Moonlight Downs (3 page)

Somewhere in the distance a cock crowed. Or a crow cocked. It was hard to tell the difference. Whatever it was it sounded crook.

I opened my eyes and spotted a rooster sitting on a nearby fencepost. I’d seen better-looking specimens on Redfern rotisseries: it was evil-eyed, balding, with dagger-like spurs and a fierce beak, presumably the secret to survival in this dog-infested world. The sun was still out of sight, but a golden windmill radiated up through the eastern sky.

Dreams, I thought to myself. Bloody dreams. I could be bounded in a walnut shell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams. Even when they’re as sweet as the one I’d just experienced, they’re still a painful counterpoint to the reality into which we must awake.

I stretched out in the swag. Dew lay across the canvas, beaded the grass. The cold night gave promise of a clear day. I rolled over and looked into the fire, vaguely surprised that it was still burning. Somebody must have stoked it.

A movement on the other side of the fire caught my eye. A baby, sucking on a smooth red stone and staring at me with eyes like search lights. And, through the haze of the fire, a woman, poking at the ashes with a stick.

It took a second or two to sink in.

The woman was Hazel.

Rough music

I LAY still for a moment, a battery of emotions pounding my brain. Given the circumstances of our last encounter, it was only my father’s assurance that Hazel wasn’t here that had given me the confidence to come back at all.

‘Am I still dreaming?’ I croaked.

‘Ah sistergirl, if you are I am too.’

Sistergirl? If only it were that simple.

‘Do you hate me, Hazel?’

‘Don’t hate nobody, Em.’

‘I never came back.’

She frowned, shrugged. ‘I coped.’ The rough music hadn’t gone from her voice. Her eyes were still as lively as a stream of tea being poured from a billy at sundown.

Everything else seemed to have changed, though. Hazel had been the wispiest kid on the station, but the passing years had moulded her into one of the rugged matriarchs upon whom the community was built. She was tall, strongly built, languid in her movements, brooding in her looks. She had a smooth, round face, thick hair and a trace of China in her eyes, a vestige of the days when the Chinese and the blackfellers had sought solace in each other’s company at the bottom of the shitheap.

She was wearing a white cotton dress, beneath which the contours of her body flowed as smoothly as the country songs they sometimes sing out here.

‘We come in at first light,’ she said. ‘Saw we had a visitor. Knew it was old Emily straightaway.’

‘How’d you figure that?’

‘Jesus, how many ways you want?’ She swept her hands through the air. ‘The shape of your swag. The size of your fire. The cut of your motorcar.’

‘Didn’t have a motorcar last time you saw me.’

She examined my ute. ‘Nah, but if you had of, this is what you would’ve had.’

I nodded at the toddler: ‘I hadn’t heard you were a mother.’

She looked horrified. ‘Neither had I. Jangala got another missus after me.’ Around the time I left the station Hazel had been rather precipitately married off to Jimmy Jangala Lively, who was older than her father. He already had one wife at the time. ‘You remember Winnie Broome?’

‘Vaguely. She was married to Jimmy’s brother, wasn’t she?’

Hazel nodded. ‘This little one hers.’

‘Jangala’s married to her as well?’

‘
Yuwayi
.’

‘Three wives?’

She shrugged. ‘Sort of. Winnie come live with us when ’er husband pass away.’

‘I’m lucky I got outta here when I did.’

‘You be one of Jangala’s women?’ A smile flew across her lips, a thoughtful, appraising smile that told me, more than anything else, how much things had changed. I was a year older than her, and when we were kids I tended to be the leader. Now it almost felt like we’d changed places: she’d stayed put, absorbed the strength of country, while I’d been drifting about like a boat that had slipped its moorings. ‘I don’t think so.’

We stood up. ‘Gimme a look at yer,’ she said. She put her hands upon my shoulders, looked me up and down.

‘Bout time,’ she said.

‘Bout time what?’

‘Bout time yer come home.’

‘Home?’ I looked around the camp, then out onto the lonely, windswept plains.

‘Well, yer best bet, anyway. Dunno how much longer you woulda lasted down there. Down south. Come say ello to the family.’

We walked over to her camp, Hazel gliding over the rough terrain with the smooth, low-slung gait that’s a hallmark of women out this way. Her feet were bare and her soles were cracked, her eyelashes as long and intricate as melaleuca leaves.

Hazel did the introductions. Jimmy Lively was the same skinny-legged old bull-frog I remembered, hopping about the fire in a fetching combination of short pants, dirty white socks and elastic-sided boots. The news of his proliferating wife-pool did give a certain lecherous edge, however, to what I used to think of as the affectionate gleam in his eye.

I spent a couple of hours with Hazel’s eccentric little family and by mid-morning I’d pieced together much of their story. Maggie, wife number one, had been hitting the bottle during the Bluebush years, but now that they were back out bush she’d settled down into a chirpy senility. Winnie, the brother’s widow, was a dignified, middle-aged woman with whom Hazel had developed a relationship more mother–daughter than wife-to-wife. She was enjoying a merry widowhood, it seemed, and getting a bit on the side from some young
budju
in the single men’s camp. She had two other little kids as well as the baby, but nobody bothered pretending that Jangala was the father.

Hazel’s main claim to fame was that she had a job, of sorts, as the community health worker. She was at work now, in the casual manner of the bush community. Every so often some miserable bugger would come shuffling up as we were talking, ask for eye-drops or Panadol, which she dispensed from a drug cupboard in the silver caravan. From time to time she’d catch one of the kids, lather them up and scrub the living daylights out of them. She weighed babies, splashed the Betadine around, massacred hordes of head lice, lanced a couple of what their owners described as ‘boilers’.

‘Where’d you learn all this stuff, Hazel?’ I asked her at smoko. We were sharing a cup of tea on the veranda of the caravan. ‘Doesn’t look like you just picked it up as you went along.’

‘Did a few terms at the uni in Alice. Even went to Darwin. Wanted to go on, become a nurse—proper way, you know—but every time I got started I’d be called back to Bluebush for some family problem.’

I nodded. ‘Speaking of which, how’s Flora?’

A look of concern shot across Hazel’s face. Her little sister had been a sweet child, but so innocent and vague you worried for her. I’d been wondering how she would have coped with the horrors of Bluebush, and Hazel’s answer didn’t surprise me.

‘Ah, Flora,’ she sighed, shaking her head. ‘She was drinkin for a long time. Then, I dunno, she went a little bit
warriya—
crazy. Follow them Christian mob. Nowadays she’s livin in the town camp with some whitefeller.’

We were interrupted by Bindi, who came rambling up with a kid under each arm: ‘They got ear-ache, these
two-pella
,’ he announced. ‘Fix em up proper, eh Nungarayi?’

She put the cup down, passed him a syringe, showed him how to use it: ‘You’re a daddy now, Bindi. You gotta learn to do these things.’

‘Why sure!’ he burbled, enthusiastically injecting a syringe full of warm water into a child’s ear. A vile, tiger-coloured compound of wax, pus and dead fly came gushing out. Bindi took one look, rushed out onto the veranda, vomited over the railing and disappeared.

‘Ah well,’ sighed Hazel, pulling on a pair of gloves and grabbing the child, who wanted to follow his father. ‘One step forward…’ She cleaned the toddler’s ears and sent him on his way with a milk biscuit and a kiss. ‘Gotta keep an eye on em, all this dust,’ she said as she stood on the steps and watched him go. ‘Too easy to burst an eardrum. Still, better’n sittin around Bluebush sniffin petrol.’

A mob of kids followed us while Hazel did her rounds. Two teenage girls seemed particularly drawn to me: Tilly and Cristal, the camp spunk rats, a pair of fifteen-year-old honeys with apple cheeks and silky bodies. They giggled a lot, brought me little gifts and poked around in my bag when they thought I wasn’t looking. I suppose I must have seemed almost exotic to them. The girl who’d left the station and seen the world.

Nice to think that somebody was impressed by my less-than-brilliant career.

I spent the rest of the day in the women’s company, and for a few hours I resurrected the sweet rhythm of my childhood. We gathered wood, picked nits, washed our clothes in Cissy Whiskey’s cute little hand-powered washing machine. The girls and I went hunting with the old ladies, hooking witchetty grubs out of turpentine bushes and roasting them in the ashes of an open fire.

For dessert, I offered the girls the remaining hunk of my dad’s ‘survival cake’—a power-packed concoction of rye flour, fruit and nuts that he claimed would have kept Burke and Wills going all the way to the South Pole. They weren’t impressed. ‘
Phhh…!
’ spat Cristal, grimacing. ‘It not even made out of a packet!’

Hazel joined us when she could. She had as sharp an eye as any of the old women, scouring the baked earth for signs of life—tracks and cracks, bees, birds, vines—and hacking sugarbag out of a ghost gum with a ferocious axe. Sometimes she’d string along beside me, a tool or weapon of some sort on her shoulders; at other times I’d feel her watching me thoughtfully from a distance.

The camp was full of people, but Lincoln was not among them. He’d disappeared before anybody else was out of bed. ‘Somewhere up north’ was all anybody would tell me. I assumed he was following up whatever he and Blakie had been arguing about.

Blakie himself came down briefly from his ridge around the middle of the day, his powerful figure clad in a pair of khaki shorts and a layer of grease and ochre. His chest was furrowed with deep cicatrices, his legs were covered with the scabs and scars that are a legacy of the nomadic life.

He took a piece of meat from a fire. Stood there chewing it and staring at me, his nostrils flared, his jaw working. A piece of gristle lingered on his lips for an instant, then swivelled about and disappeared.

I shuddered and went back to the women, but I could feel his eyes burning into my back.

Late afternoon. The day going down in flames. Hazel and I climbed to the top of the Quarter Mile and sat there in silence. I found myself being absorbed by the scene laid out in front of me: the angular women gliding back from the bore with babies on their hips and buckets in their hands, the veil of turquoise in the sky, the fish-hook moon, the gathering campfires.

And the woman beside me.

She was sitting on her hands, leaning forward, a thin smile on her thick lips, the sunset copper-colouring her cheeks.

She was part of it all: the air, the earth, the community. She belonged.

I wondered whether I’d ever be able to say that about myself.

Tom Waits meets Tiny Tim

AS HAZEL and I made our descent from the Quarter Mile a cavernous station wagon came dropping doughnuts down the track, the horde of young blokes on board looking like they’d just invented testosterone. Dust whirled, the chassis groaned, the motor emitted the great unmuffled roar of the outback bomb. A couple of apprentice cowboys leaned out the window, one of them upside down. They roared, sang, hooted and howled, saluted us with their green cans.

The upside-downer looked familiar.

‘That isn’t Ronnie Jukutayi, is it?’

‘
Yuwayi
,’ said Hazel.

He’d been a four-year-old the last time I laid eyes on him. The squinty, weasel-faced toddler had blossomed into a squinty, weasel-faced adult. His head looked like it was welded out of corrugated iron off-cuts.

‘And is that Freddy Ah Fong in the back seat?’

She smiled. ‘That’s him.’

Freddy was Lincoln’s half-witted, half-smashed half-brother. He’d never been foreman material, but now he looked like something out of a Mexican horror movie, pouring the contents of a flagon down his throat then waving the bottle at us in an enthusiastic greeting.

‘Wild time in the camp tonight?’ I asked.

Hazel didn’t look too worried. ‘They been in the Bluebush boozer,’ she explained. ‘Don’t worry.’ She gestured with her lip at the track, where Lincoln’s long blue panel van was following them in. ‘Any humbug, ol man’ll sort em out.’

She wasn’t wrong. The hoons were only half way through their first paralytic circumnavigation of the camp when Lincoln pulled over, got out of his car and blasted them into submission with a look that struck like lightning.

They slunk off to the single men’s camp with their tail-pipe dragging between their back wheels.

But Lincoln, unfortunately, didn’t hang around. He seemed troubled by whatever he’d found up north, and went to have it out with Blakie, who was still up on the Saddlebag. Soon afterwards I heard raised voices, and caught a glimpse of Lincoln rising to his feet and throwing his hat onto the ground. Clearly their argument was unresolved.

I tried to get an idea of what they were on about, but the distance was too great for me to learn anything, and I was shortly thereafter distracted by a perturbation among the drinkers. They’d smuggled in fresh supplies—a slab of beer, a bottle of Bundy rum—and with Lincoln busy elsewhere they broke them out.

The noise level rose with the moon. As the night wore on there was a lot of drunken yelling and a lot of drunken singing, the latter about as musical as the former.

I returned to the single women’s camp, lit a fire and unrolled my swag. Tried to get some sleep, but sleep was hard to come by in the general uproar. Where’s Lincoln when you need him? I thought to myself. I hadn’t heard him return from Blakie’s camp.

Festivities reached their nadir when somebody began to accompany a roaring chorus of ‘Midnight Special’ on an electric guitar that must have been tuned by Deafy Jupurulla.

I poked my head out of the swag, studied them by the firelight as another voice entered the fray. It sounded like Tom Waits singing through a cardboard box at the bottom of the dam: rasping, tuneless, truly horrible. Then it began to yodel. Tom Waits meets Tiny Tim.

‘That’s it!’ I spat, dragging my swag out into the bush and rolling it out behind a distant rock.

As I drifted off to sleep I heard Lincoln, obviously a man after my own tastes, roaring at them to shut up. His voice came from the direction of Blakie’s camp, up on the ridge. Things settled down after that, though I could hear one of the drunken bastards snoring, even at a hundred metres.

When I awoke the next morning the snoring had turned to snorting, and it was in my ear.

‘What…?’ I muttered to myself. And what was that unpleasantly familiar smell?

Halitosis. Equine halitosis. The community kept half a dozen horses in a yard over near the mill. Had one of them escaped?

I opened my eyes a little further: there was a horse’s head, huge and toothy, six inches from my own and dribbling green slobber onto my neck. It snorted again, nuzzled my cheek and grabbed the blanket with its teeth.

Shit, I thought, this is worse than yesterday’s rooster. I twisted around and saw Hazel, high up in the saddle, her skirt hitched, her shapely knees gripping the horse’s sides.

‘C’mon, sister!’ she grinned. ‘Out of the sack! We’re goin for a ride.’ I took a look at the ragged animal swaying in the breeze beside her.

‘Is that meant to be a horse?’ I groaned. It looked more like a deflated camel. Tufts of hair, or maybe spinifex, sprouted from its hooves. Flies floated around its weeping eyes.

‘More or less.’

‘I’ll take the less. Has it got a name?’

‘Kids call her Nightmare.’

‘Great. And you expect me to ride her?’

‘
Yuwayi!
’

‘Shit Hazel,’ I whined, ‘I haven’t sat in a saddle for years.’

‘You’ll manage.’

And I did, more or less, my knees remembering what the rest of me had forgotten. She’d chosen the horse well: it crept over the countryside slowly and reluctantly, like a road-train in bulldust, while her own little stockhorse danced about and had to be held back.

We rode out to Jukatayi Parti, a waterhole a half-hour’s ride to the north, for breakfast. Baked a few johnny cakes, admired the spinifex. Chatted so easily I began to wonder if we weren’t beginning to re-establish the intimacy we’d shared as children.

The rest of the camp was only just beginning to stir when we made our way back in.

‘You did all right for a
mijiji
,’ Hazel teased, giving Nightmare a playful slap on the rump. Which was a mistake, the horse taking this as a signal for the only burst of energy she’d produced all morning.

‘Why the fuck did you do that?’ I yelped back at her as Nightmare, living up to her name, pig-rooted viciously and bolted away.

We shot across the camp at a crazy gallop, or rather the horse did. I just shouted, ‘Whoa!’ and did my best to keep her company. Together we flew over swags and puddles, whipped up rubbish and reared at the startled sleepers. Having exhausted all other possibilities, Nightmare careered off into the scrub at the foot of Blakie’s ridge.

I was just about getting the hang of it when a combination of log jump and low branch sent me flying. The moment I was off its back and flat upon my own the horse pulled up. It slunk back apologetically and began to nuzzle my head.

‘Bit late now, ya sway-backed old cow,’ I growled.

I stood up, gingerly felt my arse. ‘Seems to be all there,’ I said as Hazel came trotting up into the clearing.

But Hazel wasn’t interested in the condition of my arse. She wasn’t interested in anything except the scrub behind me. As I looked at her face it was twisted into a hideous vision of strained lips and hollow cheeks. Her jaw dropped, her fingers flew at her hair.

The little patch of scrub felt suddenly dark and dangerous, its branches enveloping me like a shroud. I followed her gaze and the shock-wave shuddered through me.

The body in the hollow was half hidden by a rotting log, but we knew who it was straightaway. Both of us recognised the long, thin legs, the checked shirt.

‘Oh…my
ngampartu
,’ she whispered.

Lincoln.

I walked over, knelt down, felt for a pulse I knew I wouldn’t find. Touched his chin. It was cold and hard, a rocky outcrop overgrown with saltbush. He’d been dead for hours.

The blood from a massive wound in his right side had congealed in the dirt. I looked around me, helpless, overwhelmed.

Christ. What had happened to him? And what was going to happen to the rest of us?

Then Hazel began screaming and the camp went mad.