Moonlight Downs

by Adrian Hyland

  As I replaced the mike I noticed Blakie perched up on his ridge, cross-legged and gazing down on the scene with the cold indifference of a kite-hawk contemplating a swarm of mice.

  ‘You mad, murderous bastard,’ I whispered fiercely.

  I turned the horse away.

  Heading out to the waterhole I found myself weeping. My own little sorry business. A string of images came rolling across my mind, and, strangely, they were all monochrome and scratchy, like excerpts from the old sixteen-mills we used to watch on the back wall of the Big House. I saw a pair of little girls running barefoot across parched paddocks, laughing and leaping and weaving as a tall man on a big black horse came galloping up behind them, effortlessly scooped them onto the horse’s rump, one at a time, and carried them away.

  Jesus, I loved that man. And I knew him, knew the smell of his sweat, the scrape of his whiskers, the supple leather of his hand.

  I thought about how he’d taken me in when I first came to Moonlight. I’d been confused, angry, bitterly grieving for my mother. Lincoln had twigged to me at once, paired me up with Hazel, drawn me into a world strong enough to sustain me until my father gradually emerged from his own despair.

  And how had Lincoln drawn me into this world? By stories. Stories and songs. With Lincoln a journey of any description was a rolling dialogue with the country. A track by a waterhole or an unusual rock, a tree shaped like a woman or a circle of stones, the subtlest change in the landscape, any of these things was enough to get him going: he’d tell you the tale of the ancestral beings that had made it, the songs they’d sung, the paths they’d carved in the Dreaming. For a wide-eyed five-year old he’d made the country come alive.

  Now those stories were gone, that sonorous voice forever silenced.

  Four hours, Emergency Services had told me, before the cops could get out from Bluebush. I gave them five, then headed back, not up to communicating with anything other than a white, official face. But when I did come crawling back into camp it was more of a red face than a white one that had arrived to oversee the scene of the crime. A big red face on a big red head above a big red body inside a police sergeant’s uniform.

  A police sergeant whom, on closer inspection, I recognised.

  ‘Tom McGillivray?’

  He turned away from where a couple of ambos were loading the body onto a stretcher and looked in my direction, florid eyebrows arcing down suspiciously. There was another jowl or two under the chin, more of a droop in the moustache, but it was the same Tom McGillivray who’d whiled away all those melancholy summer nights drinking my old man’s home brew and listening to Charlie Bloody Pride on our front veranda. One of Jack’s many mates. He’d been a sergeant then, and he was a sergeant still. The career path for a copper who chose to remain in Bluebush was clearly not a steep one.

  I dismounted, hitched the horse to a post, walked towards him. He glared at me.

  ‘Who are you meant to be? Calamity Jane?’

  ‘Looking a bit that way.’ I took my hat off, dusted off my cargo pants, shook his hand. ‘I’m Emily Tempest.’

  The eyebrows shot up. ‘Jack’s kid?’ He peered in at me. ‘Shit, so you are. Only you aren’t a kid anymore. What the hell are you doin out here, Emily?’

  Jesus, I thought. How long have you got? ‘Come out a coupla days ago,’ I said. ‘Wanted to catch up with the mob.’

  ‘Jack always reckoned you’d end up back out here.’

  ‘Who said anything about ending up?’

  He shrugged and pushed his hat back, ran a palm across a sweaty brow. What had been a fine head of hair was turning into a fine head of skin. ‘Outstanding fuckin day you picked for it.’

  I took a look around the camp. The Moonlight mob huddled among the humpies, their distress settling down into a mournful chant. They looked grey, unhealthy, moulding, like an overturned Salvation Army bin at a suburban railway station. Somewhere in the middle of the mob a boomerang was thumping earth. Two kids began fighting. Gladys rushed out, clipped them across the ears, threw them back into the huddle.

  A couple of white cops had the young men corralled up against the shed, where they were trying unsuccessfully to get some sense out of them. Ronnie Jukutayi was clearly the chief suspect. With a face like that he’d always be the chief suspect. Freddy Ah Fong sat miserably tearing at a piece of yellow-streaked meat. A third copper was taking photographs of the hollow from which the body had been removed.

  ‘Poor old bloody Lincoln,’ McGillivray said. ‘Dunno that I’ve ever seen one quite this bad…’

  ‘Dunno if I have either.’

  ‘We’ll have to wait for the PM, but the ambos reckon—well, his neck’s broken, for a start. But it looks like one of his kidneys was cut out.’

  I felt a surge in the guts. Suddenly it was all too much, the tension and shock of the last two days. I’d thought a few hours out at the waterhole had calmed me down, but this latest revelation sent my equanimity, and the contents of my stomach, flying.

  Crouching in the sand, all I could see was a splintered image of Blakie Japanangka, his ferocious eyes and his filthy fucking knives.

  A kidney. Any doubts I had about the identity of the killer were resolved now. A kidney meant sorcery, and sorcery meant the madman on the hill.

  ‘Emily,’ asked McGillivray, putting a hand on my shoulder, ‘you okay?’

  ‘S’pose I am, but…I mean, Jesus…’

  ‘Jesus all right. Or juju. It’s crazy.’

  I climbed to my feet. ‘Have you spoken to Blakie?’ I asked him, wiping my lips and spitting a mouthful of muck into the sand.

  ‘Blakie?’ He flashed an angry glance at the young men. ‘Christ! Why didn’t somebody tell me Blakie was here?’

  ‘Maybe they were worried about your well-being. Lincoln had a bit of a blue with him yesterday, and look what happened to him.’

  ‘Blakie! Knew he’d kill some poor bastard one day. Where is he?’

  I nodded up at the ridge. I followed McGillivray’s gaze and watched him work out, just as I’d done, that the body could well have crashed into the scrub from its rocky summit. From Blakie’s camp.

  McGillivray put a hand to his mouth and bellowed at his off-siders: ‘Col! Ross! You too, Griffo! Get over here!’

  I tagged along behind the four cops as they made their way up the ridge.

  As I reached the summit I glanced back at the camp and saw Hazel, in the middle of the crowd of mourners. She turned around and looked right at me. I detected a movement of her head. Maybe she was hunting a fly, maybe it meant something else.

  Was she trying to stop me from doing what I was doing? Was she warning me? Or warning me off?

  Whatever her intentions, I had no time to alter the course of events. The cops came marching up to Blakie. He was sitting by the fire, as solid as a termite mound, but not as friendly. There was a cold gleam in his eyes: it could have been a reflection of his mood or the crystal into which he was staring. Blakie always had a crystal or two about his person.

  McGillivray eased his big butt onto a rock in front of him.

  ‘G’day Blakie. Remember me?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Blakie responded, not raising his head. ‘Kurlupatu Sergeant. Ma-killer-prey. Seen you travellin. Eagle wind.’

  ‘Emily here tells me you had a bit of a blue with…’ he paused; ‘…with that old man Kuminjayi yesterday.’

  I was pleased that McGillivray knew enough about Warlpuju beliefs not to say the name of a deceased person—from here on, Lincoln would be referred to as Kuminjayi—but I was sorry he’d included me in his explanation. Blakie turned those terrible eyes in my direction. They were like slits in the side of a burning forty-four. ‘Oh, she hungry as a hawk, that parnparr. Mebbe dove.’

  McGillivray glanced at me, momentarily nonplussed. ‘Yeah, well I’m sure she’ll fatten up when she gets a bit of that outback tucker into her, but it’s Kuminjayi we’re talkin about now, mate. You know what’s happened to him?’

  ‘Yuwa
yi. Two-inch mudlark makin six-foot hole.’

  Mudlark. One of Lincoln’s dreamings.

  ‘Anythin you wanner tell me, Blakie? Bit of an argument, was there? Got out of hand? Be easier if you tell me about it now, rather than in at the station.’

  In at the station? Blakie didn’t like that idea much. His sideways glance was barely perceptible, but it said more than some people say in a lifetime.

  ‘This country…too many snake. Need fire. Bushfire,’ was his cryptic response.

  ‘Right,’ said McGillivray. ‘So you thought you better sort im out, eh?’

  ‘Oh, fire sort im out itself.’

  McGillivray nodded patiently. He’d been in the job so long he may well have acquired some competency in the language of the mad. Psychological illness was rampant among the Indigenous communities of the Centre, services to deal with it stretched at best. Cops were often the front-line troops.

  McGillivray’s off-siders didn’t look so patient. Ross and Col glanced at each other, rolled their eyes. Griffo, a big flabby bloke with a high voice and a shaved head, fiddled restlessly with the cuffs on his belt.

  Blakie sat there stolidly, as oblivious to the cops as he was to the flies that crawled around his eyes.

  McGillivray scratched at the sand with a stick.

  Griffo was the first to break. ‘Look mate, we just want a simple answer. There’s a dead body down there. We wanner know whether you might be able to tell us anything about it. Like whether you were responsible, for starters.’

  McGillivray shot a jagged glance at his constable, but the direct approach did seem to elicit a response.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Blakie growled, ‘I’m ’sponsible, all right. Very ’sponsible.’ As he was speaking he’d been poking at the fire with a greenwood stick. He suddenly pulled it out of the flames, studied the smoking end for a moment, then snapped it in two. With a single thumb.

  I studied his hands: they were like a set of Stilson wrenches. It didn’t take much imagination to see them wrapped around Lincoln’s ancient throat. Nor to see why everybody gave Blakie such a wide berth.

  He was the only man I’d ever seen kill a fully grown kangaroo with his bare hands. I must have been ten or eleven at the time. I’d been out hunting with a mob of young blokes when a roo flew out of a declivity in front of us. The dogs gave chase, but they’d only gone twenty metres when Blakie suddenly shot up in the roo’s path, threw it to the ground, whipped his knee into its back and broke its neck.

  The young men had been falling over themselves to let him have the roo. But right now Griffo wasn’t as savvy. He grabbed Blakie by the scruff of the neck and dragged him to his feet. ‘Okay mate, I think you’d better come along with…’

  McGillivray put a moderating hand upon Griffo, but Blakie already had his own hands upon him: one into the groin and one among the rolls of his neck.

  Blakie squeezed and heaved. Griffo gasped. His transition from rugged outback rozzer to guided missile took about half a second, the length of time it took Blakie to pluck him from his feet and send him smashing into his partners. I dived out of the way as one of them came flying in my direction.

  Blakie was thirty feet away and accelerating before Bluebush’s finest had dragged itself up out of the dirt.

  The younger cops did the usual cop things—a lot of yelling and cursing, a lot of pumping arms and pushing legs—but they ended up doubled over, lobster-faced and gasping for air. Griffo looked like he’d be going home in the ambulance.

  McGillivray didn’t bother. He knew Blakie. He climbed to his feet and stood there glowering, hands on hips, teeth clenched. Angrily watching his prime suspect cruise up into the Jawangu Hills behind the camp.

  I might try

  AN HOUR later I was sitting in the dirt, leaning against a rear tyre and brooding upon the ironies of coming home. As McGillivray had said, an outstanding day I’d picked. I’d arrived just in time to see my utopia torn apart.

  A stubble of burnt grass crumbled under my fingers. A low wind hissed through the poverty bushes that lined the road. Spiky leaves rained down from the mulga trees.

  McGillivray was standing in the doorway of his troop carrier, barking orders and reports into the radio, drumming on the dash impatiently. His men had been consigned to the foothills where they were searching, doubtless in vain, for signs of their runaway.

  He came over to me looking flustered, but then he took a look at my scowl, went back to the vehicle and returned with a cup of coffee.

  ‘Got tea if you’d rather, Em.’

  ‘Coffee’s fine, thanks, Tom.’ I took a swig. Sweet as a toffee and bitter as cloudy ammonia, but it did the trick. ‘Been rustling up the cavalry?’

  ‘Bloody oath. Alice Springs is sending up more men. Trackers comin out from Bluebush. Getting the chopper over from Tennant Creek. Blakie’s done it this time.’

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ I murmured. I was unsure whether he was referring to Blakie’s killing of Lincoln or his humiliating the cops.

  ‘Worst thing is I had him in the slammer a few months ago. If only I could have kept him there, none of this would’ve happened…’

  ‘What was he in for?’

  ‘Assaulted some ringer he reckoned come too close to his sacred bloody stones. Over at Carbine Creek.’

  That sounded like Blakie. The Warlpuju see that every element in the landscape is suffused with religious significance, a signifi cance which Blakie defended vehemently. Crystals were of a particular importance to him. I assumed that something like this was what his blue with Lincoln had been about: a site had been infringed, a taboo broken, and Blakie had seemingly appointed himself judge, jury and executioner.

  ‘Case clear as a bell,’ Tom was saying, ‘but fuckin Legal Aid managed to get im off.’

  ‘What he needs,’ I suggested, ‘is a proper psychological assessment.’

  ‘What he needs,’ McGillivray responded, ‘is a proper psychological boot up the arse and ten years in the slammer.’

  McGillivray leaned against the ute and took a huge swig from a water bottle, his Adam’s apple going like a jack-hammer. When he’d finished he emitted a long, gravelly sigh and crouched down beside me. Beads of water dripped through his moustache and trickled down his chin.

  ‘So Emily,’ he said, ‘where’s that leave you?’

  ‘What do you mean, where’s that leave me?’

  ‘I mean, I dunno if it’d be a good idea for you to stay out here right now.’

  A brooding silence ensued, and then I muttered, ‘I’ll stay wherever I bloody want to stay, Tom.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he said, backing off as he saw my hackles rise. ‘I’m sure you will. From what I’ve heard about you from your old man, you usually do.’

  ‘And just what have you heard from my old man?’

  ‘Jesus, calm down, will ya? I’m not coming the heavy, I’m not poking my nose into your private business. If anything I’m grateful to you for pointing us in the direction of Blakie. I’m speaking as a family friend, not a copper.’

  I picked up a freshly fallen twig of bush mint, ripped off a leaf, crushed it in my fingers. Took a breath of its soothing aroma.

  ‘You been away so long,’ McGillivray continued, ‘I imagine this place kinda loomed in your imagination, like some outback Shangri-La. But it’s changed, Em.’

  ‘I’m not a fool, Tom. I’ve changed too.’

  ‘I remember Moonlight Downs when you were a kid. Sleepy Hollow meets Uncle Tom. Relations were mostly pretty good…’ ‘I do know that,’ I snapped. ‘I’m a manifestation of those relations myself.’

  He shook his head in frustration. ‘Not even listening, are you, Em? Same obstreperous little bugger you always were. Got your counter-punch primed before I’ve even opened me mouth.’

  He stood up, took a step or two away, looking lost for words. Then decided to change tack. If words weren’t going to have any effect, he’d throw in a bit of concrete.

  ‘You stop into Bluebush on the wa
y out here, Emily?’

  ‘Bluebush? Christ, no, gimme a break. Refuelled at the Resurrection Roadhouse and pissed off. I remember Bluebush.’

  He nodded at the Warlpuju. They were still huddled outside Lincoln’s humpy, weeping and keening.

  ‘You didn’t wanner stay there ten minutes—they were there for ten years. I lost count of the number of bodies I dragged out of ditches, drowned in an inch of water. The brains I scraped off windscreens. The early morning knife fights.’

  ‘I have heard a bit about the Bluebush days, Tom. Dad used to give me reports from time to time. I gather that was why Lincoln worked so hard to bring em back out here.’

  ‘And look what’s happened to him.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘What I’m sayin, Emily, is that things have deteriorated. Relationships with the whitefellers have got worse. There was a lot of bitterness over the land claim…’

  ‘I heard somebody burnt the old station house down.’ It had happened the week after the land claim court case was decided in the Warlpuju’s favour. Nobody was ever charged with arson; there were a lot of Bluebush hoons cruising around the countryside that weekend, a lot of angry station people grumbling about their new neighbours. Half the local population—the white half—were suspects.

  ‘And that was only the start,’ McGillivray grunted. ‘Sometimes I reckon it’ll never end.’

  ‘What’ll never end?’

  ‘The violence.’ His eyes were half-closed, but in the thin brown slits I could make out the reflection of the trees. He scratched his jowls, stroked his moustache with a massive index finger, gazed into the distance. ‘Even among themselves. Specially among themselves. Chuck a murder like this into the mix an there’s no tellin what’ll happen. I just know I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I knew you weren’t out here in the thick of it—for your father’s sake, if nothing else.’

  I found myself touched by his solicitude.

  ‘Look, Tom, I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But…well, two buts, really. The first is that I can look after myself…’