How the Dead Live (35 page)

Natasha had no idea what she was looking for. She had the feeling that she had
incomplete information
about all of this. This journey, this hot coming to Stearns, with the ways dusty and the travel clerks refractory. But she also sensed that information was the least of it – and that it was the aboriginal man, who’d headed off into the bush, a hundred kilometres south of Stearns, who had the right approach. The correct methodology.

The kid and Natasha decided to hang out at Stearns for a few days. There was to be an initiation ceremony on the Thursday evening, held by the people who camped along the side of the track, the displaced people. The people who lived under corrugated-iron humpies, among twisted barbed wire and broken bottles. They were former ringers and gins, who’d walked here to be near their own country after they’d been thrown off the cattle stations to the east. They would be preparing their boys for the knife. The visitors couldn’t see the ceremony itself – that would be taboo, not only for the kardibar, but for their own women and even for their dogs, who, after all, had their own complex lineages – but were welcome at a rehearsal for it. The postgrad had his own business in Stearns. In his mudicar he drove a quartet of the oldest men out to the country to the west, where they tried to remember their songs, in order to humour him.

The postgrad at least knew enough to know that he would never know enough, lying under the stars which hung from the inky sky like bunches of inconceivably heavy, lustrous grapes, dusted with the yeast of eternity. He lay in his swag, but – as he told Natasha and the kid – if one of the old wizards said ‘Jump’, he’d sit up and ask, straight-faced, ‘How high?’

He took Natasha and the kid down to the people’s camp to meet them. Natasha picked her way in slapping thongs through the broken glass, barbed wire and rusting Victoria Bitter cans, past the mean humpies where the liverish lay. The dogs spat hydrophobically, the children blew bubbles of lurid mucus from their wide nostrils, and the old people saw right through the luscious kardia, in her khaki Stubbies and her Che Guevara T-shirt. Looked right through her with eyes whited out with glaucoma, scarred with trachoma, buzzing with flies. The people had bellies swollen with malnutrition, livers engorged with cirrhosis, legs warped with rickets, bellies studded with Natasha’s namesake. Under the hard light they sat in the fourth world. From time to time first-world enforcers, fat in their short-sleeved grey shirts, came down the road in utes, with cages on their truck beds, the kind normally employed by dog-handlers. Then they’d fuck with the people.

An old woman – her face squaw-fat and dog-alien to Natasha, her breasts shrivelled – took the luscious kardia to one side, to her own private patch of dust, and showed her some undistinguished grey stones. ‘These,’ the old woman said, ‘are solidified dingo-urine chunks, not only congruent, but concomitant, in their texture and colour, with the rain clouds, which at this very moment are rising up in the thermals to the east, over the Barkly Tableland, cooling and making rain. You might say – if you were mechanistically inclined, although I, of course, am not – that I was causing this rain to fall by shifting these stones in the palm of my hand.’ But of course, to Natasha this merely sounded like a lot of cheek-sucking, palate-slapping and uvula-clicking, with the occasional ‘ngapa’ and ‘yaka!’ thrown in for added incomprehensibility.

Then there was a bustling among the people and they upped and went towards another old woman who came, distractedly wandering, across the road from the direction of the police post, her red skirt dragging in the orange dirt. Natasha and the kid hung back, but the postgrad went to the fringes of the group, then returned to where the duo stood, in the short spike of shade flung down by a dead tree. ‘There’s been an accident over at Hermansberg,’ he told them. ‘Some of this mob’s relations have been killed. Ute rollover.’

‘Did the police tell that woman?’ Natasha asked.

‘Nah – police don’t know no-thing,’ said the postgrad. ‘Anyway, it only happened half an hour ago. Come on, we best go back to the house, this isn’t our business.’

But in the car, the kid, evidently believing it to be his, said seductively to Natasha, ‘It’s telepathy. They know these things telepathically. Hermansberg is hundreds of clicks away – ‘

Natasha told him to shut up. The postgrad looked at her approvingly, his eyes narrowing in the rear-view mirror, as if noticing her for the first time.

The postgrad was friends with a mob of young men – black lads grown unbelievably fat on white bread. Most days he’d drive them all the way into Tennant Creek, where they’d spend their sit-down money on grog. They’d buy their grog, then return to the postgrad’s guvvie house at Stearns where they’d smoke yarndi and play country and western on electric guitars. This was, after all, cattle country. While the band played on, the kid, Natasha and the postgrad did trivia quizzes in puzzle rags they found in Tennant. Did them addictively. They also played Trivial Pursuit, disdaining the use of the board, simply running through the cards, asking each other the questions. The postgrad had the Baby Boomer edition of the game.

During that week Natasha began to seduce the postgrad. The kid was desolate; he could see what was happening even if the older man couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Natasha impressed the postgrad with her unwillingness to be taken in by anything, the people’s gammin, or the kid’s, or anyone’s. That and the fact that she never, ever, not even once, complained about the heat, or the flies. Natasha sensed that the postgrad had
incomplete information,
but he still had far more than she did. He knew something she wanted to know, although she had no idea what it was. The postgrad was tall and limber, with a triangular head and very green eyes. His cheeks were pitted with ancient acne scars; so deeply scored it looked as if some loony chef had once grabbed his face in lieu of Parmesan – and grated it. He wore sarongs in the house and filthy Stubbies when they visited the people. In the chirruping night, while the three of them did trivia, drank beer and smoked weed, sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor of the house, his bare knee touched hers.

On thirsty Thursday there was no point in going into Tennant – there’d be no grog for sale. Hence it was a good day for the initiation rehearsals. In the evening the rainbow serpent turned down its dimmer switch – from yellow, to orange, to violet, to grey. The trio spruced themselves up, then drove the kilometre to the people’s camp. Here they found the dogs-who-were-almost dingos, shouting for their wargili their cousins – out in the bush. They also found a rough oval of dust, defined by the people from the surrounding dirt. And they found the people themselves, chatting, chewing piltjuri, smoking, discussing prices at the store – for all the world like the congregation in an orthodox synagogue. Which is, of course, what they were.

The kid and the postgrad took their places in the oval. Natasha went with the women to the other side. From out of the grey dusk came pubescent boys and older youths, in pairs, their skinny legs scissoring together then apart, their feet kicking up the dust. They wore random bits of sports gear – one a singlet, the next some trainers, a third some shorts. They hoedowned to the sound of boomerangs clacking, one on another, big, black boomerangs carved from hard mulga wood. Scary, potent, ceremonial, each one a darkly affirmative tick. Pair after pair of initiates came scissoring into the oval, did their thing, broke the rhythm and, laughing, with their arms around each other’s shoulders, like football players when the whistle has blown, made their way out of the oval.

Darkness fell. The fire was banked up. The dancing and clacking and chatting went on and on and on. Hours passed. Natasha saw the postgrad get up and disappear into the shadows – presumably to take a leak. She followed. She saw him standing over by a tree with his back to her; when he turned, straightening the leg of his Stubbies, she walked towards him. ‘Take me for a ride?’ she asked.

‘A ride?’ he snorted. ‘But where?’

‘Oh . . . anywhere,’ she said, took his arm, and led him to where his mudicar hunched by the side of the track. Through the windscreen Natasha could see a few tired flies bedding down amid the unanswered mail he kept stashed on the dash. The postgrad had gone native – even though he didn’t know where it was.

Besidethe mudicar was a brand-new Toyota people-carrier, and leaning against it were a pair of fresh-faced Midwestern kids, with apple cheeks, blond DAs, white short-sleeved shirts with button-down collars, and grins so broad their teeth gleamed like burning grates in the night. ‘Howdy Gary!’said one of the Mormons – for that’s what they were – to the postgrad. ‘Initiation rehearsal going well?’

‘Oh, y’know, not so bad. Lotta the old fellers can’t be here, though. Dunno why.’

‘Gee – well, I guess they’ll be going all night just the same,’ said the other Mormon, who was taller, but otherwise – to eyes such as Natasha’s, saturated in the strange individuality of the people – indistinguishable from his companion.

‘S’pose so,’ Gary replied, swinging himself into the car.

‘Good evening,’ said Natasha to the Mormons, as she got in on the other side.

‘Good evening ma’am,’ they chorused.

Gary started the mudicar and they drove off. ‘Who the fuck?’ laughed Natasha, but Gary was inured to all the lost tribes in this place, and merely observed, ‘Mormons. They’re not bad fellers. Gotta dispensary down the track. Helpful guys – not too pushy. Not like plenty of the fundamentalists. They can be fuckin’ evil.’ He pulled two tinnies from the Esky and cracking one passed it to her. ‘So, where d’you wanna go for this ride, then?’ No innuendo – the man was immunised against it. He could’ve been a Mormon himself, Natasha reflected.

‘When we were on the bus up from Alice’ – where were these words coming from? – ‘I saw a man get off about a hundred kilometres south of here. In the middle of the bush. An aboriginal man – ‘

‘It’d have t’be,’ Gary cut in, wheeling the big car up on to the track, heading south. Natasha described the man she’d seen, his preposterous white Stetson, his shades, his air of possessing
complete information.

‘That’d be Phar Lap Jones,’ said Gary.

‘Take me to where he was going.’

Gary coughed, spurted beer, swerved the car so abruptly they rocked together, thigh on thigh, breast on chest. ‘Jeezus, girl – you gotta be fuckin’ joking!’

‘Why?’

‘He’s only about the biggest fuckin’ man in this whole slice of the Territory. Noone – and I mean fuckin’ no one, excepting his manager – would ever even
dream
of going near Phar Lap’s country. Y’know those big fuckin’ boomerangs I keep in the house – the black ones?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Walbiri punishment boomerangs. They’re hard fuckers. The men’d hold me down and bash me with them here, here, here, here and here.’ He pointed to his deep clavicle, the points of his high shoulders, his elbows, his prominent hips, his big bare knees, rammed against the sticky vinyl dash. ‘Then the women would hitch up their fuckin’ skirts and piss all over me. And besides,’ he continued more comfortably, back on the logistical grounds, ‘it’s way out in the bush. There’s dirt only two-thirds of the way – and that’s bad dirt; after that, nothing.
And
this isn’t even a 4WD. It’s outta the question. Outta the fuckin’ question.’

‘But we could go some of the way, couldn’t we? The moon’s coming up and I’d love to see the bush under it. That wouldn’t be such a shlep, would it?’ Shlep – where did
that
come from?

‘No – s’pose not.’

They drove out west on a clean dirt road which was like a river, running between the silver-nitrate trunks of eucalyptus, its sandy surface shining in the moonlight. How could anything so negative be so beautiful? At twenty clicks they stopped and fooled around a little in the front seat of the car, but as he reached for her red centre, Natasha stopped him, got him to drive on some more. At thirty-five clicks she helped him get his swag out of the trunk and spread it on the floor of the wadi. She found herself with no qualms at all. No qualms about crossing her arms and pulling the faded, flowery dress she wore over her head. No qualms about advancing, open to the man, open to the world. And he – he found himself ensorcelled entirely. Buggered and bewitched. Sure, she was beautiful, with her long, blue-black hair, and her all-over moth’s-wing skin, and her silvered limbs and her hungry mouth and her fingers here, there, everywhere – but this was more. This was passion as art and magic. Passion forging a destiny under stars that hung from the inky sky like bunches of inconceivably heavy, lustrous grapes, dusted with the yeast of eternity. She lost herself entirely as he abandoned himself inside her. And in losing herself, she took him with her, crying, ‘Me-shugg-en-eh!’ Where could
that
have come from?

They drank more giggle juice, and in gassy spirits she persuaded him to motor on along the wadi. At forty clicks the road ran out in a sandbank and they were almost bogged. Better for them both if they had been. But Natasha coaxed Gary, and Gary coaxed the mudicar, which growled across the flood-plain, betwixt the stands of savage thorn scrub, which loomed slowly by. They drove at walking pace by the light of the moon.

At fifty clicks she helped him get out the swag again and unroll it. Then she took his scraps of clothing off and lay him down. If anything this time their intercourse was even more strange, here in the deep country, while unicorns crashed through the brush by their thrashing legs. ‘Oh you rnensh!’ she said, stroking his rough head. ‘You mensh!’ For he was a man of fine qualities, the postgrad. A good driver in the bush, with an excellent sense of direction.

When they were finished, and he slept on the ruckled slab of canvas and blankets, Natasha filled two empty beer cans from the canteen and left them by his triangular head. She walked on with the rest of the water through the moonlight, her rubber soles crunching on the tough grass, skating on the tiny ball-bearings of impacted earth, oblivious to the thorns slashing at her ankles. After an hour or so she reached a low escarpment, and threaded her way up it, through narrow defiles of rocks so cracked and spalled and smoothed they were like the backs of a school of porpoises. Gaining the summit she saw it, spread out below her, just as Mumu had described it to her. Phar Lap Jones’s country.