The Last Pulse

by Anson Cameron

  ‘I found you floating in a dunny, remember. This is just dinner. Then we’re moving on.’

  Judge Briedahl laughs.

  The call of a boobook owl crosses the camp softly. An alien sound of the natural world it displaces these men from the hegemony of the Travelling Court of Rare and Uncommon Justice for the Certification of Vigilante Intercession back into a wider reckoning. For a moment God is watching and the court’s jurisdiction feels flimsy. Each of these men here knows, in his heart, that if an owl can heckle in their court their justice is shoddy, their jurisdiction shallow and their legitimacy of uncertain lifespan. To douse this discomfiting knowledge they tilt their heads and drink, their beer bottles and wine glasses catching the fire and blooming with light and bestowing beatitude on their faces. And, happily, the owl does not call again and they become, once more, Jehovah, The Terror, The Inquisition, a world unto themselves, they feel spry and chipper and well able to thump the gavel and harness the nags to the tumbrel.

  This brief, owlish brush with sanity over, the judge calls, ‘Men, what about dinner? Let’s eat.’ Haunches of goat and sheep that have cooked while spinning clockwise and counter on binder-twine above the coals are cut down and carved and coils of steam rise from their carcasses into the night. Camp ovens with roast duck and potato and pumpkin are unloaded onto serving trays and plates piled and served out. Judge Briedahl goes among them pouring wine. ‘Not a bad drop, eh, Minister. Not too shabby?’

  There might be thirty men here around this bonfire eating its roast meats. Some sit in the dirt and some in folding chairs and some in ancient armchairs taken from the shearers’ quarters. When his meal is passed to him the guitarist throws his instrument into the fire, sparks spiralling and roiling high. He takes the proffered plate and they watch as the flames blacken the warped veneers of turpentine and ash and the strings ping one-by-one a dying six-note riff and soon a guitar of pulsing orange ember lies there.

  Judge Briedahl removes his oilskin vest and sits between Bridget Wray and Merv. Plates of steaming meats dancing yellow with firelight in the laps of the people. Em sits with hers on her knees sucking on her lollipop, sipping her lemonade. Merv tells her to eat her meal before the lollipop and this sounds strange even to her. Like being ordered to brush your teeth while the house is on fire. She has sense enough to assume the rules of daily life were annulled here. That one might be allowed to suck a lollipop before main course in such dire company.

  Bridget Wray picks at her food, making great and nervous haste with the wine, watching the silently eating men warped through the bowl of her glass as she drinks. Merv pours himself glass after glass of red, holding each of them up between the bonfire and his eye before drinking.

  As the meal slows Judge Briedahl leans toward the fire, throws his paper plate into its red coals and watches it erupt. ‘The only thing that makes any of us good is choosing not to be otherwise. Unconsciously, every minute of every day … until, one day, we don’t make that choice – and are bad. Greed, pride, gluttony … most of the seven sins are encompassed by the working week of the dam builder.’

  A man on the far side of the fire stands unsteadily. He is as stained and dishevelled as any farmer, wearing large shorts and a baggy placket shirt, but sporting the diabolically sharp sideburns and handlebar moustache of a duelist. He holds his wineglass high and coughs for attention.

  ‘The court recognises you, Peter,’ the judge says kindly. ‘Even in the waning crescent moonlight the court detects a large moustache and says to itself, “A vintner, I’ll bet. A ladies’ man. A man who made a good living at the cellar door shifting his home-block voignier by the case to grey nomadic ladies with his silver tongue and his waxed mo. But,” the court says to itself, “a ruined vintner now. Because no water. And so, no vintage. No cellar door. No grey nomadic ladies any more. So no more wax on the mo-tips. Not now. For who waxes his mo when he has no audience, no market.” The court sees the sadly unwaxed mo and says to itself, “Come here seeking redress, this shabbily moustached vintner, this fallen artiste. Come here for vengeance.”’

  This Peter looks slightly offended to be described thus, stares up at the crescent moon under whose light he has been recognised, then across at Bridget Wray. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Right. I don’t want to harm Ms Wray. I am, as you said, a vintner. We make wine, not war.’ A smile flares briefly on his face and falls away. ‘But she has made much use of the term “flood harvest” while delivering water rights to her constituents as if a flood were a calamity and her harvest of it a heroic act. But floods were the events that sustained us. Floods were the pulse through the veins of our world. So her gifting of them to her constituents has … stopped our heart. Which she won’t be pleased to hear. Because what’s a ruined farmer got to fear?’ He looks around at the other ruined farmers. ‘Eh? The law can’t fuck up a man like me. I’m fucked. I’m pre-fucked. As free of constraints as a junkie or a carp.’ This Peter pauses and twirls one end of his moustache, driven by habit, a raconteur, a salesman. ‘So I say we execute the woman. I say if this court allows this woman to live it legitimises what they’ve done upstream. Only by her execution can we damn their dam. To diminish her punishment is to diminish their crime. She must die to tell the world of the abomination of their act. Only her death tells of the crime upstream. At least, that’s the only language that can be understood by the people in the cities. A river. A river … Are they God that they can take our river?’ The fallen vintner sits in his chair, shaking his head.

  ‘One vote for death, then,’ says Judge Briedahl, with polite regret, as if at some small rudeness. He turns to Bridget Wray and admonishes her. ‘A vintner … a cultured man. Spent his life drawing savoury wonders from plain dirt. Look what you’ve done, madam. Made a hangman of an artist.’

  Em has understood little, and all, of what the vintner has said. Girls are fragile, and their survival depends on them knowing the hearts of men, reading the brow and blush of the strong. She goes to the vintner, right around the fire and up close she puts a hand on his knee and holds out her Chupa Chup to him. ‘This is watermelon.’ He looks away from her. ‘You can have it. Coke is my favourite, anyway. So it’s all right.’

  This vintner doesn’t move to take the lollipop or to push it away. He doesn’t acknowledge the girl’s presence. He sits staring away from her into the night straight-faced, trying to staunch the quickening ebb of his righteousness, trying to hold on to the idea that has sustained him for these past years that his cause is virtuous and his injury is grievous and warrants compensation from the angels and his injurer deserves all the wraths ever authored by judiciary, despot or fate. But it is hard to call for the death of your tormentor with a small girl waggling a Chupa Chup in your face asking you for her pardon.

  Across the bonfire from the girl and the vintner a short man with a spade-blade beard and the torpid eyes of a defeated general leaps from his seat. He can take no more of this torture. With his hands raised high he shouts, ‘Watermelon? Coke? Justice is corrupted with a lollipop and our cause trashed by a kid. How did this terrible girl get into our court?’ He takes hold of his own shirtfront with one hand and points through the fire at the vintner with the other. ‘I was up next. My dairy farm. No water allocation for years. Those bastards,’ he points upstream, ‘those bastards have hurt my wife and kids. And now, well … what am I to say with her offering lollipops around? How can I say what I got to say? Look. Look at Peter. Look what she’s done to him. All he had keeping him alive was injustice … It was the last spark of life in him. The distant star of a day of reckoning. Look at him now this girl’s offering a bloody lollipop for the woman’s life.’

  They watch Peter. Em stands in front of him, unmoving, the lollipop still offered. He is avoiding her, staring past his left shoulder into the night. He appears smaller now, bent in his chair, older, his hair greyer than only moments ago. And smaller by the moment, and greying further.

  ‘Our plans are undone by this girl,’ the bearded man says,
astounded.

  Judge Briedahl leans toward Merv and says softly, ‘Go and get your daughter before she kills our vintner with that thing.’

  Bridget stands. Having heard her death sentence she is determined to have her say. ‘That dam created thousands of jobs. Families living happily. Communities of good people have grown around that dam.’

  This reasserts the vintner’s cause. He reaches out and takes hold of Em’s Chupa Chup and stands. ‘No. Those communities weren’t made. They were stolen. Razed in the south and reassembled in the north. Look at us … Behold the ghosts of those razed communities.’ He throws the Chupa Chup into the fire where it sends off sparks before beginning to bubble and flame.

  Em stares at it. She puts her hand in the vintner’s hand. ‘That’s all right. It was yours.’

  Merv has moved around the fire and bends before her as if to pick her up and whispers to her before quickly rising and taking the vintner by his shirtfront. In his other hand he is holding a sheath knife at the man’s neck, orange flames moving along its silver blade. He pulls the vintner close. ‘You blow up a dam,’ he says. ‘You don’t hang women. Jesus.’

  The men stand, their paper plates upending and their rejected fats and gristle falling to the dirt, some still holding their cutlery, some holding larger knives and one or two having snatched rifles from the dark and clutching them slantwise across their chests. They look to one another. This guy was the guy they had come to celebrate and venerate. They look to the judge, his bulk standing, rising and falling with great breaths.

  ‘Judge,’ Merv says. ‘We’ll be sailing on now. I will kill this vintner if you try and stop us. Other than that I’ll set him on the bank somewhere downstream. I won’t hurt him unless you make me. He’s practically me, anyway, from his story. I’m a vintner, too.’

  Em has circled the fire and taken Bridget Wray’s hand and together they back out of the firelight. The judge groans, holding his belly and shaking his head at this disruption of proceedings. He leaps backward vanishing into the dark. A half-scream ended by a blow and he re-emerges into the light holding Bridget Wray in his arms, bent double, her knees up against her face. He steps toward the fire, until his boot-points touch the scree of red coals and threads of smoke rise from them. ‘Didn’t I explain sufficiently about Peter? You haven’t chosen your hostage wisely. You have your knife at the throat of a ruined man. A worthless thing, his life dried up and blown away by a politics he can’t come to terms with. This woman,’ he hefts Bridget Wray, ‘put the knife to his throat long before you did. He is bled out. You are threatening a corpse.’ He spreads his arms and allows Bridget Wray’s body to open across his chest like a bride being carried over a threshold. Able to breathe again she gasps loudly.

  ‘But I am holding a young woman in her prime. With the world to lose. If I pitch her to the centre of this fire she will not emerge. Hell is disorientating,’ he smiles. ‘Otherwise many Queenslanders would have mapped an exit before now.’ One of his boot-points catches fire, a small flame he seems not to notice.

  Merv lets go of the vintner’s shirt and lowers the knife and it hangs loose in his hand. He steps toward the judge and Bridget Wray from his side of the fire, staring at it and at them.

  ‘What? Calculating whether you might fish her out? You were her enemy not long ago.’

  ‘Not long ago I was the maddest man she’d met. Things have changed. I’ve let the vintner go. Put her down.’

  ‘Well, yes …’ the judge hefts her once, twice, he looks at his boot aflame as if it were nothing untoward. ‘But as you’ve released our vintner I’m not holding her as counterbalance in a hostage-taking any more. I am holding her as defendant in a trial. And I think I know which way the jury was leaning with its verdict.’

  ‘You can’t be so broke as to throw a woman into a fire. Shit, I’m ruined and I think that’s as mad as I thought it was when I was going good.’

  ‘Broke? Beyond broke. Broken. Finances, marriages … the great cataclysm this woman called down upon us …’

  A tenor-voiced gun fires from close in the dark marked by an orange muzzle-flash big as a corgi and brief as a finger-snap. Men flinch and duck and a few drop to the ground. Black cockatoos begin to scream up and down the river, rising from their roosts and wheeling noisily over the water. The judge steps back from the scree of embers and releases Bridget Wray’s legs, standing her in the dirt, before he collapses.

  ‘Shoot any man who steps away from the fire,’ Merv says loud to the dark.

  The bloodspot pattern cast across the judge’s lower back and buttocks grows and merges, his cream smock-shirt and his moleskins shining black from many sources and blood running to the earth. As he lies on his side his legs begin to walk his torso in circles, rotating at the hip, smearing the black liquid and making of him a bloated Saturn in rings of blood. His right boot is still feebly afire, burning down now without the heat of the coals to sustain it. He begins to ask sleepily, ‘Was it the girl? The little girl? Did the little girl shoot me?’

  ‘It wasn’t her,’ Merv insists. ‘It was someone else. Another member of our crew. Someone you didn’t count on. A bloke who takes no shit. So any gunfire will get answered. You hear?’ He looks around at the ruined farmers who are crouching low and lying prone. Moving around the fire he takes Bridget Wray by the arm and leads her into the dark toward the boat. Finding Em he lifts her and hugs her to him taking the gun. ‘It’s all right,’ he whispers. ‘It’s all right. You did right. You tried the lollipop, then went for the gun. You did right.’

  The prow of The Party Animal is marked by a winking solar navigation light Merv has covered with a beanie. Squinting into the night he can see it pulsing dully through the weave of the wool. Carrying Em, he leads Bridget Wray to the boat. He throws them, first Em, then Bridget Wray, over the bow rail before smashing the light with the butt of the gun. Cutting the rope holding the boat with his knife he pulls himself aboard.

  Men have moved out into the darkness in their wake and Merv can hear them coming and see their bodies flit in silhouette across the bonfire.

  ‘The boat.’

  ‘Is the boat tied?’

  ‘They’re at the boat.’

  He looses the second barrel of the gun among the men, laying them in the leaf litter and making them silent, each suddenly cast alone, knowing the first to speak makes himself a target.

  The Evinrudes cough and catch, breathing bubbles. He guns the boat reversing into the stream until it hits a tree and Em and Bridget Wray fall to the deck, Bridget swearing, but Em bound silent in tears. Bridget finds her there and slides her across the muddy aluminium into her arms where the girl’s sobs grow and she begins to cry freely. As Merv weaves the boat downriver he is able to glimpse the men back at the bonfire gathering around and ministering to the judge. He calculates from their urgent back-and-forth that the judge is not yet dead. It won’t be long, he thinks. ‘You didn’t kill him, Em,’ he shouts. ‘He’s only hurt a bit. That was only birdshot in the gun. To shoot ducks and quail and fruit bats. A great big fat-arsed galoot like that, you only taught him a lesson. And you saved Bridget. He was mad, and they all were mad. So you saved her from madmen and bad men. No need to cry.’

  The gun had been loaded with pig-shot. Merv begins to reimagine the shooting, the judge dragging circles of his blood about himself. He sees the judge’s back and buttocks, and tries to remember whether he was hit by nine of the slugs, or the whole ten. Either way, nothing in Merv’s knowledge of killing with guns allows him to believe that man isn’t dead right now, his circling slowed to stillness and him a bullseye in rings of his own blood.

  Around the first bend Merv realises the men, with only a dinghy to row, will not be following. He slows The Party Animal, the engine noise softening and bringing them all back into contact with each other. Merv can hear Em crying softly into Bridget’s bosom. A good place, he thinks. The right place. He would like to cry into a woman’s bosom himself. Best leave her in the woman’s arms unt
il she gets over the fright of it all.

  He sees Bridget Wray looking up at him. ‘I didn’t know those guys, you know,’ he says. ‘They were as big a surprise to me as to you.’

  ‘Yeah. You’re only a terrorist, kidnapper and derelict father.’

  ‘I … made a political statement. Those guys were …’

  ‘Part of the same war.’

  She rises, still holding Em in her lap, and sits on the bench seat running along the gunwale. After a while she asks, ‘You think he was going to throw me in that fire?’

  Merv points at Em silently, letting Bridget Wray know he is saying this for her to overhear. ‘Of course he was. Em saved you. She had to do what she did. If Em didn’t shoot that fool you were toast. You can thank Em for not being toast.’ Bridget Wray clutches Em to her tightly and lays her face on the top of her head. ‘Thank you, Em. Thank you, darling.’

  She sits rocking Em, her lips pressed to her hair, watching black trees pass noiselessly before galaxies of stars. ‘Your problem is, having saved me, now I know you aren’t going to harm me,’ she says. ‘So I’m not even a hostage any more.’

  ‘You always knew I wouldn’t hurt you. You can tell yourself you didn’t. But you did.’

  Bridget stands, holding Em. ‘Let’s have a milkshake. Chocolate,’ she says to the girl. ‘Chocolate’s always best after you’ve had a fright.’ As Bridget Wray is stepping below decks Em takes her face from the woman’s chest and asks, ‘Daddy?’

  ‘What, Em?’

  ‘I don’t want to shoot ducks. I want us to eat noodles and fish fingers and milkshakes. That’s the best food.’