Carpentaria (51 page)

‘What? A fire. You got to be joking…Alright, I’m on my way.’

‘What’s up?’

‘Graham said there’s a fire over this way. Stay here, watch him Cookie. I’ll look around.’

The next moment Chuck returned, running to grab the fire extinguisher, and ordering his mate to get the other fire extinguisher on the wall next to the doorway. Ignoring Will, both quickly disappeared. The Fishman’s men had come prepared. Knives were produced to cut Will free from the chair. Within seconds they were outside the shed again, and looking back, sensed that Will was of two minds about going with them. ‘You mad, Will?’ They had only moments to get out of the place, and Will was holding them up.

‘Give me a knife,’ Will ordered, but no one listened to him. ‘Fuck you! Give me a knife or I’ll kill you. They killed Hope and my boy. I am going nowhere I swear to God, until I kill them. So give me the fucken knife.’

Moving around the benches, Will saw a tyre lever, grabbed it, and headed out the door. The two lads felt blood draining from their faces: this was supposed to be easy. They looked at the fire down at the last hangar. The flames were arching out like waves and black smoke billowed into the atmosphere.

‘Look man, I know how you feel! But those arseholes are dead already. They’re gone man, I swear it, because as true as God I am standing here, this whole place is going to blow, as soon as the fire reaches the pits. Come on, we got to take you with us, fuck you, or we are going to die in this mongrel place. Look up there and see the friggen fire for yourself man. Come on, man, or we will kill you ourselves.’

The two young men, no more than eighteen apiece, dressed in grey shorts, baseball caps, with Bob Marley staring from their Rasta-coloured T-shirts, worked simply to the letter of the Fishman’s orders. They were still wearing workingmen boots supplied by the mine. A lot of the young men in the Fishman’s convoy had done their stint in the mine, looked around, seen how it all worked, then walked off with their mining helmets and boots as souvenirs. Both still had their cigarettes hanging from the sides of their mouths, while they used the iron-fisted grit of their fathers to persuade Will to get the hell out of there.

The fire spread quickly across the grasslands, throwing long red tongues down to the south. Will looked at the black smoke billowing into the sky. He tried to see through the wall of smoke to locate the two mine men with their fire extinguishers, but could not penetrate the curtain of blackness. The only thing that was clear, were flames reaching up into the sky at the far hangars. It looked like a giant candle, a millennium flame. A wind of intense heat forced Will and the two Bob Marley faces to flee.

‘Come on, Will, get a fucking move on,’ one of the lads said, maintaining a firm grip on Will’s arm. The second lad did the same on the other side and they ran dragging Will along with them. They kept looking back over their shoulders as they ran, stumbling along through the spinifex and grass and gravel, seeing if anyone was coming from the mine, or if they were seen. Looking ahead at the distance to reach the fence line, each knew, until they were over the fence and into the scrub land and hills, they would be in full view of the mine men when they turned up in their vehicles.

‘Let’s hope the bloody lot goes up in their bloody faces,’ one lad said to the other as they ran, knowing it might be their only chance, if the bloody lot went up. But when they looked back again, the yellow-haired one and his mate were running after them.

‘Split up,’ Will said. ‘Take the left and right, and I will take the centre, go low.’

‘Do you know where the opening is Will? Head to the left, one hundred metres. Remember that.’

‘Get going. I know where it is, get going.’

The three peeled off in their different directions. The two young lads were looking around. Where was the backup? The whole operation had begun with several dozen men who had slipped in earlier, spreading themselves all over the mine site, to do ‘a good job’. It was to have been a pilfering exercise on a grand scale, pure and simple. Then they got word: Fishman had changed his mind. The teams had come in the previous night. They moved on the fuel tanks, syphoning petrol into jerry cans which had to be carried over to the fence line and into the bush on the other side towards a waiting vehicle. They had spread around
. ‘Have yourself a shopping spree, tools and equipment – for the road.’
Freezer raid, the Fishman had ordered. Usual thing. Raid everything.

‘Man! Where in the fuck are they?’ one lad screamed across to his mate. ‘Where’s the bloody backup, mannn? Jesus!’

Guns were being fired. The two lads heard the strange sound for the first time in their lives as the bullets whistled by, inches past their ear, and both yelled, ‘Duck man, they are shooting at us.’ Both ran faster, bolting for their lives like jack rabbits, and Will, where was he? They had seen him disappear into the ground like he was made out of thin air. And they did duck, unbelievingly, as they ran, seeking cover behind every clump of spinifex, as though dead spinifex could shield anyone against bullets. But that was what they did, and kept doing, with no backup at all, not even looking back to see that glorious fire tonguing down to the underground storage tanks, nor knowing there were only moments to go, and they would be all feeling what it was like to be blown sky-high, if they did not make it out over the fence and into the hills.

Fate and precious moments are tied up together, and as the saying goes,
What goes around comes around
: the yellow-haired man tripped. Instantly, his head was split open at the temple by a rock that had, up to that moment, lain on the ground, embedded in soil that was thousands of seasons old, untouched by humankind since the ancestor had placed it in this spot, as if it had planned to do this incredible thing.

Rock and roll, it was unbelievable to have seen what happened. Will had been so close, waiting to take what rightfully he claimed, and the man was running straight for him, and only Will saw what was about to happen, saw the rock was ready, waiting for this moment. Instantaneously, it was as natural a reaction as you would expect, but he felt cheated you know. He had even thrown himself towards the man to try to break his fall. It was too late, a snap, how quickly a driven man could be defeated. Will had no idea a rock could rob him of his revenge. He stood, arched over the dead man in a moment of foreboding, watching the blood pouring out of the man’s head all over the ground, the glorious yellow hair now tainted red and covered with dust, wishing he had the power to bring the dead man back to life. Where was the justice in this? The murderer struck dead, died instantly without pain, and went on to eternity with the look of peace on his broken face. And there was the stone, still there, unmoved.

‘Will! What the fuck are you doing. Keep running,’ one of the young blokes yelled back over his shoulder. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he yelled, ‘I never seen so much craziness in you man.’ Seeing Will standing there looking at the ground, the young man was certain he would end up going back for him, just to appease the Fishman, and shouted: ‘You are going to get us all killed, fuck you.’

Will heard and ran. Out in the open he looked back for the red-haired Cookie, but he was nowhere in sight. Will had missed the moment that the backup men with rifles in the hills had witnessed. In full flight, lifted in midair, Cookie kept running after his prey before he heard the piece of lead explode in his chest. His eyes jumped to the left, then to right, as though undecided which way to go to hell first, before he sunk down into the spinifex.

A dozen convoy men scrambling out of the hills, leaping down rocks, hands cut by spinifex, raced to the fence line to open a hole in the wire. The fence was rolled back for Will and the two lads to run towards. It seemed as though the whole world cheered them, yelling: ‘Come on, come on, hurry, you can do it.’ Then, the cheering turned into a synchronised ballet of men risking their lives without thought for themselves. They ran out towards the lads, and finally, had the three snatched up by a sea of hands. Their lungs burnt with exhaustion. A human chain passed each of the three along up to the hills, until finally, they were thrown down for shelter behind the boulders, in the fold of the ancestral spirit who governed the land.

The fire burned like hell over there at the hangars and even in the hills, the air was that hot, it burnt your skin. It felt like being in a furnace. Dust-dry hair turned into rust, stuck up straight and waved in the air, charged up to the hilt with electricity. Well! The moment came then, just how the Fishman said it had to be. And it would not have paid anyone to look back if they did not want to have their head blown off in ‘the process’. They were the Fishman’s favourite two words in those days.

The day, all action-packed like it was, was now all said and done. The men of Mozzie Fishman’s dedicated convoy to one major Dreaming track stretching right across their stolen continent, were sitting up there on the side of the hill – like rock wallabies, looking down at what was left of Gurfurritt mine. Just looking, and turning the sunset crimson with their thoughts.

A day at the mine had turned into a modern legend about travelling with the Fishman, and civil morality…

What a turnout. Gee whiz! We were in really serious stuff now. We were burning the white man’s very important places and wasting all his money. We must have forgotten our heads. We were really stupid people to just plumb forget like – because the white man was a very important person who was very precious about money. Well! He was the boss. We are not boss. He says he likes to be boss. He says he’s got all the money. Well! We haven’t got the money neither. And now, all it took was a simple flick. A flick, flick, here and there with a dirt-cheap cigarette lighter, and we could have left the rich white people who owned Gurfurritt mine, destitute and dispossessed of all they owned.

Straight out we should have been asking ourselves – Why are you not hanging your head in shame to the white man? We were supposed to say, Oh! No! You can’t do things like that to the, umm, beg your pardon, please and thankyou, to the arrr, em, WHITE MAN.

Somehow though, everyone got carried along the humpteen tide of events, like, we must have swallowed one too many sour pills that morning for breakfast. Now, we were looking at the world like it was something fresh and inviting to jump into and do what you jolly well liked. That was how our dormant emotions sitting down inside our poor old hearts got stirred up by the Fishman when we listened to him talking in that fetching, guru type voice of his, saying we gotta change the world order. Change the world order? Mozzie Fishman! He is sure enough a crazy man. Oh! We said that. But he goes on in his satirical slinging voice about what happened ever since that mine came scraping around our land and our Native title! ‘Well!’ he says. Us? He wanted us to tell him what that turned out to be! We were a bit cross with Mozzie standing up there, Lord Almighty like on top of that rust bucket of a Falcon station wagon of his. It and all its white crucifixes wiped all over the car through the stains of red mud.

‘You know who we all hear about all the time now?’ he asked us. ‘International mining company. Look how we got to suit international mining people. Rich people. How we going to do that?’ Now, even we, any old uneducated buggers, are talking globally. We got to help United Kingdom money. Netherlands lead air problems. Asia shipping. United States of America industry, and we don’t even know German people. ‘I says,’ he says like he is singing, ‘we mobs got to start acting locally. Show whose got the Dreaming. The Laaaw.’ He liked to empathise ‘The Laaaaw’ whenever he was heating up around the ears on the subject of globalisation.

We whispered among ourselves. Ignore him. Clap your hands over your ears to put an end to his
blasphemy
. Don’t listen to him. Still he was not finished with us. He goes on ignoring our pleas, and in the end demanded, soft as silk, he knew who he was playing with. All satiny voice, he said it was time now to end our cowtailing after the white people. It was finale time. Hands up. Who we got to follow? The white man, or the Fishman? This was the ultimatum. Well! He made us that wild. Of course, we got no choice – we got to go with culture every time. We should have known he was leading up to all of this destruction. But we? We were like following dogs, and we were happy to do it, not think, because we were acting solely and simply on pure rage.

The soundwaves coming off the explosion in the aeroplane hangars at the biggest mine of its type in the world, Gurfurritt, were just about as tremendous a sound you could ever expect to hear on this earth. Like guyfork night. Booom! Booom! Over and over. But one hundred times more louder than that. Ripped the lot. We were thinking, those of us lying on the ground up in the hills smelling ash – what if our ears exploded? What would deafness sound like? We should have thought of that first.

Sometime during our precious time on earth we could have asked a deaf person what it was like to not hear the sounds anymore, before we go around deliberately destroying our own good hearing on wildness. Oh! But there was no going back because no one was going to reverse where the rotten hand of fate was heading. So, even though we were shaking in our old work boots, thinking we got busted eardrums, we watched the fire rage like a monster cut loose from another world. It might even have come from hell. Even the devil himself would have least expected us weak people to have opened the gates of hell. But we watched full of fascination at the fire’s life, roaring like a fiery serpent, looking over to us with wild eyes, pausing, looking around, as if deciding what to do next. Then, we could hear it snarl in an ugly voice you would never want to hear again.
Alright, watch while I spread right through those hangars like they were nothing, hungry! hungry! Get out of my way
. It did that roaring along, exploding through walls and rooftops which looked like toadstools bursting open, then once those flames shot outside, going a million miles an hour up into the sky, sparks just landing wherever, like a rain shower, out in the grass somewhere around the back.