‘No, thanks.’
At Talarook four people get on the train. I look up and see dark eyes from my culpable driving sentence. They glow at me for a second from the passage before my scowl shuts them down. It’s Andrew Povey, grown an appropriate moustache. He often nearly forgets my contempt for him these days when I see him on the trains. I did two years in Barwon with him, but that’s all we share. I don’t even nod. He knows why I’m riding. I know why he’s riding. It’s business. He sees the young soldier. Slides the door.
‘Mind if I join you people?’ I do, but I say nothing.
Povey is what’s called a poof-rorter. That is, he seduces men still in the closet and then threatens to take them public unless they pay him hush-money. But in the years he’s been inside the homos have swelled up into a gay respectability that’s impossible to blackmail. So he’s hunting hard. Spending all his time trekking into northern Victoria, one of the last known habitats of the underground gay.
I wonder how far back-woods you have to go to make a buck as a poof-rorter these days. He’s carrying a mighty big suitcase.
He hoists it onto the luggage rack, leaning into the young soldier’s face as he does. It’s terrible to watch him work. He’s got a red poppy in his lapel. Baited for the Puckapunyal line. Happy that soldiers are still in the closet. He starts a conversation with the young soldier who’s been staring at him reflected in the window.
Like me, Povey’s wearing long sleeves buttoned at the wrists. I remember the smell of his burning skin, on remand in ’85, as he stubbed the glowing Marlboros into his forearms again and again. Me asking, ‘What in the name of fuck are you doing?’
‘Making myself some Evil-Stepfather scars,’ he explained through teeth. ‘They’ll earn you twenty-thirty per cent remission on a sentence if they’re done right, and they come with a good enough story.’
I was disgusted. Held him in contempt. Resisted Evil-Stepfather scars for another two sentences.
It can’t even be said he comes from a dysfunctional family. Though he knows the value of that line.
Margie will have overtaken the train by now. Probably parking at the Seymour station. Just time for a coffee and a flash of thigh at the station master before I arrive with the bag. At one time I would have punched a station master out for accepting that flash of thigh. Now I wink along.
We still love each other. But I love the her of the late eighties and she loves the pre-prison me. She loves the me I try to be when I’ve had a health scare. I love the her she denies she ever was. We often flare at each other for not being one half of that cool couple. And after a half city block of Happy Hours the nineties her has been known to take a wild swing at the post-prison me, who ducks, moves inside and uppercuts her into a wide-limbed splash onto the footpath. But on the footpath it’s always the late-eighties her. And standing over her is the pre-prison me, choked up and slowly shaking my head.
To be rehabilitated a felon must believe those trying to help know more about life than he does. Ford is too intellectually vain to believe this. He believes the opposite. He is trapped by his intelligence and his vanity. I don’t live in hope.
The hill with the red-flashing radio tower that is my cue to get ready for the Seymour drop edges past the window frame. I go down the corridor to the toilet and lock the door. I sit down. Carefully, with the blurred circle of road-metal and sleeper between my legs, I tear the Seymour bag off my stomach. I wrap it in a disposable nappy and put the nappy in a Myer bag and tie the top. I flatten the Shepparton bag back on my stomach, tuck myself in and return to my seat.
The old girl sees the Myer bag I’m carrying and tells me young people have no patience. I should wait till after Christmas for the sales, like she does.
‘I’ve got too much money to bother with the door-buster crush of the Myer sale,’ I tell her. She winces at my smile.
On the outskirts of Seymour a steward pushes a drinks trolley up to our door. It’s laden with trays of those thumb-sized bottles the airlines hand out. Chinking and chirping against each other about the fast-shivering country underneath, sounding like a hundred hopped-up finches.
‘Anyone care for a refreshment?’ he wants to know. No one cares except me, who asks for a double Jack on the rocks. As the steward is unscrewing the caps the chirping quells, like the sun is setting and those hundred finches are roosting, tucking their little heads out of sight under their wings. The train is braking onto the Seymour platform.
The soldiers rise to go. Povey heaves down his suitcase and starts to follow, talking to the young soldier about ceremonies. I’m stuck paying the steward, so I take a chance on Povey.
‘Would you mind putting this in the bin for me, mate?’ I ask. I point definitely to a yellow rubbish bin in a stand on the platform. Some kid has sprayed ‘TUBBY’ round its top. Povey knows what’s going on. But I haven’t interfered with him and his soldier, so he’s happy to make the drop for me.
‘Tubby,’ I say He nods and takes the bag. I give the steward a twenty and he digs for change. I sit at the window and watch Povey and the two soldiers cross the platform, him flipping the bag into the bin as they pass.
Margie is lounging against red brick and a Coca-Cola scene. A black wonder-bra under a see-through summer dress. Her body glowing beneath a bed of transparent perennials. Her idea of inconspicuous. Even the time-pressed lechers off the train miss nothing. She has one leg raised, the foot resting up against the wall behind her, thigh showing idle tan. She’s grinding Log Cabin between her palms. A roily paper butterfly-mad on her bottom lip.
Suddenly, the platform speakers are loud with bugle. Long, mournful blasts. I see by the station clock it’s eleven a.m. People everywhere stop their conversations and lower their heads and stand still. I watch the hush fall.
No one moves. We’re remembering war dead. All of us but Bob Noonan, who is leaning on the scales at the platform gate eyeing the frozen crowd. Bob is a vice squad detective with a string of nearly-wrongful-arrests in his past. Me being three of them. He is watching over the bin called ‘Tubby’, waiting for someone to step out of anonymity and make the pick-up. Povey already has a man too old to be wearing Nikes, but wearing them anyway, standing close behind him.
I have to yell to Margie. I have to warn her of the looming bust. I can do it without implicating myself. I can shout something that will ring bizarre across this still platform with only Margie understanding danger looms and everyone else thinking me heretic mad. I run a few choices through my head. ‘Seymour’s a graveyard for cowboys’ being my favourite. With that mysterious shout I could save her.
But we’re stranded in minutes of important silence. Because there’s my reverence for what the diggers did at Lone Pine. There’s what the old bloke opposite me boasts of on the Kokoda Trail. There’s my pride in how Napper avenged his monkey. And there’s the way Margie kissed Jim Legoe through two verses, tongue-to-palate deep in front of me as the purer of us brought in the New Year of ’87 with an unruly Auld Lang Syne.
This is a silence that magnifies my heartbeat and memory. A stillness that magnifies the waving of that Tally-Ho paper on her lip. Lest we forget, baby. Lest we do.
It’s a man-made sparrow’s-fart as the engine driver leans on the power of the locomotive and gets the platform sliding back behind us and the hundred finches in the drinks trolley wake and start to chirp again. It’s dawn.
We’ve slid off the end of the platform and I have my head out the window looking back when a bugle I can’t hear thaws the crowd into its future. I see Margie start her saunter for the bin. For the half-kilo that translates into four years with good behaviour. Margie, too naked and vain to wear the Evil-Stepfather scars that would shorten her stay. I hope, baby, they have some modern facility for you. Something a mover like you can be still in. Some enlightened institution with a sun-frock uniform and chromed appliances. And a spa. And soap operas always running, dulling you out, taking the pain from your stillness.
Bob Noonan pushes off the scales.
The train is up to hum. Inside our compartment the old lady is waggling a vacuum flask at her husband. The steward hands me my change and pushes the trolley away towards Shepparton.
I’m unemployed, riding north. The classic Australian arse-out-of-your-pants odyssey. Me making it again. Riding through gauge changes and dead stations and watching the country creep tropical. Riding until I’m under palm trees and I can almost hear those billion Asians in their creaky boats just off the coast. Lying my low under phenomenal skies.
JUST ANOTHER FUCKING MYSTERY AT SEA
A FLEET of cray boats is idling a mile off shore. There’s anger and hate out there. They’re pulled up close to each other with the crayfishermen shouting across the water about the fact of no crayfish. They’re running their diesels in neutral with dabs of Forward and Reverse keeping them stationary. Shouting accusations.
It’s the sewage outlet.
No. Shit never hurt crustaceans. It’s the fucking refinery.
The refinery’s too far away. It’s not the refinery. The refinery’s been there for twenty years.
It’s the fucking Vietnamese. I seen a whole mini-bus of them up on Cathedral Rock the other day. Filming me while I set pots.
They’ve been into the abalone for years. Looks like they’re branching out.
The fucking Vietnamese.
It’s true. In the following weeks plenty more Vietnamese are seen around Lorne. Some walking the beaches and scouring the rock pools, with their black patent leather shoes hugged to their chests and their perfectly ironed slacks rolled knee-high. All of them videoing out toward the craypots. Getting a record of where they’re set so they can find them at night. Their women are in on it, too. Brazen and laughing like it’s a walk in the park. A holiday.
It is for most of them. Two weeks annual leave. The Heavenly-Fortnight-Honeymoon package to Australia from Tokyo and from Kyoto. Those sort of Vietnamese. Vietnamese in a disc of binocular vision.
But no one can prove it’s not the Fucking Vietnamese. Just like no one could prove it wasn’t the Fucking Greeks when the crayfish disappeared thirty years ago and it wasn’t them. And the Fucking Vietnamese are the only new factor here to explain this crayfish drought. It’s known they’ve been rampant abalone poachers for years. And now they’re here where there’s no abalone. Crayfishermen from Barwon Heads to Apollo Bay stow rifles in their wheelhouses.
So in March, with the Fucking Vietnamese causing all this trouble, we get a battle at sea. Gun shots of various pitches come in off the water like a freak storm. Fast electric crackle and pop.
What has happened is this. Eight retrenched BHP workers are out on the water in the new Shark Cat they bought with their lump sum super payouts. They’re out there because the Pilbara iron-ore body they’ve dug with huge machinery all their employed lives has been turned into cars that are now hunkered low on flat tyres rusting into shit-boxes worldwide. The iron has petered out to low-grade and been called unprofitable. The mine is closed and the town is undone. Unbecome. Its residents are superannuated.
These eight men promised themselves they’d replace their working lives with fishing and that’s what they’re attempting. They’ve flown to Williamstown in Victoria to take possession of a Shark Cat built in the shipyards there. They’re riding it back to Western Australia. Fishing all the way. Three days out from Williamstown they’re anchored off Lorne.
The new Shark Cat is called Hannah, which is what the iron town was called. It’s fitted with twin Johnson MaxCascade inboards and can outrun anything that boils up off the horizon. They’re drinking beer out of hundred litre eskies and threading pilchards onto double-barb hooks. The boat is bristling with new graphite rods. Rods that taper fast and carry heavy line so big men can lean back on them fierce and dramatic when they get a strike. They’re black and shiny and as exciting as weapons. If you’re a fish they are weapons.
It’s a beautiful afternoon. The whole western run of sea is hostile chrome with sun. The men are sunglassed against it. But behind their sunglasses their eyes are dull. They’re fishing in the depths of Superannuation. Have just found out it’s not like fishing in the waters of Annual Leave.
The deck is strewn with fish. Alive and dead. The men not even bothering to put them on ice now. Trevally, kingfish, bream, snapper, tailor, Spaniards and flathead. Every now and then erupting in moves that once had them cutting water but now leave them staccato-slapping fibreglass and fallen back gaping at hostile atmosphere. Scales are plastered on every piece of new equipment.
Some of these fish are long and thin with silver skin. Some are round and pink, huge-scaled and big-eyed from the deep. Some are hard and spiky as crayfish. A few are crayfish, hauled out of the commercial pots set off Cathedral Rock. But to the ex-BHP men all these fish look the same. What they see every time someone pulls some outrageous tack of marine evolution on board is the same dull green carp-shaped fish. Just Another Fucking Fish. The sea has flattened out to boring. It surrounds them thirty years wide instead of the usual four weeks in fifty-two.
Ora’s reel squeals. His Jarvis Walker Thunder Stick points deep at the culprit. He unplugs it from its holder and stops the run of line by laying a hand over the reel. He leans back hard enough for the shiny black of the Thunder Stick to go dull grey with strain half way down its length. The fish turns. He doesn’t whoop or yeehah or swear or give any sort of Maori hallelujah. He reels it in slowly. He’s still holding a stubby in the hand that’s winding the fish up through the fathoms.
It explodes into the air on the west side of the boat spreading molten silver wide before the sun. Ora hangs it out over the water. That uninterested in its fate.
It’s a long silhouette of frenzy. Then hang-spin. Frenzy then hang-spin, frenzy then hang-spin. Up against the sun. It’s a five-kilo Australian salmon. Long and silver as something NASA made in the sixties for the religious task of proving communism wrong. Beautiful.
What Ora sees is a dull green carp-shaped species. The damn things in plague proportions here. He suspects there might be a salmon there. He may even catch a flash of silver. But it turns back into Just Another Fucking Fish before he can be sure. Fat, green, slimy and inedible. He’s forty and damned if he knows what’s going to get him to seventy. Fish were supposed to do it. Fish were supposed to keep him excited all the years until his death. But maybe it’s a burden too heavy for fish.
He unhooks his new catch flopping onto the deck.
Then, out of the blinding westward chrome looms a diesel thud and a low ugly ride of commercial fishing boat. The men on the Hannah all call greetings. Unanswered. The diesel motor dies about two boat lengths away and the heavy boat drifts in and slams her prow into the brand new Shark Cat. The eight men on the Hannah step sharp-west once for balance and shout ‘Shits’ and ‘Christs’ and ‘What The Fucks’.
There are three crayfishermen on the commercial boat. All of them are holding rifles. The captain, who is the boat’s owner and the holder of the cray licence, steps up to the bow and looks across at the men in the Hannah and at their knee-deep-in-sea-life situation. He looks all around at the sea, pouting his lips and nodding.
‘You brazen little fucks are out in broad daylight now,’ he shouts. Ora looks across at Merrill, the other Maori aboard the Hannah. They stare at each other. No one’s called them ‘little fucks’ since they were five. Ever since then they’ve been called ‘overgrown fucks’.
‘Just out for a bit of sport, I’m guessing. Recreational. Eh? Little fucks,’ he shouts.
He calls them ‘brazen little fucks’ and calls them ‘little fucks’ because when he looks into the Hannah he sees Vietnamese. So do his two crew. There are two Maoris, three Scots and three drunks descended from English stock on board the Hannah. But crayfish thieves around here now are Vietnamese. Common knowledge. So the crayfishermen are hunting Vietnamese. And when they see crayfish on the deck of the Hannah her crew shrink and yellow and their hair blacks and their eyes narrow.
‘I reckoned y
ou’d get around to this daylight shit,’ shouts the crayboat captain. ‘I reckoned those slanty eyes of yours’d struggle at night work.’ The rifle in his hands has a huge scope on it. Ends as wide as tea-saucers. It gathers light so well it would blind you to look through it during the day. He bought it to hunt nocturnal Vietnamese.
‘What the fuck do you blokes want,’ asks a Scot called Cam.
‘Blokes?’ says the crayboat captain, surprised, like it’s not a word for Vietnamese to be using. For a minute he suspects there might be someone white there on the Hannah’s aft deck. He may even catch a glimpse of red hair. But it blackens again when he sees a seven kilo eight-year-old male backed up against an esky hissing and claw-rampant to keep the slippery tide of fish at bay.
He hasn’t seen a crayfish that big since ’75, when the Department of Fisheries extended the grounds into virgin reefs ten miles off shore and he and his father motored out there and snapped up their share of the pre-white lunkers that were growing into movie props. They were all gone by ’77. He points at it with his rifle. ‘What’s that?’ he asks, hearing in his head the low whistle his father would always give when he hauled a cray that big.
No one answers. They wonder can’t he see what it is?
‘Fuck’s that?’ he asks again.
‘That,’ says the Scot called Cam, his voice sad with the mystery, ‘is just another fucking fish.’
The crayfisherman is outraged. The thing he’s spent his whole life hunting, the thing that’s the centre of all his knowledge and craft, the thing that’s kept him alive and afloat and a free man all these years has been called ‘just another fucking fish’. He shakes his head wide and slow and poignant like the men on that boat aren’t only blind to sea-life-variety but they’re blind to white morals as well, and here, here is something to shake your head slow about and look to your crew about and say a disgusted ‘Fuck’ about while they slow-shake their heads and say their ‘Fuck’ of agreement back at you.
Nice Shootin' Cowboy Page 7
