Carpentaria (18 page)
‘Biblical stories lived in somebody else’s desert,’ he would start up and talk on in a monologue with his long grey beard bobbing up and down, mesmerising every one in sight, as he talked throughout the day, if the mood for talking up big took a hold of him. Big Mozzie was at pains to make it clear that eons of indoctrination heaped onto the hapless by bible-bashers were the scourge of the blackfella’s earth. He said he believed Christian beliefs had indoctrinated Aboriginal communities like grog and it was true to say it was even the cause of grog. So, grog and other people’s religions would never do, never on the big Dreaming track. ‘Never, never will do,’ he explained. ‘Biblical stories about baskets of fishes and loaves of bread belonged to the Jewish people or some other people,’ he said, with the often-seen pleased look on his face of hardly believing his intuitiveness for hunting out the true nature of things. Time and again things happened on the road, he explained, saying that debutees must make a clean slate in their mixed-up little minds, on their hands and knees and using their own face for a rag. Big Mozzie Fishman said not to ask him about fish because he couldn’t give a dead dog’s eye about fishing, in fact, he hated fish, preferring to eat freshly hunted bush meat which the debutees had to produce for him on a daily basis, until it was proven beyond doubt that they had become true devotees.
This morning, everyone was talking about going fishing. ‘Why do they do it?’ Fishman asked with loathing and muttered a string of undecipherables into his beard. By the time the glorious sunrise grew into a hot day, he was still pouring out a venomous lecture to the people travelling in the number one vehicle of how he hated people taking it for granted that he would catch fish for them.
He spent the entire day conducting a monologue of his thoughts, speaking how he would be hard-pushed to remember the last time he had ever eaten a bit of turtle meat. ‘Stop the bloody car,’ he ordered a dozen times at least throughout the day, bringing the entire convoy to a standstill again, so he could walk down to another car and give the occupants a mouthful of his mind. ‘I should kick the whole flaming lot of you out of the convoy and just go by myself in future.’
The day was a heatwave, and the zealots, covered in sweaty dust from head to foot, were all jammed up against each other like tins of oily sardines. The dust flew through the car windows and stayed trapped inside the vehicles, swirling around in little whirly winds of country dreams. Well! Breathing dust all day clogs up the lungs, and all the vehicles were full of men with heaving coughs, or sweating skins, shaken up and down from travelling every inch of corrugation of outback roads.
Each vehicle managed to motor on, while dirty oil spluttered over overheated engines, and exhaust pipes laid about in the dirt several thousand kilometres behind. The motors were pieces of modern art held together with rusty wire and leather belts or whatever it took to keep the cars on the road. The drivers were cherished by the convoy for their expert motor mechanic skills learnt on the road. None had never shopped at the service station for the Hi Tech Carburettor, or the Fast and Efficient Brake Service, or spent time playing around with the state of the art equipment at Correct It Clutch Repairs. Nor had they ever seen the full range of spare parts and accessories for the cars they were driving, or knew what the Beaurepaires salesman sold for a living. But out on a lonely dusty road of the never never, Mozzie’s bush mechanics would have picked up enough man-made rubbish to fancy-dress a car, or do a complete engine rebuild, gearbox overhaul, the upholstery and welding done to suit.
In the middle of the day, the vehicles were travelling along a narrow, hilly road, twisting like a goat track out of Mozzie’s fishing nightmares. This stretch of road always caused Big Mozzie to break into nervous singing with a great deal of soul to the spirits. ‘Goodbye Joe, me got to go, me oh! myo! me got to go for the codfish ladies down the Bayou.’ Seriously, he told Will Phantom, a young man in his mid-twenties, who was travelling in the same car right next to Big Mozzie as his driver, he was a living expert on every Hank Williams song known to mankind. Older convoy members pretended this was true. It saved the peace. However, they knew, he knew, he never remembered the lyrics of any song, and simply invented new words to suit himself. But why not! ‘The son of a gun, hey, Will?’ And he broke into a jitterbug, singing on about some place as if he knew where it was: ‘A buzzin, having fun down the Bayou.’
Mozzie was so comfortable sitting there, wishing and shaking about with his Roy Orbison glasses on, humming on, saying his monosaccharose was playing up again, not acting his age, juggling his extra glass eye with the blue iris. The only blue eye in the convoy. Will watched the glass eye rolling through the air, landing from one hand into the other. It was a mesmerising act. The driver became so drawn into the eye, he could not keep his own eyes on the road. Mozzie usually kept the eye in the pocket of his trousers and liked to juggle with it on winding roads. It was for this reason nobody liked to drive for him and if they complained, Mozzie had one response: ‘Get out, if you don’t like it, go on, get some other so-and-so up here. He can drive the bloody car from now on.’ The rolling blue eye stared into the back seat as it bounced back and forth. Four pairs of frightened eyes in the back seat moved in time, going left, right, staring at the false eye flipping to and fro, looking back at them, catching a glimpse of what they were thinking about: ready to jump out of that number one car, moving or not, with some so-and-so driving like he can’t wait to get to hell.
Unfortunately for them, there was one thing stopping anyone jumping from the reckless speeding convoy. It was the giddy sight down the gullies below the twisting road which had been formed and re-formed from years of washaways, and now hung like fish gills, out over edges of the limestone substrata. Who wouldn’t become recomposed, after looking down to the graveyards full of rusting car bodies littered on the bottom in a hundred degrees of heat? Before they had commenced the climb, Mozzie stopped the convoy like he had done on previous occasions and told his men assembled around him how to stay healthy by following a piece of his advice.
‘If the spirit has its eye on someone’s car on this road, if your car starts rolling backwards down the road, and no matter what, this car of yours is unable to make it up the hill, then there is only one course of action. Let the ancestor have the car and be done with it. Let him drive it around if he likes, after all it’s his country. You don’t need the car. Be happy, because one day when you go to whatever heaven claims you, you will need a car to run about in, and your old car might be good enough to be waiting there for you. So don’t be a greedy person. Let it go. Always remember there isn’t going to be a guardian angel on this rubbish heap of a road to push your car up the winding hills. Instead of poisoning yourself and anyone else with your greed and selfishness, it is better for you to chuck the useless car and let it slide to the floor of the valley below.’
Feeling satisfied, Mozzie finished the speech-making taken from his epistle without end, sighed deeply, and jumped out of the heat back into his car, after ordering the convoy on its way again. ‘One time, the spirit, he wasn’t so greedy. He only used to go for fancy wagons and animals,’ he told Will, who kept his eyes on the road. He had heard a million and one stories so far on this trip with the Fishman. Fishman continued: ‘Bones, pure white of dead horses, cattle and mules, plucked clean. You would see all of them down there being consumed by the spirit, but now he only eats cars.’
The convoy finally reached the turn-off for the last night camp before home. This stop was always a lagoon at the end of a nondescript, rocky track into the thick undergrowth of spearwood trees and turpentine scrub. Suddenly, as the country opened, and the cars crawled down onto flatter ground with a view of the water, nobody could believe their eyes. They peered through the paperbark foliage at the water’s edge onto the mirror image lagoon. Fishman put his eye back into his pocket. Those driving in the front cars wondered how could it be that someone else knew about their secret fishing hole.
As each car came over the rise and crawled down from the hill, and their occupants peered out of the dust-caked windscreens down into the lagoon, they all saw the fisherman. Right down in the middle of the lagoon, a white man was sitting out there in his boat. He was sitting as casual as can be, just like he had paid good money for the place. ‘Now, what are we going to do?’ Shallow and brackish, they all realised the lagoon was drying up until the Wet arrived. They also saw the significance of the white man being there first, and knew they would soon pull out, although still exhausted, and tired from their long travel over the dry country to get to the water, hungry for fish. Will Phantom did not speak, but he thought they outnumbered the white man, one hundred to one. Mozzie, reading his thoughts, quipped, ‘You know Will, it would be one hell of a world where the truth of reality weighed nothing.’ After a few minutes of quiet talk amongst themselves in the spearwood forest, someone who had taken a sidelong glance down through the paperbarks out over the lagoon’s edge, loudly whispered, ‘You know something? I think he’s dead.’
It was a pretty big thing to say about a complete stranger. A funny sort of joke to cause a commotion. The men jostled for a better view while their whispering grew to a crescendo, muttering to each other and trying not to notice the fisherman, while sneaking glances.
‘He’s not. He’s fishing.’
‘No! Have a flippen better look.’
‘He is dead.’
‘Told you…’
Everyone started to have a good look, staring out there, waiting for movement from the fisherman, but he stayed stationary, like a painting of a still life. For a split second, nobody knew whether to laugh or cry, it was a relief, they were by themselves after all, and there was no white man, just a dead one. But, even if it was true, their minds snapped to another truth: the convoy would have to move on.
Nobody would be hanging around for long, not if there was a dead white man sitting out there. It looked bad. It would be bad for them if someone came and started to put two and two together, making connections, constructing scenarios not worth thinking of; imagining the consequences. It looked as though his boat had become set in mud where it had moored itself, when the floodwaters had drained into the ocean, after the last wet. Now he was separated from the sea by stretches of land and dry creeks. A halo of salt lay encrusted in white crystalline moulds around the sides of the boat. It was a freaky sight, the man just sitting there, tanned skinned clinging to a skeleton. It was the most terrible thing in the world in those moments of wondering what to do. Nobody thought it was a good idea to touch the body, or to be seen bringing it into town, so they said to Fishman, just leave him sitting there.
‘Someone else will find his body eventually.’
‘He’s dead anyway.’
‘Let the water take him out, poor thing anyhow.’
Fishman nodded briefly and said, ‘Alright then. Let’s go.’
‘We are out of here.’ The word spread.
Soon, perhaps that very night, with the smell of rain in the air, and the dark clouds in the north, it would start raining, and within hours the first flush of the rivers in flood would rush out to the sea. The bush echoed with the movement of men returning to their cars, and within fifteen minutes, when Will Phantom surveyed the area, he thought nobody would have ever known there had been over a dozen cars around him.
On the road again, someone said he thought the man in the boat looked a bit like old Elias. He said he recognised the way he was just sitting there was how he remembered seeing Elias out at sea when he was a boy. Fishman said, maybe it was, how would anyone know, they only got a distant view? It could have been. The idea that it was poor old Elias travelled like some strange osmosis down the vehicles as though the convoy might have been an animal with its own brain, agreeing:
Yeah! I think it was his boat too, now I think about it.
It was strange indeed, they were all talking about it being Elias out there in the boat, all through the late afternoon and evening, until they crawled into the prickle bushes of Desperance about midnight.
‘Yes, it was strange,’ Fishman yawned, reserving the last words he had to say for the day for himself. He was caving in to the deep tiredness that overcomes a person returning home after a long absence. The sea air opened his dust-fevered nostrils to the fetor of rotting fish that lived permanently in the air of Desperance. It overpowered the sweet smell of fish being cooked in dozens of homes on a Friday night which too was still lingering in the air.
Mozzie lay down to sleep beside the car on the blanket he had thrown on the ground. He heard the night owl somewhere in the trees close by, and in the distance, the guitars strumming in the drinking camps over on Joseph Midnight’s Eastside. The music of
Heartbeat why do you miss
on a car radio, voices and laughter. Oh! For sure, some people have a whale of a time womanising, drinking, having mates. Further off still, he heard the sea woman heaving her breasts onto the beach. The familiar sounds of his past were falling from a magician’s wand, waving around specks of memory in a trail of glitter, until the specks became millions of flooding, crashing helter-skelter visions in the stars, flooding through his mind. All those deeply buried emotions relating to home had resurfaced, rising out of a cauldron in clouds of steam, to strain against each other. For a long time, Mozzie lay on the ground waiting to drift away into sleep, thinking he would go mad if his mind did not stop running until, finally, escape came when he slipped into dreams that plucked their way through Desperance and back to the events of the day.
He knew now, recapturing the sight of Elias sedately sitting in the boat as a dead man would, that this was a message given to him from the spirit world. While he stood on the brink of his dream, watching Elias in the lagoon, Mozzie felt the spirits saying that he was alright. Nobody ever knew for sure what had become of Elias after that fateful morning, when he turned his back on Desperance, and was last seen dragging his boat back to sea. Now, they knew, Mozzie thought –
Elias was fine, he had gone to the spirit world in the sky across the sea, safe from the wickedness given unfairly to him at Desperance.