Carpentaria (17 page)

All those poor Uptown people who did not know any better were really frightened of Mozzie
. We know all about fallout, Mozzie Fishman
, someone shouted at him, even though people in the Pricklebush who were watching knew the speaker did not know what he was talking about. They never knew where Mozzie Fishman had been, disappearing and reappearing into their lives. They thought he must have been living in a nuclear dump if he said he was
nuclei
. But apart from what was happening in Mozzie’s life, everybody knew one thing, people had a good right to be frightened about breathing nuclear air and Mozzie should not have brought his radioactive body into the Pricklebush.

It was things like this which were the last straw. Uptown people started running around telling tales, until the whole town was jumping around about Mozzie Fishman making bombs. Soon enough, everyone had an expectation rattling in their minds. With a major explosion in sight, old people had their eyes trained on Uptown with spyglasses from the Pricklebush.
Look who was who ordering the law and order around
. Reading lip talk, they said to interested spectators what people were saying Uptown. They said,
Get him out of here, get him out, he’s a bloody troublemaker
. Nobody could believe their ears, and said they did not think it was that bad, listening to the telephone wire twang in panic for hours between Desperance, and down South. The children, who were used to dangling themselves along the wire, said it was the line that was hot, that even the mad crows flew off in fright with smoking feet dangling below in midair. No one knew what the earth was being talked about that stopped the night owl from trying to go hoot! de! hoot! at two or three o’clock in the morning. It was such an uppity town sometimes.

People united like never before to confront the Fishman with their shiny rifles aiming right at his fat belly button, which looked like a good target, but he told them to forget it. He stared at them with hard eyes. The look he had on his face had not been seen in the Pricklebush for many generations. He said if anyone got two foot in his way, he would explode like the bloated carcass of a bullock someone had run over, and when that happened he would be more or less obliged to spill his guts right into their faces.

All he had to do was sneeze he said. ‘Yes, just sneeze.’ Such audacity. And the crowd, standing too long on Uptown’s hot bitumen road, hallucinated how they would all die one terrible death of suffocation in the rotten stench of Fishman’s exploded guts. Only the men on the convoy knew the harmless sound of his cough. A sound, similar to the faulty carburettors of their vehicles, came from deep inside his throat all day long
.
‘Look out for unseasonable dust storms,’ he warned as the riflemen began retreating, heading instead to the rifle range out of town, ‘It will make everyone sneeze.’ Before they could move very far, he gave one sharp clap, and their twitchy fingers closed on triggers, with a volley of shots reverberating overhead.

When everything calmed down, and he had their full attention again, Fishman said the sound he had just made was the sound of instantaneous death
.
‘That was all they would hear,’ he explained with an honest-felt melancholy in his voice which made their eyes twitch faster. Perhaps Uptown already knew that the sound of death sounded like a sharp clap of the hand. ‘You will die one day,’ the policeman warned, wagging his finger at Mozzie. ‘You will know,’ Mozzie repeated, with a mocking sputter of spit, a little choking, and then silence. Only his cigarette continued to glow and burn on his Clint Eastwood face, whenever he inhaled its fumes into his lungs.

The trouble was Mozzie Fishman was from a different dimension to other people who had to get on with their lives. Fishman should have known too: nobody should lose respect for people who had to get along with others for the peacefulness of the situation. But, that was too good for Mozzie, he decided he would stay in, or return to his own particular time warp, unable to get it out of his system. The art of compromise was too good for him – to get on with life. No, he lived solid to the past, to relive it all when he came home like a curse. Neither would it take him long to drive everyone else back into the past with him – two minutes of plethora to reorient Pricklebush lives into the past was the record so far. Two minutes back, and off he would go, harping on the piece of bitumen in Uptown about the time when the mining venture was first established twenty years ago on his grand-daddy’s traditional land. This was not the big, multinational mining company which came recently, but an old prospector he was talking about, digging gravel with a shovel.

The very next thing which would happen, he would come marching around, like in one of them old street marches – a demonstration, and people who were just out shopping for the day, would look and say,
What is this?
Nobody knew what was happening, or what caused it, since he was acting like twenty years ago was only yesterday when there had been so much water under the bridge for everyone else. Kids grown up. Grandchildren on the lap. Mozzie was oblivious to all that. He continued marching along, left – right, left – right, stirring up the possum’s nest, bringing all those painful memories pouring back, if anyone could remember so far back in time.

The old skinny Westside mob who went out with their spyglasses, peeping through the thorny bush hideouts and in unison tut-tutting, said:
Boy! We wish he would just piss off
. Insidious nightmare. Et cetera.

Well! Nobody thought it was a joking matter because his talking caused talk everywhere, big talk, all over the country. Oh! Imagine how people felt when they turned on the radio and the television even, and there he was, speaking: talking on the radio about the mine. Even the television had his big face on it. Well! Big talk caused no sense but trouble which came along in full force. All the police flew into Desperance on an aeroplane for the day to pick up Mozzie Fishman, manhandled him forcefully to the edge of town, and chucked him out like he was nothing.

If he was not enough nuisance there was more bad talk like nobody had ever witnessed, coming out of the fat lips of the Queen of Sheba herself. She, Angel Day, had eyes all over the place, even though she was still married to Norm Phantom then. A lot of people said they saw the wickedness of the devil’s face when she smiled although none had the courage to tell her to her face. Old Mona Lisa would have looked like a sour lemon beside Angel Day on the rare days she put a smile on her dial, laughing with her friends when some new man was in town. The old women yelled out to those hussies,
Haven’t you got a kitchen to attend to instead of sitting around ponging like backstreet alley cats?
Dressed all
hoity-toity
. Angel and her friends laughingly yelled back,
Well! Old women you would know about what goes on in the backstreets
. The old women knew what was being said as they waltzed around each other’s homes in the Pricklebush, whispering among themselves and listening to their rot.

‘He was like an opal,’ Angel purred through red-lipstick lips about Mozzie Fishman to her other moonstruck friends.

‘No! He’s not. He is like a really bright sapphire shining through the night.’

‘How come he be like a sapphire when the biggest diamond in the entire world was what he was like?’

‘He like topaz too because his very skin look like warm, delicious, golden trickle of topaz.’

‘Sister, that’s not at all what he’s like. He was for sure all of the precious stones, opal, sapphire, diamond, topaz, all rolled into one.’

Perhaps it was the time of year when Mozzie returned to Desperance, which coincided with heavy doses of pheromones in the air with the Wet. They held open their hands to show a small innocuous looking insect. It was, they said, the secretions of this insect which caused younger women to become downright obsequious, although the unctuous charms of Mozzie Fishman were known across the continent, and perhaps he had an unhallowed relationship with all the insects of the earth. To those who could speak of moments in life shared intimately with another, if briefly (who could ask for more?), he shone. It was word of mouth which created this jewel of the imagination with its refracting beams of light so intoxicating for the female eye, swelling with unrequited emotional longing for the experience of the celebrated shared moment, more or less. Mozzie believed he tried no harder than other men to have women love him, but for some extraordinary reason, he was unable to deny that he was a beacon of light in the fog of men, flickering brighter than any other sojourner to Desperance, loitering in the Pricklebush of religious and political fanatics, evangelists, bigots, shamans, philistines, and passing-by self-appointed gurus.

Angel’s philandering did not stop the petulant Norm Phantom and Big Mozzie from being the best of friends. All the confused mummies told their children that both Uncles were the brightest shining stars flown in from the night sky for the people of earth. Stories, stories, the truth became so blurred, except the owl with big eyes saw everything in the night: all sorts of people were visiting each other, whenever they got half the chance. But who was anybody to butt in and dispute anything a big woman wanted to tell her children? The world would be a very sad place, little children would be lost, if they could not believe in the fantasy of a mother’s story.

Whereas Big Mozzie with the Clint Eastwood face was nothing but a bag of bones standing tall in an ancient pair of dusty R.M. Williams boots, Norm Phantom was physically and intellectually the bigger man. Their friendship grew out of Big Mozzie’s drive over those other competing religious freaks who turned up regularly to the Phantom household with their fugitive attempts to exorcise the demon, or the snake spirit, whatever it was, living beneath Angel’s house.

The Phantom house took regular forays into other-worldly matters. There had been moments of magic, precise times of exorcism, countless days of solemn prayers and undying reverence. A Catholic priest, Father Danny, drove into the Gulf one year and in the back of his car he had one thousand little crucifixes which were erected all through the house, and around it outside, and he left them there for a month. The biggest discovery the priest made was that the Phantom family were the clumsiest people alive. They knocked the crosses over whenever they moved, and the priest observed that not one member of the family was able to walk in a straight line. ‘Tell him to get this stuff out of here,’ Norm told Angel who had insisted on these matters. She told the priest to take the obstacle course away, and blamed Norm when the exorcism never worked.

Then she got a guru man to start hanging around. It was a mystery in the Pricklebush how she managed to find these people who kept turning up at her door. Everyone watched as the blond-haired guru seemed to slide around like an angel in white gowns over at the Phantoms’ place. He left out a piece of bread for the devil every day for months, bashing a drum and chanting, sometimes up to eighteen hours a day. Norm’s family did not like that either. The kids ate the bread before the spirit had a chance to get to it. At night, under the guru’s instructions, Angel made all her children go outside and beat the ground with sticks, without fail, whatever. Nothing worked. The only result was that the lurking spirit bestowed generously on all of the religious visitors a strange will to hang about, wearing out their welcome, until Norm had them evicted. All of the fanciful and fanatical became driven with obsessions like those that kept driving Mozzie Fishman, kept him dreaming of coming home to Desperance alive, to be shackled to her skirts, and to plead to be freed.

This was until one day, even with his strong connection to the spirit world under Norm’s house, his neediness for acceptance by Norm, his passionate heart for Norm’s Angel who caused only calamity for devoted men, when who would have thought Mozzie’s heart would be broken – Well it was! Whoosh! out the door. So much came unstuck from a heart torn to shreds. She said her piece to Norm like a whirly wind whistling across the flat, everything flying in sight, smack! smack! then she was gone. A middle-aged woman, run off with a…

Mozzie told Norm he could barely conjure up the vision, it was so disgusting, how a woman so magnificent in every way, who spun gold from the rubbish dump, could have stooped so low. To take up
honky-tonking
probably in the
animal bar
, who knows where, run off, with a thing, worse than any useless thing he could think of, not even a white man, but a fake. Not just one of those New-Age self-styled guru people who came looking to exorcise her demon. It was sorrowful. The so-called winner, a common black man, a coconut, even had the audacity to call himself, Uncle Tom.
So additionally
, he said of those times, what he had in common with Norm Phantom was shared devastation, although it was truer to say, Norm Phantom never lost a moment of his time to her memory. When she left he told the kids she had run away with a money spider.

‘What for?’

‘To chase the spider.’

‘Did you run after her?’

‘Sure, I did.’

‘Where did she go?’

‘A house full of spiders.’

There were lies in the Pricklebush and life was a mess when two of the biggest men around had been jilted for a gladbag full of whatever had drifted into everyone’s lives from the global winds of the world’s religions – Apache, Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, doesn’t matter what else. Five minutes worth of each, the wise men said. The old women wept for the man with no shame, running for grog, the white man’s piss they fed by the bucketful to poison the Pricklebush folk. They said nothing about Angel. It was the modern man’s dream of the Mona Lisa clawing at his heart which caused Big Mozzie to cry like a baby over many hundred kilometres of road.

The novices plucked like desert flowers to be taken aboard the motorcade community initially found the name to be highly deceptive. They had difficulty with the idea that nothing in Big Mozzie Fishman’s world was how it appeared. Big Mozzie growled at the newcomers and told them he was not connected with anything to do with fish – ‘No, siree.’ Lesson number one. Any debutees in his following who took it for granted that their spiritual leader would bring forth fish for the hungry wherever fish could not be found, discovered pretty quickly that was simply dead wrong, and being wrong would not do at all in Big Mozzie’s eyes. A thing done wrong was the right key to wind up the boss.