All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  Sam Greenway stands on the footpath beneath the awning of the Star Theatre. He wears a red long-sleeved stockman’s shirt and dirt-covered brown pants, and his black broad-brimmed riding hat sits back on his scalp so that his full black mop of hair glows beneath the throbbing awning ceiling bulbs. He’s laughing hard and his big wide smile is as bright as the lights that border the partly open-air cinema’s roof lining and climb like a string of pearls to a shining ornamental night star rising over Darwin. The same kind of star that drew wise men from the east to Jerusalem, Molly thinks, is now drawing her and Sam Greenway to the silver screen worlds of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire and God’s other sacred child, Shirley Temple.

  The Star’s playing ‘Darryl F. Zanuck’s Jesse James’ tonight and that title is stretched breathtakingly across the theatre’s marquee wall in pistol-shot Wild West lettering. Molly is about to call out to Sam, but she bites her tongue in the darkness of the street because she realises Sam is in the company of two teenaged girls, Aboriginal girls with pretty smiles and long legs, older than Molly, so old that Molly can see how their breasts are filling out their Sunday school dresses. Other Aboriginal families file out of the theatre around them; there are no white families at the pictures tonight.

  Of course, those girls see in Sam what Molly sees. They see his spark, his light, his Hollywood charm and they stare at it wide-eyed and dumbfounded, slack-jawed and spellbound by a brief and impromptu cowboy show Sam is giving right there on the footpath.

  He fixes his cowboy hat and snarls in the face of an imaginary Wild West lawman. ‘Well, Marshall,’ he says in his thickest Missouri accent. ‘I’m just about done here listenin’ to ya rabbit on about my indiscretions and I’m gonna guess your hand don’t move half as quick as your mouth.’ Sam’s right-hand fingers dance above a curved, oversized red and green apple-flavoured candy cane hooked like a pistol over his brown leather work belt. Then his hand moves so fast that Molly sees nothing whatsoever between the candy cane vanishing from Sam’s belt and it reappearing, raised in his right hand and firing three shots that explode from his film sound effects lips as his left palm speed-cocks an invisible pistol hammer.

  When the deed is done and the imaginary lawman lies bleeding in the dirt, Sam triumphantly blows smoke from the candy cane pistol shaft. In a flurry of movement worthy of a circus act, he spins the pistol vertically on his right forefinger, then shifts it into a horizontal spin that lasts a full minute, and those young women he came to the pictures with are so mesmerised by his cowboy skills they can only giggle because their bodies are too frozen by awe to clap their hands. Then, as fast as the pistol was drawn, it is holstered tightly and securely back in Sam’s belt. Only now do the girls clap.

  Sam tips his hat to his audience with a wink. ‘And what brings you fine ladies to a no-good, blood-suckin’ town like—’ His words are cut short by an imaginary bullet in his back that sends him staggering forward into the arms of his audience. ‘It’s that feller Bob Ford,’ he coughs, imaginary blood spilling from his cowboy lips. ‘He done shot me in the back.’ Sam falls grandly to the ground, the last beats of a short and tragic cowboy life pulsing out of his shoulders. ‘Please . . . ma’am . . .’ he whispers up to the taller of the two young women, ‘would you grant this sorry outlaw one last kiss before he rides off into hell?’ And Molly sees from the darkness of the road that the cowboy’s dying wish is granted: the tallest girl kneels over Sam and gently places a kiss upon his lips, a kiss that seems to Molly to last as long as most of the features that show on the Star’s big white picture screen. And of course Molly is not the girl to grant that kiss because Molly never dug enough graves to buy the blue satin dress to wear to the pictures and Molly could never look so tall and so beautiful as that lucky, full-busted girl in her Sunday best because Molly’s always six feet deep in dirt and dead folks.

  Sam closes his eyes for the cowboy’s last sleep. The older girls howl with laughter and Molly treads lightly to the scene and stands over her friend Sam, feeling, for the first time in her life, every heavy ounce of the inherited heart that’s slowly turning to stone inside her chest.

  ‘Hi, Sam,’ she says, softly.

  Sam opens his eyes. He beams wide.

  ‘Hi, Mol’!’ he hollers. He springs to his feet. ‘I didn’t know you were comin’ out tonight.’ He looks her up and down. ‘You’re gonna need shoes on if you want to catch the next picture. All the whites are coming back for Bogie in High Sierra. We just seen Jesse James. You woulda loved it. They had that Tyrone feller you like playin’ Jesse.’

  ‘Tyrone Power,’ Molly says, flatly.

  Sam looks her up and down again, deeper this time. ‘You all right, Mol’?’

  The tall girl wants to go. ‘Ya comin’, Sam?’ she asks. ‘We’re all swimmin’ under the stars at Vesteys.’

  Sam smiles. ‘I’ll catch up later,’ he says. ‘I wanna stick with me little outlaw mate ’ere for a bit.’

  The older girls turn, stroll away along Smith Street.

  ‘I’m not so little,’ Molly says, her eyes turned away.

  Sam chuckles, nods his head. ‘Yeah, I know, Mol’. You’re bigger than Bogart in my book!’

  He pats her shoulder. ‘Wait ’ere for a second,’ he says, excited. ‘I wanna introduce you to a friend of mine.’

  He disappears down a lane off Smith Street. Molly sits in the gutter, rests her elbows on her knees. Horse hooves clop along the dirt road of Smith Street, and Sam moves into the light, bouncing gently on a saddle tied to a handsome dark chestnut horse with white markings on its lower legs like it’s wearing long socks.

  ‘This is Danny,’ Sam says, a hand rubbing the horse’s crest. ‘He’s a hot-blood colt, Mol’. Real fast. Fit as a bull. Danny and me have been down south huntin’ them buffalo through the Rum Jungle. He never stops this feller. Jumps on them beasts like lightnin’ strikin’. Bang!’

  Sam holds his hand out to Molly. He turns into Jesse James once more. He turns into Tyrone Power.

  ‘Ma’am, would you grant a lonely cowboy the pleasure of your company?’ he asks. That impossible smile. Molly Hook cannot hop up onto that horse tonight. Molly Hook needs to get home. But Marlene Sky can take that young man’s hand, and Marlene Sky does.

  *

  The moon and the stars and Molly and Sam and Danny clip-clopping towards the Timor Sea. Molly’s arms around Sam’s hard flat stomach, her tired head resting on his shoulders. His warm shoulders. The Darwin heat even at night-time making him sweat beneath his riding shirt. The smell of earth and horses and land, and the hope of some alternative road that extends beyond Hollow Wood Cemetery.

  Sam revels in Danny’s wonder, explains in vivid detail how the horse made him shine in front of his ageing boss, Walt Hale, co-owner of Johnston Traders, one of the region’s most seasoned buffalo hunting outfits, which has ties right back to the 1840s, when the Asian buffalo was brought to the rapidly colonised Coburg Peninsula for meat and milk. The multiplying and soon-wild buffalo took a liking to the Northern Territory’s vast coastal floodplains, and canny riflemen like Walt’s father, Paddy Hale, made a fortune sending buffalo hides overseas and across the country to become industrial-grade leather coverings and belts. The buffalo horns became inlays for gunstocks and fancy handles for knives that international hunters could use to kill more beasts to make more belts and knife handles.

  ‘But it ain’t no picnic bringin’ a buffalo down,’ Sam says. ‘They don’t just drop like pigeons, Mol’.’

  Sam kicks his boot heel hard into Danny’s belly and the horse clicks to a trot and then to a gallop. Raised coastal houses pass across Molly’s vision in a blur and she holds tighter to Sam’s stomach. ‘Hyah!’ he hollers. And the hot-blood colt speeds along the esplanade towards Darwin Harbour and Sam holds the reins in one hand as he leans over far – too far, Molly says – to his left like a circus rider.

  ‘You gotta get your horse right up close to that chargin’ and blusterin’ buffalo and you gotta get your rifle ti
p right against the head,’ he shouts. He extends his left arm like it’s a rifle in his hand. ‘You put that rifle so close you want it touching its cheek. But you need a quick, brave horse to do that for ya, and that’s what Danny here is. One hand keeping Danny steady and one hand on the trigger. Bang!’

  Danny slows to a walk passing the Lameroo Baths and Lameroo Beach, and Molly wonders if even the horse is stunned into silence by what they see filling the black night waters of Darwin Harbour.

  United States Navy warships, moonlit and starlit and spotlit, the reflections of the still harbour waters shimmering against their grey sidings that run on for a hundred yards and more. They are as lengthy to Sam’s eye as the dead-grass Australian Rules football fields he bounces around on with his cousins, as wide across the beam as the cricket pitches he mows into the lawn behind the church. Molly tries to count all the ships and she loses track around fifty. Sam’s eyes are drawn to an American destroyer. The last time he can recall seeing something so big was when he rode two hundred miles east from Darwin to the Arnhem Land escarpment with his uncle Ernie and they saw Burrunggui Rock lit up by the sunrise. The destroyer is the same shape as that old sandstone rock, but Burrunggui isn’t fixed with the guns the destroyer has. Sam counts them: five guns in single mounts. ‘Can’t see the torpedoes,’ he says, wide-eyed.

  Patrol boats, auxiliary minesweepers, depot ships, examination vessels, American and Australian troopships carrying men in white shirts Molly can see moving back and forth across decks with the same frenetic pace the moths have when they flap around her reading lamp.

  ‘Dad reckons the Japs are comin’ to Darwin,’ Molly says.

  Sam heels Danny and they move on towards Stokes Hill Wharf.

  ‘Your dad’s right, Mol’,’ Sam says. ‘That dirty ol’ war’s comin’ to us now.’

  Molly fixes her grip on Sam’s stomach.

  ‘Look at all them boats packed in there like sardines,’ Sam says. ‘They should spread them fellers out. Make ’em harder for those Japs to hit.’

  These boats make no sense to Molly in the Darwin dream. These warships make no sense. Purple plums belong in Darwin, Molly tells herself. Cyclones make sense in Darwin. The heat belongs in Darwin, the eternal sweat. Warm beer makes sense here and hand-woven baskets on market stall tables. Fat barramundi belong here and saltwater crocodiles, and the box jellyfish whose sting will make you wish you’d never learned how to swim in Darwin Harbour in the first place – or even kill you outright. Purple plums in the arms of young Chinese women. Purple plums make sense.

  ‘Is this a dream, Sam?’ Molly asks, her left cheek pressed against Sam’s right shoulder blade. Her eyes look out to the long, curling, wooden-deck wharf running deep into the black harbour, its cast-iron and concrete supports covered in seaweed slime and mollusc shells. Cars and bodies and cranes move around the wharf deck unloading and loading a hulking naval cargo vessel some 120 yards long and 15 yards wide.

  ‘I blacked out in the kitchen today,’ Molly says. ‘I don’t even remember how I got into town. I feel like I just woke up outside Ward’s Boutique.’

  Danny clops along the beachfront. The gravedigger girl holds Sam tighter.

  Danny stops. Sam looks out beyond the wharf. On the horizon, three jagged lines of lightning split the sky, turning it violet.

  ‘The Lightning Man’s comin’,’ Sam says.

  Molly knows about the Lightning Man. Sam’s grandfather was the one who first told him about the Lightning Man, the spirit god who rides high in the sky on a high-speed vehicle made out of storm clouds. ‘Wish I had me one of those to get around on, eh Mol’,’ Sam said. He told Molly the Lightning Man has powerful ears that know things, that know the weather, and from these ears the Lightning Man shoots rods of electricity down through his storm cloud to the ground. ‘But you don’t run from the lightning,’ Sam said. ‘You go to it. Because that Lightning Man’s trying to tell you where to find what you need. The Lightning Man comes and then all the good water and food comes with him.’

  Another lightning strike in the blackness far beyond the busy wharf.

  ‘I’m leavin’ here tomorrow, Molly,’ Sam says.

  ‘Where you goin’?’ Molly asks.

  ‘I’m going to the lightning, Molly.’

  Molly releases her grip around Sam’s belly.

  ‘Me family,’ he says. ‘We’re going bush. We’re going deep, Mol’.’

  ‘Do you have to go?’ Molly asks.

  ‘Big gathering,’ Sam says. ‘A lot of talkin’ needs to be done with the elders about what’s comin’ with this war and where we all go from ’ere.’

  ‘Where are you all gathering?’ Molly asks.

  ‘I can’t tell you that, Mol’.’

  Molly wraps her arms around Sam again.

  ‘Take me with you,’ she says. ‘I’ll go with you right now. You go ahead and give Danny a big kick in the belly and we can ride away, right now. Tonight. Just go deep into the bush. So deep we never come back.’

  Sam turns his head to speak closer to Molly’s ears. ‘You’re not allowed to go where I’m going, Molly.’

  Molly closes her eyes. Silent for a full minute. ‘Do you care for me, Sam?’

  ‘I care for you a lot, Mol’,’ Sam says. ‘But I’m sixteen and you’re twelve and—’

  ‘I’m almost thirteen,’ Molly says.

  Sam nods, smiling. ‘And you’re almost thirteen,’ he says, breathing deep to finish what he has to say. ‘And I don’t think it’d be right for me to care for you the way you want me to.’

  This heavy stone heart. Cry from it, Molly, cry, she tells herself. But she can’t cry, so she opens her eyes again and slides off the horse, walks to a large rock embedded in the sandy banks of the harbour and sits.

  ‘Will Longcoat Bob be there?’ she asks.

  Sam slips off Danny, too, holds the horse’s reins as he talks to Molly’s back.

  ‘Nobody knows where he is,’ Sam says. ‘He’s been on a long walk. Longest he’s ever been on. Nobody’s seen him in almost two years.’

  Molly drops her head, traces the circle of the night sky moon in the sand with her right big toe.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Yeah, Mol’.’

  ‘Remember I told you about the sky gift.’

  ‘Yeah, Mol’. I remember.’

  Molly traces a twisting road running from the sand moon at her feet.

  ‘Remember them words my grandfather etched on the pan?’

  ‘Yeah, the poems,’ Sam says.

  ‘Directions,’ Molly says, correcting Sam. ‘They were directions. But he wrote them for the eyes of poets. Only people livin’ poetic lives could understand them. You have to be poetic, Sam. You have to be graceful.’

  Sam ties Danny’s reins to the post of a rotting fence lining the beachfront.

  ‘Directions, huh,’ Sam says.

  Molly nods.

  ‘I know where the silver road is,’ Molly says.

  Sam says nothing.

  ‘It’s what you called the glass river,’ Molly says. ‘It’s the same thing. Way beyond the Clyde River. The road you used to walk as a kid.’

  Molly looks up at the night sky moon. ‘I’m gonna leave this place, too,’ she says. ‘Everybody else goes away. Why can’t I? I’m gonna go find the silver road. And then I’m gonna find Longcoat Bob and then I’m gonna find my own treasure.’

  ‘What’s your treasure, Molly?’

  ‘Answers.’

  ‘Answers to what, Mol’?’

  ‘Why he did what he done to my family. How he’s gonna undo what he did.’

  Sam finds a place on the beach rock beside Molly and he tells her, not for the first time, his deep-gutted full-flesh heart feeling about Longcoat Bob’s curse. ‘There is no curse, Molly,’ he says. ‘Longcoat Bob don’t work like that. He can’t work like that. He’s not able. There is only what the land and the sky deems right and wrong.’ Sam’s said this before, too.

  ‘It wasn’t Longcoat Bo
b who put the dark on your grandfather,’ he continues. ‘Only the earth can do that. Only that twinkling stuff up there can do that, Mol’. The land and the stars were watching. They both said your grandfather was wrong to do what he done. He took gold from the earth and the earth didn’t want that gold took. The earth rebelled, Molly. It turned on your grandfather. You start walking into places you don’t belong and it might just turn on you, too.’

  Molly dwells on this for a long moment. Then she stands. ‘Did you like the film, Sam?’

  Sam looks up at Molly. ‘Not really, if I’m bein’ honest,’ he says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You weren’t watching it with me.’

  Molly smiles. ‘Bye, Sam.’ She walks away.

  ‘Molly, wait,’ Sam calls. But she does not stop. He stands to watch her march into the night, patting Danny the colt’s head along the way.

  ‘Bye, Molly Hook,’ he whispers, only to himself.

  *

  Two shadows in the cramped kitchen of the caretaker’s house at Hollow Wood Cemetery. The Hook brothers, Horace and Aubrey. White long-sleeved work shirts buttoned to the neck. Black trousers. Both men too drunk to notice they’re still wearing their wide-brimmed black hats inside. Molly standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Horace can barely keep his eyes open. He sways in his chair, reaching once, twice, three times for a glass jar with a scratched ‘Queen’s Olives’ label on its side, which is half-filled with a clear spirit that smells to Molly like petrol mixed with a splash of tonic water. Aubrey stares at her through the dark slits of his dead black eyes, his right forefinger circling a small glass of the same spirit. Horace’s head finally stays still long enough to see his daughter standing expressionless and mute inside the kitchen. Then a thought reaches his clouded brain. Molly knows it’s a dark thought. Horace stands abruptly – too abruptly for his blood and his body and brain to catch up with his legs – and he stumbles to his right and trips on his feet and he falls hard to the ground, his eyebrow hitting the corner of the kitchen stove on the way down. Blood spills immediately from his forehead and he tries to wipe it away but he merely wipes it across his forehead so that he looks to Molly like a war-painted Indian in a Gary Cooper western.