Moonlight Downs (6 page)

‘Tom, the only way you could get me to go and live in Bluebush would be if you were to knock me out, handcuff me and throw me into the back of your paddy wagon.’

Blue-bloody-bush

Sssskkk@@@###~~rrrxxxttt
!

I was floating up from the bottom of a deep blue dream, but the noise ripping in through the open window of my Bluebush apartment sounded like metal on metal, and one of the metals had an ominously familiar crunch to it.

Was this some sort of local initiation ritual: you wake up in the morning to find some bastard’s run into your car?

I checked my watch. Ten to six. Urk. The party in the flat opposite mine had kicked off at about the time most parties were winding down, presumably after they’d been chucked out of the pub. Sounded like one of the revellers was going home via my car.

I stumbled to the door, hesitated, then went back and slipped into a sarong. This was Bluebush, after all: if I went out there in my present state, I’d have some ravenous meatworker devouring me for breakfast.

Bluebush. I still couldn’t quite believe I’d been here for over a week now. Settled in, at least to the extent of picking up some underpaid bar-work at the White Dog and the overpriced abode in which I now found myself.

It wasn’t McGillivray’s admonitions that had brought me here. On the contrary, there was nothing as likely to make me dig my heels in as being told to go. My intention to stay with the community, however, depended upon there being a community with which to stay. At Moonlight Downs there no longer was one.

Before he died Lincoln had voiced his concerns about his people’s willingness to remain on Moonlight, and he’d been proven right. Blackfellers often move away from an area when an important person dies, but they don’t normally move hundreds of kilometres, which was what the Moonlight mob had done. Whether their motivation was fear, thirst or respect for the dead I wasn’t sure, but within a day or two of the funeral the entire community packed up and pissed off.

Hazel and a few of the closer kin were the first to go, disappearing into the desert to complete the mourning rituals. When they’d be back nobody could tell me. Since the death, nobody seemed to be telling me anything.

Then Bindi and a car-load of young men went off to the neighbouring Strangeways station. And finally what little was left of the community simply chucked their gear into the three or four working cars and took the ominous road to town.

I joined them. No way was I up to camping out at Moonlight on my own, not with the Wet on the way and Blakie on the loose. It was only a temporary move, I told myself, a place to stay until something better came along.

From somewhere outside I heard an engine roar, a dog bark and a voice bellow, ‘Shuddup, ya mongrel!’

I opened the door and spotted a monstrous four-wheel-drive ute, obligatory Rottweiler on the back, obligatory moron in the front, negotiating its way out of the opposite flat’s driveway. From the dent in my own Toyota, I figured the driver belonged to the von Ribbentrop school of negotiation.

Surely he wasn’t going to do it again?

‘Oi!!’

He did it again, the bastard. Nonchalantly rammed my car out of the way and gunned the motor for a getaway down the drive.

I raced over and thumped his window. The bloke at the wheel gazed at me, a what-have-I-done-wrong look on his raised palms and curled lip.

Oh Christ, I thought, looking into his bloodshot eyes, I’m in Bluebush. This is what you get: head like a weathered gumboot, great wobbly arms covered in great wobbly tatts, face bedecked with something that wouldn’t look out of place on a rotten grapefruit. Skinny in places, fat in others. Twenty-five going on fifty. Been taking deportment lessons from the Rottweiler.

‘You got a problem?’ he rasped. He sounded like he gargled on Handy Andy.

‘Yeah! You! You just hit me car! Twice!’

The bloke glanced at the dented fender.

‘Your fault,’ he declared.

‘My fault? Jesus, mate, you got more front than a bloody bulldozer. How is it supposed to be my fault?’

‘Yer blockin the exit.’

I waved an arm in the general direction of the driveway. ‘There’s plenty of room for a car—didn’t know you’d be coming along in a fuckin aircraft carrier.’

I was being a little disingenuous here: the block of flats in which I’d made my home was nicknamed Toyota Towers because of its popularity as a base for miners and other workers from out bush. The four wheel drives just about outnumbered the cockroaches.

My neighbour knew it as well. ‘’T’s what ya need out here, lady,’ he retorted, ‘somethin with a bit of grunt.’ He glanced disdainfully at my little ute, then began to drive off.

‘Hold it you!’ I yelled.

He ignored me, came very close to running over my toes. I thumped his dropsides. The rottie snarled, but it was held back by a chain. I judged I’d be out of range, and I was. Just. I grabbed hold of what looked like the most valuable items within reach—a Kanga jack-hammer and a theodolite—and dragged them onto the ground.

The bloke hit the anchors, jumped out and looked at the gear, his sneer rapidly transmogrifying into a full-blown glare. From the wobble in his beard and the spittle on his lips it appeared that he was getting a little agitato. Looking, in fact, like he was about ready to clobber me. His knuckles had gone white, his nostrils were standing at attention.

I braced myself, prepared to duck, weave or kick him in the nuts. But then he took a closer look at me and changed his mind. When I get fired up I’m like a thorny devil: small but fierce-looking. Not as horny, thank Christ.

Doors in the surrounding flats were creeping open, curtains were being dragged back, bedraggled faces were appearing. The rest of the neighbourhood was crawling out to enjoy the show.

You could read the bubble floating over his head: enough of a shame job belting a woman in public without making a mess of it.

‘Look, lady,’ he whined, ostentatiously studying his watch. ‘I haven’t got time for this crap. Got a job to go to.’ When he’d picked up his gear he scribbled a number onto a cigarette packet: ‘This is Brad, me panel-beater…’

‘Got your own panel-beater, have you? You do this sort of thing often?’

He handed me the packet, picked up his gear, climbed into the cab. ‘Tell em Camel sent ya. They’ll give yer a discount.’

That gave me a moment’s pause. This fuckwit was called Camel? That had to be the worst name I’d heard since Galloping Big Dick died.

He used the pause to make an escape, picking up his gear and jumping back into the driver’s seat.

‘They’ll give
you
a bloody discount, Camel!’ I yelled at his tailgate, giving it a farewell thump as it rattled down the drive. ‘Don’t think I’m paying for this!’

I surveyed the scene around me. The sun had risen, as had the contents of the coloured jocks worn by the blue-singletted gorillas who stood in every other doorway of the courtyard surveying me back. All this early morning excitement was proving a bit much for their delicate sensibilities.

‘What are you lot gawking at?’ I roared.

They scuttled.

The debris of last night’s party—maybe last month’s party— bottles and bongs, pizza boxes and porno—lay scattered among the dogshit on Camel’s little patch of weedery. The front door of his unit was agape, as was the gob of the bearded, beefy bastard enveloping the couch like a layer of molten mozzarella. Charmingly attired in a blue singlet, yellow Y-fronts and an empty rum bottle, this one was presumably too hungover to go to work.

A bracing aroma, a blend of smoke, sperm and stale beer, drifted out on the early morning breeze. Lighting for this depressing tableau was provided by a set of fluorescent tubes glowing with that ugly pallor they assume as the day dawns around them, sound by a distant bass guitar and a set of hands unseen making mincemeat out of ‘Smoke on the Water’.
Duh duh duuh, duh duh duh-duuh, duh duh duuh, duh-duh.

I sat on the steps, head in hands, heart sunk. Christ, I thought. Bluebush!

The town had a population of some fifty million: a thousand blacks, a thousand whites, the rest cockroaches. The cockroaches were on the go early this morning, crawling around blinking at the light of day, their dark brown armour glistening in the sun, their feelers flickering. The weedy geranium bush at the doorstep looked as though it had struggled up through a hole in the concrete, taken a quick look around and was heading back down. Even the dogs yelping in the distance were wondering what canine-karma they’d accumulated to end up in this pissant town.

I was wondering the same thing myself. I stood up to admire the view. Still life in a mining town. Well, not that still, actually: the smokestacks at the smelter were pumping it up and pouring it out, as they did, morning, noon and night. The furnaces were blazing away with enough firepower to blind the angels. The battery was rumbling.

Over to the west, the green mountains—of mullock—were simmering and stinking. Further on was a chemical inferno: the retention ponds, with their hissing blue cyanic waters, their evil green banks, their sagging fences, their odd little toxic rainbows leaching out into the desert.

I’d been to the ponds once. Never again. Skull and cross-bones country. You could feel the cancer stirring in your cells just looking at it.

Food smells began to waft through the air.

Meatworkers and miners were staggering out to tables all over town and getting down to the serious business of making their selection from the enormous smorgasbord of dead animals and their parts which comprised the Bluebush breakfast: schnitzels and mince, chicken wings, red gum, sausages and cutlets, rib bones, lamb shanks, pigs’ heads, bulls’ balls—you name it, it was being battered, baked or boiled in oil, chilled, grilled or charred in lard, filleted, fricasseed, skewered, stewed or brewed and demolished by the ravenous men and rough women of Bluebush.

Driven indoors by the radiant depression, I put on some coffee and some Louvin Brothers, made toast, lit a smoke. Charlie and Ira were singing ‘When I Stop Dreaming’
.
Sweet harmonies and sweet aromas filled the room, but did little to ease my mind.

Another mess you’ve gotten yourself into, girl, I admonished myself. Another fine fucking mess.

When I’d thought about coming back to the Centre, the prospect of being stuck in this dirty dust-hole, this monument to red neckery and black despair, hadn’t figured in my calculations.

Like a lot of other people, I’d ended up in Bluebush because I didn’t know what else to do.

I found myself idly scratching shapes in some sugar I’d spilt on the kitchen table the night before. Almost of their own accord, it seemed, the shapes formed themselves into letters and the letters turned into a word: ‘haze’.

Haze. The word was open to a couple of interpretations, and between them they might have been bookends to the state of mind in which I found myself. On the one hand, a haze was what I seemed to have been floating along in ever since I first left Moonlight, years before.

On the other hand, something told me that if there was a way out of the fog, if I were ever to find a home, Hazel Flinders would be part of it. If I were ever to get a foothold in this country, it could only be with her assistance.

But would she let me? I’d buggered up her life once before. Would she ever trust me again?

She’d be coming back sooner or later, and I wanted to be there when she did. Not at Moonlight—not yet, at any rate. I wasn’t up to Moonlight. The deserted outstation was too much to tackle on my own.

Bluebush was my only option; I’d stay here until I knew what she and I were going to make of each other. She’d said it was about time I came home. Well, we’d see.

I glanced at my watch. Getting on for seven. I’d promised to come in early, help Stan with the twelve o’clock swill, but that still gave me a few hours. I grabbed a book, slipped back under the covers and read myself to sleep. Since Camel’s party had kept me awake half the night and the book was entitled
A Delineation of the Precambrian Plateau in North Central Australia with notes on the impinging sedimentary formation
—when I’m trying to understand a locality I like to start from the ground and work my way up—that took about ten seconds.

Party girl

THERE WERE two pubs in town: mine, the White Dog, and the Black Dog, which was even worse. The main danger I faced at the White was the constant barrage of marriage proposals to which I was subjected by the old timers in the front bar. When things got frisky at the Black, you were likely to end up with a billiard cue through the skull.

We were generally frantic at lunch time, but I quite enjoyed it. I’d put on my running shoes and sprint from one end of the bar to the other, trying not to skittle Stan, who’d run the White for twenty years.

After lunch the miners and meatworkers scuttled back to their respective holes and sometimes we’d find time to join the regulars for a quiet drink. There was usually a comforting monotony about the conversation: I’d find myself counselling them against blowing their super on time-share apartments and Russian brides, laughing at their stale jokes and reminding them to take their tablets.

Today, however, was not one of those days. We’d been joined by a rowdy mob of blokes who seemed to have wandered into the wrong establishment and showed no signs of pissing off.

‘Be more at home over the road,’ Stan grumbled as I made my tenth trip to the back bar, from where the strangers’ conversation was rising into a crescendo.

‘Hate to tell you this Stan, but they’d probably be there if they hadn’t been banned last night.’

‘Jeez,’ said Stan, looking seriously offended, ‘you mean we’re gettin the Black’s rejects?’

There were eight or nine of them. Station hands, I picked up over the next half hour, though not the kind of station hands I remembered from my childhood. The men who worked the stations back then were unworldly, shy, often awkward blokes who’d take their hats off when a woman entered the room. Country men.

These guys looked like urban refuse: stone-faced teenage mutants, toothless drifters in John Deere caps, a rat-faced Northern Irishman, a couple of leathery bikies looking for a place to lay low and a shifty, swivel-eyed little Pom who called himself a cook and who’d apparently given the entire stock camp an opportunity to lie low when he poisoned them with a green beef casserole. They were, it emerged, from Carbine Creek, a station north of Bluebush. One of Moonlight’s neighbours in fact, though I couldn’t recall ever having been there.

I was pulling another beer when I heard the word ‘Moonlight’.

I tuned into the conversation.

‘…so den the witchdoctor points a bone at em,’ squeaked the Irishman, slapping the table, ‘and the fuckin wallopers dunno whether to shit or swim!’

A wave of laughter erupted as a bloke with a backyard buzz-cut, prison tatts and tropical sideburns took up the tale. ‘They reckon the sarge has called in the army to try and track him down! Choppers and dogs, black-trackers, C-fuckin-I-A, and they still can’t find him.’

‘Shouldn’t be that hard,’ yelled one of the drifters. ‘All ya gotta do is head for the hills and follow your nose.’

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard the Moonlight incident discussed in the bar. One blackfeller’s killing another was nothing to get excited about, but the general consensus was that the killer beating up four of Bluebush’s finest and making an escape was the best thing that had happened round here since the mayor was caught in flagrante with Benny Birkham, the town’s one-man Mardi Gras. But I didn’t like the way this conversation was heading. Coming from these guys it sounded unclean.

‘All for a runaway coon,’ yelped the little Pom.

‘Shoulda just handed out more knives and let im finish the job,’ interjected a yellow-cap cowboy, his teeth just about falling out onto the table in his excitement. ‘Get rid of the lot of em.’

‘Wouldn’t that make Earl’s day?’ asked one of the bikies.

I found the jug was overflowing in my hands. I put it on the bar, a red mist falling across my eyes, but I’d only taken a step in their direction when I felt a hand upon my shoulder.

Stan. He was standing there looking at me, his eyebrows raised.

‘You reckon they’re worth the bother, Emily?’

I glowered at him for a moment. The red mist lifted a little.

I had to hand it to Stan. He was a little old guy with a stoop and a hump and a head that looked like it was being pulled towards his left shoulder by an invisible rubber band, but he knew how to run a pub. Tranquillity seemed to radiate out from him.

‘No,’ I sighed. ‘Don’t suppose they are.’

‘Why don’t you take a break? You been workin yer little arse off. I don’t want a compo claim for, what?—RSI of the pullin arm? Go and get a bit of fresh air. Kaz can keep this mob tanked up. Come back at dinner time.’

Ten minutes later I was walking down Hawker’s Road when I spotted a dirty police Toyota pulling away from one of the Warlpuju houses. McGillivray was at the wheel, and I flagged him down.

‘Top of the afternoon to you, Tom. You do look like a bag of shit.’

He was decked out in crud-encrusted overalls, a filthy cap and topsoil thicker than most of the surrounding desert could boast.

His eyes narrowed. ‘You spend a week crawling in and out of snake holes and see what you look like.’

‘So,’ I said with an innocent smile, ‘did you get your man?’

If his eyes had narrowed any further he would have ruptured his eyelids. Not that I could blame him for looking pissed off.

‘My man…’ Tom growled. ‘I’ll be amazed if we ever do get im, way Pepper an Archie are doin their job.’ He shook his head. ‘I been workin with those boys for twenty years. Best trackers this side of the Alice, an I never seen em so arse about. If I didn’t know better I’d say they were doing their best to avoid him.’ He glanced at the house and grunted. ‘Fuck it, I do know better and they were doing their best to avoid him.’

‘Not a sign, eh?’

‘Oh, we got signs. We got signs comin out our arse. Things disappearin from stations and mining camps, the odd butchered bullock, the odd rifle shot. Trouble is they’re always somewhere we aren’t. We know he’s out there, but Pepper an Arch don’t wanner come within a bull’s roar o’ the bastard.’

‘You blame em? Dangerous man, Blakie. Specially for them.’

He started up the ute. ‘Anyway, if it’s all the same to you, Em—even if it isn’t—I’m outta here. There’s a hot bath round here somewhere with my name on it.’

‘What were you doing here anyway, Tom?’ I asked, pointing my chin at the house.

‘Just dropped Pepper an Archie off at the family seat.’

A howling chorus erupted from behind the corrugated iron fence. Somebody was singing along with that blackfeller classic, the Warumpi Band’s ‘Fitzroy Crossing’. Somebody else was singing along with something else, or possibly it was the same song, sung in a different key with some of the same words and a melody which occasionally intersected with the original.

‘Sounds like the family’s having a welcome-home party.’

‘Same one they were having when I picked em up a few days ago.’ More yells. Laughter as well, but it was that lean, desperate laughter which is only a decibel away from murder. ‘In the words of Johnny Cash, the road goes on forever but the party never ends.’

‘Robert Earle Keen.’

‘What?’

‘They’re his words. Johnny just sang em.’

He frowned, shoved the gearstick into first. ‘Whoever said it, he was a wise man. Give yer a lift?’

‘Thanks, but don’t worry about it. I’m nearly home.’

I’d only taken a few steps before I was sprung by the mob inside the house. A lot of the revellers were ex-Moonlight. They came pouring out the front gate and dragged me inside with an offer I couldn’t refuse: warm wine, wet chips and effusive greetings from a score of old friends, half of whom I’d never met before.

The scene inside the house looked like a game of paralytic pass-the-parcel—the parcel in this case being a flagon of Fruity Lexia. When one disappeared another appeared in its place. The party kicked off on the front veranda, surged into the lounge room, trailed into the kitchen, staggered out the back door and collapsed under the saltbush.

I made my way through the crowd. My fellow party animals came in all shapes and sizes, all ages and denominations, the common denominator being thirst.

Gladys Kneebone, whom I’d last seen serving up the
chat du jour
, was cracking jokes and laughing like a cyclone. Slippery Williams was gazing at a television which, like him, wasn’t properly tuned in. Jeanie Marble wandered up and wrapped me in a giant bear-hug, then subsided onto the couch and fell asleep.

‘Jeanie looks like she’s been through the wringer,’ I said to Gladys.

‘
Yuwayi
, most of the bloody ringers, too.’

There were even a couple of whitefellers among them. Whitefellers, that is, in the Territorian sense of the word, which is to say not blackfellers. One was an olive-skinned young bloke—a copperfeller?—with clean teeth, curly hair and a floral shirt. I didn’t catch a name, but from what I could gather from Slippery’s toothless introduction the bloke was either a Cuban or a Cubist. The other whitefeller was an old guy with a head like a radioactive strawberry and a name which sounded like ‘Jack Derrida’.

‘Not the deconstructionist?’ I asked Slippery.

‘Jack?’ came the reply. ‘No way. Bit of a pisshead, but he wouldn’t hurt nobody.’

Jack’s contribution to the discourse, ‘Eeeeeaaagheeoo’, was about as comprehensible as that of his namesake. He tried, and failed, to shake my hand, but the momentum kept him going as far as the laundry door, from where he was last seen raining death down on the pansies.

I wandered out into the backyard, and eventually found myself among the wallflowers—the old, the infirm, the insane, the Christian—perched around a fire beside the fence. They were a sea of tranquillity amidst a mighty ocean of booze. A billy was boiling. Tongues were clicking, teeth were clacking.

Prominent among the group were Archie and Pepper Kennedy, McGillivray’s trackers, two skinny old brothers with patches on their pants and beards growing out of their noses. Archie and Pepper had been born out in the Plenty Desert west of Moonlight. They hadn’t seen a white man until they were adults and could, it was said, follow a fish through a flooded river. They were sitting on their swags and sipping at pannikins of tea. Pepper silently handed me a brew as I joined them.

I took a sip, winced, then took another. Suddenly hungry, I pulled out of my pocket a packet of sunflower seeds, the only food I could find, and began to nibble away at its contents.

Pepper looked on with interest.

‘What that you eatin there, Nangali?’

‘Try some,’ I said, offering him the packet. He picked out a handful, put them in his mouth, and immediately spat them out.

‘
Man
eat this one?’ he asked.

‘Woman does,’ I told him. ‘This woman, anyway. I hear you had a busy week out bush with old Tom.’

‘’E bin give us bit of a run around the country.’

‘And all to no avail.’

‘Eh?’

‘You didn’t find Blakie.’

‘Man I can foller. Dunno if that one man.’

‘He’s a bit of a man.’

‘Bit of a man?’

‘The arsehole. Why do you reckon he’d do a thing like that?’

Pepper looked away. ‘What thing?’ he murmured.

Were my senses deceiving me, or did I detect a sudden tension in the air? There were eight or nine people sitting along the fence, and suddenly it seemed as though they were hanging on to our every word.

‘Kill that old Kuminjayi.’

Pepper took a sip of his tea, stared at the dirt, then muttered, ‘Dunno that ’e did.’

My own pannikin paused mid-air. ‘What?’ I asked.

‘Hard to say what it is bin kill a man.’

‘Breaking his neck, ripping his kidney out and chucking him over a cliff will usually do the job.’

‘Mebbe Blakie kill im. Mebbe
mamu
.’

Mamu
? Devil? Yeah, sure Pepper, I mused. If it was, then the devil had incarnated in the form of a wandering madman with a fighting stick and a bandolier full of rusty knives.

Whatever reply I was about to make was drowned out by a sudden uproar.

It was Lenny Coulter and his mother, Lucy: one moment two inebriated faces in the crowd, the next a couple of screaming maniacs who had to be kept from each other’s throats by a pack of party-goers.

What the ante was I had no idea, but Lenny—about eighteen, camouflage pants, fluorescent orange T-shirt—upped it when he screamed at his hangers-on, ‘Lemme go an I’ll kill ’er, the ol cunt!’

The epithet whipped his mother to new levels of fury. ‘Don’t you call me cunt, you
come
from my cunt!’

Once would have been bad enough, but her pounding repetition of the phrase shocked her restrainers long enough for her to grab a star-picket and begin weighing into anybody in the vicinity of her son. When he retreated in my direction I scrambled over the fence.

By the time I ventured back into the yard Archie and Pepper had pissed off, and I took the opportunity to do the same.

As I wandered along the dusty footpath I found myself thinking about the tracker’s comments.

I came to a vacant lot that offered a view of the north-western desert and paused to take it in. The country between the road and the sky was as bleak and empty as a cattleman’s gaze. Somewhere out there was Moonlight. Somewhere out there was Hazel. And somewhere out there was Blakie, his brain wandering as crazily as his legs.