McCullock's Gold

by Lindsay Johannsen

  Chapter 21. Staring Into The Darkness; and Marking The Road

  Back on his veranda Cadney pulled a chair away from the table and flopped into it. On hearing the car door slam Angelica had gone to the fridge and retrieved two cans of VB. She was still upset about the missing Nissan driver business and cross with Cadney for not having told her everything, so when she took them out she didn’t speak and she didn’t stay. One was in a stubby holder; the other was wrapped in a towel to keep it cold.

  But Cadney wouldn’t have welcomed the company anyway. The strange feeling of unease was still with him, despite his best efforts to wish it away. Instead he just sat there staring into the distance, the minutes turning to hours and his thoughts to fog. Cars drove past, dogs barked, children ran by, women gathered at the public phone and the sky changed colour as the daylight began to wane, but Cadney saw nothing.

  After the street-lights came on Angelica brought him a plate of stew and some bread then went back inside to watch TV. Jack Cadney could sit there staring into the darkness all bloody night as far as she was concerned.

  A few hours later he stood up and went inside for a shower, stiff from sitting too long in the one position. Angelica was asleep and the house was in darkness. After towelling himself dry he crept into bed, glad to see the end of what had been a long and frustrating day,

  His night was restless. For what felt like an age Cadney just lay there, eyes closed, trying to get some sleep. Yet whenever he did drift off something seemed to wake him again. Long before dawn he decided it wasn’t worth the effort and went to the kitchen to make coffee.

  Then, while at the sink part filling the billycan, it came to him that he’d been dreaming. Obviously he must have slept, though the way he felt it couldn’t have been for long.

  He set the billy on the stove and lit the gas. What the dream might have been about eluded him, and after the night he’d just suffered he didn’t much care. But as he went about spooning coffee and sugar into a mug his thoughts kept drifting back to it, so he tried to conjure its images from his sleep-deprived mind.

  Nothing came. And the more he tried to concentrate the more distant the dream seemed to become.

  The water boiled. Cadney filled his mug then watched the froth go around as he stirred. After a while he reached over to put the spoon on the sink. But he didn’t reach far enough and the spoon fell to the floor, and when he bent over to retrieve it his memory flooded open…

  Three Aboriginal men were standing in a row, holding up their arms. They all looked the same – thin, naked and washed in white tribal ochre. One was his father.

  Then his father’s gammy leg gave way. He turned and bent forward, throwing his hands down to cushion the fall. A mob of cattle appeared, panicked and galloping. They crashed through where the men were standing and...

  Nothing. Cadney realised he’d woken himself before his father went under their hooves. Feeling ill at ease he went outside with the coffee and sat at the table, ruminating all the while on this weird, unsettling dream – and still holding the spoon. After a time he began stirring the coffee again to cool it.

  With eyes closed Cadney reflected on its possible meaning. Was the dream some sort of omen about his father’s ultimate fate?

  It didn’t seem likely. These days the old man mostly stayed at home, sitting or sleeping on his veranda. Rarely did he go anywhere. Besides, the Community excision was fenced; there were no cattle inside. —And anyway, dreams were just dreams. Why did anyone think they had meanings? How could they, when everything in them was so crazy?

  He lent his head back against the brick wall, thoughts once more drifting into nothingness. On the eastern horizon the morning star appeared; a while later the sky began to pale.

  Suddenly Cadney jerked upright, startled and alert. The dream didn’t concern his father at all. It was the trees! The three white trees! The end one had been downed before they arrived there.

  But he’d not been looking at the trees; he’d been watching the cattle milling about on the roadway and assumed they’d knocked it over as they blundered away.

  But this was wrong. The cattle had not broken the tree, and his peripheral vision and subconscious mind had recorded the fact. —So much for dreams being meaningless.

  Then Cadney realised he was still stirring the coffee. He put down the spoon and took a cautious sip.

  It was cold. He’d been stirring it longer than he thought.

  Fifteen minutes later Jack Cadney was on the move again, heading to where the three ghost gums were growing on the side of the Plenty Highway. Halfway there the sun flared over the Tarlton Ranges, its light by chance blazing straight along the road. Driving directly into it was nearly impossible.

  Cadney slowed, despite his impatience, squinting as he tried to find his way. At least there was no need to worry about cattle or approaching traffic. Any dust they’d raise would be silhouetted against the sun, especially if the traffic happened to be a road train. Then he gave a groan. In hurrying to get away he’d again forgotten to bring a picket and cord.

  Thirty metres short of the ghost gums Cadney pulled to the side and parked the yellow Holden in the drain. He then began searching where the animals had been milling about on the carriageway, unsure of what he was looking for but determined to miss nothing out of the ordinary – in the event of there being something out of the ordinary to miss.

  On drawing level with the broken third sapling he gave up. He’d found nothing but high-speed tyre tracks on top of those made by the cattle and he stood there for a moment reflecting on the result. Just as he was about to walk across and look at the damaged tree he changed his mind and instead started searching back towards the car, this time along the shoulder and side drain.

  All he found was a short, broken-off bullock horn in the drain bottom. It was half covered in cow turd and partially trampled into the earth – still slightly damp from where the water had lain.

  He picked up a stick and prised it from the ground. Back at the car he opened the tailgate, dragged out his twenty litre water container, got a siphon going with a short length of hose and sprayed away the mud. Once the horn was clean inside and out he stopped the flow and looked it over.

  It was about twenty centimetres long and slightly curved. Midway along its hollow cone-shape was a short scrape-mark.

  Just then a pair of Major Mitchell cockatoos arrived on the scene. They settled at their nesting site in the hollow limb of a half-dead eucalypt nearby, a bloodwood locked in the species’ eternal battle with termites. Orange crests erect and heads bobbing they shrieked at Cadney in puzzlement.

  He held the item aloft. “What our Mister Cadney has found,” he informed them grandly, “is the horn shell from a four-legged moo-cow. Now the question we must ask ourselves is this: How exactly did the stupid thing come to lose it?”

  He replaced the water container’s lid then closed the tailgate and set off back toward the ghost gums, tossing the horn through the driver’s open window as he went by. “…And why just here?” he muttered to himself. Whatever the case, if everything worked out as suspected, Senior Constable Rick Frazier and Co would be wanting the horn for their strange forensic rituals.

  At the bent-over tree Cadney examined the trunk. Its smooth white perfection had a bruise-mark along one side but the break was only partial so his idea of staking it upright again should work. All he had to do was remember to bring the gear.

  Other than that there was nothing more to be learned. The ground around the trees was a mess of trashed and trampled shrubs and, like the nearby road formation, totally covered in hoof marks. He walked off into the bush

  Soon he came on another broken sapling, this time a young mulga tree. Cadney walked by its broken stump without stopping, scrutinising the ground as he went.

  Near the edge of the scrubby watercourse he stopped and squatted down. One of the animals had urinated there, and perfectly preserved amongst the chaos of the hoof marks was the imprint of a four wheel drive
tyre. The fragment was no bigger than a hand print, made while the earth was still damp.

  The tread pattern was not of the Nissan, however. It was made by a standard four wheel drive tyre, like those on the second vehicle at the Telstra pole.

  “Jackson Cadney stood up again and looked grimly ahead,” Cadney narrated as he stood up and looked ahead grimly. “Here was indisputable proof that the ace Aboriginal Detective had been right all along.” With a sense of foreboding he continued walking northward.

  Away from the watercourse there was little grass and the cattle had not gathered there, so he soon found the tyre marks again. This time they were clear and continuous. Two sets were present: one going out and one returning. They led him onto a broad stony rise and through some gidgee thickets, then onward to a twenty-metre wide zone of exposed rocks and boulders.

  Cadney knew the formation well from hunting trips in the area. Finding somewhere to lurch carefully across it was the best idea, as the outcrop went for a considerable distance in both directions. The vehicle’s driver must have realised this as well, for on the gravelly grass-free ground beyond it the tracks continued.

  Another ten minutes walking brought him to the edge of the higher ground and a gentle slope down to a shallow valley. A hundred and fifty metres beyond the valley lay another rise. Cadney stopped to scan ahead.

  Between the two was red desert sand, all captured from the wind and kept there in big undulations. Large green spinifex tussocks occupied the sandy hollows – along with the odd conkaberry bush – while the higher points were either bare or populated with tatty spinifexes struggling to stay alive, similar to many of those around Appoota Mbulkara.

  The vehicle tracks showed clearly in the soft going. Half way across the little valley they turned sharply right and looped back onto themselves. Cadney ventured down the slope as far as he could without leaving hard ground, wary of going farther before Frazier authorised a proper inspection.

  Viewing was difficult with the long early morning shadows, so he moved sunward a distance to check the scene from a better angle. Then, having learned as much as he could, he set off back to the highway.

  Half way across the rocky patch a flash of light touched the corner of Cadney’s eye. He stopped and looked around … it had come from somewhere amongst the cobbly boulders, just to his left. At first he could see nothing, but a brief search soon revealed its source: a piece of broken glass lying in a fissure.

  He squatted down to examine the shard more closely, at the same time realising how lucky he’d been in seeing the flash. Had sun, fracture, fragment and eye not momentarily come into perfect conjunction he’d never have known it was there.

  The piece was curved in shape, its outside smooth, the inside ribbed. Both surfaces were lightly dusted but the fractured edges were clean. Yet something about it seemed odd, as if it were some sort of crystal-clear plastic rather than glass.

  Resisting all thoughts of touching it, Cadney stood up and continued back toward the highway. There he repeated his earlier search, from the fallen ghost gum to where he’d parked the Holden in the side drain. As before, nothing was found.

  At the car he retrieved a small cool drink bottle he’d filled with water, then dropped the tailboard again and sat on it to chew things over. Moments later he leaped to his feet, coughing frantically as he half choked on his last mouthful. “―It was coming back, you dick-head!” he gasped. Throat cleared, he slammed the tailgate shut, drained the bottle and tossed it in through the driver’s window.

  Adjacent to the ghost gums he began searching again, walking back and forth across the road surface, this time moving slowly away from the car. Before advancing ten metres he was squatting down to examine something in the gravel.

  At first he thought it was a granule of clear quartz from the road-base quarry and then he thought it was glass. But when he picked it up he realised it was a fragment of clear plastic, similar to the piece in the rocks but much smaller. Nearby was another.

  He slipped them into his shirt pocket. Leaving them would see them lost forever, dispersed by cattle and high speed traffic.

  A few metres farther on he found a bigger piece, this one about fifteen millimetres across. Cadney marked the gravel with the heel of his boot then returned to the car. From the glove box he retrieved some tissues and a near-empty bullet packet. Its few remaining twenty-two cartridges went in a trouser pocket.

  On returning to his mark he picked up the piece, wrapped it in one of the tissues and slipped it into the bullet box. The smaller fragments were wrapped and boxed as well.

  Back at the car Cadney slid behind the wheel. What he needed to do now was contact Frazier, and as soon as possible. He put the bullet box on the dash and turned the key, thoroughly satisfied with his morning’s work. When the engine caught he floored the accelerator and dropped the clutch.

  The Holden rocketed up from the drain, dust and gravel showering from behind, engine screaming. It spun across the highway out of control, over-rotated onto the other side shoulder and slewed to a stop tail first in the spoon drain. Feeling slightly foolish, Cadney restarted the motor then set out for home again, this time slightly more sedately.

  Just then his hunger kicked in. After skipping breakfast his stomach suddenly felt like it was trying to cannibalise itself.