Carpentaria (56 page)

The place they headed to, was a sortie for young lovers who drove there in the middle of the night, and accidentally conceived their first children. It was the town’s highest point. A summit for broken-hearted people taking a lover’s leap. It was a place where myths sprung from nowhere and claimed the deeds of the next-door neighbour who might have or might not have pushed somebody over the top. Modern literary skills adorned the pinnacle. Curt messages painted over public signs told the story of the town to the whole world passing on the highway
.
Kill All Coons, or similar, left on the hill for posterity’s sake.

Angel told the boy driver she remembered Mozzie calling the racist slur on the top of the hill the white man’s title deed. ‘He said it was the white people’s way of desecrating Native title written underneath. Mozzie said he had seen the real story when the old people showed it to him.’

It was etched deep in her mind how Mozzie hated that town. He never had one good thing to say about it. He said he would never go to that town again and told everyone else, if they had any sense, they would do the same. Her silence made the boy feel tense. He looked up the hill, wishing his mates would hurry up, wondering what was keeping them. It would only take a minute to drive through if it was all clear, and head on towards the coast. They had already decided to head down to a southbound city: Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne and get lost for a while. It was like the Fishman said.

For the life of me, what was keeping those two?
He did not say anything to Angel but he thought of the last time they went up the hill. They had been driven there after the local constabulary had picked them up in the middle of the night. They were kids really! Aboriginal kids who should never be caught in a flash of a torchlight. Caught! It was like roo hunting for whoever looked for young blacks:
Who needed to be taught a lesson.
Understand
. Before they get too big for themselves.
The boys were dumped first. The young girls were dumped miles out of town for a bit of fun. The girls went home and cried rape.
It was only a bit of taunting.
This was a big town and things like that did not happen in there
. We taught them a lesson. Ya can’t call that rape. Get out of here.
Their families living black on the edge of town found justice was to send the girls away – it was the only way. They said:
We don’t want any more trouble.

The police let the boys go on top of Lookout Hill. The boy tapped the steering wheel, remembering how they looked down and saw the town lights shining. He and his mates had been left to defend themselves against a party of drunken hoons. The families came in troubled cars and took the three boys home, cut them loose, and sat them down on old newspaper. Then, everyone pitched in and bought bottles of methylated spirits and bottles of kerosene, and bottles of vinegar, but nothing was enough to remove the whole drum of tar stolen from the road works, and the feathers from pillows the white boys found in the back of their ‘love vans’. He did not tell Angel Day the story of how their naked bodies burned. His fingers paused on the steering wheel as the lad saw his former self like yesterday, screaming in agony at the burns unit in the local hospital.

The boy did not tell Angel, and she must have thought he had nothing to think about, sitting there, not saying a thing. Nor did he tell her this was the reason why Mozzie took him in the convoy, and the two still on the hill. Bad thoughts should be interrupted, and his were by someone screaming –
Move! Move!
He and Angel both heard it, and their eyes were instantly drawn up the hill. He gripped the steering wheel, ready to drive, all of his instincts telling him to escape. Up the hill, they saw the other two lads running, slipping and falling in the loose gravel, both faces looking wild.

The whole world was screaming –
Move! Move!
It was too late. He could see the police car already, speeding up the road, coming straight towards them. It braked, full stop, beside the Falcon. A swift inspection of the unregistered vehicle determined their fate.
Well! Well! Well! You boys are
coming with me.
The three boys were arrested on the spot. Angel watched in silence while the uniformed men dragged them away in the back of the police car.

One policeman came back to the car and casually looked in the window at the back seat. Angel’s heartbeat soared, she was certain it was beating against the roof of the car. She looked nervously at the cold eyes that seemed to be looking up and down at her and along the seat of the car. She clutched her handbag on her lap because she expected to be dragged from the car too, and if it was the last thing she was able to do, she needed to take her handbag with her. The policeman said nothing, and went around to the driver’s side of the car and pulled the keys out of the ignition and left. The police car drove away.

Angel sat wondering what she should do. Would she wait for the boys to return? She considered the prospect of walking into town by herself. Walk into a town she did not know? Impossible, she answered herself. What an absurd thought. How could she walk into town? White people would stare at her. Who would help her? She did not know anybody. What to do? What not to do? She looked at the bitumen road – left or right. But the more you look at bitumen the more it tells you to move. Move! Move! Just like the boys. She wished she had never left home. There was nothing left for her to do but to wait with all her memories until the future collected her.

She sat in the empty car. She brushed her hair, spending so much time on it like a cat preening and thinking minute thoughts. She cleaned her face with the remains of a bottle of mineral water. She applied new lipstick, the colour of congealed blood, and the sight of it in the mirror made her jolt. She saw blood in the mirror flowing from her two boys, spilling on the floor in the jail. She would never know what happened to them. Mozzie had spared her the pain. After some time reflecting on her image, sitting and waiting, not knowing what to do next, she decided to leave the car. Her plan, now that the heat of the day had passed, was to hitchhike down the western road to the big town where the boys were supposed to take her, and wait for Mozzie
. If he comes. If he comes.
A heroine’s plan either way. She would arrive after an hour in a fast car. Who only knows how long it would take by foot.

One kilometre she walked in her high heels, and not one step more. The phantom who had her soul in a bag, came sidling up to her again,
Wanta lift doll?
She thought,
Doll! Well! Precisely. That’s more like it
. She, leg-weary already, never gave it a second thought and she took the lift. Her fate, bizarre and twisted it seemed, had arrived out of hell, in the form of a shiny, black road train, hauled by a Mack truck. Truckies inside, of course. Fishman’s men called out her name at the crossroads, having just arrived themselves, noticing her walking up ahead, but it was already too late. The engines of the big truck drowned out their horrified voices like they had been made by little ants. Their lives went off into another story.

Destiny often visited the foot-walkers’ convoy during the night in dreams. The men were saying they had seen Angel Day living in the worlds of their dreams. They explained to the Fishman that they saw her whole life ahead of her. She lived for several years – decades if the truth must be told, yes. Yes, it was true, Angel now lived unhappily in a devilish place. She would never see the bright starry nights of the Gulf country again. They were painful dreams encompassing some mysterious, windy world, where dull silver strips of tarnished-looking fish glistened in salt under an overcast sky. Rows and rows of these snakelike fish hung on lines drawn over the land, which swayed to and fro with the breeze as far as the eye could behold. Through this grey country many sad children, some who looked like herself, others who looked like people she had never known, came and went. How did this happen? Praise for Angel Day fell easily from the lips now. She was a sensation who dreamt far above the heads of other people.

People cried and shook their heads in sympathy to the Fishman. They paid their respects. You were never supposed to see the look of a deserted woman in those jarring eyes. They sang her praises to each other. She who looked like a lurid wish come true, who had once walked with hips swinging in Desperance. She was like a trophy for best-kept town, most beautiful, best presented, the biggest fruit of a blessed season. Certainly, certainly, it was the most painful memory. Yet a burning candle for her face stayed in the world of local memories.

She disappeared into another world as simply as looking through a hollow log and having no idea where the porcupine went after just having seen him run through it. Poof! It was unbelievable that a living creature could just disappear into thin air. In the end Angel was lost. Lost on the long road to nowhere. Mozzie Fishman, unable to leave his Dreaming road, never went after her. A spiritual man could not just go galivanting around the world when he had his business to attend to.

It was natural that outside the sphere of their world she became hearsay in their lives. Some strange person amongst the zealots who never dreamed, claimed he received a letter in his mind, and took it at once to Mozzie Fishman. He read what was written. Angel Day, he read, now lives indifferently to her surroundings, alongside a fast-flowing tidal river in a cold country which was a mystery to him. The green-grey foul-smelling river, carried along severed heads of domesticated animals, fruit crates from bustling marketplaces, rotting fruit and vegetables thrown into the river as waste, corpses of white people whose lives had not been considered by anyone to be worth two bob, and the broken-hearted wares of many centuries of a poor civilisation. It was plain to see, Angel Day had gone overseas.

The letter read that Angel shares her home, an abandoned grey warehouse with a moss-covered grey-tiled roof, with others like herself who had lost trust in humankind. Sometimes on dull, grey cloudy days, thousands of grey pigeons assembled from nowhere, and choked for space on the roof. Since it rained all the time, there was rainwater leaking into the building through holes in the roof and gushing along rusty pipes and spilling out onto green slimy floors. In the night, it was no good. The warehouse people went to bed as soon as darkness fell. They slept almost on top of each other for warmth, huddling together under damp stacks of old, rotting clothes.

Every day, Angel Day sneaks away, disappearing through the morning mist like a ghost, leaving very early before the others remove themselves from the tangle of clothes they had crawled into like rats. And in this fashion she goes to work. There, before dawn, she joins numerous others, too many to count, standing in lines like sticks of chalk along the wet marshes of the outgoing tide. Even Fishman acknowledged he could sometimes hear them, flicking their strange-looking lines of plastic rope along the waters. Fishman said he felt that close to Angel, he would turn blue with a cold he had never experienced before in his life. Time and again, he said he tried to ask her what she was doing there but she ignored him. Then, when some complete stranger came along and asked her the same question, she replied, ‘Fishing for snakes.’ Otherwise, she would have offered nothing.

Words were the enemy of the twilight world where she lived. No one bothered speaking in her world, except to answer a stranger. Every day, Mozzie watched until Angel’s line resounded with the twang and thrashing about of waters which others, being more experienced snake catchers, were already making. Then, he watches her smile as the slippery snake, like an eel, starts to wind itself around the line and climb up towards her hand. Stealthily, she flicks the snake off the line into a wicker basket and closes the lid. Again and again, she flicks the line back into the emptying marshes, seemingly, unaware she stood in freezing water.

When the grey tide receded and the waters were still, Angel knew the snakes had gone far out to sea and it was safe for her to move. She wades through deep water to go home. She goes past a man with a transportable aquarium. He drives his truck with the aquarium that is so large it fills the back of the truck and is the height of the driver’s cabin. The water is full of grey fish. People pay the tall man to see the fish by throwing money into his upturned grey hat on the ground, but Angel looks for free. Once she reaches the warehouse, she sits in the sun until it fades away, just to put some warmth into her freezing body. Nearby, there are two intertwining trees outside the warehouse and all she thinks about is Fishman or Angel. Eenie, meenie, miney mo, whose dream?

At the first sign of darkness, a hidden old owl hoots from some hole hidden in the branches. Angel runs away to hide while the frightening owl of the plains flies with luminous plumage. No one could even imagine a world with sea snakes flowing in tides, and freezing bodies asleep in damp caverns of clothes where glow-worms lived. But this was how he read the letter.

It felt pretty special to be told any news of a lady like Angel Day although it was hard to imagine her new life. The zealots made up new stories to send to her. She could be like the owl who shone in the night if she slept in a damp place and became covered with phosphorescent larvae. Perhaps her cave in the mountain of clothes was once a palace, glowing with light.

The Fishman exclaimed to anybody in the world that he never knew a woman called Angel Day, whoever she was. ‘Don’t send letters to Mr Fishman.’ Letters were only from whitefellas to other whitefellas. ‘And what am I?’ He was a blackfella. No one had any business addressing any darn letter to him, he said.

U
nlike an estuary fish…

The single shrill cry of a wind-swept bird startled Will Phantom and he stopped dead in his tracks just to listen to it. The poor bird cried continuously as it was pushed further and further away in sheets of misty rain. On his journey back to the sea, this was the first time he had stopped walking since he had left the Fishman. Perhaps all it had been was a seagull flying low overhead, adrift from its flock and in shock. Up to this point Will had forgotten to think about anything else. The need to eat or sleep had evaded him as surely as though he was no more than a song sung like an estuary fish: a pelagic salmon, single-mindedly travelling against the flow, or a barramundi being tugged by some invisible thread, to struggle back to the sea.

Will lost his concentration. Nothing but single-mindedness, the only lifeline he could fathom, had let him travel so far and so quickly against all sensible logic. But as he looked for the bird, he was questioning twenty or thirty fathoms deep in the unquestionable: What on earth was he doing heading into the wall of the cyclone? He looked in vain for the bird, for it had been blown away by winds it could no longer fight. There was nothing to see from looking into the skies except a towering blackness of clouds heading across the coast – smack bang over the most improbable of all coastal towns, Desperance.

As he stood on the wet grassy slope, he described the sound. It had been a simple sound. A child could have made a similar sound. In his mind he tossed around many things it could have meant. Could he go so far as to say the bird was pierced with fear? Hesitating, he thought again. Why should anything be so terrible to have pierced a harmless creature with fear? He decided to settle for something more to his liking. He scaled down the underbelly of paranoia. It was not that bad. It was more like the simple sound of incredulity. What did it matter? It was enough to have heard it. He had not heard the likes of it before.

All day and night the wind played ancestor music. The sounds rolled in the skies, gathering up the waters of the ocean in heavy clouds, whistling while they passed through the sodden spinifex grasslands, screaming through rocky ledges of the highlands and through the gorges where the twisting river tracks led. Will would sleep deeply, when he fell. His dreams were fitful and broken by a maddening array of missed opportunities clambering over one another for prominence in his thoughts. He awoke from these dreams in a totally exhausted and depressed state of mind, telling himself he had to move on.

The cry of the bird was the luxury of turning one’s back on the roar of churning seas. This was the sound which all species on earth must flee from when they hear it. Now, since he heard the piercing cry, Will grew more conscious of the wave trains in the Gulf basin piling themselves up onto the distant shores ahead of him. He felt his body fighting against the lunacy of his mind’s determination to move on.

He swayed forward and bent into the sea winds blowing over the coastline and heading all the way back over the hills from where he had come. He tried to look back through the mist as far as he could, but although his vision was extremely limited, his eyes travelled ten dozen kilometres more through the wet spinifex hills. The magnificent hand of the wind pushed into his back, and its song whistled into his ears like a devil, and into his mind. It threatened to blow him back into the hills, where in the distance, he clearly saw the Fishman leaving his mind and walking his men into the landscape, as though he was just moments away. Yes, it was so. The old man was safe and leading his men along another path. A windless track heading inland in a westerly direction.

On the Fishman’s track, Will heard the sound of a classical Japanese song. It poured into his soul. He could see the song was being performed by a mythmaker fly with operatic voice, creating impromptu notes, as it circled around the Fishman’s head. Accompanying the fly, traditional flute music flowed from Fishman’s battery radio over the homelands. The landscape of stunted spinifex clumps and gidgee trees mutated through distance, slid from note to note, into mystical patterns of a garden of the Orient under morning dew.

The Fishman’s men in broken jeans, shorts and T-shirts faded and holey, followed through the dry riverbeds, gracelike behind the old man with the radio, in a travelling mirage of grey brolgas at one with the universe. Will yearned to rejoin their sense of lightness. Fishman smiled to the world, as though everything was easy. Then, as though he too had caught a glimpse of Will standing alone, close by, he called out:
You can catch us if you are quick, come on
Will
.

For a few brief seconds, Will felt his whole body teeming with a desire to give up,
Go on, go back
, urging him to return to the Fishman. He began to calculate how long it would take: ‘Possibly five minutes. Less even.’ Instantly, time seemed so unessential, any accomplishment could be squeezed into it. Will, realising some things, like this, were easier said than done, knew he was falling victim to his own failings. A crushing sense of defeat stopped him in his tracks. He felt exposed. Sprung by his own carefully hidden deficiencies. Weak. No. He thought he was piss-weak. And the world saw him for what he was: traitor to the family. Here was the crisis point. So arrived the hand of his father, pressing him on the shoulder. Aaah! Breathing a sigh right next to his ear as though saying: ‘What do we see son?’ Again, invariably, he knew Norm’s face was behind him, looking out where he was looking with huntsman’s eyes. Will saw his father’s presence in his dreams where Norm was always standing behind him like his own shadow, looking searchingly at the back of his head, deciding –
Do you match up?
Locking him into a duel. Will turned, concentrating his attention ahead to Carpentaria. If he was to be a member of his homeland he knew he could never afford a Mozzie Fishman distraction.
There could only be one road.
He wiped the vision of ever wishing to return to the Fishman’s haven clean from his mind.

Light rain flew horizontally from the mist hung in clouds hugging the hills against the wind. He saw through all this, navigating the atmosphere, like a fish, where predetermined knowledge dwelled from a world full of memories, told, retold, thousand upon a thousand times from the voices of all times, through his father’s voice. ‘A homeland,’ a great creation site covering these hills, ‘this is the story of…’ that somehow, Will felt, was creating the tension he felt in the air.

In tiredness, even in dreams, he sensed a mysterious change of great magnitude was taking place in the wetted atmosphere, and in vain his mind swam the depths of the ocean calling for Hope and Bala. Half dreaming of the sea, he saw the water circulating in huge masses hundreds of kilometres wide and as many fathoms deep, become moving columns of water passing over and under each other. Nothing stopped. Not a single drop. He was breathless from the simplicity of all that he saw, and continued, finding his path through the machinery of water.

Somehow he knew he was being prepared for change, instinctively, like an animal sniffing the air and sensing danger approaching, sensing a quickening in the atmosphere, sensing the future of a place. He wondered if indeed, he did carry a sense of knowing. If he would dare to describe a premonition as akin to that of the thousands of pelicans that had sensed unseasonal change happening to parts of the inland salt-lake country from a place a thousand miles away unaffected by the rains, and took the chance. He and the Fishman had once stood by the flooding desert waters a month after heavy rain and watched the pelicans that had flown inland from so far away to breed, and like themselves, momentarily, had abandoned the ocean waves of their life.

He thought about something else he could not see, a smell perhaps, travelling in the breeze, which might have triggered a single vision in the minds of perhaps a quarter of a million seagulls, who had without doubting, taken flight and headed towards the flooding lakes carrying fish that had fallen like food from the skies. This was the root of ultimate trust he thought, the knowledge of intuition, of understanding the vibrations of subtle movement in the environment. Birds, acting in unison on this slim chance, like a note struck on a piano, and no different to himself, a simple creature after all, were sealing the fate of the next generation.

He continued walking through the dew-covered grasses and the mulurru-turpentine bush, towards a rocky ledge to see whether he could gain a closer view. There, while standing at the highest point before making his descent to the mud plains far below, the mists parted. For several moments the doors were ajar on Desperance and the sun streamed down on the town. From his estimation of the distance he still had to travel, he hoped to be at Desperance by dusk.

Yet, in this simple uncovering, Will Phantom also glimpsed the town’s psychosis twinkling in the sunshine. He sighed at the malady of small white-town madness creating another eyesore to feed itself. Irritated he asked himself: Could nothing change down there? He knew his cynicism about Desperance was cruel compared to its naive innocence, but unlike his father, Will deliberately strove not to be caught up in the butterfly net of thoughts which monopolised, hypnotised and tantalised the eyes of the world, especially Pricklebush. He knew one thing and in this, he remained steadfast. He did not want to grow old saying his role in life was to be a watcher in the long grass of Uptown.

The busy, industrious, toiling residents of Desperance had been up like the larks, dressed in woodchopping gear, a brush-stroke image of working Australiana, straight off a Pro Hart canvas, chopping down the remaining few poor, poor old trees. Every man had his chainsaw. Dozens revved. Mango trees – Baaaarrrrrzip! Cedar trees – Raaaarrrrip! Poinsettia trees – Zipped. What would you give for this tree? Such magnificent trees, decades in the making, were once shade in long, bright, burning summers. Poof! No joke. Straight out, lying now, down without a lie, cactus-smacktus, holus-bolus, flat out on the ground. This was called:
The Great Bat Drive
. Will whispered to himself the name the town had given to the annual ritual when tens of thousands of fruit bats,
Pteropus scapulatus
–
as thick as flies and fleas if you please,
flew up the river towards the coast and, having circumvented the net, descended like a plague onto the town.

When Will Phantom was a boy he saw the dog responsible for this madness. Never had there been a dog alive so consumed by its own stupidity
. So, good job, serves itself right, it died from a bat bite – so say all of us
. Apparently, the dog belonged to old man Joseph Midnight, but when the bat bit it, he said it never belonged to him at all. It was Norm Phantom’s dog, he claimed. It was unnatural for a dog to attack a bat but it happened because bats and dogs were both too numerous for a small place like Desperance, so they were bound to collide.

When the dog and bat bit each other, the bat flew away precariously, this way and that, lopsided like a drunk, all crumpled wing, with dog flesh in its teeth. The dog had immediately fallen on the ground, legs up and howling. It looked as though it was having convulsions. The dog suffered immensely, with a fever so great, perspiration was dripping from its skin, froth from its mouth, and its eyes bulged from its head. No one would touch it. By this stage a crowd of people had gathered around to look. Then, when the dog rose from the ground everyone pushed back:
Back, back and give it room.

So, keeping well out of its way, they watched the dog rage, whilst wobbling with jelly legs, up and down the main street. Then, out of the blue, Will had gone straight up to the dog and killed it right in the middle of the road in front of everyone, by bashing it over the head with a stick. He might have taken it home if it was his father’s dog, but it wasn’t, it was only old man Midnight’s dog, so, what the heck? It didn’t matter. Instead, he took the injured bat home and made a juicy barbecue of it on his little campfire down the back. All the Phantom kids ate it.

In town though, the bats had made a reputation for themselves after the incident with the dog. All kinds of legends jumped out of the woodwork about bad bat bites. Elaborate stories circulated on paper from the Council about the effect of falling bat urine on human skin, of inhaling bat spit, or of bodily contact with bat fur, and with so many years passing since Will killed the dog, a little bit of suspicion had gone a long way. Bats were high on the town’s list of
things that can go wrong in the world.
Everyone now believed bats carried a deadly disease. A disease which could spread to humans through the treasured fowl pens:
If you looked closely.

Nobody really saw bats anymore. Showers of bat piss caught the imagination instead. Nobody walked the streets at night during the mango season because nobody had any trouble visualising the deadly virus pissing on the town. Poor Uptown kids crying every night, could be heard right down in the
malirriminji-
Pricklebush camps:
Don’t make us go to sleep
. Seven o’clock at night fearing the whole town would be found dead in bed the next morning. It was a sad, sad, self-perpetuating sad town. Nobody had any idea how those kids grew up so fearful of the world and everything.

So that was the origin of the bat and the dog story. Witnessed and assimilated. No one ever bothered to claim the dog, so eventually, it was removed by the Council. That too was one of the local proverbs that lived from the story and Will Phantom gained a reputation as being a violent person. Someone who would strike another as would a virus, was how Will Phantom was interpreted through the bat and dog story. The retelling of Will in Uptown was as vivid and as crystal clear as hearing that original, fatal
Thud!
on the dog’s head, through those reliving it all again. And again:
It sounded just like this, Thud!
Will remembered when he was a kid how he responded to the talk of the town. It had made him feel destined to be out of kilter with the neighbours but he loved his persona. For fun he ran up and down Uptown singing ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’. So, whatever he was suspected of, and suspicion fell on him far too easy, it was because he was always seen through eyes tainted by this one significant story.