When Colts Ran (13 page)

Eddie dropped from sight when Jack's footsteps sounded on the school verandah boards. Then he was out into the yard and into the open night, head tipped back and mouth open wide sucking oxygen. He ran along the ridge track with a pile of dark rocks outlined at the edges. ‘Oh, the crossing! Oh, the crossing!'

When they first came there from Out West, the car so loaded with belongings it scraped gravel dips and threw sparks all the way, Eddie had run through dry grass up this hill, climbed in among these boulders and scrambled higher with the feeling of thistledown rising into the sky. A rock chimney made easy climbing. At the top wildflower seedlings grew.

There Eddie loved at first sight and forever the way the schoolhouse ridge dropped away to a sparkling creek, and how when he sped the full mile to the bottom there was the promise of getting back to the sky where the house parted the wind. The Dalrymple boy launched a glider, balsawood struts papered with tissue. It curved around, coming back into Eddie's outstretched arms because he got there first. At night from his bedroom window he saw the headlamp of a train and watched it streaming across the plateau, the carriages lit from within as if by Chinese lanterns. The red glow of the firebox flared ahead and the shriek of the whistle floated back and there was nothing, nowhere, no time on earth imaginable to Eddie that defined happiness and full contentment so completely as then. He would steal, murder and destroy to keep this feeling whole: and his only mistake was in thinking he was right in that, and deserved it.

While they were still Out West chewing sand and got the news of the transfer, Jack had talked of the drives they would take when they got to the Isabel. It was months before they'd made one. Maps showed the coast only fifty miles away but to get there and cast a line meant descending a maze of hairpin bends and driving back up to the cold country well after midnight. What Eddie liked on that drive was not the South Coast itself so much as the Isabel River going down. It had shallow stones of blue and rust, and high, steep sides, forest-edged cliffs with exposed tree roots dangling and goannas clinging to tree trunks with ribbons of bark stretching to ground level from big, white branches. This was the Isabel after it broke from the high plateau through a cleft in the ranges and came over waterfalls and through orange rock gorges sheltered by tree ferns. They stopped the car and Eddie threw stones at reptiles while Jack kept score, promising a penny per strike. When Eddie reached up to feel a sandpapery tail a goanna swayed out of reach, waddling vertically in defiance of gravity, angling its wrinkled neck and looking down at the boy from dragon eyes.

What Eddie wanted was to go back down there and walk along the riverbed, camping on sandy bends, and Jack promised they would. ‘We can go anywhere we like, do anything we want, because we have only one bite of the pineapple, compadre, and if anyone tells us otherwise they can pull their heads in.'

Down at the coast they'd visited the man Jack said he liked telling to pull his head in most, Major Buckler.

‘My fascist mate,' he called him, with puzzling affection for one so bent. Buckler lived in a small, pink, plywood caravan at the back of the house where his wife Veronica lived. ‘She keeps him on a leash,' said Jack. ‘Poor, sorry old bugger he strayed but she reeled him back in.'

Guarding Buckler's van, equipment, tools, generator set, water tanks and five-ton Bedford truck was the ugliest most ill-formed dog Eddie had ever seen. Patches of hair worn from its rump left bare, scabby skin. The Grabber was the name of the pooch. He was bred by a buffalo shooter, Hammond Pringle, said Buckler, whose Arnhem Land camp was described by no less an author than Ion L. Idriess and whose father was Buckler's First War mate, Birdy Pringle, made famous by broadcast interviews on the ABC, recorded on wire recording machines in the paperbark swamps.

A croc was the only known enemy of such a cur as The Grabber. It would scale a croc's tongue, said Buckler, run down its throat barking at tonsils swinging like the bells of St Mary's. Solid from a diet of stewing beef and stale bread soaked in milk, The Grabber's diamond-shaped head appeared to Eddie like part of its neck. The Grabber had a mean, sour, dusty smell and walked gingerly, as if stung. When he lay his head on Eddie's knee and his scalded eyes drooped, Eddie loved him.

The Slims went inside for afternoon tea but Buckler didn't join them. Through the screened kitchen door they could see him standing in the yard, smoking his pipe. Eddie was sent out with a mug of sweet black tea and a slice of fruit cake. Inside, Jack exchanged a few pleasantries with Veronica and then as soon as he could took his mug out the back, where Buckler filled it with rum.

The house had the clean, thick smell of oil paints and later, excited and putting their heads together about what money they had, Jack and Pamela made a choice from among a few small pictures. They reverenced the artistic vocation and would go without much to buy an oil painting by a name such as Veronica's was now becoming among select connoisseurs (or any old linocut by a CPA member).

A brackish arm of the Isabel River came up to a white beach at the foot of the garden forming a placid, tea-tree-stained backwater. Before dark Eddie swam there with The Grabber patrolling his elbow until moonrise hinted it was time to go.

Cars were bringing lastcomers to Jack's meeting. Headlights flickered and flashed closer. Where the road dropped, Eddie started running and tried to beat past them. At each cornerpost of paddock he paused and listened to the thump of his heartbeat and the chorus of frogs. When he reached the railway line the car lights were closer but sank from view in a ripple of dark. Eddie climbed through a barbed-wire fence, scrambled the embankment and made a right-angled turn, walking along the line to get to Bonney's. The headlights re-emerged and the glint of their lamps swept along the rails; Eddie slowed to a rolling gait on the raised railbed and saw the curving tracks illuminate towards him. At the last moment, as the cars came trundling past, he lay down to break his silhouette in case Jack was told. Then the cars went grinding up the ridge towards the school and he stood and kept walking.

Frogs. Crickets. Water. The railway trestle spanned clear reed-lined pools. In the hot, dry summer Jack walked Eddie down there after school, reached in among the stones demanding quiet and tickled a trout. The two of them went climbing the hill with fish in a wet sack while Jack told his stories of being on the wallaby when he was Eddie's age, living off the beauty of the land and suffering people's hard charity, tramping from place to place eating rabbit stew and making johnnycakes and staying ahead of the wallopers. That was when Jack saw places he'd never dreamed he would see, taking him to the heights; when he'd had experiences no boy should ever have, plunging him to the depths; when he got the idea that hunger and hardship, as he liked to say, had something to do with the country's wealth, and he joined the Unemployed Workers' Movement in Bourke, and was caught on the riverbank by vigilantes and sent packing. From conversations of the kind, Eddie developed not so much similar sympathies as a desire to grab experience by the throat and not miss anything to be had. This came out as mean greed in childhood play. At best, it came with a sense of limitless ambition, which Jack and Pamela liked hearing about, except they wondered: what sort of dreamer was he, with an account book for a heart, always wanting, but with a motive of resentment?

As Eddie worked his rhythm of stepping along the sleepers a song filled his head, saxophone wails, ripples of jazz and blues. His mind rang with the gramophone records Jack played on card nights – Leadbelly, Bessie Smith and the slave songs, the railway songs performed by venerable Negroes while Jack silenced the room with upraised fingers holding a cigarette between them and jerked his hand in time, conducting. The music was grooved in Eddie's memory but not to his liking: Jack shamed him, and to fight that shame, Eddie would shame Jack.

The shape of a low hill loomed ahead. From the angle Eddie looked it seemed the line buried itself, but then the hill broke open to reveal the high-sided railway cutting, leading through. Closer to the river bridge he put his ear to the rails, heard nothing but cold silence and knew it was safe to cross. Almost his favourite action, he'd found, was going across that railway bridge, slapping his hands from girder to girder. The river shone black with flecks of white current around rocks. Water, water in a dry year coming down from hills dense with timber, wrapped in mist, the home of black cockatoos and powdery snowfalls in winter. Eddie could never get over the enchantment of cold, clean water, and every creek he found he wanted to get up higher and find the rock where the first spring began and where the mud it oozed from led. Against the bank of a stream he imagined pitching his camp, pegging a claim and digging for gold. He would bathe in gold like Scrooge McDuck if he could.

The gatekeeper's house was on the other side of the bridge guarding the level crossing. It was where Claude Bonney slept on a verandah on a lumpy kapok mattress. When the night mail came through Claude blinked an eye, raised himself on an elbow and watched his father, Phil, walk to the old white gates and shoulder them closed. There was never any road traffic at that hour, and rarely at any other time either, and Bonney could be sure his father would stand to his post reliably. Yet he still watched over him. That was Claude.

Eddie gave out a whistle, scooped a handful of track-ballast and heard it rattling the verandah boards like nails. He shone the torch down the bank and saw his friend sit up.

‘Claude, they've done for Uncle Joe!'

They sat on the embankment feeling in their empty pockets for tobacco.

‘I heard,' said Claude.

‘There's a handover,' said Eddie. ‘A leader is just the voice of the masses, one's as good as another, but what's his name again?'

‘Malenkov. Goodbye, Big Moustache. It's like the attention of a finger has wandered,' said Claude, ‘and no-one's left to point.'

Claude Bonney was a big-headed, brainy boy with a thick-nosed look of inquiry and large hands that were always ready to fix Eddie's bike when it threw a chain and quick to mend a puncture. When Eddie sat under the schoolyard tree struggling with his algebra those same hands took up a pencil, reached across and corrected his mistakes. Jack, checking Eddie's work before it was posted off to the Correspondence High School, saw what happened but said little. It was another teacher's concern to bring his boy to the start line now. The Anglican vicar, Vince Powell, a former chemistry teacher, coached Claude and Eddie's science ahead of their grade. Next year Isabel Primary would be upped to an Intermediate High and Eddie wanted to stay on and go there and be with Claude.

Eddie had always fudged, to Jack and Pamela's despair, while Claude Bonney was one of their shiners. Maybe Eddie would learn from him. Maybe they should leave him to muddle through, if a transfer came about. They read Claude's class compositions and tried to explain to each other where his ideas came from. Of course there was always a shiner in the small schools they taught. The joy was in finding them, seeing it in the eyes of a dim farmer's kid, or in one of those people of the camp who Pamela looked to for the purity of giving. Eddie had the notion once that he was a shiner himself because Jack and Pamela had said so from hope and love. Not anymore as Eddie struggled over the most ordinary right word to convey an obvious thought, often just recited what Vince Powell taught him, and Claude Bonney's brain leapt about like a dog at the end of its chain.

‘I'm desperate for a fag,' said Eddie. ‘Where do we scrounge from?'

Claude knew all the places and uncurled a fist, showing a silver key. Eddie made out the embossed legend NSWGR and the indelible ink inscription on the leather tag, the words Railway Refreshment Room, Isabel Junction, No. 2.

‘Property is theft,' said Claude.

‘Where'd you hear that one?'

‘Your old man.'

Starlight ran along the length of the key as Claude's fingers closed over it. He made a downward palming gesture, sliding it into his pocket. ‘Give me the torch,' he said. Claude's every action had the feeling of mocking Eddie's unequalness to responsibility, even for a crime.

It was like that with Eddie's friends, parents, anyone. He gave Claude the torch. Lately Claude had returned the friendship favour with Normie Powell, the vicar's nine-year-old, a junior naturalist statewide schools' prizewinner. Eddie scorned the bug collecting and birds' egg blowing as baby minding. But he wanted advantage and went for the same pursuits jealously, with no feeling, only show.

Eddie and Claude walked along the side of the embankment towards the rail yards. Here engines uncoupled and shunted rolling stock with thundering crashes over a tangle of points. Two lines met and the Refreshment Room opened when trains came through. It was when Isabel Junction came alive and busied itself with an importance it had never known since goldrush days when sixty thousand miners lived under canvas and Chinese scroungers built water races that followed the hill contours for miles. There were still gold washings in the creeks and word of nuggets to be found in the hills by kicking a rock and finding it turned over with a gleam. There was hardly ever a rock anywhere that Eddie didn't kick.

Stock trains with their open-grilled sides were backed up to loading yards, and the stink of sheep and hot wool hung over the town. Sheep complained and bleated, at night cattle loaded for early departure bellowed. Even as far away as the schoolhouse Pamela heard them and, backed by Reverend Powell, went to see Careful Bob Hooke and made a complaint about the conditions they were kept in. Careful Bob asked Kingsley Colts to take action to see they were better watered, which he did.

Then there were the daily passenger trains. People in city clothes climbed out of carriages and stretched, looked around, took off their hats and mopped their foreheads, admiring the setting of poplars and lucerne paddocks on the banks of the Isabel River. Men strode across to the pub, ‘the Five', and guzzled schooners as fast as they could before the whistle blew, when they grabbed lemonades and shandies for their womenfolk, who drained them and passed the glasses to Sandra Turnley, who came along the carriages shrieking for them and stacking them in tens, fifteens and twenties till they curved backwards behind her head like willow-wands. Other passengers walked the full length of the platform and down along the tracks towards the river where they stared under the bridge at the spirals of water flooding past. When everyone was gathered up and gone, the back of the train shrinking away, the knock of wheels faded mournfully. The dog at Demellick's store howled and Turnley the publican at the Five Alls bolted the doors with a loud clang and the Junction became neglected again, wind tossing the poplars and scattering leaves on the wide dirt road. Mrs Fripp, who managed the Refreshment Room, washed the teacups, wiped down the benches, inverted the urn, closed the cupboards and hung dust covers over the cigarette and lolly displays. She locked the double doors and went home.