Carpentaria (43 page)

Truthful said he thought the house looked like a shrine or a grotto, which was very strange, because he did not think she was a religious person. Statues were the kind of thing his Mother had in her house. If they had come when she was home, they would have known she had left behind in those silent walls, a barrage of abuse to the petrol-sniffing sons who hid themselves from her, every time she wanted them to do something. The statue dominated the house, and the eeriness for them felt too serene in its total silence. It was as though someone had died.

The atmosphere of religious piety felt disconcerting, so, being thorough, in case of some deception, some trick of the eye, they broke the house. Nothing would be preserved of the quaint architecture for the town’s posterity. In the shadowy walls, the ghosts of rosaries watched, while the two men worked desperately hard to destroy its incomprehensible meaning, its contents, its beliefs. The ramshackle house remained silently serene as the yard frogs approached, when the two men left. One by one the green creatures came inside, and so did the birds, hopping up to the open front door, deciding to move in, rebuilding the life of the love nest.

‘Nothing doing,’ that was the size of the thing, the two men agreed. Again, they walked around the rusty Holden car body, searching for clues. The day was almost over, and there was nothing left of it with the disappearing daylight, except to go down to the pub at sunset, where the usual group of men hung about. There was not much that they did not know about the politics of the State, thanks to Bruiser. He swung around on his revolving bar stool, giving the very latest news about the legislation going through Parliament, the particular failings of the legislation, and how, yet again, nobody ever took any notice of his advice.

The men talked about the mine down the road. They discussed how the ore body was shaping up in the latest chemical analysis. They talked about which part of the huge open cut was being operated on, how low the underground shaft would go before the mineral vein petered out. The extraction methods tailor-designed for the vein. The never-ending problems of pumping surface water from the pit, and the ground water tests. Could the aquifers be drying up? The talk could go into hours of general analysis, right through to the functioning of hundreds of kilometres of pipeline, the dewatering of the ore on the flood-prone coastline, and the barges operating with near mishaps while transferring the ore onto the big foreign tankers, which were a sight to see off the coastline.

This was the talk of work. This, and talk about herds of cattle and the slump in prices, other people’s horses, whose broken fences were needing a blow by blow description of repairs and maintenance. Then, once a man was talking about his outdoor work, he got around to speaking about the mysteries of the min-min light and who saw it where. How long it followed the car. How spooky was that? Or, in October, the morning glories crossing the skies.

Money and wives were two subjects of discussion that made the dozen beady-eyed men look depressively at the comfortable pub decor of stuffed baby crocodiles crawling up the wall, and the tanned skin of the biggest croc ever caught. These were two of Norm’s special works of local fish mounted and displayed proudly on the walls. Elsewhere, the walls were stuffed with autographed stubby holders, or pinned with nude pictures of women. From the ceiling hung dusty flytraps that flew about in the breeze of the overhead fans in front of the glass-fronted fridges holding fine wines and red, green, white and yellow cans of beer.

On the jukebox, droning country and western music occasionally seduced eyes to look yonder, through the little window slot that separated the Barramundi bar from the ugly, stained, mustard-coloured walls of the snake pit next door, which was crowded to overflowing with ‘the darkies’. As they talked, the Barramundi bar drinkers observed the young men from the Pricklebush around the snooker table in a play-off. They had a good squiz at the dressy black women sitting around the plastic tables laughing as if there was no tomorrow. They placed bets on the frequent drunken fights that went on and on until the defeated ended up lying motionless on the ground outside. Silences led to the usual daydreams of fish, then the talk resumed of fishing and boats, and all kinds of roads, rivers and ocean tracks which led them to fish.

Young Kevin Phantom was not welcome at the snooker table as he swung in and out through the lads standing around playing the game. All the bigger and stronger boys in T-shirts and jeans took appearance and life seriously, while standing beside the snooker table. They said to Kevin, ‘This is a serious game.’ Kevin had had more than enough to drink simply by persuading people to pity him because he had no money. A few of the lads gave him their own half-drunk cans, and went and bought themselves a fresh one. He was given sips, as he worked his way around the room, just through speaking loudly into anyone’s ear, and pestering until someone gave him some. After a few hours, nobody wanted him around, and someone went over to the bar to ask Lloydie Smith, the barman, to get him out of the place.

‘Hey! Lloydie, come over here. I want to talk to you,’ the woman called out, but the barman had his back to her.

All eyes from around the plastic tables were looking towards the window where the woman kept calling, and waiting for Lloydie to hear her. The more she got into the rhythm, she made a game of calling out ‘Lloydie’, then standing aside to wink back to the tables, motioning with her lips ‘have a look’, and rubbing her backside with one hand. Everyone started looking. Their eyes, drawn through the window slot, peered across the bar to where Lloydie was standing, then the nudging began, eyes lighting up in merriment, ‘Oh! Look! He is doing it again.’

They saw Lloydie Smith wiping down the bar that was made from grey-brown planks salvaged locally from an ancient shipwreck. He worked with a wet cloth that was impregnated with spilt beer, and he worked on the wood carefully, in rhythmical motions, as though he were caressing a woman’s skin. Truthful watched his hands at work, fastidiously cleaning, smoothing, fussing as he always did. Already he felt in the mood to see Girlie. He left Bruiser, who noticed nothing, to do the talking.

‘Well! Lloyd, what about it then, that son of yours?’ Bruiser never cut corners with his bluntness.

‘I burnt my bridges there years ago and you know it, so it’s got nothing to do with me,’ Lloydie replied in his short tone of voice.

‘You want to come down and help us ask him what happened, you might be able to get it out of the little bugger?’

‘Nope! Nothing to do with me.’

‘We’ll ask his mother then, if we can get her to talk.’

Lloydie happened to know her brother, the goat man, had had it up to the eyeballs with Aaron, and had said he would kill the little bugger the next time he saw him. And she, if you looked in the cupboard with a torch, all you would see was a black woman with white skin, who spoke even less than the spirit of the beautiful fish woman, locked inside the timber planks of the bar. He felt her body responding to the soft touch of his hand. Moving her silvery body further towards him with every movement he made. When he looked at the wood he saw the outline of her body luxuriously posed and hungry for touching. It was fascinating to him that nobody else saw her moving her body around at him through the wood. He could hardly believe that she only had eyes for him, as though they were always alone. She was the she-fish, who had come alive from his erotic dreams, that had seemed so lifelike that he had now taken up the habit of sleeping on the top of the bar at night.

‘Go ahead,’ Lloydie said, more or less oblivious to Bruiser’s enticing. ‘Talk to the brother, maybe he can help you.’

By the time Lloydie had finished talking to Bruiser, and responded to the inebriated woman screaming out to him from the bar next door, Kevin Phantom had disappeared.

‘Where are you going?’ a male voice wafted out of the car window on the passenger side, as a vehicle slowed down next to Kevin walking along the footpath in the rain.

‘Yu wanta lift Kevin?’ the voice continued, but Kevin kept on walking, hardly aware of the car. He was thinking, wondering where his father had gone and when he was coming back.

‘He should’na left me,’ Kevin said, continuing to walk, as the car purred, moving slowly along beside him.

‘We would’na leave you, come on, and we’ll have some fun without him,’ the voice hummed in tune to the car’s motor turning over.

‘You got a party going then?’ Kevin asked, opening the door of the car and jumping in.

‘Yeah! You’re the party coon boy,’ the voice snapped, and the car roared off along the sealed road, did a wheelie down the end, roared back past the pub, turning there at high speed, tyres screeching. But it bothered no one. Truthful and Lloydie were outside the pub armed with batons, fighting some of the men who had been attacking each other with broken beer bottles in the mustard bar.

‘Clear the whole place out, I have had enough of the buggers,’ Lloydie ordered Truthful, as the car swung around the corner. It was action night, the whole place, except the main bar where the dozen men drank, was to be cleared. The car headed off along the bitumen stretch going south of town. All Kevin could see were the white hoods each of the people in the car had placed over their heads. Then he felt the hands of someone in the back seat pushing something over his head. He reached up and felt the rough thread of the material, like a sack, and he could smell wheat or flour, like poultry feed. He knew the smell, recognising it from when he had passed Uptown people’s backyard fowl coops. You could smell it from the street if you were passing by some houses.

Kevin knew he had to get out of the car, but he feared the consequences of jumping out, as it headed along the bitumen at high speed. Struggling, he twisted around in his seat until he felt the handle of the car door but realised it was locked. He reached for the lock but felt the knife gliding along his neck being pressed deeply into his flesh. There were several voices in the car, all talking to him at the same time. ‘Take this for Gordie,’ fists flew at him from the front and from the back. He started to panic, and in his panic, felt spasms running through him. Kevin had moved into another world, when suddenly the car stopped, and he was tipped out onto the ground.

Someone said, ‘Great.’ He had found the cricket bats in the boot. Kevin slipped in and out of believing it was not happening to him, hearing war cries, laughter, and smelling beer and rum. He tried to rip the sack off his head because he couldn’t breathe but the knife dug deeper, cutting him. Then the knife was released by the attacker who had been holding him from behind, breathing alcoholic fumes into his ear. When he started to struggle with the sack again, he felt the knife swung about as if it was being used to slash at his hands.

Whenever he regained consciousness, it was to feel the thud of being struck with something heavy. He heard his bones break with a pain that forced him to open his shock-sealed lips, and call out through the muffling bag to his father. This was when, through the white light of pain, he witnessed his childhood, always moving back into the arms of his father. A little boy safe with his father: telling his father to run, run faster, and he felt himself sinking into water. He was wet and hurt, and his arms, stretched out in front of him, they were being dragged off his body. His skin was burning, he was being skinned alive, pulled behind the car, its exhaust fumes choking his breath.

It was during the night sometime when Truthful was driving towards the Phantom place, and in the headlights, he saw Girlie sitting out there on the road. When he stopped, he saw in the light from the car, the body of Kevin lying on the road beside her.

‘We got to get him out of here now,’ he said quickly, but she did not move as she sat crying beside her brother, his head on her lap. She continued explaining to Kevin that she had no idea how to bring him back to life. ‘Where do I start Kevin?’ Truthful saw what had happened. She had only untied his hands and removed the sack from his head.

‘I don’t know what to do, it will be alright,’ she kept talking, rocking him and talking.

‘Where’s Janice and Patsy,’ Truthful asked, picking Kevin up.

‘Nobody’s here,’ Girlie said, barely able to speak coherently as she rambled on to her brother.

They drove Kevin straight up to the hospital. The sister in charge, with no one else to support her, led the way inside the fibro building. It was clear she reigned in this isolated outpost south of town. Within minutes, she had Kevin on a drip with an oxygen mask over his face, pumping air into faint lungs. Then she was on the phone in front of the computer records, ‘Is that you Doctor? This is the situation.’

Girlie stayed next to Kevin watching his bleeding chest moving rapidly as he breathed through the mask. She could hear the sister’s voice, repeating instructions from the main district hospital six hundred kilometres away, and heard her telling Truthful that the flying doctor was already in the sky, was being diverted to land at Desperance.

By the time the doctor landed on the bonfire-lit airstrip, Truthful and the sister had Kevin set for an emergency evacuation. Girlie watched helplessly as he was transferred onto a stretcher and taken into the plane, then rehooked to the oxygen cylinder and drip. The sister told her there was no room for her to go. Then the door was closed, and the plane was gone.

So, things went on as they do when the bad things happen, with everyone talking about it like they knew everything. So many private eyes. No one owned up to knowing anything in an official capacity. Didn’t see it. Truthful should have looked. He heard the car go past. The car sounded like a rally car when it ripped up and down the main road. They said, who was going to get up in the middle of the night to look at town louts trying to kill themselves? There were dozens of people involved in the brawl outside the pub, but they all said they were too out of it to notice what was going on really.
I was too busy fighting man, but I should’ve seen that car and if I had then I would have killed the bastards
. Some people were kind enough to say that.