When Colts Ran (22 page)

Pamela sat up on the pillows and Colts brought her a pot of tea. He made her laugh by pouring it from high above the cup. She had a rush of feeling, so grateful she was for such moments. ‘I have to say,' she said, ‘that I could get used to this.'

This was strange of her, as they'd had something like it over the years. The routine of the teapot. The routine of the buttered toast. Always reliable. Always the same. Never varying, a Craven A on the bedside ashtray ready. Nothing more ever asked.

‘What do you mean,' Colts looked away as he spoke, ‘“get used”?'

‘Well, Kings,' said Pamela, a bit tensely, a bit searchingly and penetratingly defensive. ‘I might even learn what it's like to be truly loved.'

Staggered, Colts thought,
This can't be me
.

There would already have been phone calls starting at six a.m., Hooke & Hooke clients dictating his day. He'd be leaving the house around seven. That was enough for her, and what she returned for, what she found in their adulterous friendship: his gaze on parting or arrival, looking out from a settled world where nothing ever changed if he could help it. She'd never asked what it was for him beyond the craving of touch. Colts never wrote inviting her, it was she who made the choice of when to come. To pick up a telephone or send a telegram was unthinkable on his part. Patterns of nature, seasons and other people's needs besides theirs were involved. Advised by mail, he'd be at the station to greet her, or not, depending on his work movements all over the countryside. She would go to his house then and tidy it up. There was never much to do. Colts would live, if need be, from a cardboard carton or a Globite suitcase. And had.

Later she'd walk to the wrong side of town and visit the Maguires. He'd return to find her sitting on the verandah marking her place at around page nine hundred. ‘Oh, Kings, there you are – just listen to this.'

He'd gaze at her while she read him a passage, giving his fullest attention, then he'd go in and put the kettle on. There was no incessant twitter of the intellectual sort, where nothing was ever resolved. He'd taken her on train-droving trips where they'd travelled through pastoral landscapes, where it was hardly believable they weren't on a rattling ride through paradise. His acceptance was profound.

Although Pamela never said a word against her husband or son, she took that gaze of Colts's back with her to be with them. Kings never took a stand on anything much, compared with the stands lives of principle demanded – hers, Jack's. There was none of that old-time rancour of the right – Buckler's – left for Kings to work, except he sometimes said, when election day came round, that he inoculated himself against the bile of Hooke & Hooke clients by sheltering his pencil in his elbow in the voting booth and voting for whoever he damned well liked. There were years when he did that, he said, against the best interests of the rural rump royal: he meant Randolph, a Country Party somebody. Pamela alone of all Colts's friends and acquaintances – save Randolph – knew the impulse related to Buckler more than anyone, to maintaining the true life he'd made for himself over against Buckler's tremendous influence on him as a boy. After the war Buckler had stepped back onto the earth as an extraordinary aged ape, he was now in his eighties, but in Colts's dreams still drove an old finger-slapper grader with clusters of lightning bolts sparking from the blade. Colts was in animated suspension in regard to the passing of the years – his friends seemed to get younger and younger – lucky Colts, perhaps.

Jack Slim bent every rule in the book to keep Eddie from having convictions recorded against his name. Pamela likewise had never said no to their son, but argued it would teach Eddie nothing to fight it out for him through one or other of the QCs of the left who did Jack's bidding. Colts spoke of farming equipment wheeled from sheds, with cars and tractors flogged not by Eddie perhaps but by a suspected bunch whose names along with Eddie's stained the fledgling records of Isabel Junction Intermediate High.

Jack's way won, the QCs won, and Eddie free as a bird swindled a mining partner in Western Australia and was back east driving a new Land Cruiser.

‘Not all that glitters is gold,' said Pamela.

Eddie just stared at her, giving his mother that worst feeling, a son's contempt of her as a woman.

‘Say I know what I know, not all gold's dinkum, either,' he said.

Jack was tinny too – like father, like son – but you had to be clever to see the switch from Jack's better side – blasé about the affairs he had with his acolytes' mothers in the suburb of grimy houses where they lived. Pamela was sick of catching him out, a weary habit, a tired game. She had her revenge with Colts. The country seemed to be where they had left their idealism, where she returned to find it. Jack had stayed in the CPA throughout. His consistency was finally questionable, overrated as a principle. The Battle of Stalingrad, Uncle Joe presiding, had taken place as far back as when he chewed sand in the deserts with Dunc Buckler. He had fused into an attitude – resistant to 1956 and 1968 and progressivist disillusion. The left and the right meeting up in a turned circle that seemed to be of her making: the worst came when Pamela destroyed the milky glass paperweight impervious to outside light, souvenir of a Moscow delegation, that he'd picked up and thrown at her when she'd said, ‘Jack, we might have been wrong.'

One day Randolph put his revived friendship with Colts to the test. He was not sure what overcame him. He supposed it was to see if their lives were in harmony, which was to say that if two lives were in harmony two men could quarrel, say anything they liked to each other, and the upshot would be they would still remain friends. The inspiration for the test was the gesture Randolph made decades ago when Colts returned from his postwar travels ready to settle down, a gesture of the lingering hand that had seemed to ruin their friendship. But only seemed.

‘Now who's that up ahead bleak on the skyline like a scarecrow in the wind, hat brim blown back flat against his forehead?'

Colts. Eleven in the morning parked in a cold paddock corner, counting wethers jumping through a gate – Randolph surprised him in action – stood back admiringly, not interrupting, but mentally, automatically doing the count himself, as a sheep man did without knowing, whenever a mob started jumping.

‘Run them through again,' said Randolph, coming up from behind. Colts gave a start. He was nine out from three hundred – no good.

Randolph stood at the door of Colts's ute awaiting the re-count and happened to look down onto the seat to see a half-empty whisky bottle lying there, leaking its consolation to the floor.

‘Look here,' said Randolph. ‘This is no good.'

He took over, finished the job. They were another man's sheep and he saw them through. It was all quietly done, but with the effect of a bomb.

Randolph waited by the phone, by the letterbox to see if his bomb had result. To learn if taking a stand concerning Colts's workaday drinking ‘marked the test'. He stood outside Hooke & Hooke in the stupendous winter cold of Gograndli Street and waited to learn if he'd made a mistake. If he had, it would be like a death, as in death experienced as ultimate act of bravery.

It was all right, though. Colts came to Randolph and said that if he ever wanted to own a house in town there was a property on the books with a stone cottage and a five-acre orchard on the side of the creek where he remembered Randolph saying, years ago, that a man could live out his days wearing a panama hat and tending his roses. Randolph was shy of that age but smiled as he took out his chequebook, thanked Colts for the tip, and wrote out the deposit.

That was the year the drought cut in worse than ever. Buckler turned eighty-seven. Rainfall was six inches, arid zone figures. As a benefit to his peace of mind, not to his Homegrove pastures, Randolph swore drought years were an expression of essential existence. Gaps opened in distances, leaves of gum forests thinned, winter cold came deep as a dry well. A lamb's skeleton loomed on a bare hill larger than a mastodon but wool on Randolph's prize flock grew fine as spun copper. Locusts ate leaves from fig trees on his town five acres and ate the washing from lines across the backyards and out across the plateau of the Upper Isabel where summer pastures, such as they were, withered. In shearing sheds locusts lodged in the wool of sheep waiting to be shorn. On blasted hillsides foxes were seen making spiral leaps to catch as many kick-leg mouthfuls as they could. Hooke did well buying irrigated lucerne bales from rare corners of the state where flushes of green were still to be found. Colts did time at the wheel of the agency semitrailer and took on those men of the Isabel, mean as cut snakes who had money to pay, but said it was robbery, the prices Hooke charged. Colts fined them a little extra by allowing a few bales gratis to the strugglers of Woodbox Gully. It was not something that Randolph would ever know through Colts telling him about it or anyone else telling him for that matter. Just something he knew.

Here it came again. Randolph kept a book on the cycles. Dry, dry, dry, wet, dry, dry. The rhythm was the click of a grasshopper's legs on a hot afternoon. It was the rumble of rubber tyres on dusty corrugations. It was the rattle of dry lightning on the rusted heights of the Isabel Walls. Those cycles were Colts's, but also Randolph's own. There were days and weeks of dust parching the teeth. From the South Australian side it came – dust – as if Eureka Station (to give an example always in mind) picked itself up like a rippling carpet and was hurled a thousand miles east to pour over the cold plateau in galah colours. Feeder roads were impassable with dunes piling over fence posts. Tractors with buckets and council graders worked overtime clearing a way.

Crawling under a wattle bush on the drunks' common near the Isabel River railway bridge – seeing the bridge's rail line riding through cloud – a man was in the full cry of life experienced at its most calamitous extreme, existence concentrated to a limbless, armless ball of defeated energy still able to pass through solid earth to the condition of a worm flexing through the burial place of hopes.

Randolph went to AA meetings and took Colts along. Colts admitted AA had something to say about his shortcomings, but it had requirements a man couldn't meet. Later under the stars he tipped back his throat. The gargle of firewater was stupendous. Colts read in the small book he was given to take home:

In desperate and hopeless conflict, a man stands very near to the gods, in a strength that may have its source in the utter absence of hope.

– Anonymous

That was it exactly. He knew the words in his bones. Talk about shining a light. Colts had read these lines in typescript on the banks of the Darling River when he was a boy. Now to come back to them with understanding was strange. A man's battles were a longer test than a warfront's, more insidious, more grinding you might say without death flicking you off. You could swill the word hope around on your tongue and throw it full to the back of your throat. Full, what a word. Then swallow and choke time.

Colts put a bottle on the table. Crash. Took a glass from the sink. Crash. Poured brandy and drank it neat, then tipped back the kitchen chair, keeping his balance with his hands locked behind his head and staring at the ceiling of knotted white cypress. He was angry with Pamela. Disappointed. Disillusioned. Whichever way he interpreted Pamela's words they meant the same thing. They closed in on him. Weighed him down. Everything changed.

Randolph, an AA veteran who believed he was impervious to regression, was complacent that Buckler's writings were gaining currency enough to save a few alcoholics without the vanity of acknowledgement. They'd never been out of touch. Since their first meeting at Eureka and subsequent correspondence on usage and abusage of written English, Randolph and Buckler had been allies in tackling the problem of Colts from opposite ends of the same struggle. It was, indeed, the motto under which they had met on Buckler's terms. The problem had been Buckler's – passing Colts along. The problem Randolph's – what to do with him since: the two bound as one. The inadmissible faced with the inexplicable, you might say.

It was like working the land itself, a great big bloody challenging hardship getting successively worn down to the bones of gullies and sagging fence lines, the form not the substance the only reward.

Buckler wrote back thanking Randolph, and cursing the government to the grave and perdition. Politically Randolph and Buckler were of the same cloth, concurring that men of the right were beleaguered by the economics of working men (peasants, was Randolph's clandestine word) holding employers to ransom. There was more, as Randolph revived lines of connection that had lain dormant too long. He sent Christmas cards to Faye, Colts's sister, and to Colts's stepmother, Veronica. They were his shadow in-laws and he always wanted their liking.

In replies addressed to Randolph as reliable, implying that her brother his friend was not, Faye wrote from outposts of the Great Sandy Desert where she taught black children in the smoke of campfires, under bough shelters thatched in spinifex. She and Boy Dunlap had thrown in their lot with a bunch of communistic blackfellows – infamous as such – Faye as teacher, Dunlap as linguist, dictionary-maker and self-taught expert on dryblower mining machinery and prices on the rare-metals market. Although Dunlap was a Red without question, Buckler helped out when passing on desert forays, putting pragmatism ahead of principle and giving of the opinion that if you couldn't improve a blackfellow you could at least have a good laugh with him. Dunlap apparently never forgave Buckler's writing in old magazines that missionaries were meddling fools, he (Dunlap) the original poodle-fakir, but having long since resigned from the ministry disillusioned with missions, didn't fulminate overmuch when Buckler raved at him, a diamond-eyed dog growling at his toecaps and anthropological blowflies buzzing around him. Buckler was an old age campaigner of a sort made in Australia. The country ground them up and spat them out; they'd had to work out everything for themselves, and took on strange shapes doing it; mad hatters, misplaced geniuses, authentic ratbags. Veronica's visits couldn't have happened without Buckler providing the transport. It was worth it seeing how Faye enjoyed visits from Veronica. They came every second or third year. Each one felt like the last but wasn't. Randolph waited for Colts to suggest a visit – two men in a truck camping out. None was forthcoming.