Carpentaria (21 page)
If anyone had the mind to be taking time thinking about somebody else’s life until his heart was content, or cannot leave a thing alone, someone like Will Phantom, then they would have to think what else Elias would have had to do to be sitting dead for a very long time, waiting for fish, with his line out in a stagnant pond laced with salt? The only straightforward answer to Will Phantom’s mind, was that after having been forced by the path of the creek to lug the boat up ridges of stone and petrified forests, on banks of flaking earth, Elias travelled across the high plains. Elias, single-handedly, would have carried the boat cross-country through the spinifex until the watercourse had widened and he would have taken the boat back down to the creek again. He would have had to repeat the exercise at least a dozen times in following the river from its mangrove-lined mouth to where he had ended his journey in the lagoon. And who was there to help Elias to go fishing miles inland, when everyone for miles around knew all the fish had gone to the sea?
Will considered the circumstances of the day Elias left Desperance forever. He remembered what the old people said about the terrible night of Uptown:
accusing Elias of burning up the Queen’s picture.
They often told the story of how offended Uptown had been about the Queen’s picture burning, and coming down quick smart asking the Pricklebush people,
What kind of low-down dog, a complete useless loafer, would burn the Queen’s picture?
The old people thought they were expected to say they done it, own up to it, but instead they responded to Uptown:
Unfortunately, you can’t exterminate a Queen by burning her picture
. That was the kind of treachery Elias was accused of when they said he had chucked four-gallon tins of kerosene all over the brand-new Shire Council offices and burnt them flat to the ground. Nobody touched the Queen. Uptown found Elias guilty of sedition and treachery to the throne because he was a new Australian whom the whole town had seen walking out of the sea, and when he went home to the sea again, no one had even bothered to go out to say goodbye. Nobody would have helped Elias to go inland. They had screamed like a landlord at him to leave their continent forever and never come back.
Will stood up. If anyone had seen him standing there, they would have believed it was Norm, fishing this lagoon years ago, at the onset of the Wet season as a million fish teemed up the river, when he was twenty-four. Will with bare chest, no shirt to his name, covered with weeks of accumulated desert dust, his jeans, no longer blue, were ingrained with dirt from months of travelling through the dry country. One muddy lagoon was not going to do a hell of a lot more damage, so Will Phantom walked knee-deep through the mud, breaking the crust of salt crystals which sparkled where hit by sunlight, as enchanting as snow.
Will knew that Elias could not have undertaken such a trip to the lagoon by himself. He listened to thunder in the storms brewing in the North, but the skies were clear, and the afternoon sun shone like silver on the mud, glittering salt and water. As he walked out, Will was disturbed by juxtaposing images, flashing across his mind. In one image, he saw white men, perhaps from the town, he did not know, making a mockery of Elias’s death. But there were only a handful of people outside of Mozzie’s convoy who knew about the existence of this sacred lagoon.
Uncles!
He needed to think of the Uncles but they failed to appear through Uptown! The suffocating net! He put the thought aside, knowing he would have to think about who knew how to find the lagoon – titles, names, faceless people jumped momentarily, a split second only to show themselves, to announce they existed.
He saw the occasional strike of lightning from the storms in the North, the day would soon become darker, everything would be covered in darkness, within thirty minutes, when the storm had set in. He moved through the muddy water which at its deepest level came up to his waist, and did not take long to reach the boat. He said a quiet hello to Elias,
What are you doing here?
He began to investigate the human remains smelling of the ocean’s salty brine. Interference, the slightest touch can open a Pandora’s box, and Will leaning on the side of the boat, found the aroma of the sea was as distant as the sea, compared to the overpowering stench of decomposing fish which emanated in a heat of steam from two sugar bags, lying on the floor of the boat.
Will recognised the bags the instant he saw them. He remembered how he had often stood back as a child, out of the way, wishing to become Elias, cramming things into any old sugar or flour bag – tackle, food, his belongings, rowing away to sea whenever he chose, coming back, jiggling a bag of fish in front of his nose. Will expected maybe Elias had bagged one or two old barramundi. The ancient ones that lurked in hidden places of diminished lagoons waiting for the Wet to arrive. Elias, a skilful fisherman, would have pried them out of their underwater cocoons. He believed only the old hunter Uncles could achieve such a haul. Any other hunter of the barramundi fish would need to be some champion fisherman to have found a fish left in this mud, let alone catch it. The other fish Will expected could be hooked, perhaps, a few reasonable-sized freshwater sooty grunter, rifle fish or bream, if the boat was in the main water arteries coming up to the coast from the spring-fed river systems. Not the useless little tributary jutting off into a mud hole at the end of the Dry.
He got rid of the flies that had picked up the whiff of rotting fish in the air. They were swarming in from every corner of the bush it appeared, for miles around. Hundreds of flies covered his body. The larger march flies, which also flew around the boat drunk with the stench, began to attack every part of his body exposed above the water. It was then, in those fleeting moments, as he caught sight of the rotting slime-covered remains of fish spilling out of the putrid bags, a cold shiver ran down his back, and he spun around, his brown eyes surveying the banks and into the bush, right around the lagoon. He looked at what was coming out of the bags. One fish fell after the other, still with their flesh intact, and it was easy to discern that they could not have been caught more than ten days ago. Sea fish! These were fish no man had ever seen this far inland. Will turned to the spearwood as though expecting the spirits to answer, tell him what surely they knew.
Sea water was lapping its last little flip! slip! for sea creatures living where Will Phantom now stood 500 million years ago, when the sea levels had been as high as the surrounding hills, when time and life on the deep-sea plain of the Pacific Ocean was not even advanced enough to beget a fish. Yet now, on this uncelebrated occasion, Elias had apparently fished saltwater fish from the mud hole. Elias’s beautiful coral trout, pink ten days before, its putrid remains clearly recognisable falling from the bag.
Will could remember the deep trench in the ocean where Elias fished, with a line baited and dropped 200 metres deep. In the other bag, emptied perfunctorily, its contents a revelation of other sea fish, strangers to these parts of the country, were hardly given a second glance. Queenfish, snapper, red emperor, mangrove jack, bream, all reef fish, and one giant trevally, a tidal fish – so what? Will retrieved the line and pulled it in, discovering what he had expected, Elias rigged up for deep-sea trolling.
The white-breasted sea eagle’s flight was almost noiseless as it dropped out of the sky, falling down, descending down, so quick, until it flew, whistling in behind Will to scoop the stinking trevally up from the mud. Watching it perch on a dead log on the north side of the lagoon, it surprised Will that while he had noticed it hovering in the sky, he had not taken any interest in it. The large bird was yet another unfamiliar sight, almost ghostly looking as it sat motionless, claw on the fish, staring at Will, the boat and Elias’s body. The sea eagle was also an unusually long distance from the sea. Will believed it must have followed Elias.
The Phantom family knew the sea eagle well enough, although they never gave it a name. Will remembered being out in a high sea on a grey day, in a stormy sea with his father and Elias, years before, when he was ten years old, and saw the sea eagle when it was a fledgling then, injured by another sea eagle perhaps. They all saw it drop out of the sky and Elias plucked it out of the sea. For perhaps a year it hopped around on Elias’s boat, never leaving it. A greedy, demanding bird squealing non-stop to be fed, whenever he saw a person move. Then, when they had all just about given up believing it would ever learn to feed itself, Elias took it back to sea. He was gone forever it seemed to Will’s young mind so he went around telling everyone that Elias was dead. One day Elias came back and told Will the eagle was in the sky, but it stayed at sea, and lived on the perpetually passing traffic of transport barges, ships and fishing boats.
The eagle always came back to Elias when he was out at sea, sitting on his bent back while he fished, wanting to be fed, and getting a bellyfull of good fish, until Elias headed back to land. Now, evidently, it had come to a muddy lagoon, fishing with Elias for reef fish, hovering hungry for days, waiting for one of the bags to be opened and fish offered to him as though he was incapable of fishing for himself and had to be fed, as though he had again been injured.
It had grown hungrier and more disoriented, waiting for Elias to feed it. Yes, yes, Will whispered to Elias, it would be put right soon when the eagle picked up the sound of thunder rolling inland from the sea. Will watched the eagle watching him for a few moments. He hoped that now he had his fish he would be smart enough to fly back to the sea once he heard the thunder clap and roll. The bird dropped the fish and sat looking forlorn on the log. Will turned his attention back to Elias. With a deep breath, he confronted Elias’s empty eye sockets staring straight into his face. Elias’s presence felt so real, if it had not been for the missing eyes, Will would have sworn he was still alive and was playing a joke on him by pretending to be dead.
The clouds were approaching, wind started blowing through the trees and the unnatural darkness which came with storms was settling in. Alone, with Elias, he did not want to look at the dead man’s face which might tell him things of the other world he did not want to know. This was when Will saw dried blood stains all over the front of Elias’s cream cotton shirt.
The same stains covered the floor of the boat. Elias had lost a lot of blood when he died. Again, Will saw the image of white men flash by the other side of the boat. They looked as though they were laughing at Elias’s body, as though it was a joke. He placed his arm around Elias’s body and picked up the human shell, weighing nothing. Words, which even surprised Will Phantom, raced out of his mouth, ‘I am going to avenge whatever it was that happened to you, Elias. I am really sorry, old man.’ Easy now to make such a commitment for the first time in his life to somebody else, and mouth the words with conviction.
He knew the old Uncles always said there were bad omens surrounding the lagoon in that heavy foreboding of the land before the Wet. They pointed to where the spirits had lain in the atmosphere, before moving freely in and out of the lagoon, while they turned normality into a nightmare.
The clouds ran overhead, and in the distance, he heard wild winds tearing through the woodlands. He moved frantically, automatically doing what had to be done, to get the boat out of the lagoon. Blue plastic rope had been used to tie Elias down to his seat and more rope had been used to secure the boat. The rope was looped tightly around the boat twice, looped over the front and back. Working to untie other men’s work dissolved any idea he had which suggested Elias had carried his boat cross-country as just a foray into fantasy.
The cloud front had reached the lagoon and a dust storm was only minutes away, so Will took a grip of the pile of loose rope left lying on the floor of the boat and started to lug it towards the edge of the lagoon. The wind blew red dust in ahead of the rain with the pungent smell of wet gidgee warning Will to get out of the lagoon. It was time to find some shelter. He knew if the rainstorm set in, there would likely be a flash flood through the area, and he would have little to no chance in the morning of finding the boat again. If he had not been so preoccupied with his thoughts about the mystery of the fish and why the boat was in this particular lagoon, he might have recognised there were sinister undertones to this unusual situation which had been designed to look so ordinary. He did not hear the droning engine of a machine in the distance until it was almost above him.
The sea eagle’s blood sprayed over the lagoon like early rain when the bird took off in fright and hit the rotor blades of the helicopter descending at high speed over the spearwood. Will dived under the mud as the helicopter bubble, coated with blood, roared down towards him as the pilot tried to regain control and ascend the other side of the lagoon. Then, it returned at full speed and began to circle slowly above Elias’s boat. The whorling blades stirred the mud into a turbulence that boiled into the air. Will went under again and when he resurfaced with mud falling out of his eyes, he saw the bloody machine moving off over the spearwood, just far away enough to position itself to return. Will waved frantically, hoping they would see him, then as the machine drew closer on its return, Will caught a glimpse of the pilot and another man through the blood and muddied bubble. He watched while the man in the passenger seat positioned himself to lean over the side of the helicopter with a rifle to his eye, aiming the weapon directly towards him. In disbelief, he did not react, or try to figure out how to save himself. There was so much happening in those moments as the helicopter swooped nearer and the flying water whipped his face, that he was not able to determine the identity of his pursuers. Assuming they were white men, simply because they were in a helicopter, he could not comprehend why they looked so dark. Precious moments of saving his own life were slipping away, when it suddenly dawned on Will Phantom, who was unprepared for a trap by the company, that they were mining men, dressed in navy uniform, expecting his return. Idiot! Of course they looked dark.