Jacko (7 page)

—Oh Jesus, she told us. Culture's arrived in this bloody place at last!

I would find later how she knew and vaguely liked a few of my books, and knew and despised a few others. She knew Larson had a reputation in the film industry too, as a cinematographer as well as a stills man. A stills photographer of such stature that Chloe Emptor had seen his work on the Sunday afternoon arts program on the ABC, the only channel Chloe Emptor's satellite dish allowed her to get.

—Got to get you blokes tea, said Chloe. Think we'd better sit out here on the verandah with the books. That'd be bloody well appropriate eh.

She had the Northern Territory way of making her questions statements. Perhaps this was because there were far fewer than two hundred thousand people, Aboriginal and white, in the Territory's half million square miles. Questions went out into a vacancy, were absorbed by space and had the inquiring tone leached out of them.

She led us to the shadier end of the verandah, and the floor to ceiling books were here, by the cane furniture, more or less
al fresco
, There was a high proportion of hard covers and as honourable a list as you'd see in any academic library. The Dickens, Thackeray, Twain, Melville, Tolstoy, Hugo had – she later told me – been poshly bound by a firm in Melbourne, and needed to be regularly wiped, and inspected for mildew and ants. Grandfather Emptor had brought these in by dray. I noticed plenty of Thomas Mann also, including
Death in Venice
. Jacko himself, angry at his homosexual brother Frank for reasons which will be canvassed in this tale, once described
Death in Venice
to me as an endless bloody rigmarole about a poofter who dies of cholera. But Chloe got more out of some things than Jacko did.

She sat us down beneath Marquez and Joyce and William Golding and the Australian Nobel Laureate Michael Bickham, and then wandered further down the verandah to where the bookshelves ended and there was a window which gave into the interior of the house.

—Sharon! she yelled. Would you mind making my guests some tea love? We're out here by the literature.

Having got the answer she wanted, but one we couldn't hear, she came back towards us. I'd presumed that she'd been wearing sandals, but I saw now that she was barefoot.

She sat down sighing.

—My son Petie's new girlfriend, she explained. He's had a succession. He meets them at some bar in Sydney, brings them up here and they last about three months. You know, the isolation and the boredom eh. Nice girls. But none of them bloody readers you know, and the other stuff only lasts fifteen minutes at a time eh. So there you go! But he's a deep one, my eldest son. Though he's had the decency to stick around, unlike the other ungrateful little buggers. The one most like the mongrel bastard just the same. You've got to be like the mongrel bastard if you want to enjoy staying here eh.

She gave no explanation of the identity of the mongrel bastard. You quickly got used to the term though, and found that the person she meant was Stammer Jack. Like a lot of Australian insults, the words were also a form of perverse endearment.

She leaned forward. Might as well tell you, you're not going to meet him this time, the boss feller, Mr Emptor. He's in his room with a bottle of rum. He's such a bloody hypochondriac. Men are children eh. He had this accident with his ankle, and it's painful but it's not the fall of the bloody Roman Empire. Had a bit of an accident with a helicopter. With this dead-beat American we've got up here. Just a little twist of the ankle. If it gets worse, I might call the Flying Doctor. In his book, this gives him the right to be totally bloody unsociable. Anyhow, let me tell you, you're not missing much.

—Then son Peter's out in a mustering camp about eight miles out. He'll be bringing some three thousand cattle into the yards here this afternoon. I could take you out to meet them, but I'd rather not. The romance of cattle is over-bloody-done eh.

She turned to Larson.

—You'll be able to get plenty of good shots when they come in here. There'll be dust and black stockmen and helicopters and cowshit and everything you bloody want. You can even go up in Boomer's bloody helicopter, if that's your fancy.

Larson looked at me and shook his head.

I should say that all the ironies operated in Larson's case. He kept saying to me that as much as he liked the words-and-pictures book we were doing together, he didn't want to go in any cattle mustering helicopters.

—Zero height, zero brains, zero chance, he said.

It was bad enough, he said, flying in helicopters for cinematic purposes, hanging by a strap for the sake of live pictures.

The sad and worthy story, which is not really part of the grotesque tale of the Emptors, but which I must relay so that we can get on with Chloe, was that he had an appointment in seventeen days to shoot some footage from a helicopter for a tourism commercial. This in the high alpine meadows west of Canberra, the national capital Territorians like the Emptors despised for its alien bureaucracies. Larson was to film a man and woman riding horses on a great green plateau.

When he took off he would be strapped in with his young assistant cameraman, Bo, a Tasmanian, and a director Larson frequently worked with. As could only happen in reality, just before that seventeen-day-distant take off, Larson would leave a letter-tape for his father in which he would say. Here comes the bloody chopper. God, I hate those things.

There was a power line, not marked on the pilot's map. Larson and Bo and the director would all be killed in the crash.

But at the Emptors' place with me he knew he had a choice about getting into the things, and he was exercising it.

Chloe Emptor leaned towards me.

—Listen, my television idiot of a son said he'd met you. In the studio. He and the blond drongo do that morning program. You know, big Jacko Emptor?

I knew but found it hard to believe that she was associated with hulking Jacko Emptor of
Morning Oz
. The frantic three-and-a-half-minute interviews authors got on
Morning Oz
(if you were trans-sexual or a cabinet minister resigning under a cloud, you could get as much as five) seemed eons removed from the geologic quietude of Burren Waters.

—He's not a bad boy in fact, said mother Emptor. But he ought to leave those astrological sisters alone eh. They don't have a concept between them.

Chloe meant the two Logan sisters who, between them, wearing long, primary-coloured gowns, did the astrology on
Morning Oz
. The Logan girls arrived by the same limo as Jacko at the opening of new malls and cinemas in Sydney. And never losing their breath, they took part in fun runs Jacko was invited to but did not choose to expend himself on. That, in fact, was how I had first met Jacko, one drizzling morning in Darling Harbour, where I was trying to finish a ten kilometre loop on the strength of boyhood fitness and the cut wind of a middle-aged athlete. Hardy, kindly, practical women, the sisters jogged beside me on the spot for a time, attended by Jacko, massive on a trail bike.

Sharon arrived with the tea. She had a pleasant broad face but it was disfigured by some kind of tiredness and by a gloss of sweat. Chloe asked her did she want to drink tea, but she said no in a distracted way. She was not anxious to meet visitors. She went back inside unconsoled.

Chloe said, She won't last long now, poor kid eh. Feel sorry for Petie. He's the pick of the crop. While his dead-beat bloody brother's up to his armpits in sisters in ball-gowns.

She called after Sharon, Might as well go and ask the bloody malingerer if he wants some tea.

She said she didn't know why anyone with lives as interesting as ours would want to write about some hopeless bloody cattle station on the limits of nowhere. The arse had fallen out of cattle, she said. The European Community had utterly stuffed everything. Now, as we well knew, the Australian cattleman had to look for favours from the Saudis!

Grudgingly, she took us out for a walk around the place. She wore no shoes, relying on the soft, familiar dust. The school was out for a morning break. She introduced us to the teacher, who was a German the Northern Territory Department of Education had somehow managed to sign up. You needed to be a mad German, a sort of Voss of pedagogy, even to think of teaching at Burren Waters. Native born Australians, said Chloe, knew too much to sign on for such a task. You needed to have seen a lot of National Geographic programs in some green place, and you needed to have been as deprived of sunlight and desert places in childhood as Jacko had been of locked doors.

The lean German headmaster wore a pair of board shorts and a green singlet, and during this recess stood basking under the eaves of the school. His class looked fairly evenly split between white and black, and Chloe pointed to a rangy boy seven or eight years old, towheaded as young desert Aboriginals often are. The boy was about to hoist himself up onto Roman rings which hung from a steel bar in the playground. He spat freely on the palms of both hands so that the hot steel wouldn't burn him, and then he jumped and grasped and performed a complete double-jointed somersault of the kind which causes the onlooker to flinch. There was lots of quicksilver athleticism there.

—See that kid there. That's my husband's step-nephew. Want to know how? Ask the mongrel bastard's father. My daughter Helen went off to study anthropology just so's she could understand her bloody relatives. Then she fell for a bloody anthropologist in Perth and really got to despise her father and me. Mind you, that little bastard there'll probably turn out better than my crowd. Not much of a scholar. Too much Emptor blood for that. Jacko's a qualified lawyer of course, but you'd never bloody know it. A solicitor. He certainly solicited that grinning little astrological sister.

Whether we were looking at the sales ring or the mustering yards or the kitchens where Larson might photograph the early morning steak and eggs of stockmen, Chloe was never far away from the subject of the ironies of her motherhood, the betrayals a woman's progeny were sure to commit, the question of who and where her grandchildren would be. She always spoke as if we had some familiarity with her vanished bairns. Not only Jacko, but Frank and Helen as well.

Reconnoitring the homestead area in the dazzling forenoon, we saw a pillar of dust approaching and heard the sound of aircraft. The smooth whine of a fixed-wing and the lumpy racket of a helicopter.

—There you are, said Chloe. You'll get your pictures now.

Again, they weren't pictures she wanted anything to do with, and Larson's keenness for what was about to happen seemed to her to be a lapse of taste.

And yet it was all wonderful for Larson, and for me. To funnel the cattle into the mustering yards, two great walls of orange-brown hessian, running out some three quarters of a mile in length, had been erected by stockmen to serve as an avenue for the arriving mob of cattle. We had not sighted these walls on our way in earlier that day, so they must have been the quick work of the last few hours. But a genuine work of art. A breeze arrived with the cattle, and the walls of hessian began to vibrate and bellow and flap as sweetly as if Christo had put them there for pure abstract effect. The horsemen, who included Jacko's bulky brother Peter, turned on sixpences in clouds of saffron dust. Whips cracked, men whistled like whips, the herd protested in full voice. Angular Aboriginal stockmen wheeled their horses amongst nests of cattle horns. Larson would get such a picture for the book: a skinny, big-hatted Wodjiri man, the head of his horse awash in a sea of Brahma horns.

As the mob drew up to the mustering yard, freshly dismounted stockmen sat on the tubular iron railings and swung gates open and shut, admitting so many cattle to each compartment, often – by whistling and the nifty use of the gate – separating one beast from its neighbour in line. It all had a purpose. Some of the animals were cleanskins, Chloe would later tell us without showing much interest, and needed to be branded. They had never till this muster seen a horseman.

The mustering airplane which had driven the herd into the hessian funnel now performed one mad victory roll fifty feet above the horsemen and went climbing away to look for the landing strip. The helicopter stayed.

We saw a startling thing. At the tail of the herd was a young recalcitrant bull, as evilly horned as any of his species. He was tossing his head, and wanted to go back to the unbranded hills to the west. But the madness of the helicopter lay between the beast and its line of freedom. The propeller was cutting the young bull's vision to ribbons, just as it cut ours. But this was a brave beast and willing to try to fit itself amongst the tatters of air. It rounded on the machine. A reasonable helicopter pilot with a sense of the limits of his machine would have simply hung in the air and looked down on the bull. But Boomer Webb, Stammer Jack's Vietnam veteran helicopter pilot, wanted to harry it more intimately.

This was great news for Larson, and not bad news for me either. I had already secretly made my mind up that remote and vacant places favoured oddity, and Boomer was proving it for me.

He brought his helicopter down until the skids were nearly at the bull's forehead. It took that to make the young beast turn. After it
had
turned, Boomer descended further, sitting in the air at an inadvisable angle and seeming to prod the beast's rump with the skids. The young bull gave it up and ran off to face the brand and the iron enclosures.

Poor Larson would win some posthumous award for that shot, and you still see it widely reproduced in posters and magazines.

All this before I really knew Jacko. Jacko would later tell me in New York that Boomer was still flying, although he had had a dozen or so crashes if you included the forced landings. The Department of Civil Aviation had been apprised of only one of these incidents.

When the dust had settled a little, Chloe came out and introduced us to Peter and some of the other stockmen who had dismounted by the mustering yards and were smoking before beginning the branding.