decided he could not kill a holy creature. He explained, he felt good. He felt like living it up. And let it go.

An ashen-faced Will also returned empty-handed from the hills. Strange, but nobody asked since he offered no story. He sat down. He told Mozzie he had seen Hope playing in the hills with flocks of finches. He believed she was leading him away, always staying far ahead, while looking back to see if he was following, but never letting him come close to her. She was in a hurry, heading back in the direction of the dark purple storm clouds up towards the coast.

‘And the finches kept flying towards me, and they kept going south. There, the hills were plentiful with food in the paradise land of the water people. Down in the river, bream, barramundi, grunter, swam through the clear waters, turtles big and small were passing by, floating on top of the water through lotus leaves, and the spear men came home loaded.’

All evening Will went outside to check on the helicopters searching further away to the east, with searchlights, flaring down across the country, from north to south, and back again. He counted at least six helicopters in action and smiled at the cost of modern technology. It was the darnedest thing he thought, ‘Who’s going to find us? We know this country like the back of our hand.’ Fishman came out too. ‘I can hide for weeks and nobody is going to find me. I can disappear like a puff of smoke if I want to.’

This was the unofficial search. Highly confidential. The Gurfurritt boss already knew the disaster at the mine was no accident. He knew it, had a hunch, picked it as foul play in minutes, and acted on it. Within hours of the Fishman and his men disappearing into the hills, the bodies were found in Elias’s boat on the lagoon. Spilling had a sneaking feeling about this, and went straight to the lagoon. Imagine that. Graham Spilling swore blue murder for Chuck and Cookie. ‘Son of a gun if I get my hands on the black bastards,’ he thundered all the way back to the helicopter. His words were as solid as bricks. He called the people who paid him.

‘No police! No one, hear me, go calling the fucking police up here. Don’t talk about this to anyone. Fucking media can piss off. Remember we are mining men and mining men look after their own and mining men keep their bloody mouths shut. We are going to catch these bastards ourselves.’ He said this, word for word, after the orders had come all the way from New York, from the very top of a skyscraper, to Graham standing in a muddy lagoon surrounded by a cloud of flies.

The mobile phone screamed instructions into Graham’s ear and his face whitened. Strange how a skyscraper in New York could cast spells like magic. It could keep a whole floor of workers occupied with knowing whether every single switch was up or down on every last monitoring device on Gurfurritt operations, in the spinifex mind you, on the other side of the world. It could cast a security net over the whole social reality of Desperance, keeping tabs on how much food was in the fridge, who had just replaced a light bulb in town, or monitor the pulse rate of Kevin Phantom lying in a hospital, while he was trying to figure out whether to live or die. It could rock the town this way or that to make stories. It could burn the Council office down, burn the Queen’s picture, to gauge the reaction. Well! As luck would have it, timing was everything this time of year. Fishman and his men were saved by a stroke of nature from early detection by the helicopters. Even the afternoon rainstorms could beat the monitors in New York.

When midnight struck, the convoy prepared to set forth on their long journey west, through the gibber stone desert, following the Dreaming, the Fishman said, as he slowly sniffed the black air outside the cave. In the flashes of lightning from distant northern storms, he looked across at Will Phantom, who was also concentrating on the weather. Both had been thinking about the low-pressure system building up in the Gulf, sensing it in their bones as something different. Seriously different, according to Fishman, twitching his nose in the air to catch the scent of rain coming out of the gidgee trees.

The men were eager to leave, to get moving to avoid the millions of flying ants crawling out of their mounds in the ground. Fishman pointed up to the sky with curled lips, and announced flatly, ‘There’s going to be floods round here.’ Scattered clouds, moving unusually fast, were pouring inland as though they were being pushed from behind by some gigantic monster. Flocks of seagulls had left the coastline and were heading inland. Also screeching, inside these formations, were cockatoos and galahs flying, gliding, south with the coming winds. Fishman looked at all the birds flying overhead, lost in the darkness, bumping against each other, and said matter-of-factly that it would not be long before the helicopters would need to land, ‘Or be brought down by the birds.’

‘Or the wind,’ Will replied.

‘Well then! What are we waiting for men? Let’s get out of here.’ The men were relieved to be finally on their way, even if they were caught in the rains. The faster they moved inland, the further away they would be from the full wrath of the sky spirits, hitting the high country before the floods rushed through the rivers and gibber plains.

‘Well! Old man, this is where I leave you for a while,’ Will said, tapping Fishman on the shoulder. ‘I’m going back up North. You know I got unfinished business to deal with. You got the men here old man, they will look after you. You’ll be alright.’

‘I am not worried about the men looking after me. The Law is the Law and the Law will be looking after all of us. What about you?’

‘I will catch up to you later on, I promise. Or else, I will be here when you come back. Depends on how long it takes. I got to go and find out what happened to Bala. I can’t do any more than that right now.’

‘Okay lad,’ Fishman gave Will one last look. He knew only too well that Will might never return if he went chasing the spirits of his family. He started the departure, ‘West, due south-west.’ The group of men followed, the pre-storm bush emanating a steamed pungency of bloodwood and herb grasses ahead.

The tracks they followed were the very same as an underground river several kilometres wide, travelling from one side of the continent to the other. And Fishman, traveller of the big Dreaming, countryman and water diviner all in one, sensed the presence of water far underground, and knew exactly where he was headed. By dawn, they had become invisible to the eye of search parties near and far, combing the local bush around the region they had left, for nothing.

Angel Day thought she should have stayed at home. Travelling with the convoy was harder than most people could have imagined. Her longing to return home began almost instantly, once they had crossed the rail bridge, on the road out from Desperance. Even then, it was too late. Mozzie refused to take her back. Her face winced with every bump, as she went on questioning herself for leaving. She never lost the look of somebody who had made a mortal mistake. Now, with nothing else to do but sit in the back seat of the white Falcon heading south, she searched until she bellyached for a reason why she could not have been happy enough to stay in Desperance.

Invariably, she would be reproached by the same answers. Even Mozzie said that she wanted to leave because she could not stand the place. ‘Wasn’t that your story?’ He had to take her. Oh! No doubt about it: what a mistake that turned out to be. Norm Phantom had always known something that Mozzie had never learned. Angel Day was not a lady, but a queen. Queens make men awkward. Men unaccustomed to waiting on somebody hand and foot were going to come a cropper with Angel.

Abandoned in the white Falcon, driven by crazy boys who looked like they had never driven a car before, Angel was not impressed that Mozzie had not bothered to come up the road himself to say goodbye to her. The whole situation had become intolerable and she told this to the three lads in the front seat. They did their best to ignore her.
Orders were orders, babe
. Hoity-toity bitch, they glanced at each other with raised eyebrows. Although she was flattered with the word ‘babe’, she found neither of the overgrown boys, or the unbelievable situation Mozzie had placed her in, the least bit engaging.

She remembered sweet-talking Mozzie, right up to the moment they had left Desperance, trying to convince her it was going to be like the holiday she deserved. Now then – where was he and where was she? Little fish come into the dish. Without a word, he had sent the convoy of cars off. She was told by strangers that they were taking her to see Kevin in hospital. She thought about young Kevin, the promising Kevin, then the big boy Kevin who disobeyed her. Kevin who destroyed his life for nothing. She had not seen Kevin in years and she had no idea why he was in hospital, and if he was, it was no concern of hers. Her eyes fumed as she watched the boys in front escaping into the world of reggae. She questioned Mozzie’s choice of drivers. Why these three? Were they all like this? Laid-back, the three hummed to the song of ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ in another people’s world. Soon they were in cruising mode, slumped into the front seat in almost subliminal comfort, while Bob Marley’s mesmerising voice rose from the dead out of a dust-ingrained cassette player.

Why did he send her with those negligent boys?
Talk was talk.
He wanted her out of the way.
Everyone knows talk.
He wanted to get rid of her.
Finally, one day, having put the whole puzzle together on the ground, Fishman mused with self-congratulatory quickening of speech, ‘Stand back now and let’s look at the picture.’ See! them little boys, they took the wrong track. Consequences are what consequences are, and, the white Falcon fell into the hole of a devilish place. Only the shamefaced boys returned eventually to personally explain to the Fishman what had happened to the Falcon. Fishman was correct. Just like he said, they had fallen into the most devilish place on earth.

Let’s look at the exact location on the ground where Angel Day’s spirit landed. Some say you can still see it there, waiting for her to come by to reclaim it, in order to return home. The white Falcon was speeding all the way to the big mining town where Angel was to go, according to the story. But that never happened. The boys had young minds, not innocent minds, just simple minds flooded with bitter experience.

In the last moments of the journey in the Falcon, heading up towards the main bitumen road, coming off the dirt within the speed limit, the boys explained, ‘We were going along all fine like.’ Something happened, the dreamy boy driving hit the brakes at the crossroads. But the car did not stop. Instead, the steering wheel spun to the left, and the car crawled along the side of the road that goes through many towns with a pioneer history, until it finally hits the big lights of the eastern seaboard. This was not the road to the right, that led to the mother of all mining towns, and another state border beyond. The boys, excited by the Falcon’s powers of persuasion, quickly spun a new version of the Fishman’s orders for going to ground.

‘Won’t be long now and we will be in town,’ the driver, a curly-headed boy with hooded eyes, told Angel, while trying not to glance at her as he looked over the back seat. He turned and looked back up the road. The other two pushed each other out of the car, stretched their long, skinny limbs, yawned, and moved off into the bush. From their back-to-front peak caps fish heads with strange eyes stared off into the dry wilderness behind, over the car, and back towards the Gulf. Angel stayed in the car, but watched as the boys casually made their way up a hill overlooking the town. One boy was wearing a navy singlet and work shorts, the other, a rainbow-coloured reggae T-shirt and shorts. Both wore thongs but had no difficulty walking up the gravel hill to the lookout.