Moonlight Downs (7 page)

Blakie hadn’t killed Lincoln? Like hell he hadn’t. It wasn’t just the fact that he’d assaulted him the day before, or that he’d virtually confessed to the murder. It had to be Blakie because there was simply nobody else in the camp who could have done such a thing.

I ran through the possibilities.

One of the elders? No way. Too old, too weak, too respectful of Lincoln. One of the young men, then? Was the devil involved, the demon drink? I doubted it. Sure, Lincoln had been yelling at them to shut up, but I’d heard them, seen them. They were in party mode that night, not murder mode. What about Freddy Ah Fong? I dismissed the thought as soon as I raised it: he hadn’t looked sober enough to throttle a chook, much less his brother.

Could it be payback, then? Indigenous Australia, like tribal cultures from LA to Sicily, is racked by a never-ending cycle of vengeance. When a person dies, when a taboo is broken, when a sacred site is breached, somebody is inevitably held responsible. In the worst cases, the avenger will coat his body in red ochre, sharpen his spears, drag the dreaded emu-feather slippers out of their hiding place and set off on his secret mission of revenge.

Could this be the case here? Could Lincoln have unwittingly been blamed for some distant death or breach of a taboo?

Once again, it didn’t seem right. Rough around the edges I might have been, but surely I’d have picked up something. When the red ochre men were on the move it was hard not to know about it. Everybody went to ground, stoked the fires, watched their backs, did a lot of whispering. Kids were hidden away, dogs let loose. There’d been nothing like that going on.

A maniac, it seemed then, was the only logical solution, and a convenient maniac was what we had in the turbulent, rolling-eyeballed Blakie. Everything pointed to the crazy bastard. It had to be him.

Why, then, was I beginning to feel the first little pricks of doubt?

A ringer’s breakfast

A DAY later I walked into the yards of the Jalyukurru Aboriginal Resource Centre, the blackfeller organisation for the Bluebush region, and searched for signs of life. There were none. The nearest I could see was an immobile figure I took to be that of Kenny Trigger, the coordinator, stretched out on the office veranda with his battered boots over the railing and a battered hat across his face.

As I crossed the yard a puff of smoke emerged from a hole in the top of the hat. A good sign. He was still alive. Either that or he was conducting a DIY cremation.

‘Morning Kenny!’ The boots twitched in response. ‘How’s business?’

The hat rose slowly to reveal a ruddy, half-shaven shambles of a face topped by a mop of gritty hair and buckled by a wry smile.

‘Boomin,’ he drawled, the cigarette flickering on his upper lip. ‘Come to give it another go?’

‘Yuwayi
.’

The Jalyukurru Resource Centre was a demountable office and a corrugated iron workshop on a three-acre block in Bluebush’s rough-as-an-emu’s-knees industrial estate. It was also the only way of keeping in touch with the bush mob. The remote communities were linked by a network of two-way radios, and Jalyukurru was its base. I’d been here three days in a row now, trying to raise Moonlight, hoping that Hazel would have come back in from the desert.

‘Good luck! Albie Green come in from Blue Sunday Bore last night.’ Blue Sunday was an outstation west of the Stark River. ‘Dropped in to Moonlight on the way. Said it was empty as a surfie’s socks.’

‘Albie said that?’

He stared at the air for a moment. ‘Maybe he didn’t use that particular expression, but the meaning was clear enough. Moonlight’s fucked. For now, anyway. Nothing there but wind and crows.’

I shrugged, trying to appear more nonchalant about the community than I felt. ‘Things come and go.’

‘Well this one looks like it’s been and gone. Bloody shame, really. Had a lot of promise, Moonlight, but it all hung on the one feller. He was
kirta
, you know, the traditional owner, or one of them. But he cut it in the whitefeller world as well.’

Kenny Trigger cut it pretty well himself, if from the opposite direction. A whitefeller who managed the black outfit with the same elegant inefficiency with which, he explained to me once, Coleridge had managed the finances of his regiment: income into the left pocket, expenses out of the right.

‘Kenny,’ I complained at the time, ‘that doesn’t make sense.’

‘Neither does
Kubla Khan
,’ was his reply.

Kenny Trigger might have looked like a ringer’s breakfast, but my father had him figured for the smartest feller in town. For what that was worth when the town was Bluebush. He’d originally come up here with a half-finished doctorate in anthropology lurking in the bottom of his back pack, but whatever academic ambitions he’d once held had, like the doctorate, gradually turned to dust in the face of a relentless Warlpuju lassitude.

Kenny shifted in his seat and bits of paper fell from his lap and hit the deck. They might have been raffle tickets or office memos, they might have been hefty government cheques—Kenny treated them all with the same dedicated lack of interest. Another skill he’d acquired from the Warlpuju.

A few days earlier Kenny had gone to get a bank loan, and he related with relish the bank johnny’s bewildered comment on his list of assets—one twenty-year-old jeep: ‘Jeez, mate, haven’t got much to show for forty-seven years, have ya?’

But he did have another asset, Kenny, one that he couldn’t have put on paper: his intimacy with the Warlpuju. He’d spent twenty years among them as a kind of transport officer
cum
drunk-tank co-ordinator
cum
pocket anthropologist. He spoke the lingo as well as anyone alive and was married to a Warlpuju woman; they knew that when the shit hit the windmill he’d be there with them.

‘So who becomes
kirta
now that he’s gone?’ I asked.

‘College of Cardinals is debating it as we speak, but er…’ he took a final drag, flicked his butt out over the railing, and covered his ears in anticipation of the barrage, ‘Freddy Ah Fong’s putting his best foot forward.’

‘Freddy? Fuck me dead! We’ll have to change the station’s name to Moonshine!’

Freddy had only ever been the most peripheral of visitors to the community, and now that they were back in town he was flourishing. He was living in the Drunks’ Camp, north of the town boundaries. When I’d bumped into him a couple of days earlier he’d put the hard word on me. He needed sixty-two bucks to get a bus to Alice on a mission of great importance. He had the two; all he needed was the sixty.

The only indication of the kind of natural leadership skills his half-brother had by the barrel was when Freddy scored. I’d spotted him a couple of times trooping off to the park, carton in hand, a little fleet of fellow drinkers lapping at his heels. Freddy and the Dreamers.

‘And the buzzards are gathering already,’ Kenny added, his eyebrows bunched conspiratorially.

‘Buzzards?’

‘Freddy’s been spotted being chauffeured around town in some distinguished company of late,’ he explained. ‘They tell me that Massie…’

‘Who?’

‘You dunno him? Lance Massie?’

‘Rings a bell. Who is he?’

‘Territory Government’s local bagman.’

‘Government’s got a bagman?’

‘Got a District Manager for the Department of Regional Development. Amounts to the same thing. Been here for years. Word is that the little greaseball…’

‘Slow down, Kenny. Which little greaseball?’

‘Massie, of course.’ Of course. Kenny was the only Australian under eighty still in the CPA—the Communist Party, not the accountants—and I could see him salivating at the prospect of a little anti-estab scuttlebutt. ‘He’s been putting the word round the Anzac Club that there are some great investment opportunities going begging out at Moonlight.’

The Anzac Club was the watering hole of choice for the squattocracy—the station owners and their toadies—and the town’s elite: businessmen, senior public servants, mining executives, brothel owners.

‘Invest in what? Wind?’

He shrugged, smiled, flipped his hands and rolled his eyes.

I took a look around. The dominant themes of the Resource Centre were rust, dust and wire. Little willy-willies struggled to get a rise out of the gravel. Mangled motorcars were overflowing out of the workshop. A pair of overalled legs protruded from beneath one of the cars. That’d be Wally King, the mechanic. One of the legs was prosthetic, a testament to his sloppy Occ Health and Safety practices. A hundred citrus trees sat under a shade-cloth in the corner, gloomily contemplating the fate that awaited them when they were planted out on the outstations.

Reggie Cobar shuffled past with his weekly rations: a carton of beer and a carton of corn flakes. Presumably he poured the one onto the other. Reggie was a dilapidated whitefeller who camped in the scrub on the edge of town. I’d thought he looked kind of cute, at first, with his Santa Claus beard and his ribbon of dogs, but the image soured when Kenny told me what he was said to get up to with the dogs. Finding a mate might have been tough in the old days, but it wasn’t
that
tough.

I tore myself away from the scenery, rose to go into the radio room, then hesitated. ‘Mind telling me something, Kenny? Given your position as an honorary Warlpuju elder and all that.’

‘Dunno about the Warlpuju bit. Or the elder, for that matter. The honorary’s not far off the mark, given what they pay me. Fire away.’

‘What do you know about Lincoln’s death?’

He winced, then shook his head and said, ‘I know I wish it hadn’t happened.’

‘Do you know why it did?’

‘Christ, who knows why anything happens round here?’

‘Or who did it?’

He paused, took a last drag, flicked the stub into a bin, studied me for a moment. ‘What are you getting at, Emily?’

‘Yesterday I asked something similar of Pepper Kennedy. Asked him why’d he reckon Blakie’d do a thing like that, and he reckoned he didn’t know that Blakie did do it. Said it might have been a
mamu
killed him.’

‘Oh yeah,’ he replied, rolling his eyes. ‘
Mamu
, eh?
Mamus
are responsible for everything from an attack of the nits to a dose of the shits. Saves a lot of arguments, having someone to blame. Think of it as hunter-gatherer conflict resolution.’

‘You heard Blakie was getting stuck into Lincoln the day before he died?’

‘Heard something about it, but not in any detail. Mulga curtain’s come down on that one.’

‘Any idea why?’

He took a sip from a pannikin of rust-red tea, thought for a while. Face like a well-trod cattle-dog he might have had, Kenny, but he did have rather attractive eyes: they were like drops of dew on a blade of grass.

‘Fear’s presumably got a lot to do with it,’ he said eventually. ‘We’re talking Blakie, after all. He’s one out of the cracker barrel, that feller. No telling what he’ll do to you, body or soul. Wouldn’t surprise me to hear they were arguing, though. Lincoln was about the only feller round here who’d square up to Blakie without shittin his britches. Course there’s always the possibility that Blakie really didn’t kill him.’

‘Oh come on,’ I said with a conviction I was beginning to wonder about. ‘Blakie was ready to kill him the day before…’

‘You sure of that?’

‘Well, ready to belt him, anyway. Then they have another round at night and Lincoln turns up filleted in the scrub next to his camp. What’s it look like?’

He leaned forward, rested his chin on an elbow. ‘What were they bluin about?’

‘I overheard them, but I couldn’t figure it out. My Warlpuju isn’t up to scratch. Blakie seemed to think that Lincoln had broken some taboo, maybe violated a site.’

‘Yes?’ He looked at me, wanting to know more.

‘You want to know which one, but that’s what I couldn’t understand. It sounded like he was accusing Lincoln of having speared something…a
wartuju juntaka
.’

‘Fire bird?’ He studied the ground for a moment, scraping at his whiskers with a tobacco-stained finger. ‘Never heard of no fire bird. I could ask some of the old fellers if you like…’

‘I’d appreciate that.’

‘But if it is connected with Lincoln’s death I dunno that I’ll get much more than you did.’

‘If you could ask them anyway, I’d be grateful.’

He settled back into the chair, fumbled through his pockets for tobacco. As I opened the office door I heard him singing softly to himself. I was firing up the radio when he called out to me:

‘Got it!’

‘Got what?’

He sang another couple of bars.

‘Maybe it wasn’t
wartuju juntaka
,’ he suggested
.
‘Maybe it was
wartujutu juntaka
—fire crystal bird…’ I came back out and stood in the doorway. ‘It’s from the Diamond Dove Song Cycle, an epithet for the dove itself. One of Lincoln’s dreamings.’

‘Hazel’s a diamond dove too.’

The Warlpuju regard themselves as the reincarnation of ancestral beings whose sites they have a duty to protect. Hazel’s dreaming was a grey, delicate bird with rings around its eyes and flecks of white on its wings. The diamond dove.

Kenny sang another line of the song and a scene from my childhood assembled itself in my memory. Lincoln had just climbed a hill down the southern quarter; Hazel and I were tagging along in his wake. We might have been six or seven years old. As he gave us a leg up onto the rocky outcrop at its summit we startled a bird that had settled there. The three of us stood there in silence and watched it whirr away to the northwest.

‘Poor little thing,’ I said. ‘We frighten it from its home.’

‘No, not that one,’ Lincoln told me. ‘She headin for ome now. Karlujurru, that bird. Diamond dove. Home north of ere. Little bit long way.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘She Jukurrpa belonga we. Dreamin.’

‘Jukurrpa. That means you dream about her, that dove?’

He glanced at Hazel, who smiled at him, then he turned back to me. ‘That mean we
are
her. We diamond dove, just like that bird. Spirit way.’ He tousled Hazel’s scruffy hair. ‘Me an this little scallywag ere.’

Twenty years later Kenny Trigger, sitting on this dusty front veranda, expressed a similar concept.

‘Hazel?’ he responded. ‘She’d be more important than ever, now that poor old Lincoln’s Kuminjayi.’

Hazel.

I wondered, fleetingly, whether she could have shed any light upon her father’s death. She knew more about him and his dreamings than I ever would.

Maybe Kenny Trigger could fill me in.

‘This diamond dove,’ I asked him. ‘Has it got a particular site?’

‘Got a stack of them. Comes up along Hollow Creek, cuts across the Del Fuego Ranges and disappears out to the north-west.’

‘Lincoln was somewhere up north just before he died.’

‘Well, if you’re talking north o’ Moonlight there’s—lemme think—Kirripulnyu. Winnijari. Main place is Karlujurru itself, of course.’

‘Karlujurru?’

‘You know the Tom Bowlers?’

‘Of course. Up near the Carbine boundary.’