Moonlight Downs

by Adrian Hyland

  Camel managed to tear himself away from this terrifying spectacle for long enough to ask, ‘Who’s this cunt?’

  ‘This cunt’s me father, Camel. Jack, Camel. Camel, Jack Tempest. Sometimes known as Motor Jack.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Camel,’ said Jack. He extended a hand, but Camel was hanging onto the wheel like it was a barrel and the ship was going down. ‘You the lad ran into Emily’s ute?’

  Not much escaped Jack’s eye: he’d taken in the dent in my car, the location of the driveways, the look on my face and the keys in my hand at a single glance.

  ‘This is the lad,’ I told him.

  He took a look at my dented fender. ‘About eight hundred bucks’ worth, I’d say.’ Then he turned his attention to the inside of Camel’s vehicle. ‘Nice sound system ya got there, mate. Retractable, is it?’ He put a huge thumb on the dash, wedged his fingers under the bracket and ripped the stereo out in a single, smooth movement. ‘More or less.’ Camel spluttered like an over-heated cattle truck.

  ‘Whadderye reckon, Emmy?’ Jack enquired, holding the equipment up for my perusal. ‘Worth eight hundred bucks?’

  ‘No, but if it’ll help Camel lie straighter in bed at night…’

  Jack straightened up, cheerfully slapped the dropsides. ‘Righto, buddy! Ya can piss off now!’

  ‘Thanks Camel,’ I said as I gave him back his keys. ‘I needed a new stereo. I’m touched.’

  ‘You’re touched?’ he snarled, then gunned it down the driveway. The rotties gave Jack a happy parting bark.

  He stood and watched the Toyota go, feet apart, arms akimbo, big grin brightening up his face. ‘Ah, Emily Tempest…the trouble you get me into!’

  ‘Trouble? You enjoyed that more than I did. Besides, he’s a miner. Eight hundred bucks! They earn that much by smoko.’

  Jack looked at me in bewilderment. ‘I’m a miner. I lose that much by smoko.’

  ‘When did you arrive?’

  ‘Two in the morning. Didn’t want to disturb you.’

  ‘You should have. Come in and I’ll knock up a big hairy breakfast.’

  A minute later I was at the kitchen bench, whistling cheerfully and battering a steak into submission. Jack loomed up beside me, occupying the kitchen like a bullock in a burrow.

  ‘Nice place ya got here, girlie,’ he said, looking the flat over.

  ‘Fuckin ace. And I wish you wouldn’t call me girlie, Jack. I’m twenty-six years old.’

  ‘You’ll always be my girlie, girlie. But I’m serious. I like it. I mean, it’s kinda compact, sure, but it’s…appropriate, you know. Like you.’

  I lowered an eyebrow at him. ‘Like me? Oh thanks. You mean I’m overpriced, falling apart and riddled with vermin?’

  But I was quietly smiling. Appropriate? Probably as heartfelt an expression of affection as I was ever likely to get out of the old bastard.

  Soon afterwards I dropped the steak onto a plate in front of him, followed it up with a pair of eggs on toast. He pulled an ancient fob watch out of his pocket, put it on the table, began to hoe noisily into his breakfast.

  ‘Timing yourself eat, are you?’ I asked.

  ‘New diet I read about,’ he replied. ‘Doesn’t matter what you eat, long as you cut down the amount of time you spend eatin it.’

  For a moment I thought he was serious, but then he grinned and said, ‘Nah, got a lotta things to do. Just passin through, I’m afraid. Thought I’d pop in and see how you’re getting on.’

  He didn’t look like he was in any particular hurry, though. As he ate, he flicked through one of the books I’d left on the table. The book was Gouging the Witwatersrand, a seventy-year-old history of the discovery of the legendary South African reef, the author a mining engineer by the name of Kresty Wagner.

  ‘Still hangin on to these old things?’ he asked.

  ‘Sentimental value, Jack.’ The book was an old friend. I’d lugged it around with me for years. It haunted me, that book, with its black and white photographs of blacks and whites. The book was a paean to imperialism, of course, but it said more than it meant to: its pith-helmeted heroes were invariably accompanied by a group of blacks slaving away in the background, smashing rocks, pushing trolleys.

  Jack, inevitably, took a more practical view.

  ‘Resourceful buggers, those old timers,’ he said. ‘Look at the Spanish windlass. And the way they got the dolly rigged; they’re using a bucket, a rope and a couple of saplings to do a job we’d import a million dollars worth of German machinery for.’

  He flicked through the book for a few minutes longer, then mumbled, ‘Can’t stay long, honey,’ through a mouthful of masticated Brahman. ‘Gotta see a man about a map, then I’m back out the Jenny as soon as I can pick up a hydraulic hose for the excavator.’

  But his eyes strayed back to the watch, and I knew his mind was on things other than hoses and excavators.

  ‘I ever tell you the story behind this watch?’ he asked casually.

  ‘No, but I think you’re about to.’

  I knew the signs: the drifting eyes, the distant, rocky smile. Motor Jack marshalling his narrative forces. I’ve heard so much bullshit under the rubric of ‘bush yarn’ over the years that when I hear the term I tend to reach for the crowbar. But when Jack tells a story the stiffs sit up and pay attention. ‘Isn’t it the one Tim Buchanan left you?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s that, but for me it’ll always be more Lincoln than Tim.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Lincoln and me, one time, we took a mob of cattle across to The Isa, and Tim asks us to pick up this watch e’s had in the jeweller’s. Bit of a family heirloom, you know. Anyway, we got an hour or two to spare, so Lincoln pulls it out an says in a way I don’t like the sound of, “I’ve always wondered how one o’ these things works. Now might be a good time to find out.”

  ‘“An just how do you propose to do that?” I ask im.

  ‘“Why, take a look inside, o’ course.”

  ‘Well I’d have hit the fuckin roof if there’d a been a roof to fuckin hit. “Lincoln,” I says, “you touch one screw of that thing an we’ll both be fucked. Tim’ll feed us to the dogs.”

  ‘But Lincoln just flashes that old trademark smile and before you know it he’s got the thing in pieces on the swag. Needless to say this is too much for me to bear, so I creep off to the pub. When I come back a couple of hours later Lincoln’s got the truck loaded an he’s leanin against the bull-bar, studyin the clouds, cool as an ice cube.

  ‘“Okay mate,” I growl, “where is it?”

  ‘“Where’s what?”

  ‘“Where’s Tim’s fuckin watch,” I bellow, “that you had in a hundred pieces a couple of hours ago?”

  ‘So he pulls it out of his pocket an fuck me dead if it isn’t runnin smooth as a banker’s pants! Six months later I hear Tim sayin if the rest of us worked as well as that watch, he’d make a quid out o’ the place yet.’

  Jack eased himself back, stretched out his arms, gazed thoughtfully out into the strip of desert between the bitumen and the sky.

  ‘Still can’t believe he isn’t out there, the old goat.’

  Lincoln and Jack had known each other for thirty years, been mates in a way blackfellers and whitefellers weren’t meant to be mates back then. I came up behind him and put an arm around his shoulders.

  ‘He probably is still out there somewhere, Jack.’

  He sat there for a minute or two, then gave voice to the question that had been lurking under the surface of our conversation: ‘So what do you reckon happened to him, Em?’

  ‘Blakie happened to him.’

  ‘You sure of that?’

  ‘Jesus. Not you too.’

  ‘Me too what?’

  ‘Joining the ranks of the doubting Thomases.’

  ‘Just like to be sure.’

  ‘I like to be sure myself. I asked Pepper Kennedy the other day. Reckoned it mighta been a mamu killed him.’

  ‘Devil? Well, he wasn’t wrong there. T
rouble is, which one? Devils out there are thicker on the ground than termite mounds. There’s big hairy ones and little slithery ones, there’s black ones, white ones, there’s goat-bearded ones and feather-footed ones. There’s roaring mad ones and there’s shithouse rat ones that’ll pour you a drink and knife you in the back without you even noticing.’

  I smiled, went back to the bench, gathered together the wherewithal for a pot of tea. As usual, a conversation with my father was turning into a maze of left-field images and non sequiturs, and I needed a drink myself. We talked and drank and laughed at each other’s stories until we were interrupted by a knock on the door.

  ‘Don’t tell me Camel’s come to get his sound system back,’ I said.

  Jack glanced at the watch. ‘No, that’ll be for me,’ he said, climbing to his feet.

  ‘I didn’t know you were receiving visitors.’

  ‘Told you, I come to see a man about a map.’

  ‘I thought you were speaking figuratively. Like when you say you gotta see a man about a dog.’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Far as I know, Emmy, I never said nothing about no dog.’ Metaphorical speech never was one of Jack’s strong points; life in a mining camp didn’t do much to encourage it.

  Jack’s visitor was a tall, solidly built bloke with fading blond hair and a rust-coloured moustache, maybe in his early forties, carrying a PVC map canister. He was wearing a khaki work shirt, safety boots and a pair of jeans with a big brass buckle. Jack introduced him to me as Bernie Sweet. The name meant nothing to me. I had him figured as just another bit of flotsam that had washed up on the Bluebush shore until Jack prompted me.

  ‘You remember Bernie, don’t you Em? He was working Pigeon Ridge when I had that claim over at the Golden Fleece.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘I remember the Golden Fleece: more fleece than gold.’ I took a closer look at my visitor. ‘Have to excuse me, Bernie; all you blokes looked alike to me back then. Bunch of big apes covered in oil and sweat.’ He didn’t look much like an ape now, I had to admit. Bit of a hunk, actually.

  He smiled, raised his hands. ‘It’s okay, I’ve had a shower since then.’

  It wasn’t until he opened his mouth that I recognised him. It was his voice: its smooth, deep tone, unusually mellifluous for this part of the world, and the touch of an accent. German, perhaps, or Dutch? No. South African, that was it. Nothing remarkable about that; the mining industry out here was a little United Nations.

  I remembered a bit more about him as we chatted. He’d first come here as a young engineer working for one of the multinationals, but had left not long afterwards to do his own thing. The Territory had taken a toll, though: the first time I met him he came across as charming, confident, ruggedly good looking. Full of veiled references to lost reefs and bluster about what he was going to do with his fortune when he had it.

  From the look of him now, he was still waiting. The voice was still there, but it was subdued. He had blistered knuckles, a slightly ragged edge to his moustache and a glimmer of steel showing through his safety boots.

  ‘So how long are you in town for, Emily?’

  ‘Haven’t quite decided yet, Bernie. Not long, I hope.’

  ‘And then it’s back down south, I suppose?’

  ‘Not quite sure about that either. I was hoping to spend some time out at Moonlight Downs.’

  I caught a flash of concern in the corner of his eyes. ‘But there’s no one out there! Are you sure it’s safe?’

  ‘You’re well informed.’

  ‘The whole town’s talking about it. I don’t know that I’d want to stay out at Moonlight Downs,’ Bernie went on, ‘not with some madman on the loose.’

  ‘Bloody oath!’ interjected my father.

  ‘Okay, okay…’ I mumbled, holding up my hands in self-defence. The whole world, it appeared, was conspiring to keep me away from Moonlight. ‘I’m old enough to make up my own mind. Can I offer you a coffee, Bernie? How about a freshly ground Jamaica Blue?’

  ‘Hey!’ Jack interjected. ‘You didn’t offer me one of those.’

  ‘Thought you were a tea man, Jack.’

  ‘Might have been once, but you’ve gotta move with the times.’

  When they sat at the table I noticed Bernie glance at the old mining book.

  ‘Check out the pictures,’ I told him. ‘Might see someone you know.’

  He opened it up and examined the inside cover. ‘1928!’ he grinned. ‘Just how old do you think I am?’

  ‘Anyway, mate,’ said my father, pulling a battered notebook out of his bag, ‘maybe we better get down to business.’

  Bernie opened the canister and unrolled a folio of fluorescent charts I recognised as magnetic intensity surveys. Jack put on his glasses, leaned forward and studied them.

  ‘So what are we lookin at?’ he asked, the conspiratorial curl in his voice telling me that there was something slightly under-the-table about the transaction. Not that there was anything unusual in that: the mining industry knew about insider trading long before the stock-broking one did.

  ‘Two linear magnetic highs, trending 346 magnetic north, Jack,’ Bernie answered.

  ‘What’s the orientation?’

  ‘Both dipping north-easterly.’

  ‘And the strike length?’

  ‘Fifty to a hundred metres.’

  Jack ran his thumb along a grid line, then paused. ‘So the outcrop I was telling you about’d be…roughly here?’

  I soon found myself lost in the more compelling events in the kitchen sink. I liked prospecting better in the old days, when it was just a matter of me and Jack bashing rocks.

  They took a break when I delivered the coffee.

  ‘So, where are you working now, Bern?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, just a small show. The Impala, we call it.’

  ‘Keeping up the African connection?’

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose so. There are three or four of us working it. Out in the desert, west of here.’

  He was pointedly vague about exactly where out in the desert, and I knew better than to press him. They were all vague about the specifics, worried that somebody would jump them.

  ‘Finding anything?’

  ‘Not much.’ They all said that as well. ‘Bit of gold. Copper. Scheelite. Galena. Keeping us off the dole, but not much more.’ He smiled, raised his cup. ‘We live in hope, though.’

  Bernie finished his coffee and left soon afterwards, and Jack filled me in on what the two of them had been up to. He’d struck a promising site out west of the Warren Ranges and wanted a look at it from the air. When you wanted a cut-price aerial perspective on things round here, Bernie Sweet was your man. He’d picked up—i.e. flogged—the maps a few years ago, while working for an aerial geoscience company, and made a bit of beer money hawking them to needy prospectors.

  ‘Anyway, Emmy,’ Jack said, rising to his feet and poking around among the books and papers for his hat, ‘I better be on my way myself.’

  ‘Where’d you park?’

  ‘Out the back.’

  ‘Bloody nasty dog out there. Watch it.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  He took a load of gear out to the car.

  By the time I joined him, he had the Alsatian licking his hand, frolicking around and barking in its excitement.

  ‘See you soon, darling,’ he said as he climbed aboard his four wheel drive.

  ‘You talking to me or the dog?’

  ‘Take your pick.’

  The Alsatian farewelled Jack with a besotted yap, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to open up a dialogue.

  ‘Hey, boy!’ I said, patting my leg.

  The boy went berserk, charged at the fence, barking ferociously and spraying me with saliva.

  Jack grinned and began to drive away.

  ‘Fucking Bluebush!’ I yelled after him. ‘Even the dogs are racist.’

  All in the game

  I TOOK a seat in the front row of the ten-tier stand among a sea of
familiar faces with an excited, festive air about them. Bluebush’s outdoor basketball stadium was distinguished by its cracking asphalt, anaemic floodlights and Con Panopoulos’s fast food van, at which you could buy anything from a souvlaki to a pirated DVD.

  The absence of any other entertainment for hundreds of kilometres in any direction ensured a sell-out crowd at every game. Tonight’s epic was between the Panthers, the local blackfeller team, and the Schooners, something the police had cobbled together as a PR exercise. As such, the Schooners were an abject failure: they were hulking, big-footed bastards for the most part, a head taller than their opponents but nowhere near as skilful. More eloquent with their elbows than their hands.

  Through my Moonlight connections I was getting to know the town mob, and they’d turned out in force for what was a rare opportunity to get one back at the cops.

  Kristy and Linda Callaghan came back from the van with their arms loaded.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’ I asked.

  ‘F’n Cs.’

  ‘Scuse me?’

  ‘Fish,’ enunciated Kristy, ‘and chips.’ She grinned as Linda slapped an arm around my shoulders and a tomato-saucy chip into my mouth.

  Freddy Ah Fong was dancing around in front of the crowd, urging them on, putting a hand to his ear whenever the roar wasn’t loud enough. They tried to get a Mexican wave happening, but it rapidly degenerated into an uncoordinated mess of flying objects: paper, mainly, but also hats, shoes, the occasional child. Gladys Kneebone threw a loaded thick-shake.

  On the other side of the court, Kenny Trigger spotted me and raised his stubby in a cheerful greeting. I went over and sat beside him.

  ‘Evening, Kenny. Come here often?’

  ‘To the basketball?’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Well, I thought about popping down to the Concert Hall to catch a performance by the Bluebush Symphony Orchestra. Or there’s a production of Die Rosenkavalier on at the Bluebush Opera House that’s been well reviewed…’

  A lusty roar from the crowd told us that the Panthers had scored yet again. One of the Schooners dismally brought the ball back down, and as he passed by us I recognised him: Rex Griffiths, the victim of Blakie’s ball-tearing getaway out at Moonlight Downs.