Nice Shootin' Cowboy

by Anson Cameron

  We climb down and hands-on-hips admire what we’ve got. What we’ve got is the Snow-Mountain-Feature that Kevin promised the Shire would convince the city types in their go-anywhere machines that, here they are, anywhere. So they can now stop and drink our coffee and buy our petrol and our ugg boots and our pottery and our Snowy River apparel and our high-country sculptures and the other craft of our town.

  Us, the snow-flecked Gateway to the ski-fields. Even with the town above us having their own snow that falls right on them and makes them think they are The Gateway and The Jewel of the winter wonderland. Kevin saying the Gateway title belongs to the lowest altitude town prepared to put on a severe winter face. So. Us, The Gateway.

  It’s a five-metre high wonder of pure white in its lawn and mud surround.

  From the Bedford we take the Fugitive-Tracker Quartz Hallogen spotlight Kevin bought from the trading page in the Police Monthly. Him wanting to rig its whiter-than-day boast to his chimney so he could shoot wild dogs off his sheep at night without ever leaving the comfort of whichever room he was rushing into to shoot from. Only his marksmanship failing somewhere well inside the radius of illumination. And the dogs twigging to the small radius of marksmanship inside the much wider arc of illumination and using this unshot illuminated area to bring down dazzled fugitive ewes.

  So Kevin is now keen to bill the Fugitive Tracker to the Shire. We tape it up along a branch of the gum on an extension from the convenience block. Hanging right over the Snow-Mountain-Feature. We include a timer, set for dusk. So with sundown the Fugitive-Tracker will light up the Snow Mountain Feature and bedazzle the late-leaving-the-city types, the brokers-of-stoke, the finessers-of-law, the drillers-of-molars, the ledgers-of-ledgers, and other tall-building types that Kevin says are our harvest and our lode.

  The fault in our plan coming about because of Kevin’s beer-shot memory forgetting the brag of the police pilot who sold him the spot that they could hover their copter six foot above a road and melt bitumen with it such was its power.

  Righteous door knocking wakes me and Rufus at three in the morning and rattles us barking and swearing up the passage thinking it’s a drunk friend. It’s not. It’s Terence Kidman, sober in uniform, so just an acquaintance. He says to get dressed and we will take a ride.

  I dress and tell Mary I’m going for a ride with Terence. I don’t tell her he’s in uniform. And he won’t tell me what this ride is about.

  But as we turn into Buller Street I see her. Through reefs of fog. Lit like Madonna. Lying ten feet in the air on a pillar of snow the shape of her body. All of our Snow Mountain Feature not shaded by her having been carved away by the heat off the Fugitive-Tracker. Until she’s lying up there monumental. Precarious. Dead.

  She’s in khaki shorts, a red singlet, a tan and long blonde hair that disappears into the snow. Face down. People are gathered around in coats over winter pyjamas. Late-leaving-the-city types idle past in Range Rovers and Toyotas filled with window-pressed kids.

  ‘Where’d she come from?’ I ask.

  ‘You brung her,’ says Terence Kidman.

  ‘Me bullshit.’

  ‘She was in your snow. We been watching her thaw out of it for about two hours now. Nice tourist attraction you and Kevin organise. Beats hell out of the Big Trout over at Khancoban.’

  He pulls up at the convenience block which is chosen police HQ. Kevin is talking to the police. Nods are all the hello offered. I’m forced to ask something just to show ignorance.

  ‘What do you blokes say? Snake bite? A fall? Exposure?’

  Sergeant Law-Smith points a fat glove at me. ‘Go up close and have a look and come back here,’ he says.

  I duck under a POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape that hangs dripping in the fog. She looks alive. The blonde fur on her thighs is goose-bumped up like she’s cold.

  ‘Describe her,’ Sergeant Law-Smith says.

  ‘She’s tanned. Athletic. Pretty young. She’s facedown so I can’t say if she’s attractive.’

  ‘You got a nude calender at home, Bob?’ he asks.

  ‘No, Sergeant. I got a wife.’

  ‘You got a pile of stick-mags?’

  ‘I got the same wife.’

  ‘When’d you last look at a stick-mag, Bob?’

  I feel my hair. It’s about eight inches in back and six on the sides, meaning it was cut last spring. ‘Ten months ago,’ I answer.

  ‘Skin on those girls is beautiful, isn’t it? It’s all primped and preened and defoliated and moistured and buffed and perfect. Isn’t it?’ Kevin looks smug like he’s a passed veteran of this quiz.

  ‘Even barber-shop dog-eared it’s a wonder to behold,’ I agree.

  ‘Just like that girl’s skin. Blemish free,’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well how could it be that a summer hiker dies up there and gets frozen centrefold perfect? I mean, Bob, did she not have autumn to rot through? And why didn’t wild dogs and etceteras beat the freeze to her?’

  It’s a valid riddle. I eyebrow raise.

  ‘Where did you find her, Bob?’ he asks.

  ‘Well, strictly speaking, we didn’t. We fetched her unfound.’

  He stares.

  ‘Up on track three at the Razor,’ I say.

  He nods.

  ‘That’s a long way for snow, Bob.’

  ‘We wanted it pure.’ And we wanted a labour-free out-of-earshot gelignite load.

  Two constables have set up accident-scene illumination. They turn off Kevin’s Fugitive-Tracker now the taint of burning skin is on the fog.

  ‘You loaded her on without seeing her?’ Sergeant Law-Smith asks.

  ‘We sort of coaxed that load on in one piece.’

  ‘Another whole area, that,’ he says.

  He promises that will be a topic of convo for our ride up to the Razor.

  Kevin reads the local paper out loud. He starts at Sports. Reading fast, leaving out words and changing the lawn bowls results so his mother snorts in disgust and swears and wonders aloud how little, tin-pot Congupna could beat us who were once state finalists. He changes football scores and she slaps the kitchen table and says the young men of this town are just bony little grasshoppers with no muscle or purpose these days. Probably drugs. She stares toward the light of the kitchen window where strong prewar men leap in the glow in her blindness.

  Kevin and me flash eye-laughter between us. Goading his mother with made-up news being our usual morning fun. I get us cups of tea off the wood stove.

  ‘Read on,’ she says. ‘You’ll have work to be getting to.’

  Kevin turns the paper over but doesn’t read.

  ‘Read away.’ She rattles her walking frame.

  ‘ “Long-Standing Ne’r-Do-Wells Find Another Body,” ’ he reads.

  ‘Hell does that mean?’ I ask.

  ‘It means unemployed,’ Kevin says.

  I know what N’er-Do-Well means. And it strikes me they’re forgetting how we fought for and saved Donlevey’s place and his too-young-to-be-left-at-home son in the Christmas fires two years back when Donlevey and that year’s defacto were at the Boxing Day Test. The only thing keeping our hero-black faces out of the paper on that occasion being the suspicion we were out there to steal his Merino stud ram under cover of catastrophe, and so maybe our faces being villain-black instead.

  What I want to know is the meaning of ‘Another Body’.

  Kevin gives an eye-roll, exasperated the media can cook up all a man’s finer moments to smell of shit.

  ‘That body,’ he says, ‘doesn’t count.’

  It was a false and technical find. An old bloke floating in the lake. About eight years back. Kevin being the only one of many outdoor types who had seen the body prepared to fuck up his weekend by reporting it. The girl he was using fishing as an excuse to get swimming and naked being so romantically underwhelmed by a stagnant lake and boring him so much with her beg for commitment that he was in a state where he would report found bodies just to get away fr
om her.

  Several people, he says, coming forward after the event to admit, uhuh, yeah, they did see a suspicious fogey-shaped something-or-other in the water that day. The fly fishermen, being the earliest risers and greatest body-ignorers had confirmed his low opinion of them.

  ‘So,’ he says, ‘that body was hardly a find of mine.’

  ‘Would’ve found fifteen myself. When I used to work in the Goulburn Valley Base Hospital,’ Kevin’s mother says. ‘Course, they were in bed where you’d expect.’ She rattles her walking frame. ‘Keep reading. Is Gabe Waugh arseholed off the Show Committee yet?’

  Kevin finds the Agricultural Show scandal update. He invents a few more crimes for Gabe Waugh, miming to me with hip and fist that he’s going to fit Gabe up molesting a few ribbon winners. But I’m not as into the game as I was. His mother tut-tuts and points her face up at the light of the window.

  Kevin’s mother is wrong about us having jobs to get to. From day one after the embarrassing thaw, work starts to dry up. Old Mrs Carey decides with the coal industry promotion on briquettes she won’t need that load of yellow-box we were going to cut for her. Philip Austin on the phone cancels me mowing his lawns in favour of a tethered lamb. Terry Gaylard says us shooting wild dogs off his property has his livestock spooked to a point just beyond Kelpie control and he’s going to invest in an electric fence. I give him the finger, right up to my mobile phone, and hang up.

  And with the end of the financial year close the Shire has a sudden wage overrun on casual staff and doesn’t want to see us for a while. There are other disappointments.

  We talk about how it looks for us. ‘This piece of bad luck with the snow,’ I say, ‘will have us spending our dole on food before long.’

  ‘It’s the Did-She-Not-Have-Autumn? school of thought,’ says Kevin. ‘Them wondering how a probable summer-died girl gets frozen perfect. In the back of their minds being the question, “Hasn’t she probably done a couple of months alongside a crown roast and a forequarter or so in the freezer of some isolated farmer who’s played his Canberra post-marked videos one too many times?” And sure, you have the vids. We all have videos in the bush. And I have a freezer. But a freezer is only a concession to distance. It’s all what they call circumstantial … and insulting.’

  ‘And anyway, would we display evidence on Buller Street?’ I ask. ‘Especially serious-crime evidence involving women that we wouldn’t do in the first place?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘We would not.’

  But even the people who don’t insult us with suspicion blame us for bringing that loaded snow into town. We are forced to take Kevin’s old dredge out of his shed and go dredging for gold again. We float it in the winter-strong Howqua river. Us in there alongside it.

  Underwater. Getting jigsawed with burning then numb stripes and triangles of skin where our wetsuits don’t seal. Manhandling the intake against the current. Vacuuming a hole through the river-stone mosaic. Then through gravel and sand and silt, and finally watching it suck down into mud. Sometimes looking through the upward rain of bubbles to see the brown billow downstream as the cradle drops everything that isn’t gold back into the water.

  Only being able to take a few hours of this before the mountain water sucks us weak through the undressed stripes and triangles of skin. Spending the rest of the day in the Kevington adjacent to the pot-belly stove and locals. The underwater throb of the motor still alive in our heads. Talking too loud with deafness and drunkenness. Drinking the gold we’ve just dredged. Then going home and me telling Mary and Kevin telling his mother we didn’t strike it big today. But we saw enough colour in the cradle to make us think we are getting hot.

  What we are getting is cold. Cold shouldered. Frozen out. Sent to lonely underwater work by the Did-She-Not-Have-Autumn? types that run the business and thought of our town.

  I feel rheumatism setting in. I’m bush-hard but my elbows are rusting with pain. Kevin says it’s RSI from beer lifting. But it’s in my hips as well. And my heart.

  No one wants to say it but ‘Murder’ is mixed in the spit everyone’s wetting their lips with when they see us. That’s why the rheumatism’s gone into my heart. A different cold. Out of water, in town.

  Mary says maybe I could find employment by myself, away from Kevin, who after all is a two body man. ‘Mary, Mary, Mary,’ I explain. ‘Mary, Mary.’ She understands then.

  I blame the authorities for not solving the mystery of the woman in the snow. They don’t come up with a cause of death. They don’t come up with a time. They don’t even come up with an identity, despite perfect prints and a recently capped molar.

  Their ineptitude adds to the cold of our winter. The Did-She-Not-Have-Autumn? question getting louder as the mystery deepens.

  We certainly had autumn. With me power-blowing the footpath outside the Shire office of plane-tree leaves six times. And the Tourist Information types from next door coming out each time, hands over ears, to engage me in fierce broom reminiscence. Me face-stretched with the deaf-idiot grin a man using machinery is allowed. A long autumn.

  But now spring is nearly here. And now my deaf-idiot grin is used against the hum of behind-my-back whispers.

  Kevin reads. He thrashes the bowls team again. The rout is no more than his mother expected. They’re on a losing stretch too deep for certain ancients to even acknowledge, she says.

  ‘Read news,’ she says. ‘Blow sport. It’s all bad.’

  Kevin turns the paper over and goes big-eyed still.

  ‘Well … what?’ asks his mother.

  ‘ “Mystery Girl Identified”,’ he reads. And then reads to himself despite us.

  I unfold the city paper. On the cover is a photo of her behind a smoking birthday cake. She’s into a loony, deoxygenated blown-breathless-on-trick-candles smile. Eighteen candles. The second time I’ve seen her face. The first being with a cop holding a rubber blanket up off it and asking me, ‘Well?’. Melanie Van Zandt. Missing since March.

  Kevin is thumbs-upping me with a smile over the top of the local paper. He lobs it to me.

  It has two front page shots of her. Neither one distorting our opinion with sentimental birthday scenery. One is of her in a bush setting resisting two police with maximum force. Her face disturbed with hate. The other is a mug-shot taken three years ago by the NSW police after an Eden wood-chip mass arrest. She’s dressed army-disposed in both shots.

  Kevin’s mother wants to know, ‘What about the mystery girl?’ He takes the local paper back and slowly reads her list of arrests out loud.

  His mother is still winding down out of a storm of tut-tuts when the phone rings. I get it. It’s Philip Austin. The wild dogs are leaping his electric fence. His own dogs are volt-cowed and kennel-bound. His farm is a woolly Somme. The whole thing way out of hand. He’ll need us out there tonight with the .270.

  ‘Tonight … we are free,’ I tell him.

  Then old Mrs Carey rings for wood. And Arthur Barker is on the line to see if we can lend a hand with some drenching.

  Finally, and we are waiting, three cans deep in celebration, Gabe Waugh rings from the Shire. The sweet Shire that is our harvest and our lode. That Shire wants two abandoned Toyotas pulled out of a creek bed up on The Bastard’s Neck. Will we do it? I’m thumbs-upping and hip-thrusting while I give my bargain-basement quote on the job. Us, back with the Shire.

  Kevin, who has indulged himself in yellow Shire Bed-fords ever since he got his licence in the year Whitlam was arsed, is happy to be mobile again. Riding seven feet off the ground, unmuffled and slightly official, the way he likes it.

  As we pass Riley’s mill, going up to The Bastard’s Neck, he blasts the horn and we give the greenies the sneer and the finger. And not having had it for a few months some of them are no longer immune and come back at us with fingers of their own.

  And we give the finger to every log-truck we pass sluicing down off the range, pushed hard under a score of bleeding giants apiece. The drivers raise their fingers ba
ck at us. Some of them feint across the white line in threat. Stay out the way of me and my dead giants and our killing momentum. But laughing. Their faces leant forward in their cabins, beside swinging mirror-hung skeletons and Barbie dolls and furry dice. Open wide. Laughing. All of us laughing.

  THE WHALES ON THE HIGHWAY

  OUT OF the dark and my brother, with a sob in the middle. ‘Dad’s not,’ then the sob, ‘he’s not coming home again.’ His mattress creaks as he turns to face the wall, as if that’s an end to it. But he’ll sob far longer than I can take. I know him, he’s a marathon sniveller. He may need a few of my off-the-wardrobe knee-drops before his tears dry up. But I’ll let him go for a while yet. I’m not ready to sleep.

  His sadness isn’t about Dad not coming home, anyway. It’s about Dad coming home. Coming home in the nearly-light, with the wobble-boots on, spoiling for a fight with Mum. A fight my brother just can’t seem to stay out of, him being a hero. When the fists and nails start rolling he gets sucked in like the action’s a plughole and he’s a bath toy. But he comes flying out of it like a rock out from under a mower. He sometimes stops the fight though, the way a rock will stop a mower. Then there’s a lot of wailing and crying over the rock from all parties. Except me. I don’t wail ‘cause I know when he stops a fight this way, with his concussion, he stops it for a couple of weeks, and it’s like a holiday back to how it used to be.

  We sleep upstairs. On the roof outside my window I hear breathing. It’s slow and heavy, like a big man in a hat. My brother’s sobs stop to listen. I stop breathing. Shorter, who sleeps between our beds, starts to growl. Just enough to get his back-hair up and to let us know it’s the possum and not a man in a hat. I stand on tiptoes spiked into my mattress and arc a piss I keep specially for the possum into the fly-wire. It spumes through onto him and sends him scrabble-tinning away like a lot more possums than he is. Shorter takes a dive into the fly-wire and shoots a couple of barks at the stampede. My brother is laughing. I hear his mattress.