Jacko (6 page)

—In Southern California, said Jacko, even the bloody dentists own helicopters.
Especially
the bloody dentists!

They stood in the sun on the outskirts of San Bernardino, within sound of the thunder of the freeway, and introduced on camera the old man from New Jersey, who stood in the entry way of the trailer park. And the old man, so transparently honest and so pleased with his place in history, said that he had seen the girl jogging, and that he'd been aware that she was muttering to herself. Like praying aloud, he told the camera.

—Such a lovely old bloke, Jacko told me in the Odeon. And it's bloody ridiculous, but my brain was full of images of Dannie waiting, and let me tell you,
déshabillé
played its bloody part.

By noon, Jacko had a sense that the search was well-launched, and he confirmed that sense by making door-knocks among the trailer homes.

—The trailer-home park! he expatiated in the Odeon. The world's successful answer to the cost of conventional housing, but thank Christ I don't live in one eh.

As he went on his way down the avenues and laneways, Clayton filmed him from a distance, so that trailer householders would have few grounds for shyness or complaint. A number of people were very pleased to say they hadn't seen Sunny, except at last one middle-aged man spoke with something like the same sort of certainty as the old man.

—She runs here sometimes, he told Jacko, but she doesn't live here.

When Jacko asked him how did he know, he said he saw a man drop her off and wait for her. A nondescript vehicle, a nondescript man. No particular colour, the car. Dust-coloured.

—I'm colour-blind anyhow, the man confessed. She wore a tanktop too. Was skinny. Had a birthmark on her shoulder.

So sweetly did the universe seem to direct Jacko to Sunny Sondquist, such pleasant and self-validating witnesses emerging from the masses of the demented, that Jacko forgot Dannie's tormenting proposition and surrendered himself to the exaltation of his trade. To be in California, with the smutty sun on your face, and making such discoveries on one's own behalf and on behalf of the squawking battler Bob Sondquist.

—Last time I saw her, the middle-aged man had told Jacko, she was jogging along saying, A-N-O-D-Y-N-E.

Anodyne
.

—Will we find the Anodyne Kid? Jacko asked his audience.

He was confident in his own brotherly intentions and in assured success.
Live Wire
was seen in San Bernardino. Witnesses, some of them truthful, would emerge.

And he would not be made a fool of by anyone other than Dannie.

—But do you
really
care whether you find her or not? I asked Jacko over a post-Odeon dinner at the Grand Ticino, a cellar restaurant, closer to my place than Jacko's, and one of our favourites. Fettucine Alfredo and Pinot Grigio were succulent in the Ticino's little cellar, with stills from a movie it had starred in displayed on its walls.

—Jesus mate, Jacko breathed to me there. I'm going to deliver her in triumph eh. To old Bob Sondquist's window. By cherrypicker.

Vixen Six always let him fly back Sunday night on Metro Grand, on a plane which was a cross between a hotel and a piano bar. In the stern of the aircraft there were two bedrooms. Jacko always booked one of these.

Dannie stayed on in Los Angeles to research the Anodyne Kid story and others she was working on at Durkin's orders.

From a phone on board the plane, Jacko called Bob Sondquist.

—Listen, Bob mate, why didn't you tell us your daughter spelled things?

Sondquist squawked in his pained monotone.

—I didn't know she still did that. I thought she'd grown out of it.

—But a feller not much younger than you told me he saw someone like her spelling while she ran.

Sondquist became so excited that Jacko could hear him struggling to achieve intonation.

—Proves she's still the same kid! The same exact poor little tyke.

Now Jacko could hear Bob sobbing. Jacko wondered what was the freight of those tears? The weight of what remembered events had started them? On the cellular phone at great altitude, the tears sounded to Jacko like an exclusion, the turning of a shoulder.

—Where is she then? said Bob's robotic voice, under threat from further unutterable anguish. If she's still spelling …

Jacko did not either answer or press him, and said goodnight. Then he sat, ready for sleep, drinking malt whisky in the bar of the plane. At first sip, he was approached by a woman in a yellow suit, who identified herself as some sort of executive from CBS. She had, said Jacko, that ageless look: her mysteriously maintained face, a self-made and perhaps even prosthetically-manufactured body.

She said, Hello, you're Jacko Emptor. I'm so-and-so. You've booked the bedroom, and I have a favour. I'm utterly exhausted. I simply have to sleep.

Jacko said that he was sorry, he was exhausted too. He'd been up all night last night, and tomorrow morning had to go straight from the plane to talk his way into someone's door in New Jersey.

—Well, she said, couldn't we share? You know what I'm saying. I'm saying share. Would you permit that?

Jacko thought of those papers that sell in supermarkets:
I conceived Jacko Emptor's child at 37,000 feet
.

But what was more likely, Jacko quickly saw – for it was in her tone, her briskness even when tired – was that they would lie chastely side by side as a matter of course. It was an idea not customarily encountered in the Northern Territory.

—If I had made the smallest suggestion, said Jacko, she would have called it molestation. Maybe she's right eh. I don't know any more.

Bewildered Jacko told her please to take the room. He found the sofas in the bar very comfortable, and there weren't a lot of people aboard. No, please. I'll sleep like a log in a rocking chair! Please …

I was sad that I could not tell Maureen the details of Jacko's confusion so confidentially passed on to me, and, above all, of his survival that weekend as loyal spouse of Lucy. Since I couldn't, the question of Jacko's virtue continued to be a debate in our family.

In the end, Jacko drank himself to sleep and slept till the last moment of his approach to La Guardia, to a different air, the grit of the day in part absorbed by dirty washcloths of cloud and a dawn of sorts.

A car took Jacko to Paterson, New Jersey, picking up on the way through Manhattan the sommelier of the Rainbow Room. They managed to find the microwave truck and the young producer who substituted for the bewildering Dannie. As expected of him, Jacko chose a house at random and made friends with its occupant – a fifty-year-old retrenched foundry worker, a man frank about his afflictions. His wife had left him. He'd just had open-heart surgery and five of his toes amputated because of diabetes.

—Job, Jacko told the audience. A man of sorrows.

Jacko thought twice about giving him the option. The sommelier had brought seven champagnes, French and Californian, for tasting, but perhaps they should find a householder in better health.

—To hell with it! said Job. I wouldn't be able to afford this stuff if I lived to be a hundred.

And so, his bloody gauze-wrapped stump of a foot rested on his coffee table, the man drank Dom Perignon, Veuve Clicquot Grand Dame, Heidsieck, Roederer, Krug, and said, Ay, I can see why they go for this stuff! And laughing with the man, Jacko felt safe for the moment from the weekend's complicated claims.

4

My first contact with the Emptors occurred three years before I went to NYU, and it was not so much with Jacko as with his mother and with the scene of his childhood. I was travelling in the winter through the Northern Territory with a photographer named Barry Larson, half-Norwegian, half-Jewish, and utterly Australian, with both a Norseman's and a Hebraic enthusiasm for desolation. The country either side of the road from Hector to Burren Waters, part bitumen and part red soil, is by some standards plain. The country is graced only by rare hills. There is disconsolate grey scrub, and clumps of the imported folly of rubberbush, which someone in the late nineteenth century had scattered in the belief it was good stock feed.

In some lights – early in the day and late – the Burren Waters country is beautiful. But unlike the full deserts to the south, you could never quite call it splendid. Even Australian eyes, used to being beguiled by evaporated landscapes and by what light can do to them, could find the Emptor country pretty tedious.

On our way through it, I made the mistake of saying so to Larson. He got the closest to being angry with me as ever he did in our three-week journey.

—Are you a Pom or something? he asked. Did you get so buggered up by Wordsworth and Tennyson and all that stuff at school that you can't even
see
Oz?

I argued no, and I went into praises of the Tanami Desert and of Docker River west of Alice, all of which I'd loved and written about and closely remembered.

But Larson said, waving a hand to the right and then the left of the car, There isn't one yard of it that's the same as another!

At that stage, as we would both discover to our separate griefs, his more furious than mine, he had only some fifteen or sixteen days still to live. He was entitled to all his frantic loves.

It is hard to over-exaggerate the isolation in which the Emptors lived, in which Chloe and Stammer Jack had their marriage and begot their family. If you imagined the African veldt without villages, then you would come close to it. Before the coming of Stammer Jack's father, the Wodjiri people, whose country it was, had moved across it in small family groups, setting fire to it to flush out game, celebrating and obeying its scattered resources of food and water by keeping on the ancestral track, and cherishing it in luscious song as if it were a place of bounty.

But in a sense it was a vacancy even then, before the rubberbush, though you couldn't tell Larson that. It certainly came close to being a vacancy in these days of the Emptors. In Grandfather Emptor's day, you needed a Wodjiri tracker, a compass and a sextant to get you here. In Stammer Jack's adolescence the two hundred and more miles had been dirt. And now, the last ninety miles were red-grey dirt.

All this was part of Grandfather Emptor's twelve-thousand square mile leasehold, shrunk now through bad seasons and cyclical drought to the best fifteen-hundred square miles!

On the road into Burren Waters homestead, even the occasional white road post was coated in red dust. As for
signs
of the Emptors, a dirt airstrip came first, then a few cattle grids, and then at last the Emptor homestead and encampment. It was a genuine village. The red dust widened to become a square. One side of the square was taken up entirely by the mustering yards and a sales ring where – we would be told – Stammer Jack exhibited his horses to people who came in from all over the Commonwealth, camped and bedded down here in the Emptor piazza for three days, and then drove out, hung-over, towing their chosen yearling.

An aircraft hangar and offices and Boomer's helipad also sat on this side of the red dust square.

On the south side of the piazza were, first, the black or Wodjiri stockmen's married quarters, a series of corrugated iron huts, then a huge cookhouse and kitchen, built in brick – perhaps to defeat the termites of the area. Next a schoolhouse, single white stockmen's quarters, and a set of offices. For bookkeepers were needed in the cattle and quarter-horse business as in any other.

Chez Emptor itself, the homestead, lay in a highly watered patch of green. Palms, ferns, rhododendrons and other shrubs had been encouraged by a heavy outlay of water to grow there. The homestead structure was an enormous bungalow of red brick, the kind fashionable in the '60s in outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. Suitable to the place, however, it had wide, deep verandahs all around.

Larson and I felt like newly arrived troubadours at some minor medieval court. We did not go at once to the big house with its emerald garden, its pyramid of bottles out the back, monument to the Emptor thirst and its television satellite dish, which had come to Burren Waters late in Jacko Emptor's adolescence, taken his soul and transformed him into Manhattan's Jester of Trespass.

We went instead to the offices near the cookhouse. Beyond a screen door we found a large flaccid man with a boozer's pallor, working at an Apple Mac. He had a Celtic complexion, and sun sores on his lips, and his sleeves were buttoned, as sleeves were in sun-blasted Burren Waters, to the wrists.

—Oh yes, said this man, the bookkeeper. Mrs Emptor knows you're coming. She's up at the house.

When we traversed the garden and reached the huge open verandahs of the Emptors' red-brick palazzo, we found that long, ceiling-high bookshelves flanked the front door, and after they finished, a herd of beds, packed together, disappeared around the corner. It proved that this was where friends of her largely vanished children slept on visits to the great outback, or perhaps where favoured clients were put up during the yearling sales. The beds gave the Emptor homestead the look of a country hospital.

—They shouldn't bother with this green bloody lawn they've got, Larson whispered. No use pretending it's bloody Toorak and fighting against the realities of evaporation. They ought to plant xerophytes.

Xerophytes were Larson's favourite plants. He tried to keep a little cactus garden healthy in moist, sub-tropical North Sydney. At the Emptors' front door, his brave eyes glittered with the concept of a garden of desert plants.

The middle-aged woman who answered the door could only be the chatelaine, Mrs Emptor. She was slightly more than medium height. She had a broad, frank, worried, slightly fleshy face, sun-leathered but not wrinkled. She wore a mumu. The flesh of her shoulders was brown and smooth – she took the sun well, unlike her bookkeeper. She displayed the upper third of the breasts which had suckled young Jacko (whom I barely knew at that stage) and his three siblings, the one predictable brother, and the mad other two, girl and boy. She was not at first view a big enough woman to have produced such a thumping lad as Jacko, but then she had mated with an earlier thumping lad. Stammer Jack.