Machine Gun Jelly (Big Bamboo Book 1)

by Shane Norwood

  Bjørn Eggen sat in a camp chair in front of his tent, smoking a pipe and drinking beer. Mary Rose attended to her pots, which were suspended over a fragrant fire of eucalyptus branches, peering into them over the tops of her spectacles. She had made a full recovery, and had even put on a little weight. Bjørn Eggen was also restored to full vigor, and days spent striding through the bush with Jimmy, observing all the new things with the enthusiasm of a child, had bronzed his formerly pallid Nordic face.

  Crispin and Booby had set up their tent at some distance from the others out of a sense of delicacy, and now lay dozing in afternoon heat. The episode with the Machine Gun Jelly had been a revelation to Booby Flowers and had started him on the first steps of a voyage of self-discovery, with Crispin as his willing guide. It was not so much a case of him getting in touch with his feminine side as Crispin touching his masculine inside, and although at first it had felt strange he was slipping increasingly easily and comfortably into it. And so was Crispin. The only difficult part was cultivating his mustache, which steadfastly refused to grow despite every encouragement.

  Asia was wandering through the bush at the edge of the encampment, absorbed, as had become usual, in her own thoughts. She had only been persuaded to stay after great efforts by the others, and contested the wisdom of that decision with herself on a daily basis. She had almost despaired of hearing from Baby Joe, as had they all, and shared the same unspoken fear that cast its cold shadow over them, intensified a hundred times in her case. Thoughts of him pursued her through her days and nights and followed her into sleep, where dreams of him haunted the edges of her consciousness. It disturbed her that in her dreams she could never see his face clearly, and that even awake she could not quite summon an image of him into her mind. She felt that she needed him and missed him more than ever, and worried that she had lost him before she ever actually truly had him, but at the same time she felt the memory of him fading from her, no matter how hard she tried to cling to it.

  In case there were any more surprises they had decided to build a camp out at Jimmy’s place while they waited for news of Baby Joe, one way or another. Nothing had been heard from him, or about him, and Helmut had been sent on a mission to Cairns to try and get some information, to check the news and the internet, to check anything that might give them a clue as to what was happening, but he had returned empty-handed.

  It was Helmut who was now approaching, zooming in low over the tree tops, making a pass over the camp and dipping his wings before banking down and gliding to a showy landing on the makeshift runway. He waved as he stepped from the cockpit, and from the other side, Wally ducked past the still-spinning prop. Helmut walked to the back of the Cessna, opened the door, and dropped down the small step. All waking eyes were on the plane as Helmut reached inside and took hold of a pair of crutches, and Wally held out his hand and assisted a heavily bandaged man down onto the red earth.

  A distant kookaburra answered Asia’s loud scream as it rang across the meadow and echoed in the far hills. The last of the sun burnished her wild hair, flying behind her like the uncombed tail of a red mare as she galloped across the grass and through the trees to the airstrip. The man, limping forward on his crutches, stopped as she raced up to him, panting from her mad sprint.

  The man before her looked so frail and wan, so aged, that she feared to hold him, and instead stood before him and raised her hand to his cheek with tears streaming down her face. The man smiled at her and something of what he had been shone through, and as she looked into the pained but undimmed eyes of Baby Joe Young, she knew.

  It was over.

  The rock glowed blood red, so that even at this distance you could almost feel the warmth of the stone. Like its celestial twin, the pulsating half-sun stood on the rim of the world, lighting their faces with its fading glow. Except for Jimmy, they sat in the camp chairs under the eucalyptus, listening to the chattering of kookaburras and watching the sunlight on the long grass of the meadow and tinting the russet fur of the wallabies.

  Asia sat on the ground with Walkabout laid across her thighs, leaning her back against Baby Joe’s bandaged legs. Bjørn Eggen had his pipe in one hand and a beer in the other, and Mary Rose sat with her hand resting on his arm. Crispin and Booby sat a little way back, holding hands and whispering to each other. Helmut sat next to Bjørn Eggen with his feet resting on a crate, and beside him Woolloomooloo Wally sat with a beer clamped to his mouth, smiling at no one in particular, looking as ancient and unfathomable as Australia herself. Jimmy stood on a nearby boulder, leaning on his spear and facing the vanishing sun, his face turned to ancient amber by the dying light.

  A fire crackled in front of them, and the smell of roasting meat mingled with the scent of the burning gum. Peace and contentment was upon them and they luxuriated in the silence, until finally Asia said, “You know we can never go back, don’t you?”

  They all looked at her.

  Baby Joe moved his arm in an expansive circle along the horizon, saying with a gesture that could not be properly articulated in words. “Now, why the fuck would we want to do that?”

  The laughter rang out loud and without reserve, startling a crew of roosting budgerigars into flight from the branches overhead. The birds circled, twittering, and headed off through the deepening twilight to find a more peaceful perching place.

  Walkabout farted.

  The End.

  Epilogue.

  It had not been so much a case of lack of evidence as of lack of interest. By all reckoning, Baby Joe Young’s life should have been over that day. The paramedic who brought him back from the brink of eternity had not given him one chance in a thousand; but then, every once in a while a thousand-to-one shot comes in, even in Las Vegas. By the time the surgeon had finished pulling bits of metal out of him, he had enough lead to roof a church and enough iron to shoe a horse, and given the amount of stitches used any tailor worth his salt could have knocked up a pretty decent raincoat. Remarkably, none of the blades, bullets, and bits of fragmentation grenade that had pierced him had hit anything that might have proved inconvenient later on, but he had required enough plasma to keep every wino on the North Side happy for a week. It was loss of blood that nearly killed him, and a couple of times he was looking at the big white light, but something inside him refused to go, and Baby Joe dragged himself back to the world of pain.

  And thereafter, his recovery was swift. He was gimping to the head when medical wisdom said he should have been sitting in a wheelchair with his dick in some nurse’s hand—not that he would have objected to that, especially—and was in physical therapy when he should have been bed-bound and wondering how he was going to get at the itch under the cast on his broken arm that was driving him round the bend. In short, his journey from the trauma unit pissing out blood to the men’s room at the Whale Lounge pissing out Guinness was remarkably short.

  Of course, as soon as he was well enough to speak the boys in blue had been extremely interested in what he had to say. The Don’s apartment had looked like Kuwait City Center when the police arrived, and such was the destruction and mayhem that there had been absolutely no way to recreate what had happened other than to notice that there had been a serious difference of opinion. The one witness who was still in a position to shed any light on the subject was bleeding worse than the Turin Shroud, and among the many theories formulated as to what had happened, the one about a middle-aged man single-handedly assaulting an apartment containing more firepower than a South Central crack den and annihilating almost as many Italians as Mount Vesuvius did not receive much consideration.

  Not surprisingly Baby Joe also avoided this version of events in his testimony, instead maintaining that he had merely been the victim of some unfortunate timing, being in the Don’s office on legitimate business when the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre reenactment society had burst in and started spraying lead. Some minor aspects of the case—such as forensic evidence, fingerprints, bullet matches, angles of entry, powder burns
, etcetera—were not exactly overlooked, but given the apparent obviousness of what had happened and the evident state of deceasedness of most of the perps, were not examined as diligently as they might have been. The one witness that came forward kept saying something about some mysterious, black, fat man.

  Three days after Baby Joe got out of the hospital, and the day before his flight to Australia, he was sitting in his customary seat in the Whale when a senior vice squad dick with whom he had a nodding acquaintance walked up to him, handed him a brown paper package, patted him on the back, and told him he might want to consider taking a long vacation. Inside the package was the videotape from the Don’s security camera.

  Case closed. God Bless America.

  Baby Joe never fully recovered from the events of that day. Eventually his body healed, although he was left with a slight limp and his left arm would not extend properly, but in his mind he was never the same. Some part of him had died in that building, some fire in him extinguished, replaced by the absolute knowledge of his own mortality and a bizarre kind of postcoital depression that remained with him, a pervading sorrow like a cool mist that he could see through but never quite lift. The Don’s last act, and his final words, would live with him until the day he died.

  He moved to Northern Queensland, and with his share of the money built a house on the beach and bought the boat that he had always wanted. Asia went with him, and they sat on their veranda each evening watching the birds flying towards the setting sun and the light fading on the sea that Baby Joe knew, inevitably, he must one day watch alone.

  Asia was happy. She gave half of her money to her mother and bought a small souvenir shop close to where they lived. She was very popular and soon made many friends in the community. She closed her shop at five o’clock every day and went to a small bar on the waterfront, where she could have a glass of wine and watch Baby Joe’s boat sailing home though the surf outside the reef.

  And each night, as they lay in each other’s arms, she clung to him too tightly, as if to restrain the fleeing moment. But who may contain the wind?

  Bjørn Eggen took Mary Rose back to the Arctic Circle. She loved it immediately and Bjørn Eggen was extremely happy, even though she made him stop carrying dead fish in his pockets.

  He felt sufficiently re-invigorated to get himself a new dog team, and it was on his sled that he carried Mary Rose Christiansson across the sunlit snow and back to his house by the lake on the summer’s evening they were wed in the Gjudbumsenningbjerg chapel.

  Wrapped up in furs, with their breath rising in white clouds, they walked the dogs through the forest, and in the evenings they sat by the fire and drank aquavit all through the twilight.

  Wally and Stavros rebuilt the Big Blue Billabong Hotel and reinstalled the somewhat-scorched Captain Cook to his rightful place, and life continued as before. Except something in the land, a voice from the dreamtime, was speaking to Woolloomooloo Wally, telling him it was time to become Birring Barga again.

  He gave Wal’s Outback and the boat to his eldest children and he shipped his wife and her sisters, and as many of the kids as could be identified, back to Blue Billabong. In later years this resulted in some very interesting genetic combinations among the population in the surrounding area. Rodney had to be retired from show business, having discovered that it was much more fun sitting on people’s heads than stealing their cameras. She was introduced to a wild herd in the highlands, where she fielded advances from amorous bulls and kept a watchful eye on the occasional tourists that visited the region, just in case the opportunity to sit on one of them presented itself.

  As the years went by Wally left the running of the New Big Blue Billabong more and more to Stavros and spent more and more time in the bush with Jimmy and Walkabout, where he listened to the voices of the land and the wind in the trees and the birds and the animals, and stood on the painted rocks at dawn, singing the old songs and waiting for the dreamtime.

  Crispin flourished in the land down under. He and Booby moved to Sydney together, but it didn’t work out and Booby went back to the States. Crispin bought a beautiful apartment with a spectacular view overlooking the harbor and, even though he didn’t need to, went back to work, getting a regular gig at a swish little club in Kings Cross, and was soon the darling of the swinging scene.

  Feeling that he needed something more relevant to his new home, he changed his name to Ned Jelly. Besides, Crispin Capricorn was such a dreadfully silly name. Crispin—or rather, Ned—furnished his new apartment with the same opulence and style that he had his Vegas apartment, except that the new one had wooden floors, no white carpets, and no Japanese lacquered tables.

  He had bought him himself a new Bichon Frise puppy, a cuddly little fur ball bitch that he called Dolly Doo, and he wasn’t taking any chances.

  Booby was the reason that things didn’t work out between him and Crispin. Having discovered his new sexuality he wanted to explore it to the full and didn’t want to be restricted. He moved to San Francisco, changed his name to Booty Florette, and took to wearing the dresses he swiped from the chic boutique where he got a job as a window dresser. His nights were spent sinking ever deeper into the steaming sexual swampland of the bathhouses.

  It wasn’t the best time to be doing it. The inveitable happened. He started to waste away. Eventually he became too weak to work or go out and was confined to his apartment. He bought of copy of Women and Men by Joseph McElroy. He became deeply absorbed in it. The book has 1192 pages. One late summer’s afternoon, as he lay on his camp bed under the window, he reached the bottom of page 1191. As he turned the leaf to page 1192, he turned his toes up and he croaked.

  Long Suc went into rapid decline. How are you going to kick ass with no fucking feet? Actually, loss of face cost him more, and within a year he had been pushed out by more vigorous competition. Taking his considerable fortune, and what was left of his dignity, he moved to the Thai border, where he opened a very successful cathouse and spent his twilight years smoking opium and having his dick sucked and his ego massaged by girls young enough to be his granddaughters.

  Not a bad result when you consider what traditionally happens to the bad guys in stories such as this.

  Handyman Harris was compelled by circumstances to find new accommodation, ending up in the suburbs with a small garden and a dog for his kids. He also made other radical changes to his lifestyle.

  For example, whenever he shot pool he insisted that the phone be disconnected, he never opened the door to strangers, and every time he saw a man of the cloth he religiously crossed to the other side of the street.

  Hazy Doyle was overjoyed to discover the fifty grand that Baby Joe had left him under the Buddha, especially as he had run out of papers at the time. It was only the unpleasant taste that saved his windfall from going up in smoke. Not everyone is changed by success, and Hazy never let his riches go to his head, largely because he could never remember from one minute to the next that he was rich.

  He continued to surf the Milky Way by day and tune in to the groovy intergalactic transmissions, and at night dead people continued to fight each other in his dreams, and once a year a guy he knew, a buddy from the war, climbed in through his window and gave him a beer that he never opened.

  Of the other peripheral characters the reader may be curious about:

  Norm—he of the electric appendage—retired from the sea and moved to Fremantle, where he became a night watchman at an ice cream factory, spending his free time watching cricket and rugby, having a few tinnies with his mates, and on the occasional Saturday night plugging himself into a twelve-volt battery just for old time’s sake.

  Bruce eventually surrendered to a sense of futility and abandoned his wait for Kylie Minogue to parachute from the sky and give him a blowjob. He is currently waiting for Beyonce Knowles to parachute from the sky and give him a blowjob.

  Penguin Brew eventually ran the Wollongong aground in broad daylight on a reef in the Society Islands, with a cargo of s
oap powder. When he sobered up in a Papeete jailhouse three days later, he came to the conclusion that it was time for the sailor to come home from the sea. He retired to his house in Manly and became a common sight in subsequent years, rolling along the littoral from alehouse to alehouse, telling outrageous sea fables to anyone who would buy him a measure of the amber nectar.

  Helmut, whilst heading back to Cairns after the three-day opening bash for the New Big Blue Billabong Hotel, carrying the wife of a prominent media mogul and a Rolf Harris impersonator, and somewhat the worse for wear, became disoriented, ran out of gas, and had to ditch in the Torres Strait. Helmut survived completely unscathed, but of the mogul’s wife and the Rolf Harris impersonator, neither hide nor hair were ever seen again, although recently a Canadian anthropologist claims to have heard a canoe-load of Torres Strait Islanders enthusiastically singing “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport.” The media mogul was so grateful that he gave Helmut a new plane and made him his personal pilot. Helmut still gets letters from Rolf Harris fans.

  The two young men who had been hired by Monsoon to pretend to be officers in the Marines, and who turned out to be trainee grade-school teachers from Wisconsin, were disappointed when no one showed up after so much meticulous preparation. They were even more disappointed when they were arrested and sentenced to five years apiece for impersonating military personnel.

  Vulture Skull Hangover disbanded after Anna accidentally perforated her duodenum with an electric chrome dildo onstage at a private gig and gave herself a two thousand-volt enema. The surviving members are currently looking for a new lead singer.