Moonlight Downs (8 page)

‘That’s it. Karlujurru, the Warlpuju call it. It’s the dove’s main dreaming site.’

The Tom Bowlers were a crazy conglomeration of granite core stones up on the northern borders of Moonlight. If Kenny was right, and he usually was, then this had been the place Lincoln was referring to the day we watched the dove disappear.

‘And if Blakie was bawling him out,’ Kenny continued, ‘that’d make sense as well.’

‘How so?’

‘Blakie’s a self-styled enforcer in things traditional. If you step out of line—and a long, meandering bloody line it is, invisible sometimes, sneaking underground and coming up behind you at other times—he tends to dish out the punishment.’

Suddenly it was all too much. I needed help with this and there was only one person who could give it.

‘Don’t suppose you’ve any idea where Hazel’s got to, do you Kenny? I can’t help but feel she’d shed some light on all this…’

‘Hazel? Could be anywhere. When a feller like that passes away, she’d have a lot of obligations. Visit his places, sing his songs. Put his soul to rest. She’s a proper bush girl, that one. Even when the rest of them were in town, her and her little mob’d spend half their time out bush, roamin across country. I’d be careful talkin to her about it, though…Never know what you’re going to stir up. She’s been through enough.’

I scratched my head, nodded. Clearly there was nothing I could do but wait. Given what Kenny Trigger had just told me, it did seem fair enough to regard Blakie as the prime suspect. There’d been a breach, real or imagined, of some tribal law, perhaps something to do with Karlujurru, and Lincoln had been killed in retribution. Why wasn’t I satisfied?

I went into the radio room and picked up the mike. ‘Victor Sierra Nine Delta Bravo Jalyukurru to Moonlight Downs. Do you read me? Over.’

Nothing.

I repeated the call half a dozen times, without response. I could just about see my voice crackling out of the static and floating over the deserted camp.

I gave it another ten minutes, then Kenny came in.

‘I’ve got to shut up shop now,’ he said. ‘If you want to keep trying, you can lock the door after you.’

I studied the radio for a moment, silent except for the white noise. Not something I wanted to listen to sitting here on my own.

‘Thanks, Kenny, don’t worry about it. I’ll try again tomorrow.’

I picked up my hat and followed him out the door.

I took the short cut home, wandering through the back alleyways. I like alleyways, and I like perving into people’s backyards: they’re the window to a community’s soul. In Bluebush’s case, the soul was one of broken bottles, blasted grass, peeling paint and massive padlocks.

I was approaching my own place when a barrage of barks came slamming out of the yard behind mine, closely followed by a slavering, sabre-toothed German shepherd bent on ripping my head off. There was a cyclone wire fence between the dog and its dreams, but the second or two before I realised that were interesting.

‘Fuckin dogs!’ I gasped, my heart pounding. And fuckin Bluebush too, for that matter, since the two were pretty well inseparable. Whitefellers were forever whinging about the coon dogs, but their own dogs were much more dangerous. The worst you could expect from a camp dog was scabies, but if one of the town dogs got stuck into you you’d be lucky to get away with all your limbs attached. The streets of Bluebush were not for casual strolling. In this town a front yard wasn’t taken seriously unless it had some canine killer baying for blood at the gate. Leather-studded pig-dogs, black-snouted shepherds, Rhodesian ridgebacks, Rottweilers, Dobermen, Doberwomen, bitzers and bitches and brindles of every description were hiding behind every gatepost, ready to launch themselves like incubi from somewhere deep within their owners’ twisted psyches.

I went into my own place, still shaking, and poured myself a stiff drink—to my regret, since the drink was milk and its stiffness was a consequence of Bluebush’s restricted range of secondhand fridges. I put on a Lucinda Williams CD and flopped onto the couch. Lucinda was singing ‘Sweet Old World’ and, just for a while, I tried to pretend it was.

Motor Jack

THE NEXT morning I awoke, once more, to the sound of Camel’s roaring four wheel drive. Got you now, I said to myself. I leaped out of bed, stomped out the front door and down the path. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a swag on the front lawn, a hunched figure stirring inside it.

The drunken buggers are even camping on my lawn now, I thought in passing. I’ll send that one packing as soon as I’ve sorted this other bastard out.

Camel had a couple of rotties on board this morning, big, hungry-looking buggers, their teeth like rows of bottled milk, their paws scrabbling over the metal tray.

So engrossed was he in his ten-point turn that he didn’t see me until I reached in, turned the motor off and yanked the keys out of the ignition.

‘Morning again, Camel!’

His eyes shifted in my direction, slowly and sluggishly. ‘The fuck you think yer doin?’

I took a moment to answer, distracted by the lump on my lawn. A head emerged from the swag, a head with which, I was pleased to realise, I was intimately acquainted. The bloke took a look around, saw Camel and me in our morning conversation, climbed to his bare feet and began padding across the gravel with the hunched, tentative gait of a polar bear on hot rocks.

‘Same as usual,’ I said, turning my attention back to Camel. ‘Trying to talk turkey.’

‘Aw fuck off…’

The man from the front lawn made his way round to the other side of the car. He leaned forward, ropy arms on the window ledge, stomach taut, Stubbies tight, blue singlet falling open onto a vast expanse of hard, hairy chest.

Built like a bull-bar the bloke might have been, but it was the bright blue eyes that held you—the bright blue eyes, at least, that held Camel. He put his head in through the open window and carolled, ‘G’day!’ He glanced up at me and smiled. ‘Mornin, Emily.’

‘Morning, Jack.’

‘Everything under control here?’

‘More or less.’

The dogs snarled. Jack looked at them and frowned. ‘Whadder you boys whingin about?’ he growled, and patted the nearest, tickled an ear. They sat back down, tongues lolling. He’d always had a way with animals.

Camel managed to tear himself away from this terrifying spectacle for long enough to ask, ‘Who’s this cunt?’

‘This cunt’s me father, Camel. Jack, Camel. Camel, Jack Tempest. Sometimes known as Motor Jack.’

‘Nice to meet you, Camel,’ said Jack. He extended a hand, but Camel was hanging onto the wheel like it was a barrel and the ship was going down. ‘You the lad ran into Emily’s ute?’

Not much escaped Jack’s eye: he’d taken in the dent in my car, the location of the driveways, the look on my face and the keys in my hand at a single glance.

‘This is the lad,’ I told him.

He took a look at my dented fender. ‘About eight hundred bucks’ worth, I’d say.’ Then he turned his attention to the inside of Camel’s vehicle. ‘Nice sound system ya got there, mate. Retractable, is it?’ He put a huge thumb on the dash, wedged his fingers under the bracket and ripped the stereo out in a single, smooth movement. ‘More or less.’ Camel spluttered like an over-heated cattle truck.

‘Whadderye reckon, Emmy?’ Jack enquired, holding the equipment up for my perusal. ‘Worth eight hundred bucks?’

‘No, but if it’ll help Camel lie straighter in bed at night…’

Jack straightened up, cheerfully slapped the dropsides. ‘Righto, buddy! Ya can piss off now!’

‘Thanks Camel,’ I said as I gave him back his keys. ‘I needed a new stereo. I’m touched.’

‘
You’re
touched?’ he snarled, then gunned it down the driveway. The rotties gave Jack a happy parting bark.

He stood and watched the Toyota go, feet apart, arms akimbo, big grin brightening up his face. ‘Ah, Emily Tempest…the trouble you get me into!’

‘Trouble? You enjoyed that more than I did. Besides, he’s a miner. Eight hundred bucks! They earn that much by smoko.’

Jack looked at me in bewilderment. ‘
I’m
a miner. I lose that much by smoko.’

‘When did you arrive?’

‘Two in the morning. Didn’t want to disturb you.’

‘You should have. Come in and I’ll knock up a big hairy breakfast.’

A minute later I was at the kitchen bench, whistling cheerfully and battering a steak into submission. Jack loomed up beside me, occupying the kitchen like a bullock in a burrow.

‘Nice place ya got here, girlie,’ he said, looking the flat over.

‘Fuckin ace. And I wish you wouldn’t call me girlie, Jack. I’m twenty-six years old.’

‘You’ll always be my girlie, girlie. But I’m serious. I like it. I mean, it’s kinda compact, sure, but it’s…appropriate, you know. Like you.’

I lowered an eyebrow at him. ‘Like me? Oh thanks. You mean I’m overpriced, falling apart and riddled with vermin?’

But I was quietly smiling. Appropriate? Probably as heartfelt an expression of affection as I was ever likely to get out of the old bastard.

Soon afterwards I dropped the steak onto a plate in front of him, followed it up with a pair of eggs on toast. He pulled an ancient fob watch out of his pocket, put it on the table, began to hoe noisily into his breakfast.

‘Timing yourself eat, are you?’ I asked.

‘New diet I read about,’ he replied. ‘Doesn’t matter
what
you eat, long as you cut down the amount of time you spend eatin it.’

For a moment I thought he was serious, but then he grinned and said, ‘Nah, got a lotta things to do. Just passin through, I’m afraid. Thought I’d pop in and see how you’re getting on.’

He didn’t look like he was in any particular hurry, though. As he ate, he flicked through one of the books I’d left on the table. The book was
Gouging the Witwatersrand,
a seventy-year-old history of the discovery of the legendary South African reef, the author a mining engineer by the name of Kresty Wagner.

‘Still hangin on to these old things?’ he asked.

‘Sentimental value, Jack.’ The book was an old friend. I’d lugged it around with me for years. It haunted me, that book, with its black and white photographs of blacks and whites. The book was a paean to imperialism, of course, but it said more than it meant to: its pith-helmeted heroes were invariably accompanied by a group of blacks slaving away in the background, smashing rocks, pushing trolleys.

Jack, inevitably, took a more practical view.

‘Resourceful buggers, those old timers,’ he said. ‘Look at the Spanish windlass. And the way they got the dolly rigged; they’re using a bucket, a rope and a couple of saplings to do a job we’d import a million dollars worth of German machinery for.’

He flicked through the book for a few minutes longer, then mumbled, ‘Can’t stay long, honey,’ through a mouthful of masticated Brahman. ‘Gotta see a man about a map, then I’m back out the Jenny as soon as I can pick up a hydraulic hose for the excavator.’

But his eyes strayed back to the watch, and I knew his mind was on things other than hoses and excavators.

‘I ever tell you the story behind this watch?’ he asked casually.

‘No, but I think you’re about to.’

I knew the signs: the drifting eyes, the distant, rocky smile. Motor Jack marshalling his narrative forces. I’ve heard so much bullshit under the rubric of ‘bush yarn’ over the years that when I hear the term I tend to reach for the crowbar. But when Jack tells a story the stiffs sit up and pay attention. ‘Isn’t it the one Tim Buchanan left you?’

‘Yeah, it’s that, but for me it’ll always be more Lincoln than Tim.’

‘How so?’

‘Lincoln and me, one time, we took a mob of cattle across to The Isa, and Tim asks us to pick up this watch e’s had in the jeweller’s. Bit of a family heirloom, you know. Anyway, we got an hour or two to spare, so Lincoln pulls it out an says in a way I don’t like the sound of, “I’ve always wondered how one o’ these things works. Now might be a good time to find out.”

‘“An just how do you propose to do that?” I ask im.

‘“Why, take a look inside, o’ course.”

‘Well I’d have hit the fuckin roof if there’d a been a roof to fuckin hit. “Lincoln,” I says, “you touch one screw of that thing an we’ll both be fucked. Tim’ll feed us to the dogs.”

‘But Lincoln just flashes that old trademark smile and before you know it he’s got the thing in pieces on the swag. Needless to say this is too much for me to bear, so I creep off to the pub. When I come back a couple of hours later Lincoln’s got the truck loaded an he’s leanin against the bull-bar, studyin the clouds, cool as an ice cube.

‘“Okay mate,” I growl, “where is it?”

‘“Where’s what?”

‘“Where’s Tim’s fuckin watch,” I bellow, “that you had in a hundred pieces a couple of hours ago?”

‘So he pulls it out of his pocket an fuck me dead if it isn’t runnin smooth as a banker’s pants! Six months later I hear Tim sayin if the rest of us worked as well as that watch, he’d make a quid out o’ the place yet.’

Jack eased himself back, stretched out his arms, gazed thoughtfully out into the strip of desert between the bitumen and the sky.

‘Still can’t believe he isn’t out there, the old goat.’

Lincoln and Jack had known each other for thirty years, been mates in a way blackfellers and whitefellers weren’t meant to be mates back then. I came up behind him and put an arm around his shoulders.

‘He probably is still out there somewhere, Jack.’

He sat there for a minute or two, then gave voice to the question that had been lurking under the surface of our conversation: ‘So what do you reckon happened to him, Em?’

‘Blakie happened to him.’

‘You sure of that?’

‘Jesus. Not you too.’

‘Me too what?’

‘Joining the ranks of the doubting Thomases.’

‘Just like to be sure.’

‘I like to be sure myself. I asked Pepper Kennedy the other day. Reckoned it mighta been a
mamu
killed him.’

‘Devil? Well, he wasn’t wrong there. Trouble is, which one? Devils out there are thicker on the ground than termite mounds. There’s big hairy ones and little slithery ones, there’s black ones, white ones, there’s goat-bearded ones and feather-footed ones. There’s roaring mad ones and there’s shithouse rat ones that’ll pour you a drink and knife you in the back without you even noticing.’

I smiled, went back to the bench, gathered together the wherewithal for a pot of tea. As usual, a conversation with my father was turning into a maze of left-field images and non sequiturs, and I needed a drink myself. We talked and drank and laughed at each other’s stories until we were interrupted by a knock on the door.

‘Don’t tell me Camel’s come to get his sound system back,’ I said.

Jack glanced at the watch. ‘No, that’ll be for me,’ he said, climbing to his feet.

‘I didn’t know you were receiving visitors.’

‘Told you, I come to see a man about a map.’

‘I thought you were speaking figuratively. Like when you say you gotta see a man about a dog.’

He looked puzzled. ‘Far as I know, Emmy, I never said nothing about no dog.’ Metaphorical speech never was one of Jack’s strong points; life in a mining camp didn’t do much to encourage it.

Jack’s visitor was a tall, solidly built bloke with fading blond hair and a rust-coloured moustache, maybe in his early forties, carrying a PVC map canister. He was wearing a khaki work shirt, safety boots and a pair of jeans with a big brass buckle. Jack introduced him to me as Bernie Sweet. The name meant nothing to me. I had him figured as just another bit of flotsam that had washed up on the Bluebush shore until Jack prompted me.

‘You remember Bernie, don’t you Em? He was working Pigeon Ridge when I had that claim over at the Golden Fleece.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘I remember the Golden Fleece: more fleece than gold.’ I took a closer look at my visitor. ‘Have to excuse me, Bernie; all you blokes looked alike to me back then. Bunch of big apes covered in oil and sweat.’ He didn’t look much like an ape now, I had to admit. Bit of a hunk, actually.

He smiled, raised his hands. ‘It’s okay, I’ve had a shower since then.’

It wasn’t until he opened his mouth that I recognised him. It was his voice: its smooth, deep tone, unusually mellifluous for this part of the world, and the touch of an accent. German, perhaps, or Dutch? No. South African, that was it. Nothing remarkable about that; the mining industry out here was a little United Nations.

I remembered a bit more about him as we chatted. He’d first come here as a young engineer working for one of the multinationals, but had left not long afterwards to do his own thing. The Territory had taken a toll, though: the first time I met him he came across as charming, confident, ruggedly good looking. Full of veiled references to lost reefs and bluster about what he was going to do with his fortune when he had it.

From the look of him now, he was still waiting. The voice was still there, but it was subdued. He had blistered knuckles, a slightly ragged edge to his moustache and a glimmer of steel showing through his safety boots.

‘So how long are you in town for, Emily?’

‘Haven’t quite decided yet, Bernie. Not long, I hope.’

‘And then it’s back down south, I suppose?’

‘Not quite sure about that either. I was hoping to spend some time out at Moonlight Downs.’