Moonlight Downs

by Adrian Hyland

  But would she let me? I’d buggered up her life once before. Would she ever trust me again?

  She’d be coming back sooner or later, and I wanted to be there when she did. Not at Moonlight—not yet, at any rate. I wasn’t up to Moonlight. The deserted outstation was too much to tackle on my own.

  Bluebush was my only option; I’d stay here until I knew what she and I were going to make of each other. She’d said it was about time I came home. Well, we’d see.

  I glanced at my watch. Getting on for seven. I’d promised to come in early, help Stan with the twelve o’clock swill, but that still gave me a few hours. I grabbed a book, slipped back under the covers and read myself to sleep. Since Camel’s party had kept me awake half the night and the book was entitled A Delineation of the Precambrian Plateau in North Central Australia with notes on the impinging sedimentary formation—when I’m trying to understand a locality I like to start from the ground and work my way up—that took about ten seconds.

  Party girl

  THERE WERE two pubs in town: mine, the White Dog, and the Black Dog, which was even worse. The main danger I faced at the White was the constant barrage of marriage proposals to which I was subjected by the old timers in the front bar. When things got frisky at the Black, you were likely to end up with a billiard cue through the skull.

  We were generally frantic at lunch time, but I quite enjoyed it. I’d put on my running shoes and sprint from one end of the bar to the other, trying not to skittle Stan, who’d run the White for twenty years.

  After lunch the miners and meatworkers scuttled back to their respective holes and sometimes we’d find time to join the regulars for a quiet drink. There was usually a comforting monotony about the conversation: I’d find myself counselling them against blowing their super on time-share apartments and Russian brides, laughing at their stale jokes and reminding them to take their tablets.

  Today, however, was not one of those days. We’d been joined by a rowdy mob of blokes who seemed to have wandered into the wrong establishment and showed no signs of pissing off.

  ‘Be more at home over the road,’ Stan grumbled as I made my tenth trip to the back bar, from where the strangers’ conversation was rising into a crescendo.

  ‘Hate to tell you this Stan, but they’d probably be there if they hadn’t been banned last night.’

  ‘Jeez,’ said Stan, looking seriously offended, ‘you mean we’re gettin the Black’s rejects?’

  There were eight or nine of them. Station hands, I picked up over the next half hour, though not the kind of station hands I remembered from my childhood. The men who worked the stations back then were unworldly, shy, often awkward blokes who’d take their hats off when a woman entered the room. Country men.

  These guys looked like urban refuse: stone-faced teenage mutants, toothless drifters in John Deere caps, a rat-faced Northern Irishman, a couple of leathery bikies looking for a place to lay low and a shifty, swivel-eyed little Pom who called himself a cook and who’d apparently given the entire stock camp an opportunity to lie low when he poisoned them with a green beef casserole. They were, it emerged, from Carbine Creek, a station north of Bluebush. One of Moonlight’s neighbours in fact, though I couldn’t recall ever having been there.

  I was pulling another beer when I heard the word ‘Moonlight’.

  I tuned into the conversation.

  ‘…so den the witchdoctor points a bone at em,’ squeaked the Irishman, slapping the table, ‘and the fuckin wallopers dunno whether to shit or swim!’

  A wave of laughter erupted as a bloke with a backyard buzz-cut, prison tatts and tropical sideburns took up the tale. ‘They reckon the sarge has called in the army to try and track him down! Choppers and dogs, black-trackers, C-fuckin-I-A, and they still can’t find him.’

  ‘Shouldn’t be that hard,’ yelled one of the drifters. ‘All ya gotta do is head for the hills and follow your nose.’

  This wasn’t the first time I’d heard the Moonlight incident discussed in the bar. One blackfeller’s killing another was nothing to get excited about, but the general consensus was that the killer beating up four of Bluebush’s finest and making an escape was the best thing that had happened round here since the mayor was caught in flagrante with Benny Birkham, the town’s one-man Mardi Gras. But I didn’t like the way this conversation was heading. Coming from these guys it sounded unclean.

  ‘All for a runaway coon,’ yelped the little Pom.

  ‘Shoulda just handed out more knives and let im finish the job,’ interjected a yellow-cap cowboy, his teeth just about falling out onto the table in his excitement. ‘Get rid of the lot of em.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that make Earl’s day?’ asked one of the bikies.

  I found the jug was overflowing in my hands. I put it on the bar, a red mist falling across my eyes, but I’d only taken a step in their direction when I felt a hand upon my shoulder.

  Stan. He was standing there looking at me, his eyebrows raised.

  ‘You reckon they’re worth the bother, Emily?’

  I glowered at him for a moment. The red mist lifted a little.

  I had to hand it to Stan. He was a little old guy with a stoop and a hump and a head that looked like it was being pulled towards his left shoulder by an invisible rubber band, but he knew how to run a pub. Tranquillity seemed to radiate out from him.

  ‘No,’ I sighed. ‘Don’t suppose they are.’

  ‘Why don’t you take a break? You been workin yer little arse off. I don’t want a compo claim for, what?—RSI of the pullin arm? Go and get a bit of fresh air. Kaz can keep this mob tanked up. Come back at dinner time.’

  Ten minutes later I was walking down Hawker’s Road when I spotted a dirty police Toyota pulling away from one of the Warlpuju houses. McGillivray was at the wheel, and I flagged him down.

  ‘Top of the afternoon to you, Tom. You do look like a bag of shit.’

  He was decked out in crud-encrusted overalls, a filthy cap and topsoil thicker than most of the surrounding desert could boast.

  His eyes narrowed. ‘You spend a week crawling in and out of snake holes and see what you look like.’

  ‘So,’ I said with an innocent smile, ‘did you get your man?’

  If his eyes had narrowed any further he would have ruptured his eyelids. Not that I could blame him for looking pissed off.

  ‘My man…’ Tom growled. ‘I’ll be amazed if we ever do get im, way Pepper an Archie are doin their job.’ He shook his head. ‘I been workin with those boys for twenty years. Best trackers this side of the Alice, an I never seen em so arse about. If I didn’t know better I’d say they were doing their best to avoid him.’ He glanced at the house and grunted. ‘Fuck it, I do know better and they were doing their best to avoid him.’

  ‘Not a sign, eh?’

  ‘Oh, we got signs. We got signs comin out our arse. Things disappearin from stations and mining camps, the odd butchered bullock, the odd rifle shot. Trouble is they’re always somewhere we aren’t. We know he’s out there, but Pepper an Arch don’t wanner come within a bull’s roar o’ the bastard.’

  ‘You blame em? Dangerous man, Blakie. Specially for them.’

  He started up the ute. ‘Anyway, if it’s all the same to you, Em—even if it isn’t—I’m outta here. There’s a hot bath round here somewhere with my name on it.’

  ‘What were you doing here anyway, Tom?’ I asked, pointing my chin at the house.

  ‘Just dropped Pepper an Archie off at the family seat.’

  A howling chorus erupted from behind the corrugated iron fence. Somebody was singing along with that blackfeller classic, the Warumpi Band’s ‘Fitzroy Crossing’. Somebody else was singing along with something else, or possibly it was the same song, sung in a different key with some of the same words and a melody which occasionally intersected with the original.

  ‘Sounds like the family’s having a welcome-home party.’

  ‘Same one they were having when I picked em up a few days ago.’
More yells. Laughter as well, but it was that lean, desperate laughter which is only a decibel away from murder. ‘In the words of Johnny Cash, the road goes on forever but the party never ends.’

  ‘Robert Earle Keen.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re his words. Johnny just sang em.’

  He frowned, shoved the gearstick into first. ‘Whoever said it, he was a wise man. Give yer a lift?’

  ‘Thanks, but don’t worry about it. I’m nearly home.’

  I’d only taken a few steps before I was sprung by the mob inside the house. A lot of the revellers were ex-Moonlight. They came pouring out the front gate and dragged me inside with an offer I couldn’t refuse: warm wine, wet chips and effusive greetings from a score of old friends, half of whom I’d never met before.

  The scene inside the house looked like a game of paralytic pass-the-parcel—the parcel in this case being a flagon of Fruity Lexia. When one disappeared another appeared in its place. The party kicked off on the front veranda, surged into the lounge room, trailed into the kitchen, staggered out the back door and collapsed under the saltbush.

  I made my way through the crowd. My fellow party animals came in all shapes and sizes, all ages and denominations, the common denominator being thirst.

  Gladys Kneebone, whom I’d last seen serving up the chat du jour, was cracking jokes and laughing like a cyclone. Slippery Williams was gazing at a television which, like him, wasn’t properly tuned in. Jeanie Marble wandered up and wrapped me in a giant bear-hug, then subsided onto the couch and fell asleep.

  ‘Jeanie looks like she’s been through the wringer,’ I said to Gladys.

  ‘Yuwayi, most of the bloody ringers, too.’

  There were even a couple of whitefellers among them. Whitefellers, that is, in the Territorian sense of the word, which is to say not blackfellers. One was an olive-skinned young bloke—a copperfeller?—with clean teeth, curly hair and a floral shirt. I didn’t catch a name, but from what I could gather from Slippery’s toothless introduction the bloke was either a Cuban or a Cubist. The other whitefeller was an old guy with a head like a radioactive strawberry and a name which sounded like ‘Jack Derrida’.

  ‘Not the deconstructionist?’ I asked Slippery.

  ‘Jack?’ came the reply. ‘No way. Bit of a pisshead, but he wouldn’t hurt nobody.’

  Jack’s contribution to the discourse, ‘Eeeeeaaagheeoo’, was about as comprehensible as that of his namesake. He tried, and failed, to shake my hand, but the momentum kept him going as far as the laundry door, from where he was last seen raining death down on the pansies.

  I wandered out into the backyard, and eventually found myself among the wallflowers—the old, the infirm, the insane, the Christian—perched around a fire beside the fence. They were a sea of tranquillity amidst a mighty ocean of booze. A billy was boiling. Tongues were clicking, teeth were clacking.

  Prominent among the group were Archie and Pepper Kennedy, McGillivray’s trackers, two skinny old brothers with patches on their pants and beards growing out of their noses. Archie and Pepper had been born out in the Plenty Desert west of Moonlight. They hadn’t seen a white man until they were adults and could, it was said, follow a fish through a flooded river. They were sitting on their swags and sipping at pannikins of tea. Pepper silently handed me a brew as I joined them.

  I took a sip, winced, then took another. Suddenly hungry, I pulled out of my pocket a packet of sunflower seeds, the only food I could find, and began to nibble away at its contents.

  Pepper looked on with interest.

  ‘What that you eatin there, Nangali?’

  ‘Try some,’ I said, offering him the packet. He picked out a handful, put them in his mouth, and immediately spat them out.

  ‘Man eat this one?’ he asked.

  ‘Woman does,’ I told him. ‘This woman, anyway. I hear you had a busy week out bush with old Tom.’

  ‘’E bin give us bit of a run around the country.’

  ‘And all to no avail.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You didn’t find Blakie.’

  ‘Man I can foller. Dunno if that one man.’

  ‘He’s a bit of a man.’

  ‘Bit of a man?’

  ‘The arsehole. Why do you reckon he’d do a thing like that?’

  Pepper looked away. ‘What thing?’ he murmured.

  Were my senses deceiving me, or did I detect a sudden tension in the air? There were eight or nine people sitting along the fence, and suddenly it seemed as though they were hanging on to our every word.

  ‘Kill that old Kuminjayi.’

  Pepper took a sip of his tea, stared at the dirt, then muttered, ‘Dunno that ’e did.’

  My own pannikin paused mid-air. ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Hard to say what it is bin kill a man.’

  ‘Breaking his neck, ripping his kidney out and chucking him over a cliff will usually do the job.’

  ‘Mebbe Blakie kill im. Mebbe mamu.’

  Mamu? Devil? Yeah, sure Pepper, I mused. If it was, then the devil had incarnated in the form of a wandering madman with a fighting stick and a bandolier full of rusty knives.

  Whatever reply I was about to make was drowned out by a sudden uproar.

  It was Lenny Coulter and his mother, Lucy: one moment two inebriated faces in the crowd, the next a couple of screaming maniacs who had to be kept from each other’s throats by a pack of party-goers.

  What the ante was I had no idea, but Lenny—about eighteen, camouflage pants, fluorescent orange T-shirt—upped it when he screamed at his hangers-on, ‘Lemme go an I’ll kill ’er, the ol cunt!’

  The epithet whipped his mother to new levels of fury. ‘Don’t you call me cunt, you come from my cunt!’

  Once would have been bad enough, but her pounding repetition of the phrase shocked her restrainers long enough for her to grab a star-picket and begin weighing into anybody in the vicinity of her son. When he retreated in my direction I scrambled over the fence.

  By the time I ventured back into the yard Archie and Pepper had pissed off, and I took the opportunity to do the same.

  As I wandered along the dusty footpath I found myself thinking about the tracker’s comments.

  I came to a vacant lot that offered a view of the north-western desert and paused to take it in. The country between the road and the sky was as bleak and empty as a cattleman’s gaze. Somewhere out there was Moonlight. Somewhere out there was Hazel. And somewhere out there was Blakie, his brain wandering as crazily as his legs.

  Blakie hadn’t killed Lincoln? Like hell he hadn’t. It wasn’t just the fact that he’d assaulted him the day before, or that he’d virtually confessed to the murder. It had to be Blakie because there was simply nobody else in the camp who could have done such a thing.

  I ran through the possibilities.

  One of the elders? No way. Too old, too weak, too respectful of Lincoln. One of the young men, then? Was the devil involved, the demon drink? I doubted it. Sure, Lincoln had been yelling at them to shut up, but I’d heard them, seen them. They were in party mode that night, not murder mode. What about Freddy Ah Fong? I dismissed the thought as soon as I raised it: he hadn’t looked sober enough to throttle a chook, much less his brother.

  Could it be payback, then? Indigenous Australia, like tribal cultures from LA to Sicily, is racked by a never-ending cycle of vengeance. When a person dies, when a taboo is broken, when a sacred site is breached, somebody is inevitably held responsible. In the worst cases, the avenger will coat his body in red ochre, sharpen his spears, drag the dreaded emu-feather slippers out of their hiding place and set off on his secret mission of revenge.

  Could this be the case here? Could Lincoln have unwittingly been blamed for some distant death or breach of a taboo?

  Once again, it didn’t seem right. Rough around the edges I might have been, but surely I’d have picked up something. When the red ochre men were on the move it was hard not to know about it. Everybody went to groun
d, stoked the fires, watched their backs, did a lot of whispering. Kids were hidden away, dogs let loose. There’d been nothing like that going on.

  A maniac, it seemed then, was the only logical solution, and a convenient maniac was what we had in the turbulent, rolling-eyeballed Blakie. Everything pointed to the crazy bastard. It had to be him.

  Why, then, was I beginning to feel the first little pricks of doubt?

  A ringer’s breakfast

  A DAY later I walked into the yards of the Jalyukurru Aboriginal Resource Centre, the blackfeller organisation for the Bluebush region, and searched for signs of life. There were none. The nearest I could see was an immobile figure I took to be that of Kenny Trigger, the coordinator, stretched out on the office veranda with his battered boots over the railing and a battered hat across his face.

  As I crossed the yard a puff of smoke emerged from a hole in the top of the hat. A good sign. He was still alive. Either that or he was conducting a DIY cremation.

  ‘Morning Kenny!’ The boots twitched in response. ‘How’s business?’

  The hat rose slowly to reveal a ruddy, half-shaven shambles of a face topped by a mop of gritty hair and buckled by a wry smile.

  ‘Boomin,’ he drawled, the cigarette flickering on his upper lip. ‘Come to give it another go?’

  ‘Yuwayi.’

  The Jalyukurru Resource Centre was a demountable office and a corrugated iron workshop on a three-acre block in Bluebush’s rough-as-an-emu’s-knees industrial estate. It was also the only way of keeping in touch with the bush mob. The remote communities were linked by a network of two-way radios, and Jalyukurru was its base. I’d been here three days in a row now, trying to raise Moonlight, hoping that Hazel would have come back in from the desert.

  ‘Good luck! Albie Green come in from Blue Sunday Bore last night.’ Blue Sunday was an outstation west of the Stark River. ‘Dropped in to Moonlight on the way. Said it was empty as a surfie’s socks.’