Chippy puckered his rosebud mouth and waved his tiny arms, making sucking noises as Judy swung him across onto her breast. ‘Where did you come from?’ she sighed, her astounding miracle, he was so deliciously moreish, all hers. Exhausted by the demands made on her she nodded off and, awake, lived in a mental fog.
One day while Georgy and Monica looked after Chippy, Judy went for a walk. It was a test like other tests she was inclined to give herself, the first time on her own for an hour since Chippy was born, to see how long she could stay away from him. From the crumbling headland she looked down where a long, narrow steel ketch had come in since she last looked out on the strait leading back to a deeper seaway. She could hardly believe that a seventy-foot yacht was able to nose its way that far up into a tidal creek. Te Ata had been expected for weeks, talked about by Dick and Monica, a legend in world deeds. Her heavy keel lifted hydraulically, industrial-looking windlasses were bolted to her deck, her big sails folded down on the booms in grey stacks. She was lashed to a pair of stout posts and lay up against a pontoon beside a weedy bank. Seen from above, human figures moved around her deck looking tiny. Dick had worked on metallurgy formulas with the owners when they reforged their ground tackle in a foundry and struck up a connection.
Next time Judy came to look at that ghostly arrival she was happier with the idea of Chippy sleeping without being watched over every minute, for the miracle of his breath or her missing his fragrant essence. She took longer getting to know the people who’d come in, the husband and wife, Don and Jinx. The tide was full and Te Ata trembled at her pile mooring like a narrow green leaf. The name meant ‘morning light’ in Maori. The couple who owned her, Don Fawkner and Jinx Behr, had sailed with one daughter to Tahiti to confront the testing and returned with two daughters, the second born in Tonga. Just the two of them ran the ship but needed a crew member. With a feeling of possessive envy Judy layered her thoughts onto a vision of Te Ata involving her and Wes somehow.
Jinx, a doctor, had delivered her own babies with the courage of an Amazon and the delicacy of a pixie in a concrete blockhouse on a coral atoll, attended by a barely trained nurse’s aide. Don was there for her, Jinx said, without fail. Now they were getting Te Ata ready for a season in Antarctica by way of South America. Te Ata rang and jangled with metallic harmonies and crashing rattles around the hillsides. A generator hummed all the time. Hammer blows echoed through the steel hull, out from the steel rod rigging, down into the steel anchors of Don’s invention, patent applied for and in discussion with Dick, as to tensile steel, as strong as Bisalloy, with lengths of anchor chain forged to high standards on Italian machinery.
Don and Jinx’s assignment in life was counting seabirds, conveying mountaineers to peaks in the Chilean fiords and seeking evidence of human depredation in out-of-the-way places on a shrinking planet. If they heard of a cargo ship carrying nuclear fuel they would drop everything for sure, follow it and report where it was to the world. They were otherwise just another family looking up friends.
They had a haven that caught Judy’s imagination when she learned of it and that would not let go of her. It was a walled house in Mexico City with a courtyard and a fountain, Jinx told Judy, owned by her Chicago family where they and campaigning friends gathered for R&R from points south. Just that word ‘fountain’ did it for Judy. She told Jinx about her life growing up and the refrigerated tap poking from a slab wall at Blindale. Don and Jinx had been married next to the fountain under a flowering honey locust tree in that courtyard. Judy said her life flowed out from hers.
Like the girl rouseabouts Judy had seen with their babies suspended in the rafters, Jinx had various tricks to allow her to take a baby and a toddler with her on board – toys, rain gear, safety harnesses, suspended bouncinettes, an educational library and secret treats and birthday packages hidden in secret places for adults and children, plus what Jinx being a doctor could provide, a medical kit covering every eventuality.
Simply, what could be done was done by certain people, an amazed Judy reflected, and knew that although she might not be one of these astonishing people she wanted to be one, and felt her heart expand to where she thought how this might be her life in some sort of arrangement of events or dimension of time and circumstance on a yacht like Te Ata, when she was ready, if she ever would be ready, with Wes playing Don, Judy playing Jinx, and Chippy wearing a safety harness in heavy weather.
Judy leaned back and drew Chippy to her knee, wrapped a blue bunny blanket around him and tipped out a breast around the same size as he was, with a nipple like a sandwich plate floating on a cloud. He clamped onto her.
Her new friend Jinx peered through the window onto a scene of touching domestic bliss lit by a fluorescent battery lamp. Jinx tapped on the window and came in, carrying her baby and her crochet work. When Chippy had teeth Judy would have to careful, Jinx warned, as Chippy was a little tiger for feeding himself up. Despite all the help and having Chippy lifted from her arms by Georgy and his girlfriend, there was, left over in Judy’s day, an immense amount of work – cleaning up sick, organising nappy washes and preparing for the night and morning demands. But she was equal to it. Jinx could see that. It was Jinx who first said that a woman crew member with a baby was a possibility over a man or a woman crew member without a baby in those long ocean passage routines so different from coastal cruising. One woman down below with the children relieved by a woman coming down below off-watch with the capability to carry on doing so. Putting this concept to Don, he said, ‘Absolutely not!’
But men pulled in women to sail with them all the time and life itself, including his own, provided the counterargument to Don. Look how Judy had started. And of the better-known facts about Don when he started sailing was the teenage exploit when he’d sailed eight hundred nautical miles to the sub-Antarctic in a trailer-sailer with the help of a teenage girl he’d secured with a crew-wanted poster on the Akaroa Yacht Club noticeboard. She’d proved a winner, a spirited precursor of Jinx, pluck winning over any question of which sex, broadly speaking, had the edge on the other. Jinx said Judy had a streak of her in her, and Don narrowed his gaze at Judy and had to agree.
After Chippy finished his butting needs Judy put him to bed, listened to him softly snorting, made herself a pot of tea and wrote her weekly lettercard to Tony Watson. Work was underway winkling out Wes on a wide front. The grapevine mentioned horses – Wes was thought to be in the Northern Territory or WA shooting horses. This had come through Warwick Mickless to Tony Watson and on to Judy. She shot it back to Tony like a dart. The worst Judy thought of Wes, or could imagine thinking of him, went a long way, she wrote to Tony, but it would never go as far as to imagine that he could ever shoot horses. It just made her feel sick, and looking the other way in her mind she was already among the icebergs, with Chippy’s little face haloed in a seal-fur cap and in imagination Wes sailing towards her from the other side of the world.
Her last thought before dropping off to sleep was that when Wes heard what she was thinking he would be astonished.
They were scrawny animals on the edge of starvation, ribs showing and hooves too big through the disproportionate skinniness of the animals stalking above them. Manes and tails were matted with thorns from shouldering through spiny thickets. Abandoned stations were their mecca. They died in their dozens bogged in springs or were caught up in the barbed wire of old fence corners and died there, herded by panic, musterers driving them in, or thirst, or mob despair. They blundered into empty homesteads and died in the bedrooms. Across saltpans they were skeletons with hide. Once they had roved the inland usefully, or their progenitors had, ridden by Aboriginal stockmen easy in the saddle. There were reasons for shooting them relating to degradation of land, disruption to native species, clogging of springs that had run clean for tens of thousands of years. But the main reason in Wes Bannister’s mind for shooting them was pity. At the bitter end of his compassion were twin irreconcilable forces marking the limits of life. Bring back to life the d
ead or snuff pitiful life out. Take hold of life somehow in both acts. Span the holy interval. He hated the work though.
Bill Rathbone’s heavy weapon rested across his lap where he leaned, held by a harness, a shooter half-dangling from a Robinson helicopter carving figures of eight at a couple hundred feet altitude while a mob of horses bolted under the skids, manes and tails streaming.
Spent cartridges collected in a tin so they would not fly out and smack the tail rotor. Bill placed three shots in each burst – one behind, one central and one ahead of each bolting brumby selected. Aiming like that, he rarely missed a moving target.
To locate Wes doing his ground jobs the chopper pilot looked for a dead horse or a line of dead horses and a set of heavy-duty wheel tracks leading away to the next campsite or fuel depot waiting point. Anyone else trying to find Bannister, such as a determined Baptist in pursuit, would have to go out past Victoria River Downs towards the WA border and then south of that line a few hundred miles and go west again. Wes might not even by now answer to his given name. Bill called him Skipper. The person Wes had fought into being through his troubled years shrank to a nobody. He was a spiritual entity.
Dry salt lakes and spinifex plains were cut by red sandhills and rocky outcrops worn away by time. Desert oaks moaned in the night breezes. Stars you could read by, almost, were smashed glass lanterns driven over by God’s rampaging bulldozers and crushed to quartzite glitter. After the day’s work when others in the camp were sitting around yarning, sucking on beers or playing their guitars or, in Bill Rathbone’s case, listening to his boom box, thrum thrum, it drove Wes mad. Wes circled around collecting sticks for the fire, restless, always on the move. Heading for somewhere to repair the broken circle required concentrating.
‘Sit down. Put your feet up. Have a beer. Relax your brains. You’re a pain in the arse, Skipper,’ said Bill. They were headed for a mateship divorce, of which there had been any number in Bill’s life, never irreconcilable though. Regularly upon his cyclic return, the people Bill Rathbone fell out with greeted him like a long-lost brother. Maybe Skipper one day would too. But he was a hard case, remember.
Next thing Bill knew after dark Wes was taking over from the cook, scouring pots and pans, and playing no-speaks to the cook after baiting him into conversation. When it came to mapping out the next day’s movements it was like him to come on strong. It did not matter too much if he was on one track or the other, Bill pointed out, the country was mazed with tracks. Go by once and leave your mark forever in a country empty of humans for years at a time. It was like being on Mars being in outback Australia, except it was alive and beautiful. As long as Bannister positioned the fuel truck where the chopper pilot and Bill could spot him from the air, a chopper thirsty for refuelling could land. Bannister always wanted to establish a reference point down to an exact position even though the maps they used were decades, if not a century, out of date or did not exist at all. Annoying. Very annoying to be sure.
Bill shot camels too but Wes did not like camels being shot. He was not that much of a conservationist. Ships of the desert cast adrift, symbols of endurance, they had expressive lips and emotional nostrils, big eyes that seemed to wonder something immeasurable.
At night Wes could hear the bull camels roaring for their females along the beds of dried watercourses. They padded up, looming taller than poplars above the men on the ground lying in their swags. Bill Rathbone was Lee Van Cleef with narrowing eyes and stealthy half-smiling movements, drawing his Winchester .44-40 from its canvas sheath and letting go, blam. A great shape fell, followed by the thundering softness of the mob loping off and the men sitting up, bolt awake swearing. ‘Fuck you, Rathbone.’
It was arranged that the other outfit, their rival, W. M. Contract Musterers, would fly over for a shared resource of fuel if they chased too far away from their camp and ran short. Wes was asked to have a half-dozen twenty-litre jerry cans of avgas ready to load into the rival chopper if that happened. He got them ready. Around mid-morning he could hear their craft thwacking its blades away over on a distant claypan, and Bill Rathbone’s rifle shots popping out. He looked up and a second helicopter speedy as a swallow wafted over a sand ridge, circled low and landed.
Wes pulled his hat down over his eyebrows and crouched in at a staggering run with a jerry can dragged along in each hand. The blades of the chopper swiped as he hefted the containers into the doorless cargo space, just a floor of scuffed ply with metal attachment points, and went back for more. The pilot stayed at the controls while his offsider helped Wes load. When the containers were aboard and lashed down, the pilot, Warwick Mickless, looked around, looked at Wes and wondered if he could be the one Tones Watson meant was the one to look out for – Judy Compton’s bloke Bannister.
First boyfriends such as Wocka in relation to formative girlfriends such as Judy always had a flame going. It never went out. A lifelong suspicion of anyone involved with them stung them at the back of their nuts. The perfection of something Warwick never wanted to disturb by turning back time glowed back in there. It was not real and he knew it. But so what. Apparently Bannister had put Judy up the duff subsequently and shot through. Warwick’s recent marriage to a Hong Kong woman did not exclude the staying power of the primal encounter he had with Judy Compton, back when they rooted up against a tankstand and Tony Watson kept watch.
Since being alerted by Tones to keep an eye out for the runaway, Warwick had misidentified a few drifters. It went with the territory or make that the Territory, where looking for someone who possibly didn’t want to be found was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Warwick took off, as chopper pilots did, on the instant leaving everything behind, never tiring of the tilting away feeling of earth dropping from under the foot controls, and flew back to the other end of a station property that was, approximately, the size of Belgium and Holland combined.
In the movement of air swirling back from that take-off, the stink of dead animals hit Wes from across a gully where weeks before a mob of brumbies had been shot. He thought about Judy’s first love with Wocka with numb emotion. She always called it her gold standard, leaving Wes more than a bit stung. A few days later Wes heard that the two operations were to be amalgamated – the company he worked for and Warwick Mickless’s concern – so he caught a lift across to a different operation and took on another sort of job al together miles away before he could be shamed. Bill Rathbone shrugged. Time to head through Singapore, Tokyo and San Francisco to Wyoming, where a portable shearing unit was towed around by a prime mover and the Mexican cook did wonders on an open fire in a blizzard as Bill shore what were, comparatively speaking, goats.
Soon after Wes left the shooters’ camp Warwick Mickless flew over to meet his new lot of employees after the amalgamation. As men talked around the cookfire the roiling sun slid down the afternoon sky, making him itchy to be airborne a good hour before dark. He asked after the runaway, could he be the one they called Skipper?
Bill Rathbone thought the description fitted to the extent that Wocka said the bloke was a scrawny chicken of an individual.
‘That fits the picture I’m given,’ said Wocka, ‘gets a woman in the family way so it’s time to move on.’
‘But our Skipper is not a father,’ said Bill.
‘What if he doesn’t know?’ said Wocka.
‘If every bloke had his story looked into as a result of some woman wanting a cut of him,’ said Bill, ‘where’s the labour out this far back up the arsehole of nowhere to come from?’
Warwick Mickless affably agreed, looking around at the bunch of men he had just signed on. It was hard not to. He wouldn’t push it. If you subtracted runaways from the total of workers available you would have no worthwhile workforce left across the whole of a country. But take away one and please a friend. Why not? When he got back to his depot on last light Warwick bit the end of a pencil and did what he hated doing, putting words to paper, so kept it crisp: ‘ToNes I founNd him, still LooKing to froNnt him but.’
As he sealed the envelope he damned the insistent capitals that flew into his sentences no matter what discipline he applied to keep them out. They were a hurdle he overcame by action, achieving his licence endorsements to inter national standards, doing his written tests in block letters large and small. Spinning a mess of whirling hoop iron through calm and storm, dust and semi-darkness with thumb and fore-finger, his brain was a gyroscope with an ability to hold spherical balance at whatever angle of tilt the world came at him. Whether it was a Eurocopter hardly bigger than a dragonfly or a Bell Jet Ranger with twin turbines noisy as a power station, it made no difference. In a plexiglas bubble he flew along ridgelines past Albert Namatjira clifflines released from gravity with a feeling he had since birth, an easy rocking-along motion a bit like cantering a pony that lulled other thoughts and expressed who he was.
A thousand miles away from the musterers Wes stretched out and looked up at the night sky with Judy’s tranny to his ear. Yes, it was no fun being alone. Yet alone offered settled companionship. Alone you chose who you hung out with and avoided people who talked at length without making too much sense. His cards to his family were sent without return addresses still. They sent his thoughts removed from his body. That was as spiritual as it got. The sound of wind was prayer in the desert oaks at night, a mental connection to nature. It lulled him to sleep. He thanked his father for praying for him in those letters. He asked his father, if spirit was not eternal did it still count? The answer the Rev. was unable to post back was emphatically yes. As a boy Wes explored the caves and overhangs across the harbour, reaching them by dinghy. Gone bush like he was now had the feeling of getting back to that, making a new start. He had wrecked the Rattler with the finality of an obliterater. Judy had cut him out of her life with an anger that gutted him. So let her have what she asked for. No more hand on the tiller of a yacht unless it was his hand alone with his back to her. His dusty cheeks were creased with tears if only she could see it.
A Sea-Chase Page 18
