Carpentaria (50 page)

‘You, on the fucking chair,’ ordered the big-boned man with the fat face and yellow hair, the mobile phone still to his ear. Will sat on it and waited. He had time.

‘Hello? Yeah! We’re back. And we got the fucking mother load. We got him. Yeah! Thought you’d be pleased. Told you it was just a matter of time. We’ve got the bastard.’ The man with the yellow hair, eyes covered with expensive sunglasses, looked into Will’s face. He casually inhaled from a cigarette in his other hand.

‘What does he look like? What do you mean? Don’t they all look alike? I don’t know. Tall, skinny bugger. Got the kind of mug on him you won’t want to see down an alley way in the middle of the night. Remember the cop we had in charge of the crossing that time? ’98 or ’99? Yeah! Well! He was right. The mongrel looks like the rest of his so-called family…Yeah! It’s him alright…What? No, she panicked when we took off. Wasn’t any point bringing the bitch back was there? No! Oh! Too late anyway. Alright. We found her camping by herself. Yeah! On the island next to the store. Where we picked up that weirdo that time…Yeah! Elias Smith whatever. So, you were right. It was a good job we gone back and checked…Kid? Wasn’t any kid there. Probably didn’t make the journey in the dinghy with them in the first place...We found him sniffing around the store. Yeah! The Conte’s fine. Singing away to the birds when we last saw him…Alright! We’ll wait down here with the bastard.’

Will watched yellow hair put his mobile phone back onto his belt. He walked over to the door, looked out for a few moments, then came back and saw Will was staring at him, straight into his eyes.

‘Hey! Shit-head. What are you staring at?’ The question was asked with a fist planted straight into his face. ‘You wanta have a go, do you? You wanta have a go? Well! Go on.’ The cigarette butt burned into Will’s lips.

He remained motionless, only his eyes alive. Then he heard the footsteps coming closer from behind him, returning from the kitchenette at the far end of the hangar and with the footsteps came the wafting smells of hot coffee and fried steak. The fried-steak-smelling man with the red hair started winding plastic tape around Will and the chair. ‘Just in case you got some fucking funny ideas,’ the man snarled, with his stiff red hair standing out on tufted ends.

‘Come and eat,’ he said, handing the other man his coffee and heading back to the kitchen to deal with his cooking.

‘You can see the mongrel’s eyes. He can’t wait to get his hands on us,’ the yellow-haired one replied, drinking the coffee down in a single gulp. He wiped what remained in the cup across the air, in front of Will, and was not hurrying off for food. Whatever was misplaced in his mind was not hungry for food. He found it necessary to torment Will a bit more. He needed some kind of reaction to his achievements for the day. It was as though he could not find enough ways to fill the job description. Inches away from Will’s face, he taunted him with his responsibility for the deaths of Elias and Hope, screaming as though the whole world needed to know, not just Will Phantom. Will stared past the man’s ravings to observe the blue kingfisher. It surprised him that the bird he had minutes earlier seen flying away with its shrill whistling echoing behind it, had flown into the hangar and was sitting on a rafter, as though it had been sent back to keep him company. You don’t kill sea spirits pure of soul, Will instinctively knew in his own mind – like Hope, like Elias. They come amongst the living for a short time, perhaps little Bala was such a spirit too, because he was their child.

The man’s voice disappeared. The sickness in his soul swelled inside his body until it burst, looking for company and faded away. His shadow joined in its owner’s personal triumph. Both took off their expensive sunglasses. Both mouths pulsating, describing a crusade of killing; describing how it would not be long now, they would be christening the new pipeline.

‘It will be a journey an a half you betya! Only fitting boy – after all of the expense the mine had to go to having to build a brand-new pipeline just because of people like you. I tell you what – you got the money to pay what it costs and we’ll let you go. No you haven’t? Nevermind, once we get you through the mill you’ll come out the other end, nothing but a big pile of slurry for the fish to eat. How do fish eat blackfellas like you? Slurp! Slurp!’ The yellow-haired man laughed at his own joke until his teeth bared like a wounded dog. Seemingly content, he put his sunglasses back on, and went to get his meal.

Will had not heard the threats. He was thinking about the eyes of the murderer, and how he had looked into those eyes and seen his own reflected back at him. Perfectly matching eyes of despair – a mirror image of the murderer’s. The kingfisher was sitting in the rafters preening its turquoise feathers, and as Will watched it, it too returned a steady gaze until, as though hypnotised, it closed its eyes and fell asleep. Will remembered he had not eaten for two days as a sick hunger tugged in his stomach from the smell of meat cooking. Whispering a refrain to himself –
Got to keep the wolves from the door
,
keeping free of the wolf pack, kill the wolves, keeping the wolves away
– he soon lost interest in food. Searching around the building from where he sat, he began calculating distances and speed in his mind. How long it would take to reach the lagoon, laying out the track through spinifex, until finally, he too fell into an exhausted sleep.

The radio in the kitchenette woke Will to the sound of familiar voices from the ABC, broadcasting across the airwaves, travelling through realms of ancestral spirits over great expanses, to reach into the loneliness of people throughout the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Channel country, and along the Diamantina. Stray rays of sun found their way into openings on the western wall of the hangar. The white beams of light crossed Will to spotlight the dirt and grease on the opposite wall. The radio broadcast only reached this far north about six o’clock in the afternoon. This was after the heat waves had fallen from the sky, and their enormous energies vaporised into a lightness, clinging to the ground. Will listened vaguely to the news bulletin and the weather report. He had to figure out what the two men were doing behind him, but there were no other sounds coming from the kitchenette.

Could they have gone outside? He glanced towards the door. Perhaps their boss had already turned up from the mine, although he thought it was unlikely. He would have been woken up. Inconsiderate! Will cursed the bloke he remembered seeing on TV. After the pipeline was destroyed. Of course that mongrel would keep him waiting, want him to sweat, dreaming up how he was going to carry out his dream to finish off
the little punk
.

Will had watched the bloated red face of someone called Graham Spilling staring from the television screen as though it expected to see someone wanting to destroy his mine jump back at him. Then after an outburst on how the mine was now threatened because the company would fail to meet the timetable of some overseas refinery already threatened with closure, which meant the loss of hundreds of Australian jobs, the face had paused, as if its voice had been crushed, as though a terrible idea had occurred to him, that his own job was on the line. Then, after a few moments, he just as remarkably found the strength to continue: ‘I swear, hundreds of jobs, and because we fully support the sunshine State of Queensland, and we want to help the people in this state get ahead and want to see good things happen here like this development, the biggest mine of its type in the world, I am offering a $10,000 reward, no questions asked, for any information leading to the capture of…’ He continued, his voice breaking, trying not to be personal about his tormenter, but Will recognised what he was trying to say. For the younger Will Phantom, from the era of destabilising the mine, the sight of the face twisted into mock hyperdrama was a memorable moment, but hardly the result he expected at the time from sabotaging the mine. It had been the day of the terrible hitting back, hit and run, bang! bang! bang! Straight along the pipeline with gelignite.

Will had always half expected that if he had been captured, the mining company bosses would queue up to have a look at the kind of person who would destroy a mine. The very same newsreader had called this kind of person the most feared of the North. But the red-faced Graham Spilling he had once seen on the television was not the kind of man who would be coming posthaste to the hangar in the light of day. The irony was, men like Spilling did not kill other men. Only the person, perhaps inebriated enough to turn into another kind of human being, like Frankenstein, could temporarily find courage to instruct the cold bloodedness of killing. Wasn’t it in the dead of night when good people go about their dark deeds?

One becomes more confident when one’s not alone, and somehow, this was how Will felt. An odd sensation that made no sense, yet it would not leave him alone. There was no rationale in the stupidity of thinking others – what others? – would come to help him. Even though he had not heard any movement, he was convinced the Fishman and enough men were outside, waiting for his signal. Now he saw a different perspective on his arrival at the hangar when he was thrown from the helicopter. The Fishman’s two thieves were lying flat in the grass next to the shed when the helicopter had taken off. Through the dust he had seen them raise their heads from the grass. Hands signalled, questioning what had happened. Then when his eyes followed the flight of the kingfisher, now retracing its movement, taking notice of the whole panorama of spinifex to the foothills, he saw the subtle movement of other men from the convoy stationed in the distant hills on the other side of the fence. They were back-up for the thieves scouting the hangars for an overnight operation. Will knew if they were still around, then the rest of the convoy would be down at the lagoon. What was new? They were short of fuel.

Will looked for the kingfisher but it was now nowhere in sight. He kept an ear on the radio in the background, listened as the weatherman read the weather report. A cyclonic build-up in the Arafura Sea. Will grew interested, remembering an earlier report of a cyclone sitting off the opposite coastline, east of Cape York Peninsula. He could hear the words –
low-pressure system building into a depression heading in a south-easterly direction along the
Arafura Sea
. This surprised him. What had happened to the cyclone off the Cape? Nothing. The weather report ended. It must have been in his dreams.

The day he had left old Midnight and taken his boat to sea he had heard the report of a cyclone hanging south-south-east of Cape York, somewhere in the Coral Sea. What happened to that? The weatherman ended with a short statement about a tidal surge due to the cyclone activity in the region. Will closed his eyes and saw the tremendous fury of the winds gathering up the seas, and clouds carrying the enormous bodies of spiritual beings belonging to other worlds. Country people, old people, said it was the sound of the great spiritual ancestors roaring out of the dusty, polluted sea all of the time nowadays. Will believed this. Everyone clearly saw what the spirits saw. The country looked dirty from mining, shipping, barges spilling ore and waste. Something had to run a rake across the lot. ‘You really got to watch your step now,’ old man Joseph Midnight warned when Will had taken the boat out. His voice had crawled over the water to Will. ‘Last couple of years, there was one every few weeks, another cyclone jumping around. Whoever heard of that before?’

Jesus Christ! There was water piling up in the skies. Then nothing. The weather report was over. Stuck in a empty hangar a couple of hundred kilometres from the sea, Will imagined all the satellite activity hovering over the Gulf. Spies of the world zoomed in onto a pimple on your nose, or knew what you were saying in the privacy of your own home. Was anyone looking at Gurfurritt? If someone spied on the weather, why not provide more information about what was going on? Rich men paid for foreign cargo ships from the four corners of the globe to anchor in the Gulf to transport ore.

It was high tide. Will knew how the tides worked simply by looking at the movement of a tree, or where the moon crossed the sky, the light of day, or the appearance of the sea. He carried the tide in his body. Even way out in the desert, when he was on the Fishman’s convoy, a thousand miles away from the sea, he felt its rhythms.

This feeling for the sea had been inherited from Norm, and Will began to think of his father on his journey with Elias.
I hope you make it to the old world
. But of course he would make it. Will scowled at his weak sentimentality over his father who never bore his children’s burden. A saltwater man who insisted he belonged to the sea like fish.
I’ll weather the storm.
So said the veteran of the mother of all storms, invading the hangar out of the blue, to this wasted luxury of his son, reminiscing what was once upon a time:
If the natural forces get me in the end, it will be on the flippen land. Never the sea. I bet my life on it.

Puzzled, irritated, by the commonsense madness of his father’s hick town philosophy, Will twisted about on the chair, muttering to himself: ‘If you’re dead, you’re dead, no need to bet on that.’ But the memories of his father were not done with Will’s thoughts, even in this moment of crisis. Norm Phantom was keen to show his son whom he had not spoken to in years, something else from the past. The little list. The list boy! Did you remember to bring the list? How a man could come back to collect his winnings, if he did not keep his little list of fools in his back pocket: who owed him money, so forth.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ The Fishman’s men had been trying to attract Will’s attention.

‘Dunno. Throw a stone and see.’

Someone hit Will on the leg with a small stone to bring some sense into his head. Now he saw two men from the convoy standing by the door smiling at him. Then the mobile phone rang.

‘Chuck,’ the yellow-haired man spat his name into the mobile. He had come out of the kitchenette and was standing somewhere to the back of Will in the hangar.