Moonlight Downs (10 page)

A dirty green cardigan caught in the
windbreak

THE NEXT afternoon I went back down to the Jalyukurru Resource Centre for the usual bemusing conversation with Kenny Trigger and the usual depressing conversation with the ether in my attempts to raise Moonlight Downs on the radio.

I was climbing despondently to my feet when a single word came whispering back through the static.

‘Emily…?’

I sat back down, my heart galloping. The voice was Hazel’s.

‘Victor Sierra Nine Delta Bravo Jalyukurru to Moonlight Downs. That you, Hazel? Over.’

‘
Yuwayi
,’ she replied. ‘Over,’ she added, belatedly remembering her radio etiquette.

‘Oh Hazel,’ I cried, ignoring the etiquette myself, ‘it’s so good to hear you. Are you okay?’

‘Oh, you know…’ I could picture her standing beside the radio, her shoulders shrugging. ‘It’s wintertime…’

‘So who have you got there with you? When’d you get back to camp?’

‘We come in last night. Just me an the family here now. Others have gone on into Bluebush.’

‘You got a workin motorcar?’

‘We had one.’

‘Had?’

‘Only got as far as the camp. Jangala got it up on blocks already.’

‘Hazel, I’m dying to see you. When can I come?’

I lost her reply in a wave of static, then my heart lifted as she repeated it. ‘How bout now?’

‘Can’t come right now, Haze. Gimme a bit of time to get me shit together. Tomorrow morning okay?’

‘Lookin forward to tomorrow, Emmy.’

‘So am I, Hazel.’

I spent the rest of the day in a state of restless anticipation, picking up supplies and loading the ute, but when I reached Moonlight Downs the next morning the heavy-duty desolation of the place smacked me in the face. I pulled up at a deserted humpy and took in the signs and symptoms of its sudden abandonment: the blistered frypan on the dead fire, the armless doll, the dirty green cardigan caught in the windbreak. Little mounds of grey sand were piling up against the walls.

Worst of all was the wind itself, a restless, unsettling spirit which skittered through the camp and lifted the odd willy-willy of rubbish into the air. Tumbleweeds rolled and spinifex crept. The desert, it appeared, was reclaiming its own.

And Hazel looked like collateral damage.

The delight she’d shown at the sound of my voice on the radio had evaporated now that she’d taken in the wreckage of her community. I walked over to where she sat by the fire, alone.

‘Hey sister!’ she said, smiling wanly into my eyes.

I crouched low, touched the back of her hand. Her own eyes were all that was left of the old rough beauty: they were like pools of water in a blasted quarry. For the rest, she was all battered passion and fatigue. Her hair had been hacked off, streaks of ash ran across her face and down her neck.

‘Hey sister,’ I answered with all the cheer I could muster. ‘How are you going?’

She shrugged, glanced at the camp. ‘You know…pluggin away. Lonely out here with everybody buggered off.’

‘Give em time, Haze. They’ll be back—long as there’s someone here to show the way.’

I leaned forward, took her hands in mine. ‘Hazel, I haven’t had a chance to say this yet, but I did want to tell you how sorry I am for your loss.’ This was the first time I’d been alone with her since the chaos that followed her father’s death.

‘I know that, Em. It’s your loss too.’

She turned away, studied the ground, looked as if she’d aged ten years. It was grief. You could feel it. You could almost touch it. Not just for her old man, but for her community, her mob. Without them she was only half alive. I had a sudden vision of her as the last of her people, a lonely misfit prowling out on the edge of the powder country while the rest of the mob were living it up in town.

When we were kids I’d sometimes found myself wondering whether Hazel didn’t feel some kind of affinity with Blakie. She’d run, screaming and giggling like the rest of us, when he hove into view, but I’d catch her glancing back at him with a delicious fascination in her eyes.

Looking at her now I could see how much the two of them had in common: they were both visionaries, both travellers in the world of dreams. The difference was that Hazel’s was a more generous vision, something she tried to communicate to others; she wanted to go places, sure, but she wanted to bring her people with her. Blakie’s, on the other hand…well, I’d seen what Blakie’s could do.

But even Hazel’s vision was of little use when there was nobody to share it, when the people to whom it should have meant the most were getting their dreams from a TV or a green can.

I slung an arm across her shoulders. Don’t worry, I wanted to tell her, and maybe did in some obscure way. It isn’t your fault. It isn’t just you and it isn’t just here: I’ve seen it everywhere from China to Africa: the whole world’s moving into town.

I thought about the fifteen-year-old Hazel I’d left behind: quirky, eclectic, eccentric, but when something was important to her, as tough as a drop forge.

She wasn’t going anywhere, and I loved her for it. Buffeted by the wind and drained by the loneliness she might have been, but she was staying put. She was her father’s daughter.

‘How long can you stay?’ she asked me.

‘Just a day or two. I’ve got to be back at work tomorrow night. I’ll be able to come out for a longer stay in a week or so.’

A dog appeared, then another, then a pack of them, loping in from the scrub. Jimmy Lively and Maggie weren’t far behind them, marching back into camp in a cloud of dust and flies and dropping a porcupine onto the fire. Winnie came out of the shack with her kids and Hazel brightened up. All of a sudden the atmosphere didn’t seem so oppressive.

The old bloke’s eyes lit up like blown coal when he spotted the supplies I’d brought out—biscuits and apples, tinameat, white flour, golden syrup, milk powder—and he spent a feverish minute or two poking his way through the cardboard boxes.

‘Aaiiiyy, my little Nangali,’ he crowed at me, hawking and spitting and sticking his big wet schnoz into a packet of Drum tobacco, ‘you too good to this ol feller!’

‘I figured you been living on goannas and bush bananas so long you’d appreciate a bit of real tucker.’

‘You better look out, h’Emily,’ chortled Maggie. ‘Allus room for nother missus in the family.’

‘Aaagh!’ I yelped, glaring and shaking my fingers at him in a sign of the cross, ‘don’t start trying to rope me into the harem, ya poddy-dodgin old bugger!’

I don’t know whether or not Jimmy knew what a harem was, but he sure as hell knew about poddy-dodging—the rustling of young, unbranded stock—and he just about pissed himself laughing.

‘Ah, come on, h’Em’ly,’ he wheezed, slapping a knee, ‘you little bit long in the tooth for poddy now!’

‘Fuck off! I’m twenty-six. How old are you?’

This stumped him. He stared into the air for a moment, tilted his head, scratched his whiskers and said, ‘Mmmm, might be somethin…’

‘Oh something!’ I growled, but I was beginning to see how Hazel had managed to remain a member of this eccentric outfit for so many years.

We sat by the fire, Jimmy and I chiacking each other while Maggie cooked up the grub—or grubs, witchetty for the most part. Others I wished were. Hazel was carving a wooden snake, and I noticed several other craft pieces around the shack: a wire-burnt coolamon, a quartz crystal on a length of string and a wind-chime dangling from the veranda. The latter, on closer inspection, turned out to be more sculpture than wind-chime, a ring of banded stones suspended from a crystal and held together with a length of string.

Weird, I thought. But typical Hazel. It brought to mind some of the objects she’d used to decorate her space when we were kids: feathers, fossils and thunder eggs, insects suspended in gum, globs of honey and blobs of spinifex wax. Once she brought in a bush potato which was a perfect replica of an erect dick, complete with balls, and we watched in fascination over the next few days as detumescence set in.

I was sitting by the fire chatting with Hazel and Maggie and chewing on a porcupine bone when I heard a motor approaching. Something big and beefy. A red F100 came rumbling down the track. It pulled up at the shack and something else big and beefy climbed out of the driver’s seat.

‘Hurl Mars,’ Maggie whispered, suddenly uncomfortable. She scuttled into the shack.

Hurl Mars?

Mars attacks

WHATEVER IT was, it was dressed, surprisingly, in black. From the tip of the toe to the top of the broad-brimmed hat. It looked like Johnny Cash heading for a funeral—possibly his own.

Our visitor looked about distastefully, sniffed the air.

‘H’owner for Carbine,’ Jimmy explained.

Ah yes. Earl Marsh, from the neighbouring Carbine Creek Station. Although I hadn’t met him yet, I had met some of his employees in the White Dog, and I knew him by reputation.

Carbine was one of the oldest properties in the region, but Marsh himself was something of a ring-in, having snuck in from Queensland a few years before. Jack had told me a bit about him. The whitefeller station owners hated land claims, and Marsh had been one of the biggest noises in his opposition to the Moonlight one. He’d done more than shoot off his mouth: he’d hunted Aboriginal Lands Council anthropologists off his property with a shotgun, bulldozed sacred sites, initiated a press campaign to show that those he termed the ‘real owners’—a couple of old blackfellers who worked for him—weren’t interested in getting the land back.

From the look of him now—dark shades on a red, blistered face, a mess of tatts on his forearms, a black cigar and a massive, buckle-smothering gut—he hadn’t come to offer his condolences for our recent loss. He rumbled up and towered over us. He had squat legs, broad shoulders and the ubiquitous elastic-sided riding boots. He would have killed any horse he tried to sit on, but that was not so unusual for your latter-day stockman, who was more likely to be mounted on a thoroughbred four wheel drive than a horse.

‘Hello, old man,’ he barked, us women apparently invisible.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Mars,’ chirped Jimmy.

‘We got a problem,’ Marsh announced, pleasantries out of the way. He had a voice like Darth Vader’s big brother. Quite a feat, considering that he spoke without moving his jaw. The Territory, I reflected, must be a hell of a place for lip-readers.

‘Them bloody mongrels of yours,’ he continued, nodding at Jimmy’s pack of canine lassitude. ‘They been attackin me cattle.’

It’s his neck, I decided. That’s what makes this guy such a weird-looking dude. He hasn’t got one: his head just erupts out of his shoulders, like an enormous blood blister.

Jimmy scratched his pants in contemplation, sucked through sparse black teeth. ‘Aaaiiyy,’ he murmured. ‘Reckon they must be quiet dog.’ He waved an arm at the dogs by way of explanation, but he was looking worried. You had to sympathise with Jimmy when it came to dogs: the poor old bastard was down to his last half a dozen.

‘I seen the evidence, old man,’ the visitor insisted. ‘Seen the evidence with my own eyes. You people, you let your animals run wild. Wild!’ he repeated, warming to his theme. ‘I just come down from the North Block. Three separate attacks, there’s been. Poddies, mainly. Half a dozen savaged, rest of em spooked as hell.’

‘North Block, eh…?’ Jimmy crooned sympathetically.

‘Can’t say I didn’t warn you,’ Marsh growled. ‘What we got here is a situation which needs, like…resolution.’ He glanced at the rifle mounted in the cabin of his F100.

‘Bullshit!’ I interjected. ‘What we got here is a situation which needs, like, clarification.’ Dogs had been shot round here before, and I didn’t feel like watching it happen again. I climbed to my feet and pointed a porcupine leg at the dogs. ‘Look at them, for Christ’s sake! Cattle? They’d have trouble attacking a mixoed rabbit.’

The dogs played their part beautifully, huddling in the distance like a flock of new-mown sheep. All except for old Leather, the attack dog, who couldn’t help himself and was curling an upper lip in a manner most un-sheeplike.

Marsh swivelled his shades in my direction. After a long interval the words ‘Who’re you?’ forced their way through his clenched teeth.

‘I’m your worst nightmare, Mr Marsh.’

‘My what?’

‘A Moonlight woman with a law degree.’

He looked like the long-drop dunny in the men’s camp had just been shoved up his left nostril.

‘Lawyer, eh?’ His shook his head, then said it again, his lips skirting round the word as if it were something dredged out of the aforementioned dunny.

I almost smiled. The only thing they hate more than blackfellers out here is lawyers. The prospect of a black lawyer must have been causing a meltdown somewhere in among the neurons. And it wasn’t that far from the truth; one of my non-degrees was in law, and I figured I should be able to get a Lands Council lawyer to back up whatever bullshit I improvised now.

‘Who you workin for?’ he asked warily.

‘I’m working for Moonlight, and what do you mean “North Block”? If you’re talking north of Carbine we never go out there, and if you’re talking north of Moonlight, it’s not your land.’

Hazel put a hand on mine and mouthed the words, ‘Emily, hush!’

Marsh studied me for a moment, then turned to Jimmy Lively. ‘Old man, I thought we had an agreement. Who is this nosey little bitch?’

An agreement?

Jimmy, never much of a fighter unless his opponent was edible, scuffed the ground uncomfortably. ‘You remember that ol mechanic longa Moonlight, back in Tim Buchanan time? Motor Jack? This h’Emily, daughter for im now.’

Marsh sniffed the air. ‘Never heard of im, nor his daughter.’

Must have been before you got through the rabbit fence, as Jack used to say about these Queensland interlopers. I spat a bit of porcupine gristle onto the ground, licked my fingers. ‘So what’s this agreement?’

‘What?’

‘You said you had an agreement.’

‘I told old Jungle Jim ere when I come across him down the Mosquito last week, I got a signed agreement with the owner to run cattle on the North Quarter.’

‘Owner?’ Christ, I was thinking, with a sinking feeling in my chest and Kenny Trigger’s scuttlebutt surfacing in my memory, this bloke doesn’t fuck about. Was he part of the distinguished company who’d been chauffeuring Freddy Ah Fong round town? ‘What owner?’

‘Wait ere,’ he rumbled.

He lurched back to the F100, then returned with a grubby document which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a ninety-nine year lease on the north quarter of Moonlight Downs.

At the bottom of the page, under the heading ‘Moonlight Downs: Owner’ and over a date reading August 4th, was a great wobbly X and the words ‘Freddy Ah Fong: His Mark’. The initial letters of the latter two words were heavily capitalised in an attempt to give the paper a bit of a legal finish.

Hazel read it as I did, and looked puzzled. Jimmy didn’t seem too perturbed; he just sat there, nodding politely and chewing his tobacco. Not that this surprised me; for one thing, about the only thing on the paper he could read was Freddy’s X. For another, you could have told Jimmy his arse was on fire and he would have continued to sit there nodding politely and chewing his tobacco. He was a nodding and chewing sort of guy.

I wasn’t in such an accommodating mood. ‘Enjoy your paddock while you can, Mister Mars.’

‘Marsh!’

‘Mr Marsh. You don’t seriously expect this bullshit to stand up in court, do you? You think you’re dealing with a pack of fucking savages? The ownership of Moonlight Downs is vested in a trust, of which Freddy is merely a member—a senior member, maybe, but anything as significant as this needs to be ratified by the entire membership. Adequate compensation needs to be paid, terms and conditions agreed upon. Next time you see me, Mr Marsh, I’ll be packing an injunction. In the meantime, I’d suggest you get packing yourself.’

‘I got an agreement…’

I gave him back his folder. ‘What you’ve got, Mr Marsh, is an X on a piece of paper.’ I sat back down, gathered together the wherewithal for a smoke, fidgeted in my pockets for a light. ‘You’ll be hearing from us.’

He gave me a long, slow stare.

‘What’d you say your name was?’

‘Emily Tempest.’

He folded his arms, squared his legs, not talking. Not with his mouth, at any rate, but his Ray-bans suddenly looked like ray-guns. He swung his overgrown head round and stormed back to the F100. I noticed Winnie’s kids looking out through the hessian door, bug-eyed and slack-jawed.

As Marsh opened the car door old Leather, seeing his chance, galloped out and bit him on his broad behind.

The Carbine man didn’t miss a beat. As he heaved his carcass into the cabin he swung down, swiftly and accurately, with the tyre lever that had materialised in his big right fist. We could hear the skull crack from twenty feet away. The animal collapsed in a heap of teeth and skin.

The kids shot back into the shack.

‘That’s one less to worry about,’ Marsh grunted. He drove off without a backward glance.

We sat there chewing his dust, all of us a little shell-shocked. Maggie appeared, looking about as sprightly as the dog.

Eventually Jimmy shuffled over to the dead animal, put a hand on its neck and gave it a last massage. ‘Ah shit!’ he crooned mournfully, ‘me best fuckin dog.’

Hazel nestled into my side, looking for comfort. She hadn’t said much, but when she put her hand in mine I could feel the pulse racing. We watched as Jangala pottered around for a shovel, picked up Leather and carried him into the scrub.

‘Emmy?’ she said.

‘Uh-huh?’ I answered, vaguely, my mind on other things.

‘Can we get outta here for a while?’

I looked at her. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘Maybe out the old gaolhouse?’

Which did surprise me, so much so that I was momentarily distracted from the question that had been bobbing around my head from the moment I spotted Marsh’s dodgy contract.

Which was, what had inspired him to get it signed the day before Lincoln died?