Moonlight Downs (14 page)

Shoot!

AS SOON as I got back to town I phoned the Aboriginal Lands Council in Alice Springs. I was put through to a field officer named Miller, to whom I made my complaint about Marsh and his trespassing cattle. He promised to look into the matter and get back to me.

My next port of call was the police station, where I tried, without success, to speak to Tom McGillivray. His day off, they told me, but I knew where he lived so I decided to go and hassle him at home.

As I was walking back to the car I heard a rough voice behind me.

‘Emily?’

I turned around. A shapely, big-haired blonde in a tight red dress and silver sandals was standing there staring at me, a young girl bouncing around beside her.

‘It is, isn’t it? Emily frickin Tempest?’

‘Candy?’ I asked, peering at her.

‘Course it’s bloody Candy! Haven’t changed that much, have I?’

‘Only for the better, Candy.’ I gave her an enthusiastic hug.

Candy Wilson, in addition to being one of my oldest friends, was that rarest of the rare, a white Territorian who’d actually been born there and emerged with her faculties intact. Her father was head stockman out at Edge River for most of my childhood. After an initial demarcation dispute at the Edge River Races one year, she and I had ended up as good, if sporadic, mates.

She had turned out a bit of a rough diamond though, if the rough diamond drilled into her left nostril was anything to go by. She had, as well, an array of fat rings on her fingers and a fierce little scorpion tattooed above her right breast. Fair enough, I decided. From what I’d seen of Bluebush, cultivating a rough edge was one way to survive. Cultivating a cactus hedge was another. She was looking pretty good, albeit in a slinky, slightly harried way that whispered ‘single mum’.

‘So, Emily,’ she was saying, ‘what on earth are you doing back here?’

‘What are
you
doing here, more to the point. I thought you’d be long gone, woman of the world like yourself.’

‘Woman of the world! Huh! I was pregnant a year after you left.’

‘Didn’t have me to keep you on the straight and narrow.’

‘You! Fat lotta fuckin straight and narrow you would have kept me on! Remember that rough-rider boy I sprung you with at the rodeo?’

‘Should’ve stuck with him: there’s been too many smooth riders since him. And what about you? Is there a Candy Man?’ I asked.

‘Don’t get me started, bitch!’ she laughed. ‘The men of Bluebush! Jeez, I oughta write a book about the bastards.’

The little girl at her side began jiggling around and dragging at her mother’s sleeve. ‘Mum, you promised me an ice-cream.’

Her mother frowned. ‘Don’t push it, Teisha love. Say hello to Emily Tempest. Em’s one of my oldest friends. You ever heard me talk about her?’

‘No.’

‘You will. Look Em,’ she said to me, ‘can’t stay; gotta sort this one out. Where are you living?’

‘Toyota Towers.’

She tore the top off a cigarette pack, scribbled a phone number on it and handed it to me. ‘Give us a call.’

When they’d gone I drove out to McGillivray’s place. His property, as I’m sure he would have preferred to hear it described, ten acres of spinifex and wind and a red-brick hacienda at the posh end of town. Posh in the sense that you could take a walk there without getting raped or scabies.

I found the man himself in the yard out back, a big bay stallion stamping and snorting furiously as he struggled to restrain it with a twitch. He gave the stick another twist and the beast stood still, but its massive shoulders were radiating rage. He stroked its mane, whispered into a quivering ear. Like a lot of other blokes on the fringes of the cattle country, McGillivray was a bit of a cowboy manqué.

‘Tom…’

He glanced at me, nodded curtly, then got back to the business at hand, his own hands busy with a wad of twisted horse nose.

‘Sorry to interrupt.’

‘Yer can make up for it by stickin some of this…’ tossing me a bottle of gentian violet, ‘onto what’s left of the poor bugger’s eye.’

From what I could see there was bugger all left of the poor bugger’s eye: the good eye spat fire as I scraped pus out of the gruesome wound that was all I could find of the other and coated it with purple paint.

‘What’s happened here?’ I asked, momentarily mesmerised by the stream of pus and blood that trickled down the horse’s head.

‘Infection. Started out as a grass seed in the eye. Vet took it out a couple of weeks ago.’

‘The seed?’

‘The eye.’

‘Urk…’

‘Thought we’d got rid of the infection, but it keeps coming back. All this fuckin dust and heat…’ He waved a despairing arm at the adjoining red-dirt paddock.

When we were finished we watched the horse go pounding out into the paddock. It swerved to avoid a stump it hadn’t seen until the last moment, then careered off into the rest of the mob, scattering them like billiard balls. McGillivray shook his head. ‘Gonna have to put a bullet into that poor bugger one of these days, but I can’t bring meself. Had him fifteen years. Give it a bit longer—maybe it’ll clear up.’

The horse pushed its way up to a clump of lucerne hay, misjudged it and stumbled, then angrily flicked back its head, looking for somewhere to lay the blame.

‘Maybe,’ McGillivray said sadly.

We adjourned to the back porch. McGillivray pulled a beer out of an old fridge by the door and tossed it into my lap.

‘Okay, Emily, shoot!’

‘You’re a cynical bastard, Tom. What makes you think I’d need anything other than the pleasure of your company to bring me out here?’

‘Yer old man, for one. I seen that look in his eye when he thinks he’s onto a buster.’ He licked the foam from his mo with a big, ugly tongue, then added, ‘And from the look of you, you reckon it’s Lasseter’s lost reef. This’s about Lincoln, I suppose?’

I nodded, then gave it to him both barrels. Blakie and Marsh. Everything I had. It wasn’t much, but it was too much for his delicate equilibrium.

‘Jesus, Emily!’ he interjected when I got to the Earl Marsh bit. He even rolled his eyes—for Tom, after twenty years among undemonstrative Territorians, the equivalent of an hysterical fit. ‘You
tryin
to dip me into it or what? I mean, Blakie we can handle…’

‘You’ve done a great job so far.’

‘Okay, okay, so you can’t get decent help these days, but we’ll get im in the end. By waitin if nothin else. But you’re askin me to interview Earl
Marsh
? About a dead blackfeller?’ He looked like he’d just spotted a quartet of hooded horsemen cantering up the drive. ‘You must’ve forgotten how things work out here. When Marsh bought Carbine he joined the gods! One call in the wrong direction from that particular quarter and I’m bookin rabbits out on the Gunbarrel Highway.’

‘Somebody’s gotta check out the tracks. Somebody’s gotta find out what inspired him to sign up Freddy the day before Lincoln died. He have ESP or what? Just think of it as one of the perks of the job, Tom: all that fresh air, travel, you might even score a bit of free meat.’

‘Fuck the free meat—it’s dead meat I’m seein, an it’s got my brand on it.’ I gave him my coldest stare, the one Jack referred to as the Refrigerator. He wiped the sweat off his brow, chewed his inner lip, seemed to tear a sizeable strip from it. ‘Oh all right, Emily, all right, course I’ll look into it. But, shit, it’d be a lot less complicated if you could prove to me that Blakie did it.’

One of Tom’s kids—a six-year-old girl who looked so much like her old man that I thought I saw a big red Dennis Lillee moustache on her lip—came out and delivered a plate of
lebkuchen
, courtesy of his German wife. Like her husband, she’d spotted me for work at first glance and was keeping well out of the way.

I took a biscuit, bit a chunk off, then glanced down at the splinters of blue stone I’d just shown him.

‘Blakie probably did do it, Tom. I just want to be sure. Tell you what—I’ll make a deal.’

‘Reckon I need another beer before I’m ready to do a deal with you, Emily.’ He glanced at my stubby. ‘How’s yours goin’?’

I picked it up and showed him. ‘Slowly.’

He went across to the fridge, pulled out another bottle, came back and settled into his chair. ‘Okay,’ he said warily, ‘let’s have it. This…deal.’

‘You investigate Marsh…’

‘And you?’

‘Gonna do what my father’s been telling me to do for years.’

‘What’s that?’ He flipped the ring and took a swig.

‘Get me a man.’

His eyes grew dark and narrow. ‘And which man would that be?’

‘Blakie,’ I answered, then ducked as a mouthful of beer came spraying in my direction.

The Jindikuyu Waterhole

I NESTLED down among the rocks—two massive slabs of ironstone on the spur of a sandstone plateau—and prepared myself for another day’s hunting. I lay on my stomach, adjusted my binoculars, swept them across the valley below. What my little hideaway lacked in comfort it just about made up for in vantage. From its massed battlements I could spot anything that moved within a wide circumference of the Jindikuyu Waterhole. Without, I hoped, being spotted myself: the last thing I wanted the mad bastard to know was that I was after him.

Jindikuyu, five hundred metres below, was a lonely waterhole at the base of a valley in the hills to the south of Moonlight.

By noon the main disadvantage of my observation post had become apparent. It was exposed to the sun. When I got up that morning I’d dressed lightly—T-shirt, shorts, boots—for what looked like a warm day, but now I regretted it. I pulled the blanket over me, but it still seemed like an oven in there. The gravel that had slipped inside my singlet was turning to mud between my breasts. My elbows looked like shrivelled waterholes, my armpits smelt like onions. The water-bottle I’d brought with me had long been emptied, and I was reluctant to make the long haul back to the car in case he came while I was away.

I peeled the last of my oranges, sucked the juice out of it, ate the flesh, picked at the pith and thought about McGillivray’s doubts about the wisdom of my undertaking. I was beginning to share those doubts. This was my fourth waterhole, and all I had to show for my efforts so far was a muddy stomach and mild conjunctivitis.

McGillivray had had more than doubts, of course. When I told him what I was planning to do, he hit the roof and told me I was sailing close to a charge of interfering with the course of justice.

I came anyway. I was sailing close to all sorts of things, the least of which was a criminal conviction. Round here criminal convictions are like sorry scars and body mutilation—a rite of passage. Everybody who’s anybody’s got one.

Blakie had to be out there somewhere, and I was going to find out where.

One thing I’d always known about him was that, for all his crazy peregrinations, he tended to have a bolthole. Or a series of boltholes, carefully concealed havens among which he circulated and within which he stored the trophies and emblems of his eccentricity: his bottles and bones, his feathers, coins and coloured stones.

Jack and I had stumbled across one of his camps once, while we were out prospecting. It was in a little hollow in the hills above the Mosquito Creek Waterhole. We’d known whose it was at a glance: the translucent skins stretched between branches, the ochre stones and crystals, the reek of green meat. Unfortunately Blakie had come back at the wrong moment and sent us on our way with a volley of spittle and imprecations, but the memory lingered.

The Mosquito had been my first stake-out, of course, but in two days of careful observation I hadn’t seen a thing. When I did finally screw up my courage and check out the campsite, I found a family of mulga snakes that looked like they’d been settled there for generations.

If the Mosquito Creek hadn’t given me Blakie, however, it had given me an idea of how to find him. Water, that was the key. Blakie might be able to sleep with his rocks, but he couldn’t drink them. There were only half a dozen permanent water supplies within striking distance of the Moonlight camp. If I staked them out, one by one, sooner or later I was bound to come across him.

Looked like it was going to be later, I decided by late in the afternoon of the Jindikuyu stake-out. It had been a long hot day. Blakie must have thought so too: clearly he wasn’t going to show.

My thoughts turned to Hazel. As they tended to do. I’d fucked things up there all right. As I tended to do.

Blakie and Hazel. I still couldn’t believe it. Blakie and a pus-eyed dog would have been a lop-sided enough item—in favour of the dog—but Blakie and my beautiful Hazel? How could she?

I rolled onto my back, closed my eyes, let my mind drift down corridors of filtered light. What would she be doing now? Pottering round the camp, carrying water, cooking. Painting, perhaps. Thinking about me? Christ, who could say? Probably not.

I stirred myself, sat up, took a look around. The only movement to be seen was a shimmer in the air and the odd meandering bullock.

Knock-off time. I’d had enough. McGillivray was right: this was crazy.

Two parrots appeared, scudding through the air like small green boats, rising and falling and forging their way forward: heading for the waterhole. I decided to do the same, get a drink before making the long haul back to the car. I picked up a water-bottle, clambered over the rocks and made my way down to the hole.

I was twenty metres west of the water when a sudden perturbation in the shrubbery made me look up in alarm.

A bullock came clattering out of the umbrella bushes. I sighed with relief: just another thirsty nomad. It stood there staring, tentative-eyed, wing-ribbed, tongue like a dried-out porcupine, then decided I wasn’t a threat and moved forward.

Know how you feel, feller, I thought as I watched its great grey body go panting up to the water’s edge. Don’t worry about me: there’s enough for both of us.

I took a step forward, then stopped in horror as a monster exploded out of the waterhole.

It was mud-swathed, water-whirling, huge and hairy, presumably human, with a roar in its throat and an axe in its hands. The bullock’s terrified bellow was cut off by a terrible, arcing blow which finished up half way through its skull.

I stood there, rooted in more ways than one.

Where the fuck had Blakie come from? How had he got here without my seeing him? This wasn’t the way I’d planned it.

I dropped onto my stomach and hid behind a boulder.

Had he seen me?

Maybe not. I heard him squelching through the mud, heard the carcass being ripped, hacked and cracked, all to the accompaniment of a sonic cocktail of every imaginable bovine fluid.

If I was the next item on the menu he was taking his time getting to me.

Half an hour later I smelt smoke, heard the sound of wood being smashed. I poked my nose round the side of the rock. He was sitting with his back to me, a fire at his feet, a mess of bloody beast beyond. Soon there came the smell of roasting meat. Rib bones. Sizzling offal. Later a set of crocodilian jaws crunching, a pair of fat lips slurping like the suction pump on a slaughterhouse floor.

He began to sing, his big, bull-frog bass hammering out into the night.

Another hour and the singing turned to snoring.

I gave him thirty minutes, then inched my way back up the hill, my heart hitting the mouth-tops every time a rock rolled or a branch broke.

When I finally made the lookout, I was tempted to do a runner, so shaken was I by the closeness of the encounter. But no, I resolved, I’d set out to do a job, and I was determined to see it through. I put a blanket round my shoulders, leaned against a rock. I tried to stay awake, but sleep crept up on me in a subtle flood. The stars were still high in the sky when the cold awoke me. I studied the waterhole: Blakie’s fire could be seen dimly glowing at water’s edge.

When it grew light enough I was alarmed to see that his blanket was empty. I instinctively glanced behind me, visions of that terrible slaughter-axe racing through my mind, but there was nothing there. Blakie came back into the camp below soon afterwards, a snake draped across his shoulders.

I kept the glasses on him, watched him go about his morning activities. He ate, sang, laid his stones out on the ground and studied them. One time he stopped for a shit under a wirewood tree. So clear was my view that I saw his attendant flies disappear, then return, evidently deciding that Blakie was a better prospect than a free-range turd.

Finally he filled a water-bottle, threw a slab of meat and an armful of bones into an improvised back pack—a blanket twisted around his shoulders—then set off, striding down the valley with the slow, relentless gait of a post-prandial goanna.

I followed. He headed west, keeping to the flats and foothills, for which I was grateful. It made it easier for me to keep to the ridges. From time to time, when I had to cut across a gully or skirt an incline, I’d lose him. But whenever I got back to the heights he reappeared.

I had a moment of concern when he reached the blacksoil plains. It would have been impossible for me to tail him out across those bare, cracking tablelands without being seen, but he swung north, rounded the cape and headed up into Koolya Gorge. For the next twenty minutes I more or less retraced my steps as he worked his way up the gorge.

I lost him in a stand of desert oaks at the bottom of Pangulu Hill, and was surprised when he reappeared a minute later, making his way up its cliffs.

Now I’m fucked, I thought. I’ll never be able to follow him up there.

But he’d only climbed for four or five metres when he disappeared.

‘What the hell…!’ I said out loud.

I studied the spot where I’d last seen him. A clump of hoya vines clung to the rocks there. I focused on the vines, trying to work out what had happened to him.

Soon afterwards his head appeared; he peered up and down the valley, then vanished. There was a cave of some sort in there.

I sat back, allowed myself a brief smile.

I’d found the bugger’s hideout.