Gunshot Road (13 page)

Nor'-nor'-west of nowhere

ANOTHER VEHICLE, A YELLOW
Toyota, had come back during the night with a bleary-eyed Nipper Crankshaft at the wheel. Nipper was called that not because he was small; he wasn't. It was because when the going got rough—and it was rarely smooth—he liked a little nip of the hot stuff.

He'd picked up a couple of hitch-hikers: his nephews, Benny and Bernie Crankshaft, both nursing monster hangovers. The car was in worse shape than its occupants; the tail pipe was hanging off, the petrol cap was a pair of undies.

Bernie came to, took a while to work out where he was. He was a town man these days, a tall, powerful fellow with a shock of black hair—a walking conkerberry bush. When he found out we were about to embark on a bush trip he immediately took charge in the inimitable Crankshaft manner.

He found his rifle among the rubbish, fired off a couple of test shots, scavenged a water bottle and a clasp knife, announced that he was ready to lead the expedition.

I noticed the flicker of a smile on Eli Windmill's lips.

We set out soon afterwards, a convoy of three vehicles, maybe twenty people all up. Eli and Magpie ended up in the seat alongside me, although the hyperactive Magpie spent more time out of the car than in it.

You don't often manage highway speeds when you're grinding through rough scrub. Between the low-gear crawl and the numerous puncture stops, he had plenty of time to dart off and run down a goanna, light a fire, leap up and navigate from the bull-bar. At one stage, as we wound our way through a patch of swamp grass, he dashed on ahead, my only sight of him a broad-brimmed hat bobbing on a sea of tussocks.

Maybe it was the heat; worried about fuel, I kept the air-con off and the windows down as we growled along in low gear. Maybe it was the intensity of the Kantulyu's emotions at opening up a parcel of lost country. Maybe it was the power of the dreaming paths we were following.

Whatever the reason, the day passed in a kind of delirium, a feverish dream in which time, geography and our little band of travellers coalesced.

Eli was curled up next to me. Most of the time he seemed to be asleep. It wasn't until we'd been on the go for an hour that I realised it was he—old, blind, crippled, gasping for breath—who was running the show.

Every so often he'd stir himself to ask a question: ‘Coupla big rocks up there, innit? West side?'

He was usually right.

‘Go under their shadow. See that hill up ahead? Sharp point, like a needle?'

Once again, there was.

‘Pawalyu. Go round about it. Up along the creek.'

Then he'd go back to sleep. We'd make subtle changes in response to his suggestions, and the other vehicles would swing in behind us.

One time we dropped down into a shallow gully and he told me, ‘Turn little bit west when you see them big rock. Boulder. Jawangu n'other side that hill.'

‘Which hill?'

‘Southside. Where the clouds are comin up.'

He was right: there were clouds coming up over a hill to the south, but how the hell had he known that?

Danny spent most of the day beside him, his expression illuminated and loose, joyful almost, drinking it all in.

We drove all day, made camp in the middle of a radium sunset. My companions were excited and happy: one bearded old lady struck up a song, plainsang lovingly, a single tooth exquisite in her tin smile. The others pitched in, illiterate poets hammering ancient melodies: they sang canticles and star charts, hunting songs, invocations of invisible rivers. They were celebrating the return to country they'd last visited on foot.

Danny sat close to Eli, his legs crossed, his face alight. He was a town boy and young, but fascinated. Keen to learn. From time to time the blind man would tap him on the knee, offer a whispered explanation.

While they were singing, I sat by the fire, scribbling into a notebook. Determined to catch the essence of the trip while it was still fresh in my mind.

Where do we go?

Over rolling termite plains, through cracked ranges, crooked gullies, stretches of vicious scrub that scrapes our flanks and tears at our tyres.

To the edge of a lake of snow; we walk out onto it, salt crystal crunching underfoot, the noonday glare like lightning.

To the rim of a crater the size of a football field: ‘made by snake, that one…' says Eli.

Up fierce red cliffs, along the ridges of vast, crescent-shaped hills.

What do we see?

A hawk falling from the sky, smoke pluming behind it.

The bones of a horse that went too far, was caught by the dry: scraps of leather and rusted metal, grinning teeth.

What do we feel?

Mostly—hot. This is a fire dreaming we're following, and that's what it feels like. The heat clings and parches, rises inside you like yeast.

What do I learn?

That the Kantulyu word for compass—warlujinta—is the same as circle, that the word for watch—warlukari—is the same as the word for sun. Both circular, both living.

And that fire—warlu—is at the heart of both.

Dingo Springs

LATE ON THE SECOND
day we struggled round the south side of a range, and there it was, three or four kilometres away: the rocky outcrop from Doc's photo.

‘Irinipatta,' chanted Eli. Dingo Springs.

I drove towards it slowly. The outcrop was an island of jumbled rock that glowed in the hovering sun like the fires of its dreaming. It was crystalline in the main, a mass of rhomboidal joint blocks with the odd slab of speckled ironstone on the higher reaches. The vegetation was sparse: a few figs and a bush olive, tenacious little caustic vines that clung to the grooved slopes.

We climbed out of the vehicles, walked towards the site. A pair of dingoes broke cover and dashed across the sand, vanished into some invisible declivity.

The women tore off branches, formed a line and moved around the base of the outcrop, sweeping the rocks as they approached, making their peace with whatever spirits lingered there.

A wallaby came out of the rocks, took a few awkward bounds, stood looking at us.

‘Quiet one,' murmured Meg, puzzled.

Eli tilted his head in the animal's direction, his jaw stiff. ‘Maybe sick?'

‘Maybe.'

Perhaps because of its tameness, the distant look in its eyes, nobody seemed inclined to kill it.

The granite walls were worn mirror-smooth at wallaby height, polished; there must have been a lot of them here at some time.

I took a close look at a cutaway rock face on the eastern approach, saw at once why the place had intrigued Doc. From a geological perspective, the outcrop was extraordinarily diverse. Some of the rocks were clearly volcanic: rhyolite flows, perhaps. Yet directly abutting them were dropstones. Ice rocks, if I remembered my theory correctly, fallen from the frozen sheet that had covered the globe six hundred million years ago.

There were other seams embedded there I couldn't recognise: banded dolomites? Doc's cap carbonates, perhaps. Rocks that could only have been formed by a rapid change of atmospheric conditions to extreme heat.

Even with my limited knowledge such a diverse stratification—rocks from the ages of ice and fire in a single outcrop—seemed unusual.

But what did it have to do with the murder I'd come to investigate? Why would anybody want to expunge any reference to this place from a geriatric geologist's records? The outcrop may have pointed towards some sort of geological discovery, but who the hell would have killed him over that? Another geologist? Crazy. I'd heard of geos going hammer and tongs over competing theories, but the hammers didn't usually end up in their throats.

Was there something else here? Had Doc stumbled across a metalliferous lode, gold, platinum or the like? It didn't look like it, but I'd need more equipment than I had with me now to be certain.

I was struck by the variety of fossil evidence, much of it from the Ediacaran period. Geordie Formwood had told me about Doc waving fossils under the Reverend Bodycombe's nose when they were arguing about evolution. Was this where Doc had found them? But there were fossils all over the desert. Surely the Rev wouldn't have murdered him over evo-bloody-lution?

Another idea drifted in from left field. Could Doc have been killed for some interference in blackfeller law? God knows, it was possible. I'd made a similar mistake myself once; paid a heavy price for it. And this place was obviously an important dreaming site…

The thought disappeared as quickly as it came: no kudaichi I'd ever heard of would even be able to read Doc's notes, much less steal them. I'd come here with a group of traditional owners: they, more than anyone, would have known if a law had been broken, and yet they'd been keen to make the trip.

Magpie and Meg joined me, and together we began the climb to the summit, maybe sixty feet above ground. Half way up was a spring, a trickle of water flowing from a fissure, which created the illusion that the rocks were weeping.

I cupped my hands, was about to take a drink, when we were distracted by a call from below.

‘Em'ly!'

Danny.

Eli was crawling towards us on his hands and knees, his face peeling and panicked, racked with grimaces and wrinkles. He seemed to have aged ten years—and he hadn't looked like he had ten years in him to begin with. Danny moved alongside, struggling to support him.

‘What you doin, old man?' implored Meg as we helped him to his feet. ‘Shouldn't oughter come up all this way on your own.'

‘Somethin wrong…'

His ancient goanna claw clutched the air, frustrated, helpless.

We stood there, mystified.

‘Nothin wrong, Japanangka.'

He gazed into his own darkness, shook his head. ‘All buggered up…Not workin…'

Magpie frowned. ‘What not workin…?'

‘Fire song. I don't understand.'

Meg put a hand on his shoulders. ‘Please, Japanangka, take it easy.' Her voice was as soft as the desert after light rain. ‘We getting old, all of us, jumpin at shadows, runnin round in circles. But we back on our own country now—right way. Young people around us, the land comin back to life…'

‘But aiee…' He sighed, felt his way towards a rock, flopped against it. Tears, or beads of sweat, glistened through the stipple on his cheeks. ‘Maybe just me, me and these useless bloody eyes…' But it wasn't just Japanangka: I noticed Danny studying him, a dark cloud moving across his face. Whatever Japanangka's finely tuned radar was picking up, Danny was getting by osmosis. I worried for him. His outer layer was a delicate membrane, letting through too much of the world.

Danny led the old man back down and did his best to make him comfortable. They made an odd couple, the slight young man, the heavy-set elder. An instinct for country the link between them. And a shared sense of jeopardy and loss.

Magpie stretched his back, studied the land below. ‘Track down there: motor car bin 'ere, little while back.'

It took me a moment to discern them: twin red ribbons of dirt cutting through yellow porcupine grass.

‘Heading directly back east,' I said. ‘What's over that direction?'

‘Keep goin straight, take you allaway back to Gunshot Road. Roadhouse.'

‘Maybe the way Doc and Jupurulla come out here?'

‘We might have a look.'

We scrambled down the far side of the outcrop, walked over to examine the tracks.

‘What were they driving?'

‘That old blue Jeep bilonga Doc.' These tracks were wide, wider than Doc's Jeep would have made.

‘So somebody else has been out here?'

‘Look like.'

He studied the wheel marks, picked up a handful of sand, let it drift through his dirty fingers.

‘How old?' I asked.

‘Fresh.'

An idle thought strayed across my mind. ‘Wouldn't be from that campervan the pastor drives?'

He gave the idea a moment's consideration, then scratched his chin. ‘Maybe not's wide as that.'

He turned his eyes to the east, emitted a soft worried whistle, his tongue up against the stumps of his teeth.

We headed back to the cars, an uncomfortable sensation stealing over me—and, I couldn't help feeling, my companion.

What did Dingo Springs have to do with Doc's murder? And why was it affecting us all in a way that seemed so out of proportion to the deaths of two old men?

We piled the fires high that evening, but the atmosphere in camp was a far cry from the cut-glass beauty of the night before. The sky seemed darker, the stars on fire. The Kantulyu were rattled and restless. A choir of dingoes yelped from the hills, pissed off that we'd driven them from their home.

Eli sat on his bedroll, chanting softly but purposefully, pausing to sip at his pannikin of tea. Danny was looking edgy: once or twice he got up, stood staring into the darkness, nostrils aquiver. Meg said a prayer—to Jesus, praying for Him to watch over us in the night. The notion of praying to an alien god while on a journey into her own traditions didn't seem to strike anyone but me as strange.

I drifted off early, but it was a fitful sleep. I'd only just closed my eyes, it seemed, when I was awoken by a terrified scream.

Bad dreams

DANNY WAS HALF OUT
of his bedroll, his thin body shivering in the moonlight, his hands clutching his temples.

Meg was already at his side, soothing with soft old hands and murmurs. Eventually the boy was calmed enough to lie back down.

‘Bad dreams…' he moaned.

Meg looked down at him, her face fraught with anxiety.

‘What's happenin to this boy, Em'ly?'

‘Think the world's happening to him, Meg.'

‘He bin smoke that Mary Jane in town?' she asked shrewdly. ‘Make him little bit crazy?'

I shouldn't have been surprised; she'd have seen her own daughter, Danny's mother Rosie, ripped mindless on every imaginable substance. Meg had spent years dragging her out of drunk tanks, hospital wards and morning-after ditches. She probably knew more about intoxicants than any rehab worker.

‘You name it, he's tried it. Comin off any of that stuff drills a borehole into your brain. But with you mob looking after him,' I tried for a reassuring smile, ‘he'll settle down, I'm sure.'

I looked at Danny lying there, a sheen of sweat across his brow, mouth moving silently, felt a surge of affection for him. Torn by dreams and delusions he might have been, but he was trying. He'd come out bush, spent time with his elders, tried to learn their vanishing words and ways.

For a boy who'd grown up running wild on the broken-bottle and tin-can fringes of Bluebush, he was doing all right. There was something almost heroic about his efforts.

Meg had made up a concoction of milkweed and bark from an umbrella bush, worked it into Danny's brow. She placed some aromatic herbs on the fire, made him a pillow of lemongrass. Something in the herbal cocktail must have worked: he began to breathe more easily.

‘We gotta look out for these young ones,' she said. ‘They all we got.'

I rolled onto my back, gazed up into the deranged planetarium that was the night sky, brooded on the traps and snares that lay in wait for a child of Danny's generation. God knows, I'd been snagged on a few of them myself. It was returning to the Centre that had saved me. The way I saw it, in coming out here, the boy was searching for a centre of his own.

I realised an underlay of distant noise cushioned my thoughts. It almost sounded like a vehicle revving, but that was unlikely, out here in the middle of nowhere. Had some animal—one of the dingoes, a wild horse—started a little landslide? Difficult to tell: sounds played tricks in the desert at night, carried for miles on the stock-still air.

‘You hear something just then, Meg?'

She peered out into the darkness, shook her head. ‘Nothing.'

That was hardly conclusive; a lot of our old ones have damaged hearing. The prospect of another vehicle sneaking round made me strangely uncomfortable. I picked up my torch, pulled on my boots.

‘Might have a quick scout round before I turn in.'

The idea made her nervous. ‘More better you stay here, Nangali. Out there in the dark, little bit danger. Might be cheeky devil-devil, might be something worse.'

‘I'll be right.'

But her warning resonated as I scratched around the bottom of the outcrop, then climbed to its summit. I stood on a boulder and scrutinised the dark blue plains.

Nothing: if it was a vehicle out there, it'd stopped, or was crawling along without headlights. I listened carefully, heard nothing.

I made my way down the far slope and onto the flats, the torch beam sweeping before me. Apart from the usual scuttling creatures of the night—a bat swooped, a ningaui dashed at a barking spider—all was quiet.

I turned to go, but was shaken out of my meditations when a huge mulga snake suddenly twisted underfoot, clattered off into the undergrowth.

Shit a brick!

I tripped, heart pounding, found myself tumbling into a gully. My arms went windmilling and my legs flew out. I fell into something face first. Something soft, slimy, like rotten fruit, but webbed with cutting edges and sharp points. A deeply disgusting odour crunched my nose.

I flashed the torch, gasped in horror: I'd landed in the rotting corpse of a maggot-eyed wallaby. I swivelled the beam: there were more of them in the gully, maybe a dozen, covered in a layer of dirt and white powder. Lime? I wasn't hanging round to figure it out.

I scrambled to my feet, set out running and didn't stop until I reached the camp and found the water tank. I scrubbed my hands, scoured my arms and face, rinsed my mouth, gagging, trying not to spew. More or less failing.

Magpie rolled over in his bedroll. ‘You right there, Nangali?'

I spat a mouthful of gunk, avoided a direct reply. I felt reluctant to tell him about the dead wallabies; this mob had enough on their plates without worrying about some maniac cruising around slaughtering wildlife, which was what appeared to have happened. A few months ago, at Moonlight, we'd come across a gang of Bluebush meatworkers whose idea of recreation was to hunt roos from the back of a trail bike—with machetes.

‘Snake, out there,' I replied. ‘Bloody big one. Gave me a fright.' He nestled back into the hat he was using for a pillow. ‘You watch that one now. Might be snake, might be dream.'

He seemed pretty cool about it, but he wasn't so cool in the morning when he discovered another snake—smaller but just as lethal, a death adder—lurking under his own bedroll. He stared at the reptile, aghast, mumbled something doom-laden, then raised his voice.

‘Orright, you mob, time to get on the road.'

I wouldn't have thought it possible for him to accelerate—figured he was already moving at top speed—but accelerate he did, breaking camp at the speed of light and wind at the speed of sound. Hurling our gear together and getting us out of there quick fast.

Everybody joined in. We were going home.

It was almost as if they sensed the slaughtered animals. That, or something else—maybe Eli's forebodings—had thrown a wet blanket over the journey. The high spirits of the previous day, the sense of rediscovery and return to country, had evaporated but nobody seemed to know why.

Or if they did, they weren't telling me.