Nice Shootin' Cowboy

by Anson Cameron

  Her family is gathered around her bed. All but her brother Gary, who is a promising centre-half-forward in the Ovens and Murray league with two perfectly compatible donor lungs that he won’t give up. Much to Lillian’s disgust the family has frozen him out for his miserly actions. He’s an easy-breathing, high-leaping orphan. Melanie counsels them all in their turn. Tries to thaw the family. Gives them clues on how to carry the horror. And carries her share home to me.

  She looks puzzled. It’s the radio, I tell her. It’s what the dolphins hear. She listens, trying to find dolphin noises in the static. Then she’s trapped by the situation in her lap again and her jaw starts to flex.

  Professor Zhou turns the machine off. For all purposes the Baiji is deafened … blinded, he tells us. They can no longer hear each other. They live in total isolation. White noise. Swimming within metres of each other — not making contact. The only time a Baiji ever hears another Baiji today is when one swims blindly into a hook-net or is hit by an unseen propeller and lets out that piercing squeal of pain or panic that is a dolphin’s death song.

  Then he’s finished, and he drops a shallow bow at us and shakes his interpreter’s hand. To a man and woman we stand and applaud — as if the whole tragic story is his brainchild. His Hamlet. And to be honest it is a hell of a tale. And he has put in. The tears, the unblinking silences. We clap wildly. Melanie claps along, but looks bewildered at the ovation.

  I can understand the opera not getting through, but I really thought the dolphin would get to her. She’s chained herself to a thousand trees over the years. Thrown her heart at many a needy species.

  When they start the collection for Zhou’s dolphinarium I sign a cheque for five thousand dollars that causes some applause of its own. Zhou himself shakes my hand. His little hands embrace my big one as he gives me unblinking thanks. He makes an ‘Eeee’ noise that I interpret myself as a ‘Whooee’ of impressed gratitude.

  It’s a cheque that could buy a hundred-thousand Chinese man-hours. I want it to buy a moment from Melanie. Her realisation that big things, apart from the Lillian Green situation in her lap, have been happening here tonight. I want to jolt her back into the world I’m living in for a while.

  She smiles and raises my arm and says out loud, ‘That’s my boy. A one-man movement. A Noah for the nineties … and an all-time show-off.’ And she kisses me and says softly, good on me, and tells me we can rent out the beach house for a couple of weeks over winter to pay for it, and that my heart’s in the right place.

  She means it in the right way, and just for a moment she’s knocked off work and stopped searching for words to lead people easily into death. But what she does is let me know that I’ve given no more than a couple of weeks in the life of an empty house. She’s not tuned to the subtlety of everyday conversation.

  Professor Zhou and his interpreter stand close to me, watching my movements, like I’ve paid for their attention.

  ‘Very sad story,’ I tell them. ‘We must drink to the future of your dolphin.’ Zhou smiles and nods a lot. Respecting our customs is a lucrative pleasure with him. He tips an imaginary glass to his lips and nods again.

  So we head downstairs to the bar, about eighteen of us, all more or less tuned to the plight of the dolphin — apart from Melanie. I start the shout, and Zhou turns out to be a half-decent capitalist roader. Even with that missing chromosome that makes the drink such a problem for the Chinese, he’s a demon for the VB. Either he or his interpreter stop making sense after a while.

  I see Melanie, on her bar stool, has found her lap again. Her jaw shows a slow-flexing tooth-grind. She’s hunched down over her sadness like a baseballer over the plate, putting the slow work on his gum. Trying to divine the mystery of the curve and dip in the coming trouble. Using muscle on questions thought can’t budge.

  Zhou’s interpreter snaps me from this by slapping my knee and announcing that honourable Zhou wants me to know that I’m the second biggest single donor to the Baiji in the whole world. I stand behind only China Airlines in my generosity. And I — an individual, not an airline.

  We’ve been drinking an hour or so.

  ‘China Airlines,’ I say. ‘Oh, the happiness China Airlines and their crashing jets have given me over the years. I always loved it when one of their jets went in nose-first and everyone on board was burnt. Or an Aeroflot jet. They were as good. It proved the superiority of the Western way to the young me, one of your jets crashing. So much of the stupidity of capitalism could be forgiven by a blinding black fuck-up in a rice paddy somewhere in China.’

  Jaws fall. ‘Don’t translate that,’ a man tells the interpreter. ‘That’s not the Australian way. There’s no cause for talk like that here.’ Several people agree. Our president is running his fingers through his beard in thought.

  ‘Professor Zhou is our guest,’ he says. ‘Communism cannot be laid at his door.’

  Melanie is crying again, and under heavy glares I take her out of there.

  On Saturday Dinny and I are in the crowd at the MCG. Dinny, my brother, is a doctor who works for humanity but ends up making a hundred-and-fifty-thousand a year for himself. We sit high in the stand, and from deep within the crowd we shout our orthodoxies. We feel strong even before the beer in plastic cups.

  Geelong is playing Essendon, and Ablett does it all. Surfs Kickett’s shoulder like it’s a two metre swell. Starts reefing the ball out of the ozone hole like Little Jack Horner grown up. And kicks fourteen goals — some from outside the fifty line, some from outside geometry. He’s a heart sending pulse up through the tiers. Shapes every shout, the praise and the abuse as well. I want to be old enough to have grandkids and tell them about Ablett. Tell them how I’ve seen the best there ever was to see or ever will be to see. To tell them how they have no hope of ever seeing in their puny lives what I’ve seen in mine. To tell them Gary Ablett was the good old days. For four quarters I forget about Mel.

  We shoulder up to the urinal when it’s over. Dinny is metabolically hot. Steam rises in great swirls off the steel where he is pissing, lifting the stench of a thousand bladders. There is a noise of struck gong as the metal buckles out under the heat of his stream. Men lined up either side of us stare edgy-eyed as they talk about the game.

  ‘How’s Mel coping?’ he asks. He used to love her as much as I do now, so he can ask.

  ‘It’s still hitting her hard,’ I say.

  ‘I could get her thrown off the programme,’ he offers. ‘Atheists make shitty carers, anyway. They have no out. They have to cop the cruelty of it on the chin. Often it knocks ‘em.’

  ‘No, leave her alone,’ I say. ‘She’s a mighty woman, with no glass jaw. She’ll rally. Leave her. She’ll come good.’

  ‘All right. But she’s taking on misery at a rate that won’t allow her to see the tragedy in a Geelong loss before long. Who knows if she won’t turn religious. Maybe even vote Labor.’ He smiles at me through rivulets of steam and shakes himself and ducks in his hips and zips before leaning back into space and stepping down.

  It’s just the portraits staring into the dark when I get home. No light, no noise, no black cooking smells. No Melanie trying to curse and manhandle piquancy into her cuisine. She’d told me she wanted to stay home and cook something intricate for our anniversary. Something confusingly choreographed that would take all her concentration, and her mind off things. I’d told her I liked my food salt-free so to keep her eyes dry.

  There’s a note on the kitchen bench telling me Terry Samazan has taken a turn for the worse and she’ll be back when she can.

  I start to cook, to take us back to our honeymoon in Thailand. First I build the pastes, add the garlic, the coriander, the lemon grass, the chillies, the fish sauce, the ground shrimp. Some of these ingredients are so foul-smelling that they reminisce me back to the streets of Bangkok by themselves.

  I drink a Singha beer and start slicing pork. I know all the while some bastard is adding the foul ingredients of his misery to my wife’s day.
Reminiscing sad episodes at her. Telling a story of childhood abuse that mysteriously adds up to leukemia at thirty-one. Yes, even cancer can start with brutality. If you’ve sat at enough bedsides, or your loved one has, you can make this generalisation.

  I cite the story of Harvey Kenny she told me when she was listening to him die back in July. Harvey ran into his burning house to save his daughter. The further in he went the hotter it was and the louder her screams were. Until the air was too cruel for lungs and skin and only his daughter’s death-noises were dragging him along. And he took the last step he had in him when he was an axe-swing short of his daughter’s bedroom door. There heat and fume brought him down.

  Six months later the doctors tell him he is dying of cancer caused by the fifteen minutes of carcinogenic fumes he inhaled that day. But Melanie wants to know if it’s a few lungsful of acrid smoke that corrupted Harvey’s cells or six months of screams echoing down from his memory into his heart. She and Harvey decide on the screams.

  I want to know. If the brutality of Harvey’s memory has done that to him, what will the brutality of his story do to Melanie? All these stories?

  I put some cashews in oil to fry. I set the table. I surround our seats with banks of candles and incense and flowers and photos of Thailand. The best of the photos is of small brown girls on a wild river, reaching up out of the shallows to touch her blonde hair. Frozen on tiptoe, stretching for her.

  She doesn’t get home until after ten. And when she does I see Terry Samazan has ruined our dinner. She’s svelte for his death, in a short black dress. She puts on this garment the way a judge dons a black cap. In this exciting dark skin she finally gives her male patients permission to let go. Some of them die half hard is my guess.

  I’m bitter with Singha beer and waiting. She kisses me and gets herself a wine. ‘Terry’s gone,’ she says.

  ‘I could tell. Did he like the outfit?’

  ‘He was flattered, yeah.’

  ‘You haven’t worn that dress outside a hospital since we did the Whitsundays.’

  She drinks her whole glass and pours another. ‘Terry’s dead,’ she says. ‘He’s not your rival. You’re safe. Buy me a new dress.’

  ‘It’s not just me, Mel. It’s Othello. You used to love Shakespeare … the opera. It’s your mother … old and lonely but with no major illness. What about spending some time with her? It’s the dolphin … dying out without you. Anything that’s not the death of a patient is just white noise to you now. Nothing else reaches you any more.’

  ‘It all reaches me. It’s just some of it makes me feel guilty.’ She has a drink. ‘For instance, this big kitchen, that’s never made a meal for someone sick. I feel guilty being here.’ She looks from the bench tops through to a Streeton in the hall. ‘I feel guilty in all these well-hung rooms. There’s never been tragedy here. There’s none in our life. None in you. Maybe I am being faithless, getting so into them … but you’re not on your back praying.’

  ‘I could get there.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

  ‘Sorry’s no good, Mel. You have to realise the people and things you love are terminal, too.’ She nods, submission not agreement, and takes the wooden spoon from me and starts stirring the curries I’m burning.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

  The bitterness and beer and waiting has allowed me to overload the meal with chillies. Still, she eats fast and unflinching like a Thai national. Without wince or compliment she slights me. Only the wetness shining on her nose in the candle-throb indicates my cooking is hot and nostalgic. The candles, the photos and the flowers miss her altogether. Not even the brown girls stretching high to touch her hair make her smile.

  When I get back after four days in Sydney the house looks ready for a real-estate inspection. It has an every-thing-in-its-place deadness. I get the feeling a man in a double-breasted suit is about to step out of some room with a brochure. Perfect for a large family, sir. Or the wealthy and solitary. Centrally located. Easy beach access. Look at the view. The space. Those incredible deco eaves.

  Melanie has gone. I search the whole place and all her personal effects are here. Her wallet is by the bed with all its plastic in it. This may mean nothing. If she was going to make a run at freedom she’d do it damn near naked.

  The only thing missing is her bike, and its security chain is cut, so it might have been stolen. On the other hand she was always forgetting the combination.

  I ring around and everyone is surprised to hear she’s not at home. At her work they know nothing. They’ve reassigned her cases. Vera, her supervisor, is not shocked she’s quit. Volunteer workers at this case level have a high, high attrition rate, she says. I tell her Mel hasn’t resigned, she’s disappeared. But Vera keeps ringing me, wanting to know if I’ve seen Mel and how she’s getting along. On five occasions I tell her Mel has disappeared on me.

  On Friday she rings at close on midnight. Excited, and trampling over anything I say. ‘Hi there,’ she says. ‘Can I speak to Mel?’

  ‘Vera, you know Mel has left. I’ve told you that ad nauseam. It’s fucking midnight. And I’m alone.’

  ‘Well okay, okay. Just tell her Lillian’s brother has done an about face. He’s going to donate a lung. Everything looks like working out for her.’

  ‘She’s fucking gone, Vera. It’s a lung too late. She’s gone.’

  ‘Just let her know. She’ll be thrilled.’

  And that’s how it sits. No one will cop the without-trace scenario — except the cops themselves. They, when they get it out of me that Melanie is a counsellor to the terminally ill, lose interest. ‘Mr Erdrich, a woman goes missing under those stresses, we couldn’t tell if she’s a runner or a jumper. Either way it doesn’t concern us. We’ll put her on a bulletin. But really … ring her mother at intervals, that’s the best.’

  I don’t need to ring her mother. She’s steeled herself to hear the worst and keeps ringing me so I’ll tell it to her.

  It’s the night after the police interview that my recurring dream starts running. It’s probably the police who start it running. In it Melanie mounts her bicycle in deep night and rides up from our home near the pier onto the West Gate bridge. When she reaches the top she dismounts and heaves the bike on its wheel-over-wheel last ride into the wide north-easting sweep of city-lit river. Then she waits. Legs dangling through the rail. Watching away toward the shrieking cranes and flashing lights of North Wharf. Before long a ship pushes down the Yarra. She watches it nosing the phosphorescent bow wave ahead of the hundred metres of dark that precede the white bulk of its superstructure. It comes on noiselessly. And when the light of the bow wave is doused under her bridge she jumps. Lands, bridge-height hard, in among the hundreds of containers on its deck.

  As she crosses the Pacific her skin blackens and hardens and her face sets in tight Nefertiti parchment. Through the Sea of Japan the black of her skin is gull-shitted piebald. Until, what they find on the deck in Vladivostok when the last containers are craned overboard they blast off with water cannon.

  I have this dream for a week before I tell Dinny about it and get his beautiful rebuttal.

  Pathetic, he says, what a man in distress will tell himself. The lies he’ll lie for his dignity. Face it. She’s left you, he says. She’s left the battleground this town’s become. But he knows where she’ll be. Knows, not thinks.

  Don’t I remember she went hand-to-hand with a poacher in Zambia over a white rhino in the early eighties? Was nearly gutted in the process? Haven’t I traced my tongue along that crooked scar? That symbol of unkillable commitment?

  Can’t I still see her in an inflatable, circling a pod of humpbacks in black Antarctic water, baring her magnificent breasts and heart to the Jap harpoonist in some sly mammalian link? Can’t I hear the cheers and whistles of those jaundiced sailors?

  Don’t I recall her manacled to aged giants from Gippsland to the Amazon?

  That’s where she is now, he says. Up in Far North Queensland i
n a rainforest, chained to a tree. On the front line. Firing abuse at the redneck on the dozer. Doing clear good that won’t kill her. Having at least some victories. Out from under the heavy terminal causes. Paying less for having her heart where Jesus and Buddha and several other bearded and fat and otherwise impressive men told her it should be. Smoking dope and drinking and driving iron spikes into half-millennium old eucalypts. Heckling hairy-necked men in Jackie Howes and hardhats. And happy, he smiles. Happy.

  I don’t know. The wrinkles in this man’s face are there from squinting out a twenty-year chain of white lies.

  Either the dream or the rebuttal is true, in essence. I don’t know. I dream the dream and pray the rebuttal.