Sugar Town

by Robert Nicholls

  And you’d never guess where my thoughts bounced to from there! It was straight to the message that Amalthea had left on the Grand Gourd: ‘We follow. Now we follow.’ I’m not saying I had some great epiphany about it; only that it was suddenly there, like a little anthem. And its message was: Pay attention! Because jokes only make sense when you get to the punch line.

  “Anything else?” Morrow asked us finally and that’s when Dale told his story about the knife. The knife that was used on Rosemary – the one Amalthea had delivered to the police station: “I stole it from Ansell Williams’ shop,” Dale said. “But then I lost it.” Morrow nodded through the story and also through Dale’s claim that he had been at home with his parents and brother through the whole of the Night of Mayhem.

  “Well I’ll be talkin’ to Ansell and Snowy ‘bout you, won’t I! Anyone else?”

  I was wondering if I’d have to bring up Hoggs’ fake confession at Amalthea’s but thankfully, Frieda jumped in and told the tale. She included Hoggs’ misguided motivation – thinking he was protecting his father – and pointed out that Morrow himself knew where the mayor had been and what condition he’d been in, so surely that was alibi enough?

  She didn’t, however, mention Isak’s presence at Amalthea’s, so I did that, explaining how he had come to us, following the trail we’d left while hauling Queenie out of the cane.

  “He thinks it’s kind of alive. And that it’s told him stuff, or reminded him about stuff . . . what happened with Les and Grandma Gracie and everything.”

  “Yeah? An’ the ‘Les havin’ accomplices’ story, I suppose?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It tell him anything else?”

  “I don’t know. He wants to talk to Doctor Dabney; about why Grandma Grace died. And he’s got a gun.”

  “Yeah?” He shook his head thoughtfully. “Licensed shooter is Isak, so I guess he’s got a right. Sorta shape’s he in?”

  I shrugged. “Pretty good, I guess. A lot better than two days ago! It was him found Rosemary.”

  He cocked his head questioningly and I reminded him, “Rosemary’s the goat? Amalthea’s goat? The one that got killed?”

  “Yeah yeah! The second one! Still dead, is it?”

  I nodded.

  “An’ Isak found it? What, in the night like?”

  “Yeah. He . . . put her out of her misery. And brought her home.”

  “Uh-huh. The ol’ fella say where he’d been, out walkin’ around in the night?”

  “No. But like I say, he’d got a gun and some other stuff so I guessed he’d been to his place. Musta just got what he wanted and come back to be near Queenie – the Space Thing.”

  “Righto. Okay. Good. So. ‘Cept for this space gizmo interest, seems like he’s got over his fit. An’ he wants to talk to Dabney. An’ he’s got ‘years ago’ on his mind – jus’ like every other bugger in town these days.”

  I watched him write the words ‘Isak’, ‘gun’ and ‘Dab’ in his notebook. He studied it for a moment, then added ‘space junk’ and banged down an exclamation mark.

  He asked Lyle to fetch Hoggs in then and I got up to go. I’d already heard Hoggs’ story once that day and I didn’t want to sit through it again. I needed air, I said, and I wanted to get back to Asael, to make sure he was coping alright. That part of it wasn’t really true: between Amalthea and Queenie, and having spent the morning with Bridie, I knew he’d be fine. But I did need air.

  A moment after my feet hit the ground I heard heavier footfalls behind me.

  “Go for a drive?” said Dale.

 

  Chapter 21 - Revelations

  He had his father’s farm Ute; not the new one that had carried the Grand Gourd in the parade. The roof was gone off that one, torn off by Johnathon’s Tiger Moth.

  “Why’ve you got this?” I asked.

  He was determinedly patient. “I got this ‘cause I went home after listenin’ to you go off this morning. And my ma was one of those on Frieda Hoggitt’s hotline. So I hauled back a tent and some cooking gear for her and got her set up.”

  “What, so she’s one of these campers?”

  “Yep. She loves camping. Steak and plonk under the stars and she’s happy as Larry! The ol’ man’ll come in later and stay the night with her.”

  I looked sceptically at the Ute. I hadn’t thought about actually going anywhere. And I certainly wouldn’t have thought of going anywhere with Dale Sutton! Until that moment.

  On an impulse I said, “Okay, I’m in! Let’s drive.”

  His brows shot up, but he recovered quickly, jangling the keys and a nervous smile at me, and we got in.

  “To the river,” I said. “To the boat ramp! Get us a gasp of fresh, clean ocean air.”

  So that was where we went. It wasn’t a long drive – eight or ten kilometres of quiet back-country road to the tidal end of the river. There’s a small gravel parking lot there, surrounded by gums, with a narrow stretch of concrete that passes through thirty metres of adjacent mangroves, straddles the mud flat and pokes a dentist’s finger into the grey salt of the river’s mouth.

  I was surprised and impressed at how carefully and attentively Dale navigated the winding little road. It was so relaxing, in fact, I rolled down the window and leaned my head on the sill, losing my thoughts in the drone of cicadas.

  “So,” he said at one point, “staying with the goat-lady! That’s gotta be weird!”

  I gave him a glancing look. I was torn between answering with an off-hand ‘I’ve seen weirder’ or telling him the full story of Amalthea actually being Kevin’s daughter, even though Kevin didn’t know it and was probably never going to be told. I opted for the off-hand. He went quiet for a minute then tried a different tack.

  “What’s the old man like? Old Isak? He’s gotta be not right in the head, eh? Ye reckon Morrow should go confiscate his gun?”

  Again, I had choices. Isak was the town loony and a complete loner. Yet somehow he’d wound up closer to Grandma G than anyone else I knew! In his time, he’d been a murderer and a lover! And he and Asael – you couldn’t get two more different people, but they had something in common. Their sensitivity to Queenie, at the very least. Isak was all tangled up in my mind.

  “Naw,” I said to Dale. “He’s okay, I think. Just old.”

  Silence again. The hum of the insects and the rush of the wind. I took my hair band out and shook my ponytail loose, wondering if the smell of the eucalypts could get caught up in it. I caught Dale glancing at me.

  “What?”

  “Not a thing,” he said. “Just wish you’d stop yakking.”

  “Oh. Right. Funny.”

  “No, maybe not. But I tell you what mus’ be funny! Thinking about Asael, eh?”

  “Why? Whaddya mean?”

  “Well like, all this time he’s been your brother and now . . . !”

  “Now what?”

  “Now folks’re saying . . . you’re actually his auntie! That’s gotta be weird!”

  I sighed.

  “Don’t go there, Dale.”

  We parked in the gravelled area, alongside a big Pajero with an empty boat-trailer attached.

  “At least someone’s got the right idea,” Dale said, sizing up the rig. I walked down the ramp, past the ‘No Parking’ sign and the ‘Estuarine Crocodiles’ sign with its ‘no swimming’ symbol. Dale followed close behind.

  “You don’t see ‘em if they don’t want you to, you know,” he said, indicating the sign. “My ol’ man saw a fifteen-footer sunnin’ itself right here on the ramp a couple o’ weeks back. He turned ‘round an’ went straight back home. No way he was goin’ anywhere near that water. Could be lyin’ there in two feet o’ water, even now, an’ ye wouldn’ know ‘til it jumped out an’ grabbed yuh.”

  I walked almost to the water’s edge, until the muddy slime became too treacherous to stand on. A kilometre or so away to the left lay the Coral Sea; to the right, the tidal stretch of the river narrowe
d, turning first into a maze of muddy, mangrove-lined channels and ultimately into the dry, sandy cut that passed through Sugar Town. In the mangroves, there were heaps of footpaths, I knew, pushed through from the road by prawners; just wide enough for a man with his bucket and cast net. I’d been down one or two of them in times past and the memory of it made me shiver. The gloom – the suck and buzz and plop of secretive, scuttling things! The mangroves are no place for people.

  “Somewhere back up there,” I said, pointing toward them, “that’s where my mother died.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Down one of the paths. Prawners found her.” And I told him the story of the tide coming and going and of Asael’s dreams of her, still whole and beautiful, except for her skeleton feet.

  “Holy shit! The poor little bugger!”

  “Yeah. Poor little bugger.”

  “Why’d she do it?”

  “What, aside from the obvious, you mean? Her mother’d been murdered and her daughter raped. She was raising a kid who wasn’t hers and trying to look after Bridie who was an even bigger basket-case than she is now. Seems like she was trying to keep alive a relationship with a man who was a cold fish and maybe feeling guilty about the success of the one she was having with a hot baker! Aside from that, who knows? I’ve got a newspaper clipping that said she was depressed which I guess . . . who wouldn’t be? Nothing in her life coulda been making much sense! What do you think?”

  He made a sucking noise with his lips and shook his head.

  “It’s a cow, all right!” he said.

  “Yeah. A cow. Moo.”

  “You wanna go look?”

  “Go look at what?”

  “I dunno. Where she died, I guess.”

  “And why would I wanna do that?”

  “Dunno. Just an offer. I just thought . . .”

  “What? What did you think, Dale?” I was prepared to rip a strip off his stupid hide which, of course, made him get his back up straight away.

  “Just keep your feet on the ground for a minute longer, eh! Give listening a go for a change! All I was gonna say was that sometimes, when you go to the actual place where someone died, you can kinda get a bit of a feel for them! That’s all! Like at Port Arthur, where all them people got shot! I bin there! And walkin’ around under the trees where those people died . . . I swear, Ru’! In some kinda way . . . they’re still there!”

  “Don’t call me ‘Ru’,” I said. “Call me . . . !”

  “Ratbag. What about I just call you ‘Ratbag’ from now on. How’d that be?”

  I clenched my teeth and did a slow burn, counting to ten in my mind. Then I said, “Right. Let’s go do it then.” And I marched back to the Ute, leaving him standing like a stunned mullet on the boat ramp. It would have been the perfect time for that croc’ to jump out and grab him but it must have been off somewhere else, watching some other big gonzo creature scratch its head.

  * * *

  I had no idea which path it was, of course, or even if it could actually be seen from the road. The prawners don’t go out of their way to make them obvious. But we found one and started down it anyway, Dale leading and me following. It was little more than a bony outcropping that stuck up two inches out of the mud, but at least the footing was relatively dry. We lost the sun immediately, though, and a cloud of mosquitoes rose like a mist. Three minutes in, I called a halt to it. Dale, his t-shirt already drenched with sweat, came tip-toeing back, shaking his head.

  “Doesn’t make sense, does it?” he said. “Coming to a place like this? I mean how’d she even know these paths were here, or where they led? How’d she find one? And you said she walked? All that way! And nobody saw her! Nobody stopped and said, ‘Whatcha doin’? or ‘Where ya goin’?’ or ‘D’ya need help?’ I don’ get it at all!”

  We stood there looking at one another, walking on the spot, waving our hands, fending off the mozzies. Suddenly one of his big hands flashed in front of my face and the heel of it thudded against my forehead. I staggered a step and one of my feet slipped off the path into the mud.

  “Sorry,” he said, half-lifting, half pulling me back onto the ridge. He showed me the heel of his hand with a splotch of my blood on it. “Little bastards’ll have us drained if we stop here.”

  He slid past, holding me in place by my shoulders, brushing against me on the narrow trail. I watched him move away, edging between the grey trunks, the big farmer’s muscles in his back moving under his damp shirt. He was like a troll, I thought. Who’s that, walking on my bridge? It’s just me . . . a little goat who needs to get home.

  * * *

  We didn’t talk much on the drive back to town. I used my fingertips to pull off the sandshoe that had filled with, and been coated by mud. It stank and oozed like something that was half alive, but also half dead.

  “Don’t get that on the carpet, will ya!” Dale said.

  The ‘carpet’, being the floor of a farm Ute, was barely visible through bits of cane trash, hand tools, lolly wrappers, empty drink bottles and random orders of plain dirt. I looked at him.

  “The ol’ man’s a bit particular about it,” he said and that little something that happens to your eyes when you’re happy, happened to his.

  I hung my shoe from an outstretched finger and placed my heel very lightly, toes up, on a scrap of paper.

  “Sorry,” I said. “My bad.”

  He looked out his side window and I looked out mine, both of us, I guess, preferring to share our smiles with the late afternoon countryside rather than with each other.

  * * *

  It was after five when we got back to Amalthea’s. The first thing I noticed was a little pop-up trailer parked in the yard with the ambulance pulled up behind which, I assumed, meant that Marybeth had chosen to extend the vigilante camping effort away from the Showground. She and Dorrie Gunster, who did everything else together, had come to share in the warding off of evil. The second thing I noticed was the thin plume of smoke that continued to rise from Rosemary’s funeral pyre behind the house.

  It was the smoke alone that caught Dale’s attention.

  “Iron bark sleepers,” he muttered worriedly. “Could smoulder for days. I might just have a look.”

  And off he went around the house. It was sparks he was thinking about, I knew. If a few live ones got into Alf’s cane, those tonnes of fuel in there could go up like a bomb. Not that it wasn’t going to be burnt soon anyhow, but controlled burns were a whole different kettle of fish from wild ones.

  Dale was barely around the corner when Amalthea came out onto the veranda, looking as stern and unhappy as I’d ever seen her.

  “What’s up?” I asked, limping toward her, one shoe off and one shoe on. “Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing that won’t come right. With time.”

  She flicked a glance over my shoulder and I turned to see Marybeth, nodding and waving from the door of the caravan.

  “It’s okay, dears!” she called. “Just making sure we’re all safe! Pay us no mind. Unless you need us, of course! That’s what we’re here for!”

  Then I thought I heard the rumble of a man’s voice from inside the caravan. Marybeth glanced behind her, gave us another wave and disappeared back into the tiny room. I looked a question at Amalthea and she shrugged.

  “Isak’s out there with them. I think they’re cooking up something. You all right?”

  “Yeah, sure! Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason. Just, you said you were going to be gone an hour. That was four hours ago.”

  “Oh! Sorry! I guess I left in such a hurry . . . I forgot my phone.”

  “Mm. I guess.” And indicating my muddy shoe and foot, she added, “There’s a tap around the side. I’m doing stir-fry. Is your friend staying?”

  “Who, Dale? No, he’s not!”

  “Not what? Not a friend or not staying?”

  I’d known Amalthea had a temper, of course, but I’d never before seen her be just plain sull
en. My blank expression must have told her as much. She shook her head and clenched her lips.

  “I’ve got stuff I should be stirring. Dinner’s in ten if you want any.” And she turned away.

  I legged it around to the tap and met Dale coming back.

  “Truckie’s watching it,” he said. “I reckon it’ll be okay.” Then he said, “So I’ll be off,” and stopped dead in front of me, studying my shoe, my filthy foot and, it seemed to me, other parts of me as well.

  “Okay,” I said, turning sideways and waving him past. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

  “No fear,” he said, giving his little edge of a smile.

  I let him go only a few steps before I spoke his name again. He turned a wary look on me and I made a show of putting the filthy shoe aside and wiping the bit of mud from my finger onto the grass.

  “I think I might owe you an apology after all, Dale. I started off thinking some very dark things about you. But it’s possible I was wrong.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” I stepped up, quite close to him – almost as close as we’d been on the path in the mangroves. “You spoke up for me . . . at the mayor’s caravan. And the drive to the river; and what you said about mum; that was kind. You didn’t have to do any of that.” I reached up to touch the bruise under his eye, (mostly, I confess, to remind him it was there). And I looked him steadily in the eye, like I do with Asael when I’m trying to hypnotise him into doing what I want. “I’m grateful, Dale,” I said softly. “And I’d like to give you something back. Would that be all right with you?”

  I took the last half step that brought me right up against him and I glanced up, giving him my most innocent, poor-vulnerable-little-me smile. He swallowed and squinted suspiciously down at me and his mouth opened but no words came out. It’s really almost pathetic, how easy guys can be! It was all I could do not to laugh! Then, holding his gaze, I slowly lifted my muddy foot onto his, wiping congealed muck onto his sandal.