by Trent Dalton
The Darwin dream has a smell and it smells like the maggots eating all those discarded crab claws. It smells like all the cut ends of vegetables left to rot in Chinatown bins that dingoes and lost dogs tip over after dark. Darwin dreams in drink and sweat. Warm beer and toil. Fat-bellied fist fighters and men who piss in buckets beneath their bar stools. Empty car bodies left abandoned in the streets outside town by empty men who shot themselves dead inside them. It’s frontier territory where nothing stays nailed down. America’s Wild West all the way down here in Australia’s wild north. Some came by boat and some just emerged from the dust; they crawled out of the dirt and dusted off their shoulders and staggered into the Victoria Hotel on Smith Street for three shots of black rum then a glass of water. Darwin dreams in dinner dances and woodchopping contests and travelling freak show tents where Sydney wolf boys and Melbourne pig girls reel in horror at the ticket-buying Darwin locals staring at them through the glass.
Van Diemen Gulf and Snake Bay to the north. South Alligator River to the east, the Rum Jungle to the south. And beyond it all, the vast ancient wetlands and wilderness of Molly Hook’s wild dreams, the prehistoric stone and vine country. The deep country. Suffocating monsoon forests and tidal flats and jagged plateaus and rock formations that tower over the city buildings of the London and New York and Paris in Molly’s head.
Giant tree rats just on the outskirts of town. Killer snakes beneath your bed. Killer spiders crawling up your trouser legs. Here are Japanese pearling crews tying down rickety luggers in Darwin Harbour. Here are Christian missionaries instructing Aboriginal servants, whose families once sang on the land where they now dust down church pews. Drunk and wealthy cattlemen and their mistresses skinny-dipping in the voluminous water tanks of the abandoned Vestey’s meatworks at Bullocky Point. Sunburnt stockmen clocked off and rolling dice in a Mitchell Street gambling hall. There are hardly any cars on the street: most everybody walks or rides bicycles in the Darwin dream.
A fat and drunk man sleeps on the toilet seat of a hot tin earth closet on a corner of Knuckey Street. Molly blocks her nostrils with her forefinger and thumb as she passes. The man’s ‘long drop’ waste will sit for days before being mercifully burned. There’s the state school bus that’s been parked on Peel Street for the past month, a rusting semitrailer with a long rear tray. On the days when her father bothers to send her to school, Molly and her mates sit beneath a mesh cage, their arse bones bouncing hard on the metal tray at every pothole on the road to Darwin Primary.
Molly ambles barefoot into Chinatown. Half a century ago, the Chinese outnumbered the Europeans here four to one. Horace Hook told his daughter once that the Orientals – the ‘Celestials’ – called Australia ‘The New Gold Mountain’, while California was the ‘The Old Gold Mountain’. Then the new gold finds got old, too, and half the Chinese left. The other half stayed to keep breaking their backs for five shillings a day building the railway line from Port Darwin to the goldfields of Pine Creek. ‘Then when the railway line was finished,’ Horace said, ‘when there was no more hard labour to be done by the Chinese, the government told ’em they best not lob in here no more.’ Horace considered that for a moment. ‘Nice bastards, eh.’
Molly nods to an old Chinese woman selling green mangoes from a table at the side of the wide yellow dirt road of Cavenagh Street. She passes a Chinese tailor, a Chinese fruit market, a stonemason’s workshop. Four Chinese fishermen walk alongside a thin and hungry brown horse pulling a cart filled with a day’s haul of trap-caught fish off Fannie Bay. Another old woman in front of a vegetable market stirs a pot of seafood soup. A Chinese boy by her side wears a white long-sleeved shirt and white pants. His hair is tied by a band in the centre of his scalp and it sprouts from his head the way a bunch of celery rises from dirt. His top button is done up so tight his neck fat spills over his collar. He blows on a red paper windmill spinning on the end of a bamboo stick.
Corrugated-iron sheds of blue-grey and rust and Chinese characters on the subtlest signage lining entryways to stores and workshops. Families of fourteen share ramshackle two-storey dwellings made of scavenged materials – old car bonnets and flattened and nailed kerosene tins turned into walls – while the wealthy whites who frequent these markets and stalls live in raised houses where they sip gin on wide, latticed verandas and the air blows against wet kerchiefs around their necks.
Molly sees old Chinese men with hollowed cheeks and white chin hairs finger-shaped so that their beards look like white flames when they blow in the Darwin breeze. One, who has only a bottom row of teeth, rests his backside on a wash bucket as he nails a heel back on to his right black slipper, a smoking pipe gripped in his left fist.
Molly stops briefly outside her favourite store, Fang Cheong Loong’s rambling giftware and clothing shop filled with Chinese dolls and red and blue and green cheongsams and camphor-wood boxes carved with the outlines of dragons and emperors and Chinese princesses. She walks past the Crown Bakery and Suns Inc. Tailors to the two-storey, white-walled bloodhouse of Gordon’s Don Hotel. She creeps up to the sprawling pub’s swinging entry doors and sneaks a look inside, eyes drawn straight to the bar just as two stockmen in shorts fall down arm in arm singing a song about Ireland. They roll into the stool-bound legs of Horace and Aubrey Hook, and it’s Molly’s uncle who kicks the Irish beer swillers away with a push of his right boot while keeping a firm grip on a foggy glass of brown spirit. Horace Hook, as if by instinct, turns his slow-moving neck and his bloodshot eyes to the swinging entry doors. He’s all shadow and he’s too dark and drunk to know if it’s his only daughter standing beyond those swinging doors or if, in fact, it’s the ghost of Lisbeth Fleming and she’s come to collect what rightfully belongs to her – Horace Hook’s grey-coloured heart and the pitch-black soul of his older brother, Aubrey.
Molly rushes backwards from the swinging doors into bustling Cavenagh Street, bumping into a young Chinese woman carrying a tray of purple plums that nearly spill. ‘Sorry,’ Molly says. And she runs now because night is here and she needs to go home. She needs to find the red tin thimble. It has to be there. It has to be there. And the few street lights of Cavenagh Street flash on, and Molly runs past A.E. Jolly’s store and Cashman’s Newsagency and the Bank of New South Wales and the town post office where not a single letter has ever arrived with the name ‘Molly Hook’ on its envelope. Run, Molly, run. Dig, Molly, dig. Heart pounding. Dirt roads beneath her feet. Speed. Motion. Destiny. But, wait, there’s a face she knows on her left. Stop right here on the spot because it’s him, it’s Tyrone Power in the flesh, by way of Mataranka, south of Katherine, right here on Smith Street, Darwin.
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 sta
re 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 speedcocks 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 tip 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 m
inesweepers, 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.
