Moonlight Downs

by Adrian Hyland

  ‘Albie said that?’

  He stared at the air for a moment. ‘Maybe he didn’t use that particular expression, but the meaning was clear enough. Moonlight’s fucked. For now, anyway. Nothing there but wind and crows.’

  I shrugged, trying to appear more nonchalant about the community than I felt. ‘Things come and go.’

  ‘Well this one looks like it’s been and gone. Bloody shame, really. Had a lot of promise, Moonlight, but it all hung on the one feller. He was kirta, you know, the traditional owner, or one of them. But he cut it in the whitefeller world as well.’

  Kenny Trigger cut it pretty well himself, if from the opposite direction. A whitefeller who managed the black outfit with the same elegant inefficiency with which, he explained to me once, Coleridge had managed the finances of his regiment: income into the left pocket, expenses out of the right.

  ‘Kenny,’ I complained at the time, ‘that doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Neither does Kubla Khan,’ was his reply.

  Kenny Trigger might have looked like a ringer’s breakfast, but my father had him figured for the smartest feller in town. For what that was worth when the town was Bluebush. He’d originally come up here with a half-finished doctorate in anthropology lurking in the bottom of his back pack, but whatever academic ambitions he’d once held had, like the doctorate, gradually turned to dust in the face of a relentless Warlpuju lassitude.

  Kenny shifted in his seat and bits of paper fell from his lap and hit the deck. They might have been raffle tickets or office memos, they might have been hefty government cheques—Kenny treated them all with the same dedicated lack of interest. Another skill he’d acquired from the Warlpuju.

  A few days earlier Kenny had gone to get a bank loan, and he related with relish the bank johnny’s bewildered comment on his list of assets—one twenty-year-old jeep: ‘Jeez, mate, haven’t got much to show for forty-seven years, have ya?’

  But he did have another asset, Kenny, one that he couldn’t have put on paper: his intimacy with the Warlpuju. He’d spent twenty years among them as a kind of transport officer cum drunk-tank co-ordinator cum pocket anthropologist. He spoke the lingo as well as anyone alive and was married to a Warlpuju woman; they knew that when the shit hit the windmill he’d be there with them.

  ‘So who becomes kirta now that he’s gone?’ I asked.

  ‘College of Cardinals is debating it as we speak, but er…’ he took a final drag, flicked his butt out over the railing, and covered his ears in anticipation of the barrage, ‘Freddy Ah Fong’s putting his best foot forward.’

  ‘Freddy? Fuck me dead! We’ll have to change the station’s name to Moonshine!’

  Freddy had only ever been the most peripheral of visitors to the community, and now that they were back in town he was flourishing. He was living in the Drunks’ Camp, north of the town boundaries. When I’d bumped into him a couple of days earlier he’d put the hard word on me. He needed sixty-two bucks to get a bus to Alice on a mission of great importance. He had the two; all he needed was the sixty.

  The only indication of the kind of natural leadership skills his half-brother had by the barrel was when Freddy scored. I’d spotted him a couple of times trooping off to the park, carton in hand, a little fleet of fellow drinkers lapping at his heels. Freddy and the Dreamers.

  ‘And the buzzards are gathering already,’ Kenny added, his eyebrows bunched conspiratorially.

  ‘Buzzards?’

  ‘Freddy’s been spotted being chauffeured around town in some distinguished company of late,’ he explained. ‘They tell me that Massie…’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You dunno him? Lance Massie?’

  ‘Rings a bell. Who is he?’

  ‘Territory Government’s local bagman.’

  ‘Government’s got a bagman?’

  ‘Got a District Manager for the Department of Regional Development. Amounts to the same thing. Been here for years. Word is that the little greaseball…’

  ‘Slow down, Kenny. Which little greaseball?’

  ‘Massie, of course.’ Of course. Kenny was the only Australian under eighty still in the CPA—the Communist Party, not the accountants—and I could see him salivating at the prospect of a little anti-estab scuttlebutt. ‘He’s been putting the word round the Anzac Club that there are some great investment opportunities going begging out at Moonlight.’

  The Anzac Club was the watering hole of choice for the squattocracy—the station owners and their toadies—and the town’s elite: businessmen, senior public servants, mining executives, brothel owners.

  ‘Invest in what? Wind?’

  He shrugged, smiled, flipped his hands and rolled his eyes.

  I took a look around. The dominant themes of the Resource Centre were rust, dust and wire. Little willy-willies struggled to get a rise out of the gravel. Mangled motorcars were overflowing out of the workshop. A pair of overalled legs protruded from beneath one of the cars. That’d be Wally King, the mechanic. One of the legs was prosthetic, a testament to his sloppy Occ Health and Safety practices. A hundred citrus trees sat under a shade-cloth in the corner, gloomily contemplating the fate that awaited them when they were planted out on the outstations.

  Reggie Cobar shuffled past with his weekly rations: a carton of beer and a carton of corn flakes. Presumably he poured the one onto the other. Reggie was a dilapidated whitefeller who camped in the scrub on the edge of town. I’d thought he looked kind of cute, at first, with his Santa Claus beard and his ribbon of dogs, but the image soured when Kenny told me what he was said to get up to with the dogs. Finding a mate might have been tough in the old days, but it wasn’t that tough.

  I tore myself away from the scenery, rose to go into the radio room, then hesitated. ‘Mind telling me something, Kenny? Given your position as an honorary Warlpuju elder and all that.’

  ‘Dunno about the Warlpuju bit. Or the elder, for that matter. The honorary’s not far off the mark, given what they pay me. Fire away.’

  ‘What do you know about Lincoln’s death?’

  He winced, then shook his head and said, ‘I know I wish it hadn’t happened.’

  ‘Do you know why it did?’

  ‘Christ, who knows why anything happens round here?’

  ‘Or who did it?’

  He paused, took a last drag, flicked the stub into a bin, studied me for a moment. ‘What are you getting at, Emily?’

  ‘Yesterday I asked something similar of Pepper Kennedy. Asked him why’d he reckon Blakie’d do a thing like that, and he reckoned he didn’t know that Blakie did do it. Said it might have been a mamu killed him.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he replied, rolling his eyes. ‘Mamu, eh? Mamus are responsible for everything from an attack of the nits to a dose of the shits. Saves a lot of arguments, having someone to blame. Think of it as hunter-gatherer conflict resolution.’

  ‘You heard Blakie was getting stuck into Lincoln the day before he died?’

  ‘Heard something about it, but not in any detail. Mulga curtain’s come down on that one.’

  ‘Any idea why?’

  He took a sip from a pannikin of rust-red tea, thought for a while. Face like a well-trod cattle-dog he might have had, Kenny, but he did have rather attractive eyes: they were like drops of dew on a blade of grass.

  ‘Fear’s presumably got a lot to do with it,’ he said eventually. ‘We’re talking Blakie, after all. He’s one out of the cracker barrel, that feller. No telling what he’ll do to you, body or soul. Wouldn’t surprise me to hear they were arguing, though. Lincoln was about the only feller round here who’d square up to Blakie without shittin his britches. Course there’s always the possibility that Blakie really didn’t kill him.’

  ‘Oh come on,’ I said with a conviction I was beginning to wonder about. ‘Blakie was ready to kill him the day before…’

  ‘You sure of that?’

  ‘Well, ready to belt him, anyway. Then they have another round at night and Lincoln turns up fillete
d in the scrub next to his camp. What’s it look like?’

  He leaned forward, rested his chin on an elbow. ‘What were they bluin about?’

  ‘I overheard them, but I couldn’t figure it out. My Warlpuju isn’t up to scratch. Blakie seemed to think that Lincoln had broken some taboo, maybe violated a site.’

  ‘Yes?’ He looked at me, wanting to know more.

  ‘You want to know which one, but that’s what I couldn’t understand. It sounded like he was accusing Lincoln of having speared something…a wartuju juntaka.’

  ‘Fire bird?’ He studied the ground for a moment, scraping at his whiskers with a tobacco-stained finger. ‘Never heard of no fire bird. I could ask some of the old fellers if you like…’

  ‘I’d appreciate that.’

  ‘But if it is connected with Lincoln’s death I dunno that I’ll get much more than you did.’

  ‘If you could ask them anyway, I’d be grateful.’

  He settled back into the chair, fumbled through his pockets for tobacco. As I opened the office door I heard him singing softly to himself. I was firing up the radio when he called out to me:

  ‘Got it!’

  ‘Got what?’

  He sang another couple of bars.

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t wartuju juntaka,’ he suggested. ‘Maybe it was wartujutu juntaka—fire crystal bird…’ I came back out and stood in the doorway. ‘It’s from the Diamond Dove Song Cycle, an epithet for the dove itself. One of Lincoln’s dreamings.’

  ‘Hazel’s a diamond dove too.’

  The Warlpuju regard themselves as the reincarnation of ancestral beings whose sites they have a duty to protect. Hazel’s dreaming was a grey, delicate bird with rings around its eyes and flecks of white on its wings. The diamond dove.

  Kenny sang another line of the song and a scene from my childhood assembled itself in my memory. Lincoln had just climbed a hill down the southern quarter; Hazel and I were tagging along in his wake. We might have been six or seven years old. As he gave us a leg up onto the rocky outcrop at its summit we startled a bird that had settled there. The three of us stood there in silence and watched it whirr away to the northwest.

  ‘Poor little thing,’ I said. ‘We frighten it from its home.’

  ‘No, not that one,’ Lincoln told me. ‘She headin for ome now. Karlujurru, that bird. Diamond dove. Home north of ere. Little bit long way.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘She Jukurrpa belonga we. Dreamin.’

  ‘Jukurrpa. That means you dream about her, that dove?’

  He glanced at Hazel, who smiled at him, then he turned back to me. ‘That mean we are her. We diamond dove, just like that bird. Spirit way.’ He tousled Hazel’s scruffy hair. ‘Me an this little scallywag ere.’

  Twenty years later Kenny Trigger, sitting on this dusty front veranda, expressed a similar concept.

  ‘Hazel?’ he responded. ‘She’d be more important than ever, now that poor old Lincoln’s Kuminjayi.’

  Hazel.

  I wondered, fleetingly, whether she could have shed any light upon her father’s death. She knew more about him and his dreamings than I ever would.

  Maybe Kenny Trigger could fill me in.

  ‘This diamond dove,’ I asked him. ‘Has it got a particular site?’

  ‘Got a stack of them. Comes up along Hollow Creek, cuts across the Del Fuego Ranges and disappears out to the north-west.’

  ‘Lincoln was somewhere up north just before he died.’

  ‘Well, if you’re talking north o’ Moonlight there’s—lemme think—Kirripulnyu. Winnijari. Main place is Karlujurru itself, of course.’

  ‘Karlujurru?’

  ‘You know the Tom Bowlers?’

  ‘Of course. Up near the Carbine boundary.’

  ‘That’s it. Karlujurru, the Warlpuju call it. It’s the dove’s main dreaming site.’

  The Tom Bowlers were a crazy conglomeration of granite core stones up on the northern borders of Moonlight. If Kenny was right, and he usually was, then this had been the place Lincoln was referring to the day we watched the dove disappear.

  ‘And if Blakie was bawling him out,’ Kenny continued, ‘that’d make sense as well.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Blakie’s a self-styled enforcer in things traditional. If you step out of line—and a long, meandering bloody line it is, invisible sometimes, sneaking underground and coming up behind you at other times—he tends to dish out the punishment.’

  Suddenly it was all too much. I needed help with this and there was only one person who could give it.

  ‘Don’t suppose you’ve any idea where Hazel’s got to, do you Kenny? I can’t help but feel she’d shed some light on all this…’

  ‘Hazel? Could be anywhere. When a feller like that passes away, she’d have a lot of obligations. Visit his places, sing his songs. Put his soul to rest. She’s a proper bush girl, that one. Even when the rest of them were in town, her and her little mob’d spend half their time out bush, roamin across country. I’d be careful talkin to her about it, though…Never know what you’re going to stir up. She’s been through enough.’

  I scratched my head, nodded. Clearly there was nothing I could do but wait. Given what Kenny Trigger had just told me, it did seem fair enough to regard Blakie as the prime suspect. There’d been a breach, real or imagined, of some tribal law, perhaps something to do with Karlujurru, and Lincoln had been killed in retribution. Why wasn’t I satisfied?

  I went into the radio room and picked up the mike. ‘Victor Sierra Nine Delta Bravo Jalyukurru to Moonlight Downs. Do you read me? Over.’

  Nothing.

  I repeated the call half a dozen times, without response. I could just about see my voice crackling out of the static and floating over the deserted camp.

  I gave it another ten minutes, then Kenny came in.

  ‘I’ve got to shut up shop now,’ he said. ‘If you want to keep trying, you can lock the door after you.’

  I studied the radio for a moment, silent except for the white noise. Not something I wanted to listen to sitting here on my own.

  ‘Thanks, Kenny, don’t worry about it. I’ll try again tomorrow.’

  I picked up my hat and followed him out the door.

  I took the short cut home, wandering through the back alleyways. I like alleyways, and I like perving into people’s backyards: they’re the window to a community’s soul. In Bluebush’s case, the soul was one of broken bottles, blasted grass, peeling paint and massive padlocks.

  I was approaching my own place when a barrage of barks came slamming out of the yard behind mine, closely followed by a slavering, sabre-toothed German shepherd bent on ripping my head off. There was a cyclone wire fence between the dog and its dreams, but the second or two before I realised that were interesting.

  ‘Fuckin dogs!’ I gasped, my heart pounding. And fuckin Bluebush too, for that matter, since the two were pretty well inseparable. Whitefellers were forever whinging about the coon dogs, but their own dogs were much more dangerous. The worst you could expect from a camp dog was scabies, but if one of the town dogs got stuck into you you’d be lucky to get away with all your limbs attached. The streets of Bluebush were not for casual strolling. In this town a front yard wasn’t taken seriously unless it had some canine killer baying for blood at the gate. Leather-studded pig-dogs, black-snouted shepherds, Rhodesian ridgebacks, Rottweilers, Dobermen, Doberwomen, bitzers and bitches and brindles of every description were hiding behind every gatepost, ready to launch themselves like incubi from somewhere deep within their owners’ twisted psyches.

  I went into my own place, still shaking, and poured myself a stiff drink—to my regret, since the drink was milk and its stiffness was a consequence of Bluebush’s restricted range of secondhand fridges. I put on a Lucinda Williams CD and flopped onto the couch. Lucinda was singing ‘Sweet Old World’ and, just for a while, I tried to pretend it was.

  Motor Jack

  THE NEXT morning I awoke, once
more, to the sound of Camel’s roaring four wheel drive. Got you now, I said to myself. I leaped out of bed, stomped out the front door and down the path. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a swag on the front lawn, a hunched figure stirring inside it.

  The drunken buggers are even camping on my lawn now, I thought in passing. I’ll send that one packing as soon as I’ve sorted this other bastard out.

  Camel had a couple of rotties on board this morning, big, hungry-looking buggers, their teeth like rows of bottled milk, their paws scrabbling over the metal tray.

  So engrossed was he in his ten-point turn that he didn’t see me until I reached in, turned the motor off and yanked the keys out of the ignition.

  ‘Morning again, Camel!’

  His eyes shifted in my direction, slowly and sluggishly. ‘The fuck you think yer doin?’

  I took a moment to answer, distracted by the lump on my lawn. A head emerged from the swag, a head with which, I was pleased to realise, I was intimately acquainted. The bloke took a look around, saw Camel and me in our morning conversation, climbed to his bare feet and began padding across the gravel with the hunched, tentative gait of a polar bear on hot rocks.

  ‘Same as usual,’ I said, turning my attention back to Camel. ‘Trying to talk turkey.’

  ‘Aw fuck off…’

  The man from the front lawn made his way round to the other side of the car. He leaned forward, ropy arms on the window ledge, stomach taut, Stubbies tight, blue singlet falling open onto a vast expanse of hard, hairy chest.

  Built like a bull-bar the bloke might have been, but it was the bright blue eyes that held you—the bright blue eyes, at least, that held Camel. He put his head in through the open window and carolled, ‘G’day!’ He glanced up at me and smiled. ‘Mornin, Emily.’

  ‘Morning, Jack.’

  ‘Everything under control here?’

  ‘More or less.’

  The dogs snarled. Jack looked at them and frowned. ‘Whadder you boys whingin about?’ he growled, and patted the nearest, tickled an ear. They sat back down, tongues lolling. He’d always had a way with animals.