Dirt Music (11 page)

From way back up the house the chained dog barks.

And finally across the track in the soft dirt, luminous beneath the moon, Bird. Like a fallen kite there in her nightie, breathing, breathing but there’s no way he can lift her. His collarbone grinds like a broken joist. When he tries again her weight rends him almost in two and he falls back into the blood-varnished oats. His back goes into a fierce spasm through which he still feels the child’s breath hot along his arm. He fights to his feet and pants a while and then with his good arm he takes the small, warm foot and proceeds to drag the child along the white rut of the track, resisting the pain for several paces until the wheatbag noise of her on the dirt shames him and he relents. He knows he should never have moved her. Stepping back, he stumbles into the broken belly of a guitar which cries out, and for a few moments he makes horrible vaudeville shaking the bastard thing from his boot.

The moon hangs above the house. He limps up the track. He creeps, he shuffles. He leaves all of them out there under 119 the moon. There is no wind now but the wire of the paddock fence sings and a hiss is abroad in the weeds. Just behind the ruined fence the heavy orange blossoms of the Christmas trees shiver in the night and beyond them the beetle backs of melons shine. At the house he takes the verandah steps in increments of pain and as his hips lock up he staggers against the doorjamb and smears someone’s blood across the timber frame.

The verandah table is loaded with crabshells and sodden newsprint and already the ants are into it. Plates, beer bottles, a roach end. On the jarrah boards a child’s rubber thong.

Inside the floorboards shine. The telephone has dial tone. The house smells of life, but he knows he has seen the end of the world.

The walk back up the hill does nothing to settle his mind. Fox comes back in the dark with his whole outlook in ruins, his thoughts sprayed in all directions at once. The wry, throaty sound of her laugh. The miserable prospect of children involved and, worse, the probability of it all ending here tonight, that it could all have been merely an adventure for her. At least she won’t be stupid enough to brag about it at his expense. Nobody would be that reckless, not anybody who knows the Buckridges.

Even the idea of them, of falling into their orbit again, makes him agitated. It’s hard to be specific about why. Big Bill is long dead, there is nothing to fear from him anymore but even he was mostly legend to the Fox boys. They understood that White Point was his town and that before the shacks were built there the coast was considered his fiefdom. Fox has never seen a burning or a 121 sinking with his own eyes and he’s never got the straight story about those Jap boys who disappeared after the war. The old man wouldn’t speak of it but the stiffness that came over his father’s body at the mention of the name said plenty.

Fox can’t help but think of Jimmy Buckridge at school, his brooding presence at recess. He was untouchable; his word was law, but some days he turned up with unexplained grazes and once or twice a shiner even. Still you’d never pity him—even if you could feel such an emotion you wouldn’t dare admit it, not even to yourself. There was something frightening about him, something spoiled in his nature. Poisoned was the old man’s verdict, but he never would elaborate.

He remembers best a single boyhood day on the White Point jetty.

Jimmy Buckridge when he must have been eleven years old. One of the big kids, it seemed to him then, and a townie as well, out to impress the visiting city girls with feats of cruelty. Stomping blowfish, ripping the jaws from live trumpeters. Fox remembers looking on, coiling his own handline with an absentminded intensity while the finale unfolded. A live boxfish, harmless and silly-looking, about the size of a softball, was shoved beneath the back wheel of the idling depot truck. The spray of gore, the laughter. And then some brave mother who’d seen it from the beach striding up to give the Buckridge kid a high mouthful in front of the entire holiday assembly. Later, while she was back on the beach attending to her toddlers the boy tipped whale oil through the open window of her car. King of the kids, Big Jim even then.

Back at the house the dog is already panting on the step and it leaps against him for comfort, as though the whole day has been a confounding of routine. Fox sits a moment to ruffle its ears and consider that he’s well out of it if Georgie goes back to Jim Buckridge and puts the whole episode behind her.

She’s impulsive, sure, but smart too. She knows which way the wind is blowing. They’re both better off letting it go. But the entire business has rocked him. He cannot believe the ludicrous hopes he’s entertained these past few hours. In her presence he was all over the place; it was a kind of madness.

While the night deepens he lets the dog mug up to him, licking his hands and face for all it’s worth. He’s too disgusted with himself even to bother pushing it off and eventually the dog grows bored and slopes off under the house.

Georgie knew within the first half-hour that neither the vodkas nor the ten milligrams of Temazepam would get her over the edge tonight. She felt mind and body holding sleep at bay. The anxiety reminded her of those nights in Jeddah when she was afraid to sleep lest she dream once more of Mrs Jubail stalking her down the hospital corridors. The nightmare pursued her from Saudi Arabia and on to the States, to Indonesia and home to Australia.

For a long time at White Point she thought she’d shaken it off but it had reprised itself of late. She recognized the creeping sense of dread. She thought of how epileptics and vertigo sufferers could feel episodes approaching. That’s how she felt tonight with Jim Buckridge lying so still and quiet beside her.

His breathing was too reserved. He was feigning sleep.

She didn’t dare move. She understood what it took during 124 the lobster season to keep him awake after midnight. So why not just front him with it? Why lie there pretending alongside him?

Unless he really was asleep. But that stillness felt like restraint. And somehow that holding back, the force of it—it unnerved her.

Georgie considered how little money she had saved. She thought of working again. Of the boys. That house out in the bleached paddocks. The hire car. The towing fee. The hotel bill. The things she’d miss.

At four-thirty Jim sighed and rolled out of bed. She half expected him to say something. Lying there doggo she thought he lingered a moment before padding into the bathroom. She wished she’d said something, told herself it wasn’t too late, but she let him dress and make his coffee in the kitchen while she lay there. The Hilux rattled into the drive.

She was almost asleep when the blurt of Raider’s diesels rose from the lagoon.

Fox stands out in the hot, still morning dark with the dog whining at his feet. It’s totally calm. The air is thick. It feels as though somewhere over the horizon two opposing systems have stalled momentarily and cancelled each other out to leave this peculiar stillness. You can tell already that the day will be breathless. Gift weather. Last night he resolved to keep his head down a while, to stay ashore until things settled down again, but how can you pass up weather like this on a coast where a howling wind is the only constant? Some days you just have to be out there; it’d be a sin to waste it.

Problem is, it’s already a little late for a proper fishing run.

He’s unprepared with no bait ready. But he figures there’s fuel enough in the boat’s tanks for a quick foray. Out and back, maybe. Just time for a quick dive, a hit-and-run job on his 126 favourite coral lumps to the north. What the hell.

Fox strips the boat of special tackle and all instruments. No echo sounder, no GPS, nothing fancy. Without droplines and beacons, with not even a decent icebox aboard, who’s to say he’s anything but just another barebones amateur hoping to spear himself a jewfish? Even the most suspicious Fisheries crew will have nothing on him. And the White Pointers? Well, he’ll always have the jump on those dozy bastards.

By the time he’s left the dog on the beach and broached the northernmost limits of the White Point lagoon it’s almost daylight, but Fox feels protected by this weird meteorological dispensation. He absorbs the perfect calm into his very being. He skates out on a motionless sea. Hair beating at his neck. Pearly dunes at the corner of his eye as he hugs the uninhabited empty coast. Warm air. Lurid calm. Flashing daubs of seagrass and reef underfoot. And not a damn boat in sight.

A few miles north he anchors and goes over the side and right away he wishes he hadn’t bothered with the wetsuit; days like today you want to feel it barebacked. There’s a delirium in the water, something special in the way the reef morphs and throbs below. He hangs at the surface a few moments to hyperventilate and then he kicks down through the enfolded layers, the unseen byways of current and the changes of temperature that lace the clear water. From a hole in the reef a groper slides out into the open in a blue-green blast of light. Fox doesn’t even load the spear. The big fish rolls aside to watch him. He hovers motionless over soft corals and sponges, across hard yellow plate and rifts of purple-blue. There’s stag//horn and brain coral, eels and blennies and blackarse cod and the feelers of a hundred wary rock lobsters.

The sea is thick with clicks and rattles, the encrypted static of the silent world speaking. Pressure tightens his skin and current roots through his hair. You could stay here, he thinks. On a single breath you could live here on a God-given day like this when plankton spin before your eyes and fish leave their redoubts in phalanxes to swim to you. The thread of heat inside him trickles back to a thudding core. There’s no discomfort now, no impulse to take another breath. Way up there his boat hangs from the anchor rope like a party balloon. It looks so buoyant, so beautiful, that he has to go back and see. He kicks up lazily.

From too far and too long down. Poisoned and happy. A distant part of him knows how close he’s come to shallow water bblackout, but as he crashes through the glittering surface where his body still does the breathing for him, the rest of him settles for simple ecstasy. He lies half in the world. Tingling .128 Just after eight Georgie walked the silent boys to school, kissed their averted heads and walked on to Beaver’s to see about a car.

He seemed surprised to see her. She put the Bette Davis cassette on his counter.

Not her best, he mumbled.

So what’s the gossip?

Industrial deafness, Georgie. Blame Harley Davidson.

Can you sell me a car?

Not before Christmas. You wanna lift somewhere?

No, I’ve got a renter for the moment.

Jesus, George.

What?

Be careful.

That’s why I came to you, she said brightly. I wouldn’t buy a used car off just anyone.

I’ll let you know. When something comes in.

You’re a mate, said Georgie.

He laughed his rumbly laugh.

Well. Aren’t you?

Oh, I’m everybody’s mate, George.

She was halfway home when she heard what sounded like gunshots.

God, she hated this town.

The sea is so flat and cerulean that clouds seem to founder in it. Planing through their reflections Fox feels more skybound than waterborne as he bears in toward the lagoon.

Nothing moves ashore at White Point. There’s only this prevailing painterly stillness. Deserted beach. Norfolk pines immobile. And boats languishing at their moorings.

Throttling down across the seagrass flats he feels watched but he knows he’s home free—there’s nothing to be caught with, no fish, no lobsters, no abalone. He cuts his motors and tilts them to glide in to the shallows. His wake folds on itself like poured treacle. He thinks of the curve of her neck. Smells saltbush, pigface, iodine. The world feels becalmed and dreamy.

The bow grinds gently against the sand. The dog doesn’t get up to greet him. The truck windows have no sheen .131 Cicadas. The boat wake arrives; it laps up a desolate crescendo while he begins to see what he’s looking at.

He vaults from the boat in his wetsuit and walks up to the dog which lies in a stain of itself on the chain’s end. Fragments of hair and meat discolour the sand. There’s blood underfoot but no flies yet. The truck windows are blown out and the iceboxes are ragged with holes. Fox fishes the keys from beneath the sidestep and shoves them into the ignition through the ruined doorframe.

He doesn’t expect a spark; doesn’t get it. He pops the hood, sees the V8’s blasted entrails and knows it’s useless.

He walks away before he falls, walks to the boat. Washes his feet of gore. Steps up onto the transom. Pushes off.

About nine Georgie made herself a stiff coffee and stood at the kitchen window to drink it. Down on the beach she saw a boat trailer and the curve of a vehicle roof mostly obscured by the foredune. She put the cup on the sink and snatched up the house binoculars. Oh, Jesus. Lu. What was he doing going out? Today of all days, and in broad bloody daylight?

She went down across the grass at a half-trot and came over the dune to see the Ford’s windscreen blown out and the pink spray of dog on the sand. The sun beat into her head.

The first thing Georgie did was shower. She couldn’t help herself; she had to wash and, no matter how hot the water, she couldn’t get warm. She had a drink. For half an hour she looked for the keys to the rental car but they were nowhere about. She found a cardboard removal carton in the garage and took it upstairs. She threw open the wardrobes and looked at her clothes.

Most of them were rubbish. Apart from a few toiletries and a handful of CDs, that’d be it. Christ, she’d barely fill a single box with her life here. Everything else was Jim’s.

The phone rang. She let it ring out. Georgie sat on the bed and held her face. The phone started up again.

Out in the livingroom she took up the house binoculars and scanned the lagoon, the reef, the passage. A couple of boats were steaming in already and a terrible panic took hold. She was cut off, encircled. She thought about the kids at school. The highway. The watchful quiet of the town. She picked up CDs.