Carpentaria (46 page)

Truthful just stared blankly at the floor with a smile on his face.

Bruiser smiled weakly too, in case Truthful noticed him before he had a chance to get out of the building. He tried to be quiet, like a mouse, without making any sudden noise to upset him. He could hear his heart thumping like a drum. Relieved he had reached the door in one piece, he closed it quietly behind him. He got back into his car and completed a second wheelie back to the pub, and went straight inside, without saying a word to Carmen and the gang who had followed him.

‘They are all dead. All of them. ’Cept Truthful. He’s gone stark raving mad. Give us a drink will ya?’

‘Can’t be.’ Someone whispered.

‘The smell inside, man, it was that strong I am telling you, I thought I was going to pass out. Hurry up with that drink Lloydie.’ Bruiser began telling everyone crowding around him what he had seen. They watched him spitting out his words as though he wanted to be rid of the shock as quickly as possible. Lloydie Smith, with detached face, placed a large glass of beer down on the bar. Bruiser swallowed it with a single gulp.

‘Can’t be,’ someone kept whispering. All of the people gathered in the bar had anxiously cushioned themselves around Bruiser, not wanting to miss a word of the terrible things he had seen. Ignoring them, and speaking directly to Lloydie, Bruiser said his head felt like a merry-go-round. It seemed life was not spinning fast enough, for with resignation and loss in his voice, he claimed, ‘They were catching me.’ This was the best way to explain what he preferred to have kept to himself. The fact that as he was backing out of the police station, he saw the three boys running after him. ‘Watch out,’ Bruiser whimpered. The words escaping from his mouth surprised everyone listening, including himself. A tighter circle formed around him and he thought he was going to faint. The cool draughty breeze hit everyone in the face. A loud thumping noise filled the bar room, the sound of all their hearts beating loudly.

‘You are going to die for this,’ Bruiser whispered, dragging Lloydie closer by his T-shirt, so he could speak softly into his ear. Lloydie looked shocked, for what he had heard was the thin voice of a boy coming out of Bruiser’s mouth. Everyone heard Bruiser speak like a boy and thought it was a horrible miracle. ‘How could this be happening?’ Carmen nudged someone close beside her. Those boys were working like angels – it was the only way of explaining it in the white man’s tongue. But it was nothing to be frightened about, because their poor little spirits had gone to the sea and you would see them down there playing in the surf, juggling fish above their heads, if you caught them on a lucky day. Nothing was going to touch them now.

‘Stop it mate. Pull yourself together because this is going to get very, very bad. If we don’t deal with it quickly,’ Lloydie spoke to Bruiser, his voice low. ‘Ignore it,’ he encouraged, for he had done this at times himself to shake off the spirits. Bruiser started shaking his own head as though this would free him from whatever it was that was bothering him. Lloydie stared at the bar, startled, then Bruiser decided to beat it with his fists, as if this would help too. It soon came to the point where Lloydie must have cracked too, for he did a most unusual thing. He hit Bruiser in the mouth with his bony fist. The impact shocked everyone. Lloydie was shocked himself.

Just when Lloydie thought he was going to be paid back, the mayor turned around and said with a grin, he needed it. ‘Thank God he’s normal again,’ piped Carmen. ‘Get on the phone, and get Valance to come over here,’ Bruiser ordered Lloydie. The first time, Lloydie dialled nervously, and had trouble dialling the right number. He tried again, while everyone waited to hear the phone ringing in the Council office, on the other side of the street.

It seemed like an eternity before Valance arrived, after being watched by the entire pub as he ambled across the road. ‘Valance! Truthful’s gone stark raving mad. You know that?’ Bruiser hollered at Valance as soon as he appeared in the pub. ‘He has locked himself inside the police station, with the dead petrol sniffers. The three boys are dead.’ Valance did not bat an eyelid at the news. He had heard the flogging from the Council office. ‘Now,’ Bruiser continued haltingly, trying to think, while waving his hand from side to side, to brush off Valance’s attempts to speak, ‘we got to be darn clever about this. The cop is likely to kill someone the way he is, I am telling you.’

Again, Valance tried to speak, but Bruiser, pausing to think, waved his hand between them. Soon, he detailed the plan to capture Truthful. ‘What you have to do, use the phone here and get someone to round up all the workers, and tell them to get here and bring their rifles, or whatever they got. Tell them, don’t worry about the gun laws. We know they’ve still got their rifles. We got to sort out what’s happening over at the station there with the cop, before there is any more bloodshed.’ Valance responded indifferently, taking his time. His soul was nothing now but deep hatred. It walked with hate towards Bruiser but not with Valance alongside, because the shame of it was that Valance knew he could not kill Bruiser.

T
he Fishman had decided to leave town about the same time Norm had taken to the sea. The convoy, with its noisy exhaust pipes spewing black fumes, drove like a long black snake through the storm-darkened town. More white crosses had been hand-wiped over the muddied cars. The Fishman told Angel he was leaving. He said he wanted to beat the clouds gathering, before the Wet had properly settled itself over the plains again. He drove around the outskirts of Desperance, signalling his convoy to set forth, with a bony arm swinging assuredly, as each car drove off. Then, using a finger sign and a face of total concentration, he instructed, ‘Head south.’

Fishman still tried to understand the foreboding that refused to leave his mind since he had arrived in Desperance, but the more he thought it over, the answer kept escaping him. ‘Time to move on,’ he told Angel again. ‘Before the devils catch up.’ He hated the illusionary world particularly in Desperance, which was tied to his childhood. He felt as frightened as anyone else of seeing spirits wherever he looked. Where others saw their shadow, Mozzie saw dark spirits following people around. They were inside every house, listening to conversations, remarking like gossips if they believed this or that was right. He watched them putting words into the mouths of the living. He knew out on the road, it was hard for spirits to keep up when vehicles travelled faster than a person could run, and in the convoy, there were too many people around talking among themselves, and drowning out the little voices of their consciences playing around with peoples lives. In any case, Mozzie preferred to dwell in the mystery of people, even if he got them wrong occasionally.

In the end, he drew strength from a narrow point of view, where, even if it were possible, there was nothing to be gained from penetrating the cloudy wall into his depressed state of mind to find hidden messages. There would be no time to catch up with old friends like Norm Phantom, Mozzie smiled as his mind captured the maker of silver fish, labouring over his work bench. ‘Oh! He is the real fisherman.’ He sat back in the car travelling down the south road, thinking of Norm travelling the seas of oceans.

Ah! The good life. Mozzie worried more for Will Phantom. He had fretted for Will. What was he up to? After he had disappeared at the lagoon, he had not seen him again in Desperance. He thought Will must have heard about the mine men, the ones from the big powerful mining company, Gurfurritt International. Everyone knew they were out searching the area for the body his convoy had seen on their way up to Desperance. Angel said that Will would be around. She heard from the girls, that they had to keep Truthful from finding Elias’s body in the fishroom.

This was all becoming too close, Fishman thought, and he told Angel this. He knew if he stayed the feeling pricking his heart so deeply would not leave until something went wrong. He remembered how on the road, he had begged Will to stay away. Knowing that it would be at least two years before the convoy’s return was why Mozzie had taken him away in the first place. At the time, Will was lucky to get out of the place.

The whole world had turned upside down two years ago when Will Phantom had blocked Gurfurritt’s pipeline in a dozen different places along the 150-kilometre stretch, when it was being built to carry the ore from the mine to the coastline. Rest on your head Desperance! There were insinuators. It had taken some investigation on the state of the art pipeline to establish the method of sabotage. At first it appeared that the pipe was self-exploding across the plains of spinifex. It seemed the pressure of ore travelling down the pipe to the coast needed to be adjusted, then readjusted.

Sweating engineers cursed each other’s incompetence each time the thing burst, and they were sent out in the hostile midsummer heatwaves, to do the backbreaking work to fix the darn thing. It was a nightmare to suspect that a thirty million dollar pipeline had been constructed of the wrong material. What went wrong with the
grando
plano
? It was a good question with no answer. Oh! Yes! The Fishman convoy had been lucky to get Will Phantom out of town alive. Security was running mad. No one had seen the likes of it before. Every exit point had been heavily guarded.

When the big miner threatened to withdraw, halting further building of the mine, the town watched as its population increased by one hundred per cent. The State Premier ordered a squadron of police to be flown in from the state’s capital down South to help search for Will Phantom. There were dozens of pot-bellied police stationed in plastic chairs at all of the river crossings. When the religious convoy had reached the crossing of the wide, tide-surging Normal river on the edge of town, Mozzie Fishman saw what they would have to confront to cross the bridge.

He studied the rifles first, and behind the rifles, the set faces of dozens of police officers, uniformed and plain-dressed, lined up on the other side of the bridge. Further back, police cars were swung across the road as a roadblock, ready and waiting. When the convoy started to cross the bridge, for it was already too late to turn around, the uniformed police came forward with the German shepherds. Mozzie saw the dogs panting for a drink of water, and very quietly, sent word back through the cars: ‘It is nothing. Be brave. The dogs are just a threat. Everything will be searched. Pretend it’s nothing.’

It did not pay to protest when the police made the occupants of the unregistered cars push their vehicles over the side into the flooding river. The ones who did, if they had been observant, would have just been fast enough to see the slight tug of the handler’s lead, a signal, before the dog lunged. Then, knocked to the ground and savaged, they crawled on their stomachs to slip over the side of the bridge. Well! When they clung onto the wooden planks – as thick as railway sleepers, simply hanging there, suspended over the swollen body of the brown snake ripping along at a tremendous speed below on its way to the sea, they might have heard laughter, and for brief moments felt the sensation of shock at the incongruous misplacement of mirth with fear. Then, with the sounds of savage snarling dogs ringing through their heads, the dogs thrashing about above, ripping at their ears and the backs of their clinging knuckles, their bloodied hands were slippery like black eels. If there were moments to spare, they retained their last hold by dragging their hands through the long splinters of that old bridge which became impaled in the palms of their hands. Finally, they would let go. They fell through the brown depths of the raging waters, surfacing metres down river, looking back to the sea of blank faces on the bridge, watching them disappear to kingdom only come.

But with all of that, it was some kind of comic relief when the convoy got through, and the police missed Will. Still, Mozzie thought, Will was never going to be the picture of anyone’s stereotypical black rebel, guerilla, activist, stirrer. He was too familiar, like an invisible man, who walked through his whole life in a town without anyone batting an eyelid to notice what he looked like. The chief detective thought the whole town was brain dead when every person with civic responsibilities responded likewise – ‘Ah! They all look the same to me.’ ‘Can’t tell them apart, never could.’

Call it providence! Call it neglect! Call it what you will. There was not a single picture in town of Will Phantom. Both factions gave contradictory descriptions. They used whatever wardrobe full of memories they possessed. Anyone who sprang to mind they gave as their honest opinion of the description of Will. They were more interested in rhetoric. There was more to say about warring factions and community disputes, than the likes of Will Phantom, and his cohorts in crime against others. The senior detective had to say very loudly at least a hundred times in his best attempt at broken English, that he was not into theorising or analysing their brawls. He did not want to think about it. He was a very hard man.

The police hurried away to ring up the regional newspapers, but somehow, even they did not have a picture of Will Phantom. Not a single snapshot in all of their records. Unbelievable! Even though he had excelled in all school sports and was once the student of the year. The police went down to the Council office to look at the historical records. Yes, they were sure there was a photo somewhere – Man of the Match on Picnic Day sometime. An Aboriginal boy with a big grin. Caught the biggest fish during the Easter fishing competition. You heard about the fishing comp? It’s very popular? No. No picture must have been taken that year. Sorry!

The police had already been through the school
. Where were the class photos? I can’t believe you have no class photos of Will Phantom?
The senior detective hissed how he was sick of being in the mongrel town, while he looked incredulously at the unkempt piles of crumpled photos spread over the green pingpong table. There were dozens of photos, but nothing that showed this person had once spent eight years of his life in the building.
Didn’t he go to school?
they asked out of interest.

Yes! Yes! He sang ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Come Lately’ when he walked home from school.
The police learned Will was a charming boy with a melodic voice who sang Neil Diamond songs. The whole town loved listening to him. Often the whole town would be singing the same song in his wake, as he walked past.

The police went straight down to the Phantom’s house. At least twelve good men using a fine-tooth comb searched every inch, two times, maybe three, and came up with nothing. Nobody could beat Angel Day’s daughters for fastidiousness. Norm had ordered them to destroy anything that would remind them of Will, the day he left home. Norm Phantom did not help the senior detective either, since he insisted that someone called Will Phantom was no relative of theirs, never was, and never would be.

The Phantom family were paraded in a line at the police station in front of all of the out-of-town police. The senior detective spoke to his men: ‘This is to help you men to get a bit of a gander at what you are looking for.’ He walked up and down in front of the silent family, and in return they glared back, with spite in their eyes. There was no strong family resemblance running through them, anyone could see that, but the senior detective saw smidgens of familiarity, and must be credited for his exceptional detective skills. The four eldest, Inso and Donny, Janice and Patsy, were on the heavy side although each had completely different facial features. The old people called it a testimonial to the strong differences in both their parents. Girlie and Kevin were worlds apart from their older siblings. Both were skinny as rakes, but again, perhaps, looking more like their father.

Angel Day did not help either. Treating what was happening to her like a terrible illusion, La Goddess of Mozzie Fishman was very annoyed to be rudely rejoined to the family she had quit having anything to do with a long time ago. She had a new life, she told the senior detective. Even minding her own business did not seem to be enough these days. ‘What a family,’ she had scoffed with her words flowing like butterflies. ‘Police barging into your home, and even though we have done nothing, I am forced to come down to the police station and parade around like I was nothing but a bullock in the cattle yard.’

Femme fatale almost flew out of her house after she finished complaining about the invasion of privacy. But she absolutely refused to get into the police car when she saw her ex sitting there. ‘I am not going to sit next to that bastard,’ she had told them flat, but how were the police expected to know she had been avoiding him like the plague for years? She stood her ground out there on the footpath, holding the police cars up in the heat, until another car was sent around to pick her up.

Once inside the police station, Angel Day demanded that Norm tell her what he was looking at. Norm was surprised himself that he had been glaring at the way she was dressed. Too tight, too short. Wanting to correct her behaviour – arms flapping everywhere, eyeing all the men off, showing her legs like a spring chicken. He wanted to pull her together, stop her making a fool of herself in front of the children, but no, he remembered, she was not his property. Then, if that was not enough, she refused to stand in a line with her ex-husband. Norm went up to the desk where the senior detective was leaning and quietly let him know how insulted he was
:
‘How dare you parade that harlot next to my family.’

She spat at the foot of the senior detective and when he looked down, he saw that it had landed on one of his polished brown shoes. He looked straight back at her and she winked at him, giving him the eye, as she had given many others before. He thought he was going to hit her. Instead, he instructed his officers to make her stand in line, at the other end, as far away from Norm as possible. She said she was quite capable of standing by herself, and with her head facing off to the furthest wall, she did not have to look at anyone. The senior detective looked at the lot of them – six children, two parents – and asked the assembled police, to note the remarkable family resemblance. ‘Believe me! this Will Phantom is going to have a similar look about him.’ A hick town crook was not going to beat a smart man like him. Satisfied, he clapped his hands. ‘So let’s go boys, we got a job to do.’

When the mud dried…

Claypans breathed like skin, and you could feel it, right inside the marrow of your bones. The old people said it was the world stirring itself, right down to the sea. Sometimes, in Desperance, everyone heard the drying mud crack in the vast claypans. You could hear the ground groaning, splitting its epidermis into channels of deep cuts all across the ground. It looked like a fisherman’s net, except it was red brown, and it trapped whatever was down below from breaking through to the surface. It made you think that whatever it was living down underneath your feet, was much bigger than you, and that gave them old clan folk real power. They said it was a good reason to keep on living right where they were. Keep it right. Everyone had to keep fighting those old spirit wars, on either side of that,
Got nothing, going nowhere
neither, Uptown
.