Blood Brothers

by Charles Beagley

  He was exhausted watching this gangly native move about with such agility.

  Before Martin had a chance to settle, the boy had broken off several branches, and removing his fire-stick from his pouch, he soon had them alight. As they were burning he collected a few spinifex clumps and tossed them onto the fire and before long they were ablaze also.

  Martin was amazed at how quickly he set up the camp. He started by shredding branches of their leaves onto the fire; then, sticking the bare branch into the ground, he made a small windbreak. He next took fresh branches and wove them horizontally in and out like a skilled craftsman following the traditions passed down from father to son. Finally he added more spinifex clumps to support them. A few moments’ work had provided them with a shelter.

  The sun had dropped down below the horizon by now and Martin saw the stars for the first time in ages. They were not as bright as above the Indian Ocean from his balcony at home; the remnants of the vermilion rays had not been overcome yet by the darkness of night, but they were just as beautiful.

  The boy had finished and he beckoned Martin over to the fire. The day’s heat was rapidly dispersing and Martin was experiencing his first cool night in the desert. As he approached the small enclave he noticed the boy had scooped out two shallow hollows with his boomerang and when Martin settled into his, it felt warm. The sun had been heating the sand all day and it passed as a warm bed.

  Sitting cross legged in his hollow, the boy picked up his leather pouch and removed a small package. From where Martin was sitting it looked as if it was made of fine bark and the boy had unwrapped a selection of beef jerky. Martin was familiar with jerky from his many dealings with miners who found it easier to handle underground than sandwiches. He called it beef jerky, although he knew it could well have been kangaroo, crocodile or any other form of dried meat.

  As the boy offered him the delicacy, he had no idea what meat it was, but still accepted it. He had survived on Mars Bars and Hard Tack biscuits for three days, and even though it was hard and dry, the taste of real meat was wonderful. It was the ideal food for travelling light. It took ages to macerate the dried meat into a chewable state; all the time swallowing the rich, concentrated juices. He washed it down with another mouthful from the boy’s gourd. It still tasted bitter.

  “Tomorrow we shall eat fresh food,” the boy said. “Good game from now on.”

  “Did you get that water from a stream?” Martin asked.

  “No. It was ground water.”

  “So that’s why it was so bitter.”

  “Not water. My crazy dust,” he replied, reaching into his pouch again and pulling out a smaller leather bag and taking out a pinch of a green substance.

  It looked like the herbs Kate added to her so-called ‘Cordon Bleu’ preparations, but Martin knew this was different. He sensed it had a medicinal use.

  “Why do you call it crazy dust?”

  “The desert can make you crazy with the heat. The Aborigines use this for many generations. It clears the mind.”

  “So I was crazy, was I?”

  “Oh, you big-time crazy,” he said, with a big smile. “I got you just in time.”

  They laughed and Martin felt they understood each other. But he could not keep thinking of him as the Aboriginal boy; he had to have a name.”

  “What do they call you, or more to the point, what can I call you?”

  “They call me Willy at the cattle station.”

  “That’s not your Aboriginal name.”

  “You can’t say my real name.”

  Martin was going to have to get used to Willy’s stunted sentences. They made sense, but they had little real meaning. Was the reason Martin could not say his name because it was hard to pronounce or that his culture would not allow a white man to use the words? Martin had little understanding of the Aboriginal culture, but his experience with indigenous miners had opened a small window to a highly diverse set of beliefs and taboo subjects. He would just have to tread carefully.

  “Okay…from now on I’ll call you Willy and you can call me Martin.”

  He flashed those white teeth again and repeated his name a few times. “Martin…Martin. Yes, I like Martin.”

  As they sat in their warm hollows watching the sparks float up into the night and disappear just as quickly, Martin tried to clear his thoughts by asking Willy the question that had been on his mind since they’d first met; or at least since he had been able to understand what was going on.

  “What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  Willy remained silent for a moment as he placed more wood on the fire, then he turned and faced Martin.

  “I’m proving good with my ancestors,” he answered.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Willy looked surprised. Although he had a reasonable grasp of Australian English – enough to make him understood – Martin’s statement seemed to trouble him.

  “Why don’t you understand?”

  “Well…what are you trying to prove to a bunch of people that died generations ago. No offence meant.”

  Willy was either unable to explain or had a reason not to as he sat silently raking a stick through the embers, kicking more sparks into the night.

  “My tribe no good with our traditions; they say they good Aborigines…but all the time they live off station food, medicine and money, and they call me no good Aborigine because I learn Aussie ways at school.”

  “So you have a school on the cattle station?”

  “Yes…good school. I learn the three Rs.”

  “And your people say you’re not a good Aborigine just because you went to school. Why would they say that?”

  “They want me to stay a stockman. The pay’s good and I won’t get any fancy ideas from stuck-up Miss Gerry.”

  Martin could see the conflict between old ideas and new.

  “And what sort of fancy ideas have you got in mind?”

  Willy looked as if he found it difficult to put his dreams into words. It had to be in that part of his ancestral background that he was trying to break away from. The part of dreaming that was expressed in images, not words, and Martin hesitated from expressing those words for him.

  “What do you do?” he finally said.

  “Me? I’m an engineer.”

  “You mend cars?”

  “No, it’s a lot more complicated than that,” Martin replied, noticing he was not getting through. “Have you seen any mine sites?”

  “Only what I saw on television; it was a gold mine in the Kimberley.”

  “Did you see any of those giant machines that dig the rock out of the ground, or the conveyors that bring it to the surface?”

  Willy still looked vague. Martin was being too technical for him. “I saw men driving big…machines. Was that what you said?”

  “That’s good enough. Well, I mend them when they break down.”

  “You were going to mend one of those things when you crashed?”

  “Yes, I was. It was an emergency as well.”

  Willy’s face lit up. There was a look of recognition on his face. “That’s what I want to be: an engineer. It sounds good.”

  Martin stopped himself from laughing by pushing a burnt ember back onto the fire. It was a distraction that made him realise his amusement was not because he thought Willy was stretching his dream too far, but because he had reduced what was within his grasp to one goal, and not the best of achievements in his opinion. There was a whole world out there with a wealth of opportunities for him to choose from and helping this young boy suddenly crossed Martin’s mind.

  The heat of the fire must have affected Martin’s arm. He was listening to Willy but all the time he was rubbing it. The pain had returned for the first time since before Joe died. Martin reached into the first aid bag for a painkiller. He thought about whether he needed water, thought better of it and swallowed the tablet dry.

  As the pain subsided Martin realised they had digressed and turned t
he conversation back to his original question.

  “So why walk out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “So I go walkabout. Show them I’m good Aborigine.”

  “But why here?” Martin asked, determined to find out what had brought Willy to that exact spot in the desert where the plane had crashed.

  Martin was feeling tired, but did not want to go to sleep until he was satisfied there was a simple explanation. He could still feel Joe’s presence. He was fearful of dying in his sleep like Joe did. When his time came it was the way he wanted to go, but not now; not out here. He shook off the dullness that was creeping back.

  “So you just came across the plane by chance?”

  Willy took his time to answer. He was staring into the flames again. They seemed to have an effect on how he put his words together. “No. You were in the sacred place. And I found you. I was meant to find you.”

  “You’re losing me again, Willy.

  “I was following the ancestors’ journey; the original walkabout. Not the walkabout the stockman use when they sick of working, but the journey in the dreaming. The journey they take when the seasons change, to find fresh food and water. And as they travel the four points of the heavens, they name sacred places.”

  Willy suddenly looked uncomfortable. He knew he was entering the realm of sacred words. He was trying to tell the story without naming those words.

  “You shouldn’t be telling me this…should you?” Martin said.

  “It belongs to the dreaming. It’s not meant for telling.”

  “Is this to do with Aboriginal painting?”

  “Yes. It’s not for telling,” he repeated.

  “Just tell me in white man’s words…not what it means.”

  Willy picked up the remnants of a half-burnt branch on the edge of the fire and cleared a space in front of his crossed legs. He then stabbed it into the flat area and started talking. “This is my ancestors’ traditional camp on the banks of the Oakover River, east of Port Hedland.” He traced a line above and marked out several crosshatched strokes, “They left the river and walked two days to the marsh land to hunt for eels and frogs, then east to the riverbed you crashed in.” He drew a line to the right and then changed it to a wavy line and stopped. “This is sacred land. I can’t tell you why. Then they turned south to the Sandy Desert and Lake Waukarlycarly.” He scratched another line in the sand with an oval at the end.

  Martin could see it all now drawn into the sand. It was a round trip of many kilometres, always turning into another quadrant after each stop. Willy finished his pictogram by finally turning west back to where he started.

  Willy looked pleased. He had managed to tell Martin how he’d arrived at the crashed plane without divulging any Aboriginal secrets. But Martin was even more anxious about those shadowy areas of ancient beliefs and customs. He was a long-standing agnostic with unwavering views on the supernatural and anything to do with ordained occurrences. The possibility that something from the past guided Joe’s plane to the very spot where Willy was heading for was beyond his belief.

  “Joe, that was my pilot, said this was an ancient riverbed when he was looking for somewhere to land.

  And your ancestors just happened to visit this place?”

  “I don’t know. It has no name. It has always been known as the dry riverbed.”

  As Willy continued with his explanation, Martin’s eyelids suddenly became very heavy. He tried to keep them open, but in the darting, hypnotic flames of the fire it was difficult. All he could think about was the strange coincidence that Joe should pick the very sacred riverbed that Willy’s ancestors visited thousands of years ago. And, more significantly, that Willy should travel to the very spot where the Cessna had crashed.

  In mythology a believer would account for such a coincidence by saying an ancient race, many thousands of years ago, seasonally visited the same flowing river for its abundance of fish until an oracle predicted a great occurrence, when a giant magical bird would fly down and drink all the water. From then on the ancients would make their seasonal pilgrimage to the river to extol the bird’s arrival.

  Martin never completed his analysis. A mythological veil fell across the campsite enveloping them in a long sleep.

  CHAPTER 12

  It was six-fifteen in the evening, three days after Martin’s plane had gone missing in the Sandy Desert. Kate was sitting on her balcony, sipping a glass of riesling, watching the smouldering orb of the sun sink into the Indian Ocean. She was continuing a ritual she and Martin had started the first day they’d bought the house overlooking Cable Beach. On that occasion it had been champagne, an expensive practice they had to compromise on. Yet they vowed to continue.

  It was Martin’s idea. He had been on a mining site in the Kimberley hills for two days and it was late afternoon when he’d returned to Broome. He felt guilty leaving Kate on her own all that time and bought a bottle of champagne at the airport. When he walked into the house he found Kate sitting on the balcony watching the sunset, exhausted after moving into the new home. He placed the bottle on the table with two glasses he’d found in the kitchen. It was not how he’d planned their first evening, but the champagne and the sunset changed everything.

  By the time Jennifer and Adam returned from the local takeaway they found the house in darkness and their mother sitting on the balcony silhouetted against the orange horizon.

  “What are you doing sitting out here?” Jennifer asked, walking onto the balcony and noticing the bottle of wine. “Drinking isn’t going to help.”

  “Sit down, have a drink and watch the sunset,” Kate answered her.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Jennifer said, sitting down.

  “I heard you…and I’m not just drinking as you say. I’m sitting here quietly, as your dad and I have done every night since moving here.”

  Jennifer noticed the glass of wine in front of her; the glass that was meant for her father.”

  “Mum…you’re talking as if Dad’s dead.”

  The sun was no more than a thin orange line stretching across the horizon as Kate switched her attention to Jennifer. It was a harsh look, the sort of look that said you are entering sacred territory; beware. But as usual a gentle smile replaced the scowl and she stood up, looked around and asked where Adam was.

  “He’s in the kitchen getting the meal ready… remember? We went out to the takeaway. That’s what I came up to tell you.”

  “Then we had better get downstairs before it gets cold.”

  “Oh, there you are,” Adam remarked, switching the kettle off.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” Kate said, wandering into the kitchen. “I bet the food’s all cold by now. What did you get?”

  “I hope it isn’t…not when I went to all that trouble, dragging Dad’s portable fridge with us. You should have seen the look on their faces.”

  He lifted it up onto the end of the table and undid the catches.

  “I thought it was just for keeping things cold,” Kate questioned.

  “No, Mum…it’s a thermal box. You put ice cubes in to keep things cold and empty to keep them hot – or at least at the temperature they were served at.”

  Kate was leaning over the box when Adam removed the lid and she had to admit she actually felt a warm, sweet smelling current catch her face.

  “I don’t think your dad was aware of that…I’ll have to tell him.”

  Adam made no comment when he brought out his mum’s fish and chips, Jennifer’s lasagne and his own beef balls and noodles.

  “Is that to madam’s liking?” he said, pouring the tea.

  “I had no idea you liked Chinese, Adam.”

  “That’s what happens when you go to university in Sydney.”

  Jennifer laughed. “You don’t have to be in Sydney.”

  It had just gone seven when Kate walked into the lounge and switched on the television. It was news time and she had the ridiculous notion there might be a mention of the missing plane, despite Philip
saying it would not be broadcast.

  Just as she picked up the remote to find the channel she wanted the phone rang. She dropped the remote and rushed to pick it up but Jennifer had beaten her to it and was nodding her head listening to the caller.

  She had a pensive expression as she cupped the mouthpiece and looked at Kate. “It’s Philip,” she said, passing the phone to Kate’s outstretched hand.

  Kate held the phone to her chest for a moment while she composed herself. She sucked in a deep breath and answered, “Philip…I didn’t expect you to call so late. I expected all the planes to be back by now.”

  Adam walked into the room and stood next to Jennifer with a puzzled look on his face. Jennifer shook her head.

  “It is late, Kate,” Philip replied. “And, yes, I’ve just been de-briefing the pilots on another wasted day. That was until the Lear Jet just radioed in—”

  “I thought they all had to be back before sunset,” she interrupted.

  Kate was beginning to shake and Jennifer put her arm around her.

  “The Lear has clearance for night flights and the pilot decided to stretch his time over the area to the last minute. Kate…he found the plane.”

  She burst out crying and shook the phone in front of Jennifer’s face as if she could not bear what was to follow. Jennifer took the phone and explained to Philip what had happened.

  “Jennifer, that’s the best news we’ve heard in four days,” Philip said.

  “What did they see?”

  “Tell your mother the plane looks intact. He flew over it a couple of times but there was no activity. But that doesn’t mean anything. They had a tarpaulin over the cockpit to keep the sun off, so they’re alive.”

  “What happens now?”