Carpentaria (53 page)

‘It was a bad business what happened next. There was only a wind talking through the trees, that was all, then all of a sudden, everyone was saying, ‘What’s that? Sounds like engine noise.’ Everyone was a bit worried because we know the sound our cars make.

‘Anyway, a late car turned up. Seventies model Holden station wagon rode in flat chat, “Look out,” reckless driver and all, coming down the road into the lagoon. Did it belong to the convoy everyone was asking, and I said, no it did not. I knew who it belonged to, it belonged to the family of that silly, old troublemaker – Joseph Midnight, same man. So, I said to Midnight’s car, when it pulled up in front of everyone and before anyone could get out, “You got no respect coming in here like this. I don’t like what you are doing here,” I told them.’

Will perfectly understood the significance of this story because everyone knew that old man Joseph Midnight and the Fishman had nothing to do with each other. Both were like his own father Norm Phantom. Stubborn old mules who anchored their respective clans in the sordid history of who really owned different parcels of the local land. Fishman claimed the lagoon, and not just the lagoon either. The old war went right up the coastline to Desperance and out to sea. Will remembered hearing the Fishman explaining that he was the living bible of all times. ‘I am pointing to my brain,’ he said, pushing his fingers into his head. ‘Inside here is the whole history of your government. I can tell you if everything is correct, right back to when time began, before Adam and Eve. I can tell you perfectly for four hundred years, the Midnight people have been doing the wrong thing.’ The Fishman had taken Will Phantom out to the spinifex where the mine was to be built. Following the old man’s yellow cat eyes, Will watched the warring spirits falling from the skies in the middle of the night to fight on the flat lands until close to dawn, before fading away. ‘I see everything,’ the old man said with the utmost sincerity in his voice. ‘And you come along with me and I will show you because I have been alive forever.’

When the mine was built it exacerbated the situation because it created a window of opportunity for Joseph and his family to start making Native title claims over the area. So, Fishman said, he told Joseph to his face, ‘If I see you anywhere around the lagoon I will kill you with a spear.’ Old Norm did not get involved in the dispute but Will remembered him still, slinging on about those greedy Midnight pigs, ‘trying to justify whatever’, in a long-forgotten string of accounts to justify the family feud. The whole lifestyle of old Joseph Midnight’s family grew into one sick family joke about pigs slopping around in their sty, waiting for scraps from the mine.

‘So, I told them Midnight boys before they had a chance to get out of the car – “You got no ceremony here. You got to go back to your own country. Joseph Midnight’s country is a long way off to the West somewhere, salt water and water buffalo where the wild people are living. Go and fight them if you are looking for trouble and you might get lucky enough to get your land back”.’

Even in the light of a quarter moon, the Fishman said he was smart enough to see the frightened looks in the eyes of the young men, so, even while thinking he was getting soft in the head, he let them talk. A young voice from inside the car finally spoke. ‘Don’t get hot under the collar, old man, we will be going. Grandfather sent us to tell you something and we are sorry to have to be the ones that’s got to say any bad news to you.’

Will understood when the Fishman paused in this story of his to talk about his premonitions before leaving Desperance. He said he was no angel, but he was listening to the sound of angels singing like when you feel something bad is about to happen. All the way, while driving down to the lagoon, Fishman said he did not know what it was, but his mind was in overdrive, waiting for something to happen. As he became trapped in the quagmire of his imagination, he said he had tried to gasp one single image, but the kaleidoscope refused to come into focus.

‘It had to be in one of the cars – it was so close,’ he said of the sensation which gripped his mind and was, by now, all over the place. All he could think was that one of the cars in the convoy was about to roll. ‘I stopped the cars must of been ten times, got out, and told them off for not driving more carefully.’ Every car kept slipping through his mind, while he was trying to figure out who the spook was, not driving his car properly.

‘Imagine that!’ he spoke quietly. ‘But it was too hard, I couldn’t see it because I had no faith in my own premonitions. They were the last ones – my own flesh and blood. It was why I could not see them, could not explain, could never picture their future, because they never had one. Poor little boys.

‘So, the voice says to me, “The cop killed them, maybe. Maybe, Bruiser, too, because they both flogged them really terrible”. Well! I know what Bruiser is like. And you know too that town has gotten worse since the mine came. Killed three little boys, babies really, my kids. Stupid Gordie the reason being, although you can’t really blame him can you? Poor thing. I had to think then. Think about what was happening here. Think about why. Why my sons, and not theirs, killed for nothing? I kept thinking it was strange how things were starting to happen around here – all since the mine. Strange, how ordinary people were getting killed, I thought. Innocent people like children. My children. First time I can ever remember, when I did not know what would happen from one day to the next. We always used to know when somebody got killed. Know it. What happened. So, I said to myself, where did it all start? First time, when they got rid of Elias, because he was your friend.’

Will nodded, and listened while the Fishman continued, reflecting on his story. They walked into the bush and finally, they were standing next to the three small bodies wrapped with blankets. ‘Bruiser, it had to be Bruiser,’ he said.

‘I think Bruiser killed Gordie because he started to be too efficient at his job. Gordie must have had something on Bruiser, so he killed him, then he got the boys to make it look like they did it. I had those Midnight boys out of the car. My blokes dragged them out and made them talk. Well! They knew nothing about anything it seemed. They said nobody knew why anyone wanted to kill Gordie and everyone thought the boys did it. But you know Will, I know they never did it. I wasn’t much of a Father, but they couldn’t have killed anyone.

‘Well! Anyhow, I let those Midnight boys go home. Shouldn’t have. They were pleading to join up with the convoy but I wouldn’t let them. I told them, “I got no use for any of you so you may as well go back to your grandfather”. All I could think of was the amount of trouble they would be on the road. I told them to go back to Desperance, but they said their grandfather had told them to keep going. He said Desperance was no place for young boys anymore. They said they were leaving forever. They were heading South.’

The Fishman said he had selected a dozen young men to stay behind while he had the convoy move out and told them, ‘Even if I don’t get through, don’t survive this, the story has to go on. Nothing must stop our stories, understand?’ He turned away from the three bundles lying on the ground, and, as they walked back to the waiting men, Mozzie kept talking.

‘I sent men out to the mine with my orders, then two young fellas come flying back with news, “Our Will’s over there”. That was alright, I sent them back to get you out, same time. The rest of us, we went back to Desperance then, travelling slow and easy, not looking like we were on the warpath with anyone. Silently, like mice, we drove into Desperance, two cars in the middle of the day, driving up the main street.

‘The whole place was deserted. No one took any notice what we were doing about the place. They probably are still trying to figure out what happened. We knew where they’d be alright. All Uptown was inside the pub meeting, like they always have a nice meeting together. Having a meeting, when they want to talk about something, like cleaning up all the rubbish in the town – like talking about us mob.

‘Well! I said I wanted to be a fly on the wall, and I was, so I heard them. They was all there, jammed in like sardines, and they were trying to figure out what to do about Truthful going mad inside the jail. So, I decided we would take Truthful too. But he was already dead. His rope was still swinging. Sill warm. We take my boys and the other little one as well, and all very quietly, we just slowly drove away and they were still having their meeting.’

Will searched, perhaps half expecting to see the body of Truthful somewhere in the spearwood, or where the crows were perched in the branches breathing in the odours of death, or where the files were buzzing, but he only saw the black cloud of swarming flies hovering around the bodies of the blondie and his mate Cookie. Where was he? Will thought, still shocked at what Mozzie had said. But he could see nothing. Fishman thought he had better explain. ‘Don’t bother looking around for him. They asked, “You going to bring im too?” Meaning Truthful. And I said, “No way am I going to bring im down here”. His type don’t belong on our religious ground, anywhere near my boys – let them rest in peace. So, don’t go looking because you will never find him here. We left him in Bruiser’s house – that’s where he is. Sat him up to go cold on Bruiser’s personal reclining chair, waiting for Bruiser to come home, singing some old Dean Martin song. Bruiser was going to be hearing that song forever, haunting him, whispering in his ears when he is lying down sleeping in his bed, for the rest of his life. No, I told the men, “Let them look after their own, and we will look after ours”.’

Fishman said his last words about what happened in Desperance. ‘We never killed Truthful, and he never killed himself either, just like the boys never killed themselves. They were all killed by other hands, just like Gordie, and Elias. The mine made killers Will, and now I’ve made the mine go away. May the great spirit show us some mercy one day, that is all I say.’

So, so, on Cloud Nine…

The men, signalled with flicking fingers by the Fishman, worked quickly with Will to bring Elias’s boat down from the hills. It was not that they wanted to
waste time helping Will Phantom’s craziness
. What did they have in common with someone wanting to extract some weird kind of revenge?
The scum of the earth lying flat out on the ground as dead as?
These were nothing more than a couple of charred corpses that should be buried with as much decency as the next person.

Grumbling all the time about being used,
like they were anyone’s
, they thought they were something else now; a huge metamorphosis had taken place. In their new grandeur which felt like infinity, it was as plain as day that a special something had been defined out of their ‘what for?’ kind of half life, in so-called normal society. Their heads swelled with a greatness comparable to the once biggest mine of its type in the world, which they had conquered. It was as though the mine’s greatness had been pasted on their identity. It felt like they were on Cloud Nine. Now, revelling in the
Star Wars
theme tune, which they were softly humming as jives to each other, these vigilantes were oscillating on the knife edge of some kind of madness in the ‘belly of the big fish’, where nothing could be assumed normal, and helping Will! Well! It felt like it was blunting the edge of their mania, and they did not feel this should be happening to them.

So, the men of Cloud Nine worked like a pile of snakes, dragging the only concrete memory of Elias, old
Choice,
through the woodlands and rocks like a piece of Desperance backyard junk. The skip skidded through the unyielding, thick, skin-stabbing twiggy scrub. Their styleless contribution of labour, together with their noisy skylarking full of curses and bad language, had scared the living daylights out of hundreds of scavenger crows perched in the scrub. The birds soared straight up into the red ochre clouds, squawking and carrying on throughout their hurried flight, while others, appearing from out of nowhere, flew in untidy flocks to land. Clouds of birds fought each other for places to perch on the spindly dry branches which in all of the kerfuffle, snapped off close to the ears of the men who became so anxious to leave, they quickened their pace, until they saw the full red sun.

When all is said and done, none of these men had a wish to run about with death. Death had its own air, and in this red haze, that unworldly air sang long, sacred vowels across the land. And while Mozzie’s men ran quicker to be away, they heard things they had never heard before. The ghostly poem, summoning the spirit tribes, swept past them as they moved down into the battleground of the spinifex flats. The ode unfolded seasons and months of wind, rain, storm, sun, night owl, swarming flying ants, crows, eagles, dingos, dung beetles, flies, and fish spawning. All came in droves to claim the unprotected spirit until only bare, bleached bones remained.

‘Be careful with that boat,’ Will demanded.

‘What for?’ came the reply. ‘It aren’t that anyone will be using it again.’

‘That’s not the point,’ Will snapped. It was not worth wasting words explaining family sentiment to the Fishman’s men.

Once the green boat was moored on the shore again, Fishman came along to have a last glance at the killers. Above, a dark cloud of sentinel flies – dart, dart, darting to and fro – pestered their eternal rest. He looked at the dead men’s spirits pleading to be released from inside the decaying bodies. With a deadpan expression on his face, everyone could see for themselves that he had lost interest in pleading clemency for them with Will.

Within seconds, the men had plucked the two dead killers from the ground. ‘Okay boss? Heave Ho!’ They laid Chuck and Cookie in the boat, side by side, without shedding a tear in mourning. Fishman looked, grunted his disapproval through clenched teeth stained with rolled tobacco, then turned his back and walked away. The men continued the task without thought, and anchored the boat out there, fully exposed, by throwing a rock attached to a rope over the cathead, into the middle of the lagoon.

Fishman led the way with a long stick, pushing along an ancient path invisible to the naked eye, heading through the foothills. Unquestioningly, instinctively, he was following a map etched on his mind from the times of the many fathers’ fathers before him. The men followed in his footsteps, each sending off little bubble clouds of thoughts into the wind, thoughts of faraway places, of people and noise, children laughing, and dogs running down the road to see the convoy leaving. They threaded through golden papery grasses rustling with white flower tips, through flowing green-gold spinifex whispering through waving coolabah branches, and silent rock faces of red granite, white quartz, white-grey quartzite, all looking down, watching a funeral procession for the children who marked a full stop in history.