Moonlight Downs (26 page)

A knockabout geology

THE ROAD from the Stark River ran close to the north track, and I decided to make a diversion and see for myself the parcel of land around which Marsh’s schemes, whatever they were, apparently revolved.

An hour’s drive brought me to Jalyukurru Hill, the nearest thing to a vantage point in the northern quarter. I’d never set foot on it before. I grabbed my field glasses and spent twenty minutes grunting my way to the summit.

Once there I wedged myself between two massive slabs of stone, then relaxed, leaned back, let the sun wash over my face.

I took a swig from my water bottle, chewed a bit of jerky, then did what I automatically do when I encounter a patch of new country: studied the rock formations, subconsciously endeavouring to slot them into the geological map that’s forever flowing through my mind.

Given a Wantiya mother, a knockabout miner father and a Warlpuju foster mob, it wasn’t exactly surprising that I often thought of geological formations as having lives of their own. I imagined them as enormous creatures, crawling through time, interacting with one another, forever changing, forever being changed. Sometimes, lying on a slab of quartz in the afternoon sun, I could feel a pulse that mightn’t have been my own.

The west was a folded scarp of red granite and yellow sandstone under an iron-coloured duricrust. Two dark peaks, known locally as the Brothers Grim, towered over the slopes. The rock face there was irregular, rugged, pitted with fissures and frets and lightning scars, streaked with veins of hematite and limonite. Nothing unusual in any of that.

Eastwards, more of the same. The ubiquitous granite, a warped sandstone wall, the odd beetling overhang, a coating of kaolin over the lower slopes. Some interesting shapes and formations but, geologically speaking, par for the course.

Below me was another site in which I had more than a passing interest: the dozen or so acres of bizarrely shaped and weathered granite boulders that whitefellers called the Tom Bowlers and which Hazel knew as her dreaming site. Karlujurru. Diamond Dove. From this angle it looked like a ruined city. Some of the massive corestones seemed to be floating on air, so delicately were they balanced upon each other’s backs.

Absorbed in the long-range perspective, I almost forgot about the close-up: the outcrop under my arse. Jalyukurru itself. Jack had cast a prospector’s eye over it years before, only to be stopped in his tracks by a minatory glance from Lincoln. I wondered, fleetingly, whether they’d mind my being here, whether I was breaking some taboo.

The boulder upon which I sat was rough and grey, and, given that it was mottled with dents and cavities, surprisingly comfortable. I ran a hand over its fractured face. Hackly and jagged, the texture flaky, almost greasy, with a vitreous lustre. Anorthosite, I decided, with xenoliths of dunite. The coarse-grained gabbro jutting out at the base was something else, possibly norite.

Anorthosite. Dunite. Norite. Was there a pattern there? Something told me there was. Hadn’t I seen something similar of late? Possibly, but I couldn’t remember where. Hazel’s wind-chime? No, the interesting bit there was labradorite, or so Jack had reckoned, and he was usually right.

I put the rocks in my pocket and made a mental note to follow them up with Jack next time I saw him.

I turned my attention to the country below. From the heights of Jalyukurru it assumed a different perspective. A dream perspective, perhaps, the echo of an inland sea. I felt like I was hovering over a red and yellow canvas painted by an old woman with sandy-blighted eyes. The wind guttered, the heat shimmered. Light shot away from an infinity of minerals. A brown hawk clawed air, floated over plains and pasture, went eye to eye with me.

I raised my binoculars and scanned the horizon. A few cattle mooched about. Marsh’s, presumably. Bastard was taking his time responding to the court order. Why did that not surprise me? It was poor country this. Relentless, treeless, the wiregrass sporadic and as tough as tungsten, the gibbers the colour of arterial blood. Bare enough to flog a flea, as Lincoln would have said.

Worth killing for? Shit, who could say? Especially if it had water. In Bluebush I’d seen fellers come close to killing each other over a carton of chips. Had Marsh, already enraged over the land claim, been tipped over the edge when Lincoln told him to sod off?

I picked up the boundary fence with the glasses, followed it along until I came to a gate, on the other side of which lay the waving Mitchell grass plains of Carbine Creek. The transformation here was dramatic. Rich pasture, to be sure, but for how much longer? Strange to think that the station, one of the oldest in the Territory, was becoming a marginal prospect because of its dwindling water supply. How many other properties were going the same way? How much of our future were we slowly devouring?

I followed the fence a little further to the south, then paused, came back and had a closer look at the gate. There was something unusual about it. I studied it carefully, wondering what it was that had snagged my subconscious. It wasn’t until I put the glasses down that I realised what it was: the set of wheel tracks ploughing through it. They were much deeper and wider than what you normally saw round here.

I raised the glasses again.

Marsh’s F100? Too deep. Cattle truck? Too wide. This was something really big.

What the hell was that big out here? A road train? No, the country was too rough.

A drilling rig, that’s what it would be. They could go just about anywhere these days. Earl Marsh, I knew, was looking for water. Had he already drilled? I followed the tracks. They came towards me, up into the lower slopes of Jalyukurru. I lost them for a moment on the outskirts of Karlujurru—you could lose an army in those crazy acres of scattered granite—but then I found them again. And something else. Beside the track was a metal cylinder, rising a foot or two out of the ground.

A capped bore hole.

There’d been a drilling rig here all right, and it had drilled on the outskirts of Karlujurru. Depending on the angle, the hole could well have bored right into the site itself. Lincoln would never have agreed to that. Not here. They didn’t come much holier than Karlujurru.

Marsh, I thought, you cheeky bastard. Lincoln barely in his grave and already you’re drilling into his heartland. Or did you drill beforehand? Was this what Lincoln had found the day he died? Was this why he died? Did he spring you drilling for water? Did the two of you have another argument over it? Did you follow him home and murder him in the night?

I rolled a smoke, took a long, slow drag, thought about the significance of what I’d seen. Whether I was any closer to finding out who’d killed Lincoln.

Not particularly, I decided. Both of my main contenders were still shuffling round the ring. If the aquifer was accessible and deep, Marsh could have killed him to facilitate his rip-off over the water rights.

The trouble was that the drilling could just as easily have been a motive for Blakie. A hole punched through the heart of Karlujurru. Even if Lincoln hadn’t known about it when it happened, he still bore ultimate responsibility for the sanctity of the site. He was
kirta
, the owner. In Blakie’s merciless system of justice that could well have meant he had to pay the price for its desecration. I thought about the butchered body, the missing kidney, the intricacies of responsibility and atonement among the Warlpuju.

But was I getting ahead of myself? I didn’t even know for sure whether or not Marsh had actually drilled here. What was it Bickie had said? He’d found water close to the boundary. This hole was three or four kilometres in. Not what you’d call close. Had Bickie’s water been too salty? Were there other drill sites, closer to the fence? Maybe Marsh had been doing some exploratory drilling. I scrutinised the country. There were no more holes that I could see. A lot of the country round here was criss-crossed with old tracks and trails, pock-marked with mines, dams and other desecrations committed before blackfellers had any say in the matter. Could this be one of them? I needed to take a closer look.

I considered my options, thought about climbing down.

No. It was tough, and risky. Steep in parts, loose in others. And getting back up would be even worse. This was no country to be out alone in with a broken leg. I’d have to go the long way round.

I climbed back down to where I’d parked, still chewing over what I’d seen. It would take me a good hour to get around to Karlujurru. I’d have to head up through the Mater Christi Jump-up, and it was a hell of a tough road for my little Hilux. Should I risk it now, or come back better equipped?

The moment I broke out of the scrub I regretted the fact that, absorbed by the view in front of me, I hadn’t paid more attention to what was going on behind me.

The big red F100 parked in front of my ute was the least of my worries. The two blokes sitting inside—their fiery faces and John Deere hats marking them as the kind of runaway urban trash who’d overrun the Territory in my absence—weren’t such a worry either.

The worry was what was standing next to my car, its arms crossed, its feet squared, its glasses glowing.

Earl Marsh.

Black hole

WE STOOD there for a moment, sizing each other up.

He reminded me of a lump of weathered granite, all scarlet and black faceted, the sunlight glimmering off his blistered skin, the buckle on his enormous girth-strap gleaming. The most compelling aspects of the man were the five-gallon hat, the ten-gallon hands and the small, worried-looking woman reflected in his shades.

‘Mr Marsh!’ I began. ‘You’re looking particularly…’ I stumbled around for the right adjective, then settled on the glasses, ‘reflective today.’

‘You set me up,’ he barked.

Small talk, I was beginning to realise, would never be one of the Marsh strong points. ‘On a pedestal?’

His nostrils quivered. ‘You set your fuckin PC hounds onto me.’

Tom McGillivray PC? Police constable once, presumably; but hardly politically correct. ‘I had some concerns which I reported to the relevant authorities.’

‘Well, the relevant fuckin authority is cooling its heels in Darwin, from what I hear.’

‘That was an impressive piece of political lobbying— congratulations—but it doesn’t answer the question, does it?’

‘Which is what?’ He loomed over me like a loose boulder in avalanche country. ‘Whether I killed some bloody blackfeller?’

‘Well, some bugger did.’

‘That’s no reason to go spreading bullshit round about me.’

‘I didn’t spread any bullshit about anyone. I simply asked a few questions.’

‘Questions! You enter my home under false pretences, accept my hospitality and then go sniffing round to see what kind of crap you can dig up. I’ve had half the Anzac Club ribbing me about it all week…’

‘I didn’t enter your home under any pretences, and, frankly, I don’t think you can blame me for being curious. Doesn’t it strike even you as a little convenient that Lincoln is murdered the day after you do a dodgy deal with his drunken brother to take over half his country?’

I noticed a flicker of movement behind the shades, then he muttered, ‘Them’s the breaks.’

As long as Lincoln’s neck wasn’t another, I thought, but thankfully didn’t say. If a verbal stoush was all I had to worry about, I could have gone the full ten rounds, but I didn’t like the situation: lonely road, lone woman, the possibility of a slanging match escalating into something more serious.

I glanced at Marsh’s red-faced henchmen. If he was granite, they were termite mound: equally red, but friable, pock-marked and a pain in the arse if you ran into one. The nearer of the two squinted back at me with a twisted grimace. His mate was worse: big nose, weak chin, thick lips. Barbra Streisand on steroids. And half shaven, the pair of them. Why couldn’t the blokes out here make up their minds whether to shave or not?

No, I didn’t like the situation at all.

But—fuck it!—somebody had killed Lincoln. If this bloke had had anything to do with it, if he knew anything which could provide me with any insight into the murder, I wanted to know about it. This was as good an opportunity as I was likely to get.

The trouble with Marsh, though—the trouble with a lot of these outback meatheads—was that he was such a black hole. I’d been wondering what it would be like to go head to head with him. It was high time I found out.

I took a deep breath.

‘Mr Marsh, look, I want to say something to you: I know I’m not one of your…set, okay? I’m not a cattle king and I’m not some big-shot public servant, and I’m not even white, but I’ll tell you something else I’m not.’ I faced him full on, stared at about where his eyes ought to be. ‘I’m not going to go away. I’m not going to stop asking questions until I get some answers, and I’m not going to stop asking about you until I’m convinced that you had nothing to do with Lincoln’s death, and frankly, right now, I’m not convinced.’

He stood there, stock still, glowering, then glanced at the Dynamic Duo in the truck. Was this the bit where they began breaking necks? But no, he put a finger to his chin, grappled with a thought. The effort made him look like a gorilla examining a gyroscope. Finally he spoke.

‘What makes you think I had anything to do with it?’

‘You haven’t exactly been a model of reconciliation.’

‘Eh?’ he grunted.

‘You’ve been a royal pain in the Moonlight mob’s collective arse, Mr Marsh. Hijacking their land, killing their dogs, generally scaring the shit out of what little’s left of the community. You blame me for suspecting you might have taken your opposition to the next level?’

Another long silence ensued, and then, to my surprise, he held out his hands.

‘Look at these,’ he said.

‘Very impressive,’ I answered. And I had to admit, they were— callused, corn-fed, rough as buffalo hide. ‘Done a lot of miles. Why are you showing them to me?’

‘The point is that what I got,’ nodding in the direction of Carbine Creek, ‘I worked for. I earned. I was ridin a horse before I could walk. You know a bit about my background: I come from that to ownin one of the most famous properties in the Territory.’

He leaned in close. I could have compared his dentistry with Blakie’s if he’d ever opened his mouth when he talked. ‘An there’s nothin gives me the irrits more’n seein a bunch of useless layabouts pickin up what oughta be prime property without pullin a finger outer their—what’d you call it?—collective arse. Nothin!’

I was willing to skip mentioning the Warlpuju’s long-term land management—sixty thousand years of it, at last count—in the interests of my own short-term survival, but there was one anomaly glaring out of his argument that I couldn’t let go by. ‘I can’t see that there’s a huge amount of work in getting Freddy Ah Fong to sign the place over to you.’

He chewed his lip, then grunted, ‘That was more by way of creating a buffer zone than anythin else. There’s a lotta blackfeller stations round the Territory. They got a reputation, believe me. When you got a neighbour won’t put in—I’m talkin disease control, noxious weeds, gates, dogs—you need a bit of room. To manoeuvre, like. Bit of breathin space.’

It was more cant than Kant, but, by local standards, Marsh was sounding almost reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that before I knew what I was doing I found myself seeing how far I could go. Seeing how far I could push the envelope, as his little mate Massie would have put it.

‘If I had a neighbour that bad I might be tempted to get rid of him.’

He ripped the envelope to bits and threw it into my face. ‘You still tryin to pin this fuckin thing on me!’ he snapped impatiently. ‘I’m not the only neighbour, you know. There’s the roadhouse, there’s three other stations, pack of pissant mines, an a stack of bloody blackfellers, one of who’s mad as a cut fuckin death adder.’

‘Maybe, but you had a motive. I don’t know that any of them did.’

Sometimes I say things I wish I hadn’t, but I can’t help myself. It’s in the genes, my big mouth. My only regret was that my old man’s big right hook wasn’t in the genes as well. Marsh took off his shades and studied me, his eyes like cracks in a slab of blistered liver. ‘Motive?’ he growled suspiciously.

‘Water,’ I said softly.

‘Water?’

‘Water.’

‘Water!’ he bellowed. ‘You think I killed the pig-headed old cunt for some
water
?’

I’d hit it now; water was obviously the tender point in the Marsh psyche. ‘Well, why did you kill him?’

‘I bloody well haven’t killed anyone! Yet!’ he added ominously. ‘And what the hell has this got to do with water?’

‘I know you need it. And I think you might have found it when you drilled on Moonlight.’

‘Whadderye mean I drilled on Moonlight?’

‘I’ve seen the borehole.’

‘Lady, you wouldn’t know a borehole from a bum hole!’

I would have responded in the same intemperate manner, but the crash of his fist upon the bonnet of my car which had accompanied the last outburst brought me to my senses.

One of Marsh’s henchmen—the one with the squint—was climbing down from the cabin, his nose twitching, his overbite bared. He looked like a cross between a hamster and a pig dog. He glanced at his mate with an expression I found hard to read but hoped wasn’t saying, ‘Here we go again, get the shovels ready.’

Whatever their intentions might have been, they were interrupted by the sound of another vehicle coming down the track. Blackfeller outfit, from the broken-down sound of things. Bindi, I saw gratefully, as his crudbucket-of-the-month came limping round the bend with a mob of women and kids on board. His mother-in-law, Minnie Driver, was sitting on the back, waving a skinny claw and grinning like a bearded dragon. She even had the beard.

Bindi’s automotive standards had hit rock bottom: his front axle was a mulga branch, his petrol cap a pair of undies. A jerrycan on the roof was feeding petrol into his fuel pump.

‘Everythin all right, Emily?’ Bindi inquired as he rattled to a halt beside us.

‘Everything’s great, Bindi.’ Especially now that you’re here. ‘What are you mob up to?’

‘Oh, we’s headin for town. Strangeways give us the arse. Too many family, manager reckon.’

The Strangeways manager probably had a point. If the car had had rafters they would have been hanging off them. The more the merrier right now, as far as I was concerned.

‘You wanner come along?’ he offered, glancing at the Carbine entourage and reading the situation beautifully.

Marsh was reading it as well, and retreated to his car with a glance that was laced with dog-bait.

‘Not just now, thanks mate.’

I watched Marsh as he pushed his off-sider away from the wheel and roared off. Terrible temper that man had. At least there weren’t any dogs around for him to kill this time.

I didn’t feel up to checking out the mystery bore right now. It’d keep. After the traumas of the past twenty minutes all I wanted was a bit of company.

‘Did you call into Moonlight on the way, Bindi?’

‘We bin camp there last night.’

‘Hazel there?’

‘Yep.’

Bindi rounded up his mob—some of the old ladies had taken the opportunity for a spot of hunting, a couple of kids had to be dragged down from a tree—and rattled off down the track. I was about to do the same when I noticed movement at the foot of the bushes behind the wind-row. I took a closer look and spotted a carcass disintegrating in the scrub. A bullock. Long dead, from the smell, or lack thereof.

The bag of bovine bones was bad enough, but what was infinitely worse was the fat black snake crawling out of its rotted arse. Deaf-adder. The reptile gazed up at me bleakly, its eyes as cold as a winter dawn, its fangs flickering. Sun-dried shit on wicked scales.

I shuddered, climbed into my car and drove away, fast. But not fast enough to escape the shiver that rattled my backbone and the sudden intuition that somewhere, somehow, something bad was going down.