Moonlight Downs (5 page)

I might try

AN HOUR later I was sitting in the dirt, leaning against a rear tyre and brooding upon the ironies of coming home. As McGillivray had said, an outstanding day I’d picked. I’d arrived just in time to see my utopia torn apart.

A stubble of burnt grass crumbled under my fingers. A low wind hissed through the poverty bushes that lined the road. Spiky leaves rained down from the mulga trees.

McGillivray was standing in the doorway of his troop carrier, barking orders and reports into the radio, drumming on the dash impatiently. His men had been consigned to the foothills where they were searching, doubtless in vain, for signs of their runaway.

He came over to me looking flustered, but then he took a look at my scowl, went back to the vehicle and returned with a cup of coffee.

‘Got tea if you’d rather, Em.’

‘Coffee’s fine, thanks, Tom.’ I took a swig. Sweet as a toffee and bitter as cloudy ammonia, but it did the trick. ‘Been rustling up the cavalry?’

‘Bloody oath. Alice Springs is sending up more men. Trackers comin out from Bluebush. Getting the chopper over from Tennant Creek. Blakie’s done it this time.’

‘You’re not wrong,’ I murmured. I was unsure whether he was referring to Blakie’s killing of Lincoln or his humiliating the cops.

‘Worst thing is I had him in the slammer a few months ago. If only I could have kept him there, none of this would’ve happened…’

‘What was he in for?’

‘Assaulted some ringer he reckoned come too close to his sacred bloody stones. Over at Carbine Creek.’

That sounded like Blakie. The Warlpuju see that every element in the landscape is suffused with religious significance, a signifi cance which Blakie defended vehemently. Crystals were of a particular importance to him. I assumed that something like this was what his blue with Lincoln had been about: a site had been infringed, a taboo broken, and Blakie had seemingly appointed himself judge, jury and executioner.

‘Case clear as a bell,’ Tom was saying, ‘but fuckin Legal Aid managed to get im off.’

‘What he needs,’ I suggested, ‘is a proper psychological assessment.’

‘What he needs,’ McGillivray responded, ‘is a proper psychological boot up the arse and ten years in the slammer.’

McGillivray leaned against the ute and took a huge swig from a water bottle, his Adam’s apple going like a jack-hammer. When he’d finished he emitted a long, gravelly sigh and crouched down beside me. Beads of water dripped through his moustache and trickled down his chin.

‘So Emily,’ he said, ‘where’s that leave you?’

‘What do you mean, where’s that leave me?’

‘I mean, I dunno if it’d be a good idea for you to stay out here right now.’

A brooding silence ensued, and then I muttered, ‘I’ll stay wherever I bloody want to stay, Tom.’

‘Okay, okay,’ he said, backing off as he saw my hackles rise. ‘I’m sure you will. From what I’ve heard about you from your old man, you usually do.’

‘And just what have you heard from my old man?’

‘Jesus, calm down, will ya? I’m not coming the heavy, I’m not poking my nose into your private business. If anything I’m grateful to you for pointing us in the direction of Blakie. I’m speaking as a family friend, not a copper.’

I picked up a freshly fallen twig of bush mint, ripped off a leaf, crushed it in my fingers. Took a breath of its soothing aroma.

‘You been away so long,’ McGillivray continued, ‘I imagine this place kinda loomed in your imagination, like some outback Shangri-La. But it’s changed, Em.’

‘I’m not a fool, Tom. I’ve changed too.’

‘I remember Moonlight Downs when you were a kid. Sleepy Hollow meets Uncle Tom. Relations were mostly pretty good…’ ‘I do know that,’ I snapped. ‘I’m a manifestation of those relations myself.’

He shook his head in frustration. ‘Not even listening, are you, Em? Same obstreperous little bugger you always were. Got your counter-punch primed before I’ve even opened me mouth.’

He stood up, took a step or two away, looking lost for words. Then decided to change tack. If words weren’t going to have any effect, he’d throw in a bit of concrete.

‘You stop into Bluebush on the way out here, Emily?’

‘Bluebush? Christ, no, gimme a break. Refuelled at the Resurrection Roadhouse and pissed off. I remember Bluebush.’

He nodded at the Warlpuju. They were still huddled outside Lincoln’s humpy, weeping and keening.

‘You didn’t wanner stay there ten minutes—they were there for ten years. I lost count of the number of bodies I dragged out of ditches, drowned in an inch of water. The brains I scraped off windscreens. The early morning knife fights.’

‘I have heard a bit about the Bluebush days, Tom. Dad used to give me reports from time to time. I gather that was why Lincoln worked so hard to bring em back out here.’

‘And look what’s happened to him.’

‘Well…’

‘What I’m sayin, Emily, is that things have deteriorated. Relationships with the whitefellers have got worse. There was a lot of bitterness over the land claim…’

‘I heard somebody burnt the old station house down.’ It had happened the week after the land claim court case was decided in the Warlpuju’s favour. Nobody was ever charged with arson; there were a lot of Bluebush hoons cruising around the countryside that weekend, a lot of angry station people grumbling about their new neighbours. Half the local population—the white half—were suspects.

‘And that was only the start,’ McGillivray grunted. ‘Sometimes I reckon it’ll never end.’

‘What’ll never end?’

‘The violence.’ His eyes were half-closed, but in the thin brown slits I could make out the reflection of the trees. He scratched his jowls, stroked his moustache with a massive index finger, gazed into the distance. ‘Even among themselves.
Specially
among themselves. Chuck a murder like this into the mix an there’s no tellin what’ll happen. I just know I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I knew you weren’t out here in the thick of it—for your father’s sake, if nothing else.’

I found myself touched by his solicitude.

‘Look, Tom, I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But…well, two buts, really. The first is that I can look after myself…’

He rolled his eyes. ‘You think you can…’

‘Tom, I’ve travelled through some of the roughest places in the world, including a few years hanging round the edges of the inner-city Koori scene in Melbourne. If I can survive those I oughta be able to survive whatever Moonlight can throw at me.’

‘And your other?’

‘My other what?’

‘Your other “but”…’

I took a swig of coffee, studied the ground. ‘Not quite sure how to put this, Tom, but…I didn’t just come back because I wanted to reminisce about the good old days…’ My voice trailed off.

He studied me for a moment, glanced up at the hills, where his men were busily wasting their time, then sat down in the dirt beside me.

‘Wanner tell me about it, Em?’

He was a big man. Powerful once, overweight now, with a flush in his cheeks and a trickle of sweat dripping down from the inner rim of his hat. But decent, I thought, under that rugged exterior, as decent and sweet as a jar of home-made jam. When I was a kid he used to take me, Hazel and the rest of our little mob out to the waterhole in his police van. I’d often seen him let blokes off with a warning when he could have locked them up, or settle a blue with a stern word.

‘I’ve been away for what, twelve years now, and in all that time I never felt at home. Never knew where I was going.’

‘Must admit,’ he said, ‘your old man was always a little vague about exactly what you were up to.’

‘Don’t blame him. I was pretty vague myself.’

‘I heard you were studying geology. Jack said you were gonna make him rich.’

‘Yeah, did a year of geology. Then I got distracted by Chinese, for some reason.’

‘Chinese! What brought that on?’

‘Started off looking at old maps of the Silk Road in the Earth Sciences Library at Melbourne Uni. Before I knew it I’d spent a couple of years trying to figure them out. Then I enrolled in a law degree, when I got so pissed off with what you mob were doing to us that I thought I could fight fire with fire. Didn’t stick at any of them, though.’

‘And after uni?’

‘After uni I just…’—I shrugged my shoulders—‘floated, I suppose. Worked at whatever came along. Whenever I had enough of a stash together, I headed off overseas. Deck-handed on a yacht across North Africa. Ran a bar in Turkey. Travelled through Rajasthan—on a bloody camel, half the time. Spent six months wandering along the Silk Road itself. I was running so hard it never occurred to me that I was lost. Truth hit me a few weeks ago, back in Melbourne.’

I gave McGillivray the story. I’d been called up for jury duty. The feller in the dock was some fabulous creature—part lawyer, part farmer—who’d been caught in a bottom-of-the-harbour tax avoidance scheme. As I watched him being sworn in, a thin smirk on his fat face, I was struck by a feeling of déjà vu. We went through the motions, but he got off of course. They always do. My fellow jurors took more note of the cut of his suit than that of his jib, and I wasn’t on the ball that day myself. My mind was elsewhere, trying to trace the memory sparked by the defendant.

I remember the night of the court case I slept badly, my sleep lashed by dark dreams. At four in the morning I gave up. Outside there was a soft rain falling: neon lights were buzzing, hoons in crimson muscle cars were thrashing up and down the main drag. I was living in a dingy Northcote flat, working in a Turkish bar, eating a lot of pita bread and chips, drinking a lot of cheap booze. I lit a smoke, switched on the radio, fiddled with the dial and found myself listening to a station from country Victoria. An old Jimmy Little song—
the
old Jimmy Little song—‘Telephone to Glory’ came floating through the static.

Suddenly it hit me, the memory that had been nagging at me all day.

It was the only other swearing-in I’d ever witnessed: Lincoln Flinders, giving evidence at one of the early land claim hearings.

‘Do you swear to tell the truth?’ they asked him.

He thought about it for a moment. ‘I might try,’ he answered.

Might try. I loved that, especially when I knew that he was talking about his dreaming, about a belief so ingrained in his soul that he quite literally wouldn’t have lied about it to save his life.

I pulled on a coat, went for a walk, found myself standing on an empty railway platform watching the first rays of the winter sun struggle for a spot among the carbon monoxide. Rubbish drifted, cats prowled, weeds crept along rusty fences.

‘And that,’ I said to McGillivray, who’d been sitting patiently while I told the story, ‘is when it dawned on me.’

‘What dawned on you?’

‘The reason I’d so often been drawn to other people’s deserts.’

‘Which was?’

‘That I was running from my own. And I knew if I was ever going to have any peace of mind I had to come back to Moonlight Downs.’

And so it was that I found myself, a few weeks later, sitting in the dirt and baring my soul to a burly outback cop.

‘May be that there’s nothing for me here either, Tom, but I have to give myself a chance to find that out for myself.’

A ripple of tenderness scudded across his face, then he nodded and grunted: ‘Okay, I hear what you’re sayin, Em. But I still dunno if you’d be wise to stay here right now. I got a bad feeling about this. A feelin like maybe it isn’t over yet.’

He looked around the camp, his brow furrowed, then up into the hills into which Blakie had disappeared. For a moment he looked like Lincoln, troubled by a premonition he didn’t understand, and I felt a shiver rattle my backbone. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was being rash. McGillivray had, after all, spent twenty years working among whatever dark forces lurked in these parts, and may well have developed a sixth sense for them. If he was nervous, maybe I should be as well. But what else was I going to do?

‘You wouldn’t consider staying with your old man for a while?’

‘I just come from the Jenny, Tom. I love old Jack, but do I want to spend my time sitting on top of a gold mine in the middle of a salt pan with him and his trained gorillas? I don’t think so.’

‘You could come with us, back into Bluebush…’

‘Bluebush!’

He appeared to be offended by the look of alarm that shot across my face. I was, I supposed, insulting the place he’d chosen to make his home. But Bluebush! What a dump! The sort of town where it’s easier to buy a silencer than a decent coffee. When we visited town, I’d never leave my father’s side: as a little black kid, you could feel the antagonism radiating out from the whitefellers when you passed them in the street.

And what a mob they were themselves. A bigger collection of dickheads and drop-kicks you’d have to travel a long way to find: boozers, bruisers and substance-abusers, rockjaw Germans and lockjaw Yorkshiremen, grease monkeys and gamblers, meat-workers, meat-heads, missionaries, maniacs, men on the run, men on the dole, men on the Witness Protection Program. Peddlers, pushers, whores and bores, desperadoes of every denomination. You name it, they were there, drawn to the town like flies to a carcass.