The Finder

by Will Ferguson

  “Grandmother, and yes.”

  They followed the trail past prickly bushes ringing with birdsong. “Grandparents,” he said. “They’re really important,” and Tamsin agreed. “They raise the kids,” he said. “The parents had to focus on hunting, surviving, so they gave the children to the grandparents, who knew more stuff, were more patient. Sad for the parents, maybe. But when they got older, it was their turn.”

  Slabs of stone, like warm clay. Dark stains ran down the flanks of Uluru, and when she asked about these, he said, “Waterfalls. When it rains, Uluru streams with water. It’s something to see, it really is. There’s these plants, ‘everlastings’ they’re called, can lie dormant in the earth for years waiting for the right moment. It rains, and they bloom. Pink petals opening up. Very beautiful. And there’s these plants, resurrection ferns. Looks dead and dry in the soil, under rocks, hiding in crevices, notches in the stone. Looks dead. But when it rains, comes back to life.”

  “Like Lazarus,” she said.

  “I guess. And there’s these trees, on the plains, we call them bloodwood. Their roots can wring moisture from the driest soil, and the sap is really thick and red. You cut them and they bleed.” They walked awhile in silence, and then he said, almost shyly: “My name is Malya, by the way.”

  “Tamsin,” she said.

  “Nice name.”

  “Thank you. Yours as well.”

  The heat and flies were getting worse. She stopped to take some water under her veil.

  “Uluru,” she asked, after she’d realigned her fly net. “What does it mean?”

  “The name? It means ‘meeting place.’ Lot of songlines converge here.”

  “Is that part of the Dreamtime?” She had heard of the Dreamtime.

  “We don’t like that word. There is nothing dream about it. We call it Tjukurpa. It’s the basis for everything we do. Everything that’s real, everything that’s right, everything you can see, everything you can’t. Stories and lessons, all of it. It’s ongoing—like creation. Hard to explain. The Anangu, our way of being, it’s thirty thousand years old.” It was the oldest existing culture on earth, protected by the United Nations. “Those pyramids in Egypt that everyone keeps going on about? What are they, three thousand years old?”

  “Something like that.”

  “A blink of the eye to the Anangu. I studied at a Catholic mission. The crucifixion? That was like yesterday to us. Anangu believe every ripple, every groove, every hole, contains a story. Most of these stories are off-limits, can’t be shared. C’mon,” he said. “I’ll show you where Kuniya the python woman fought Liru the poisonous snake man. That’s a children’s story, so it’s okay to share. Good photos, I reckon.”

  It was the story of a mighty battle, still embedded in the surface of Uluru. Kuniya, protective of her eggs, had attacked Liru. Pointing to the surface above one of the water holes, Malya showed Tamsin the shape of Kuniya rippling down to strike at Liru. He later pointed out the wounds that Kuniya had inflicted as well, pocked in the stone.

  “Can even see the stain left by the blood from one of Liru’s wounds, over there. Do you see it?”

  She did.

  The Australian sun was higher and harsher now. Flies in a hectic flurry. Pythons in the rocks. She couldn’t think of any place like this place; it reminded her of nowhere else but here.

  “This entire park,” he said, “everything around it, is Aboriginal freehold. Too arid for grazing.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t see any sheep,” she said.

  “Cattle,” he said, “and that’s farther out. Pastoral lands, they call it. Massive stretches along the train route. There are cattle stations out there the size of Belgium. That’s what they tell me. Ranches, I think you’d call them.”

  They had followed the path past Kuniya Piti to the eastern tip of Uluru.

  “This is where I leave you,” he said. “You can keep walking, I have to turn back. Kuniya Piti is man’s business. But around that next corner is Taputji. That’s women’s business.”

  It was a fundamental divide, one that Tamsin might have rankled with, but she also recognized that when the oldest existing culture on earth tells you something, it was, perhaps, something worth heeding. She thanked Malya for his time, asked for a photograph—she had long since outsourced her memory; if it wasn’t on a memory card, it didn’t really exist. She promised to send it to him, but of course she wouldn’t, and was about to push on alone to the stone island of Taputji and the women’s business beyond, when he asked, “Why do you go about photographing fallen-down buildings like that?” He was referring to Christchurch.

  “Well, someone has to, I suppose.”

  “But does it have to be you?”

  “No,” she said. It doesn’t.

  * * *

  THERE ARE TREES THAT REQUIRE fire. The extreme heat cracks open their seeds, and though the tree itself dies, the seeds burst, falling into the ash-rich soils. Acacia and eucalyptus are two such trees, spreading with every wildfire, living torches known to explode at high temperatures. The scorched earth and charred wood, the skeletal branches of burned shrubs reaching out. Lightning strikes that ignite the landscape, the flames that both consume life and create it. Kali, dancing on her mound of skulls.

  Tamsin had been warned to watch for dragons on the road, but this was not the season for dragons, and there were no lizards sunning themselves on the blacktop. As the heat of day bled away, Uluru become redder still. She wanted to capture this moment. Driving out to one of the park’s designated “sunset viewing points,” she parked the Land Rover, pulled out her gear, walked up the bristly ridge, and let her tripod fall open. Crickets in the dunes. The landscape was singing.

  Tour buses began to arrive, pulling up in convoys, their uniformed staff hurrying off ahead of the guests, producing champagne and canapés with a flourish of tablecloths and linen napkins. These were sunset tours, and the guests held up their drinks, took photographs of Uluru through the lens of the champagne glass, upside down in the reflection.

  The moon appeared.

  Uluru became a silhouette, and in the sky above, the Southern Cross slowly took shape. Fragments of the past. Stars so bright they cast shadows. Voices that remained long after the faces were gone.

  Anangu women had appeared. They quietly spread out their canvases for sale, sat on the ground behind their artwork, waited silently. The art was exuberant. Colors and contours, curves and myriad dots, wild wavy lines and ripple-like patterns that seemed to emanate with vibrations, never static, always in motion. It was the oldest existing art tradition in the world: the shimmering, pointillistic world of Anangu women. A few sales, not many. And when the tour buses pulled away again behind their cones of light, the Anangu melted into the Outback. They lived nearby in villages not marked on maps, and Tamsin watched them disappear. The entire scene seemed sad and surreal, from the canapés to the idle chatter to the artwork and the equally idling coaches.

  She locked in her camera on top of her tripod, set a long exposure time, and recorded the stars carving perfect arcs across the sky, like the grooves in a record. She was alone now. She packed up her gear under the chill of the night, tromped back to her Land Rover, the only vehicle in the parking lot, and then drove out, into the night. Down here, the stars were upside-down, constellations gone topsy-turvy, and her headlights were full of moths. At the main road, Tamsin slowed to a stop. Left would take her back to the hotel and the campsites, with their satellite relays and email pleas. Syria is on fire. Where are you?? Right would take her farther into the Outback. Most of her gear was already in the vehicle. What would she be abandoning, really? A toothbrush, some laundry powder, a couple of cotton T-shirts, a pair of cheap sandals. Items more often lost than found. (How many toothbrushes had she left behind over the years? Strange to feel wistful over lost toothbrushes.) Those songlines we follow, and those we lose. And slowly the compass needle spins back around.

  She put the Land Rover into gear, cranked the w
heel to the right, signaling even though there was no one there to see her, out of habit, one supposes; longing, one suspects. An empty highway, mice bounding across the road in front of her were caught in her headlights, the same headlights that were pulling her forward, through the darkness, across the interior of a continent that was, if not entirely lost, at the very least mislaid.

  Here, then, was the end of many things.

  She couldn’t do it, couldn’t go back to the world, couldn’t face the plunge into another fray where ignorant armies clashed by night. Her cell phone was blinking, but Tamsin Greene was out of range, beyond the brute force of news cycles, and the only voice was the one she hummed to keep herself company, a rhythm of her own making as the gap in the stars that was Uluru receded in the mirror behind her. And ahead of her, only night.

  ENTER THE BANSHEE

  IT SEEMS SO LONG AGO.

  A pewter locket, a nylon tent gritty with sand, a storm-tossed beach in southern Japan. And now here he was in Devil’s Spite Creek, nursing a drink in the dry heat of a faded hotel tavern, with a half-eaten chiko roll in front of him, a severe-looking woman across.

  She was balancing a cup and saucer in front of her, strikingly out of place, both the woman and the teacup. She smiled, but not with her eyes. Dunked the tea bag like she was drowning a mouse. “You’re taller than I expected,” she said. “Heavier, too.”

  Thin, blond, anemic. He could see the bones under her face. Pale as a bride behind a veil, eyes of Prussian blue. She was wearing a blazer—in this heat. Age: undetermined, but on the far side of thirty, certainly. She wore the years well. More than he could say for himself.

  Rafferty smiled back, eyes and all. “Thanks. I think.” Taller than she expected. Heavier too. The first was possibly a compliment, the second a little off-putting. But what the hell, he was lonely and half-cut, and she seemed to be interested in him. Lips, narrow, almost nonexistent, a mouth bracketed by deep lines, parentheses of worry. He tried to imagine kissing those lips, couldn’t. Some were leg men, some were ass men; he always started with the lips. His smile was returned, unopened.

  Taller than I expected.

  “Is this what passes for a pickup line?” Rafferty asked.

  The woman placed her cup and saucer to one side, stared at him. She seemed to be studying everything he did, as though gathering evidence—and perhaps she was. Rafferty, unshaven. A face like wet cement. “How’s the food?” she asked.

  “I’ve had worse,” he said, though he couldn’t imagine when.

  “Given the parlous state of today’s publishing, I would think you should be out hustling stories, instead of sitting ensconced in a bar in a dead-end town in what I believe is the geographic middle of nowhere.”

  Ah. A fan.

  “You’ve read my book,” he said. It should have been plural, but he’d only ever written the one memoir of note. The others had dropped, unheralded, like pebbles down a well.

  “I skimmed parts of it, yes.”

  Okay, not a particularly committed fan, but still.

  “I can’t help but wonder,” she said. “What brings you all the way out here? Searching for dinosaur bones, a lost treasure, perhaps?”

  “You could say that.”

  “One other question,” she said. “And understand, this is purely curiosity on my part, but indulge me if you will. Can you whistle?”

  “Can I…?”

  “Whistle. You aren’t from Belfast, are you?”

  This question confused him even more than the last one. “Why would I be from Belfast?”

  “Didn’t think so. If not Belfast, where then—exactly?”

  “Me? Nowhere really. Just a place. Winterset. It’s in Iowa.”

  “Yes, I know. But where are you actually from?”

  “I just told you.”

  “You’ve been to Okinawa, Mr. Rafferty.”

  Conversation by non sequitur. “I have, yes.”

  “Hateruma Island?”

  “Which one is that?”

  “The last one.”

  “Probably.” What was the name of the last island? The one where Rebecca had interviewed the priestesses?

  “Not probably, you have, several years ago. I read your article. You spent a lot of time in the southern islands, Mr. Rafferty. Hateruma included.”

  “If you knew, why’d you ask?” Jesus. Was any lay worth this rigmarole?

  She had stirred up memories as well as tea…

  Rafferty had been to Okinawa. Twice. Had gone there with Becky; it was their first trip together. “We’ll camp on the beach,” he’d said. “We’ll sleep by the sea, and make love like sex-crazed rabbits.” Becky was a child of the Midwest and unacquainted with the sea, and she paced out a spot for them on a clean sweep of sand, below the grungy boa of flotsam and seaweed above, and he’d had to explain to her that the reason the sand was so clean was because it was below the tide line. Had they pitched their tent, when the sea came in during the night they might well have floated away. At the very least, it would have made for a soggy sleep. “Have you tried to wring out a sleeping bag? It’s not a lot of fun.” Instead, they slept on a diving platform that was stranded at low tide, had woken to find themselves afloat after all, wading back to shore past confused tourists, backpacks on their heads like characters in a jungle expedition, laughing and in love (probably). Was that the last time he had been truly happy? In Okinawa, that first trip?

  It was in Okinawa that she first heard about the world of the noro priestesses, had applied for a grant to return, and he had come along with her in a doomed attempt at re-creating that moment, but now she only complained—about the sand, the wind, how he breathed, how he chewed. The noro women had refused to cooperate, smiling all the while, parrying every query, and somehow this was Raff’s fault. He had purchased a gift, a pewter heart, hoping. False hope, as it turned out. But then, most hope is.

  He blinked.

  The thin woman was staring at him.

  “Have you been?” he asked. “To Okinawa?”

  “I have indeed. Just last year, in fact.”

  “Remarkable, isn’t it? Fruit so lush, so heavy, so laden with ripeness they look like lanterns lit from within. It’s like an untended bonsai garden. Hateruma? Is that the one with the secret society? The priestesses? Noro, I think they’re called.”

  Moving on. “You were in the Peace Corps, Mr. Rafferty. Back in 1991. Ecuador, I believe.”

  She seemed intent on going over his entire CV. Was this a job interview of some sort? The prelude to a romp? Was he required to prove himself worthy of her loins? “I joined the corps, yeah. When I was young. I wanted to go out into the world, find people less fortunate than I, and do good to them, whether they wanted me to or not.” It was a line that usually got a laugh. Not this time.

  They had now come to the crux of the conversation, if this could be called a conversation. It was beginning to resemble more of an interrogation than a chat. She leaned in, watched his face carefully when she spoke the next word—“Rwanda”—saw him react as if to a blow. The breezy smile vanished, the eyes narrowed.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve read my wiki bio.”

  “Oh, I’ve read more than that. You were in Rwanda to write a travel article about the gorillas, but that’s not entirely true, is it? You were, in fact, a guest of the country’s minister of the interior with ties to President Habyarimana’s genocidal regime. I’ve seen the paperwork.”

  “The minister oversaw Rwanda’s national parks, so, yeah. I had to go through his office. I didn’t have a choice. Listen, that letter kept me alive.”

  “I’m sure it did. You were in the camps as well, in eastern Congo after the government of Rwanda fell.”

  The conversation had entered darker depths, but he didn’t know what this meant. First Belfast, then Okinawa, now Rwanda. And still the shovel hadn’t hit stone.

  “You were in Rwanda, you were in the Congo, and,” she said, “most recently in Christchurch, New Z
ealand, right after the earthquake.”

  “During.”

  “You’ve had quite the life, Mr. Rafferty.”

  “If you can call it that.” He held out his arms like the Christ over Rio. “Guilty as charged! The rumors are prodigious and insidious, but they are true I’m afraid. They cannot be shaken nor ignored.” He dropped his hands onto the tabletop, palms down. “A full confession is in order. I am indeed monstrously endowed and phenomenally informed in bed. But why take my word for it?”

  She didn’t smile. Not even a flicker. “You think I’m interested in you? I’m not interested in you. I find you about as appetizing as hobo’s breath.” She reached inside her jacket, flashed her badge. “Interpol,” she said, slipping it back into her pocket.

  “Oh no,” he replied, voice flat. “The jig is up.” He threw back the rest of his drink, shoved the half-eaten roll to one side. “Listen, Miss…?”

  “Rhodes. Agent Rhodes.”

  “Whoever the fuck you are. As far as—”

  “I’m with the ICA, the International Crimes Agency, it’s a division of Interpol. And yes, Mr. Rafferty, the jig is most certainly up.” She finished her tea, savoring the moment, leaned back, considered her quarry. “A travel writer. Of course. Why hadn’t I thought of that? A perfect alibi, able to slip in and out of countries on a visitor’s visa, leaving only a trail of poorly written articles in your wake—”

  Hey!

  “—and no one the wiser. For a long while, I wasn’t even sure if you existed. But now that we’ve met?” Her voice became grim. “I find myself decidedly underwhelmed. You have blood on your hands, Mr. Rafferty.”

  “I’m American, so yes.”

  “Does the name Billy Moore mean anything to you?”

  A blank look.

  “Billy Moore. The man without a face. No? How about Alonso Ricconi?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “An antiquities dealer in Vatican City. You cut out his tongue to send us a message.” This was called “throwing chum.” You toss a few chunks of raw fish into the water, see if you can draw the shark closer.