Moonlight Downs

by Adrian Hyland

  ‘That’s no reason to go spreading bullshit round about me.’

  ‘I didn’t spread any bullshit about anyone. I simply asked a few questions.’

  ‘Questions! You enter my home under false pretences, accept my hospitality and then go sniffing round to see what kind of crap you can dig up. I’ve had half the Anzac Club ribbing me about it all week…’

  ‘I didn’t enter your home under any pretences, and, frankly, I don’t think you can blame me for being curious. Doesn’t it strike even you as a little convenient that Lincoln is murdered the day after you do a dodgy deal with his drunken brother to take over half his country?’

  I noticed a flicker of movement behind the shades, then he muttered, ‘Them’s the breaks.’

  As long as Lincoln’s neck wasn’t another, I thought, but thankfully didn’t say. If a verbal stoush was all I had to worry about, I could have gone the full ten rounds, but I didn’t like the situation: lonely road, lone woman, the possibility of a slanging match escalating into something more serious.

  I glanced at Marsh’s red-faced henchmen. If he was granite, they were termite mound: equally red, but friable, pock-marked and a pain in the arse if you ran into one. The nearer of the two squinted back at me with a twisted grimace. His mate was worse: big nose, weak chin, thick lips. Barbra Streisand on steroids. And half shaven, the pair of them. Why couldn’t the blokes out here make up their minds whether to shave or not?

  No, I didn’t like the situation at all.

  But—fuck it!—somebody had killed Lincoln. If this bloke had had anything to do with it, if he knew anything which could provide me with any insight into the murder, I wanted to know about it. This was as good an opportunity as I was likely to get.

  The trouble with Marsh, though—the trouble with a lot of these outback meatheads—was that he was such a black hole. I’d been wondering what it would be like to go head to head with him. It was high time I found out.

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘Mr Marsh, look, I want to say something to you: I know I’m not one of your…set, okay? I’m not a cattle king and I’m not some big-shot public servant, and I’m not even white, but I’ll tell you something else I’m not.’ I faced him full on, stared at about where his eyes ought to be. ‘I’m not going to go away. I’m not going to stop asking questions until I get some answers, and I’m not going to stop asking about you until I’m convinced that you had nothing to do with Lincoln’s death, and frankly, right now, I’m not convinced.’

  He stood there, stock still, glowering, then glanced at the Dynamic Duo in the truck. Was this the bit where they began breaking necks? But no, he put a finger to his chin, grappled with a thought. The effort made him look like a gorilla examining a gyroscope. Finally he spoke.

  ‘What makes you think I had anything to do with it?’

  ‘You haven’t exactly been a model of reconciliation.’

  ‘Eh?’ he grunted.

  ‘You’ve been a royal pain in the Moonlight mob’s collective arse, Mr Marsh. Hijacking their land, killing their dogs, generally scaring the shit out of what little’s left of the community. You blame me for suspecting you might have taken your opposition to the next level?’

  Another long silence ensued, and then, to my surprise, he held out his hands.

  ‘Look at these,’ he said.

  ‘Very impressive,’ I answered. And I had to admit, they were— callused, corn-fed, rough as buffalo hide. ‘Done a lot of miles. Why are you showing them to me?’

  ‘The point is that what I got,’ nodding in the direction of Carbine Creek, ‘I worked for. I earned. I was ridin a horse before I could walk. You know a bit about my background: I come from that to ownin one of the most famous properties in the Territory.’

  He leaned in close. I could have compared his dentistry with Blakie’s if he’d ever opened his mouth when he talked. ‘An there’s nothin gives me the irrits more’n seein a bunch of useless layabouts pickin up what oughta be prime property without pullin a finger outer their—what’d you call it?—collective arse. Nothin!’

  I was willing to skip mentioning the Warlpuju’s long-term land management—sixty thousand years of it, at last count—in the interests of my own short-term survival, but there was one anomaly glaring out of his argument that I couldn’t let go by. ‘I can’t see that there’s a huge amount of work in getting Freddy Ah Fong to sign the place over to you.’

  He chewed his lip, then grunted, ‘That was more by way of creating a buffer zone than anythin else. There’s a lotta blackfeller stations round the Territory. They got a reputation, believe me. When you got a neighbour won’t put in—I’m talkin disease control, noxious weeds, gates, dogs—you need a bit of room. To manoeuvre, like. Bit of breathin space.’

  It was more cant than Kant, but, by local standards, Marsh was sounding almost reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that before I knew what I was doing I found myself seeing how far I could go. Seeing how far I could push the envelope, as his little mate Massie would have put it.

  ‘If I had a neighbour that bad I might be tempted to get rid of him.’

  He ripped the envelope to bits and threw it into my face. ‘You still tryin to pin this fuckin thing on me!’ he snapped impatiently. ‘I’m not the only neighbour, you know. There’s the roadhouse, there’s three other stations, pack of pissant mines, an a stack of bloody blackfellers, one of who’s mad as a cut fuckin death adder.’

  ‘Maybe, but you had a motive. I don’t know that any of them did.’

  Sometimes I say things I wish I hadn’t, but I can’t help myself. It’s in the genes, my big mouth. My only regret was that my old man’s big right hook wasn’t in the genes as well. Marsh took off his shades and studied me, his eyes like cracks in a slab of blistered liver. ‘Motive?’ he growled suspiciously.

  ‘Water,’ I said softly.

  ‘Water?’

  ‘Water.’

  ‘Water!’ he bellowed. ‘You think I killed the pig-headed old cunt for some water?’

  I’d hit it now; water was obviously the tender point in the Marsh psyche. ‘Well, why did you kill him?’

  ‘I bloody well haven’t killed anyone! Yet!’ he added ominously. ‘And what the hell has this got to do with water?’

  ‘I know you need it. And I think you might have found it when you drilled on Moonlight.’

  ‘Whadderye mean I drilled on Moonlight?’

  ‘I’ve seen the borehole.’

  ‘Lady, you wouldn’t know a borehole from a bum hole!’

  I would have responded in the same intemperate manner, but the crash of his fist upon the bonnet of my car which had accompanied the last outburst brought me to my senses.

  One of Marsh’s henchmen—the one with the squint—was climbing down from the cabin, his nose twitching, his overbite bared. He looked like a cross between a hamster and a pig dog. He glanced at his mate with an expression I found hard to read but hoped wasn’t saying, ‘Here we go again, get the shovels ready.’

  Whatever their intentions might have been, they were interrupted by the sound of another vehicle coming down the track. Blackfeller outfit, from the broken-down sound of things. Bindi, I saw gratefully, as his crudbucket-of-the-month came limping round the bend with a mob of women and kids on board. His mother-in-law, Minnie Driver, was sitting on the back, waving a skinny claw and grinning like a bearded dragon. She even had the beard.

  Bindi’s automotive standards had hit rock bottom: his front axle was a mulga branch, his petrol cap a pair of undies. A jerrycan on the roof was feeding petrol into his fuel pump.

  ‘Everythin all right, Emily?’ Bindi inquired as he rattled to a halt beside us.

  ‘Everything’s great, Bindi.’ Especially now that you’re here. ‘What are you mob up to?’

  ‘Oh, we’s headin for town. Strangeways give us the arse. Too many family, manager reckon.’

  The Strangeways manager probably had a point. If the car had had rafters they would have been hanging
off them. The more the merrier right now, as far as I was concerned.

  ‘You wanner come along?’ he offered, glancing at the Carbine entourage and reading the situation beautifully.

  Marsh was reading it as well, and retreated to his car with a glance that was laced with dog-bait.

  ‘Not just now, thanks mate.’

  I watched Marsh as he pushed his off-sider away from the wheel and roared off. Terrible temper that man had. At least there weren’t any dogs around for him to kill this time.

  I didn’t feel up to checking out the mystery bore right now. It’d keep. After the traumas of the past twenty minutes all I wanted was a bit of company.

  ‘Did you call into Moonlight on the way, Bindi?’

  ‘We bin camp there last night.’

  ‘Hazel there?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Bindi rounded up his mob—some of the old ladies had taken the opportunity for a spot of hunting, a couple of kids had to be dragged down from a tree—and rattled off down the track. I was about to do the same when I noticed movement at the foot of the bushes behind the wind-row. I took a closer look and spotted a carcass disintegrating in the scrub. A bullock. Long dead, from the smell, or lack thereof.

  The bag of bovine bones was bad enough, but what was infinitely worse was the fat black snake crawling out of its rotted arse. Deaf-adder. The reptile gazed up at me bleakly, its eyes as cold as a winter dawn, its fangs flickering. Sun-dried shit on wicked scales.

  I shuddered, climbed into my car and drove away, fast. But not fast enough to escape the shiver that rattled my backbone and the sudden intuition that somewhere, somehow, something bad was going down.

  Rust

  I’D SPENT a lot of time soaking up bleak vistas of late, but Moonlight took the damper.

  They don’t come much bleaker than this, I thought as I gazed out over the camp from the relative luxury of the ute. The windscreen was like a magnifying glass, concentrating the sun’s rays on the tinder of my unease. Bits of rusty tin rattled and flapped in the wind. Rust was seeping into the soul of the community: the turpentine bushes and blade grass, the scorched scoria, the wire that held the humpies together, the shredded wheels, the wind itself. They were infused, all, with a kind of rust-coloured clarity.

  Where was everybody?

  I climbed out, called a cautious greeting.

  No answer. Not that I’d expected one. If they’d been here they would have come out and greeted me when I drove in. And yet Jangala’s car was parked near the shack.

  It was the silence that struck me most. Even the radio, perched on its totem pole in the middle of the camp, had gone quiet. Normally it was rabbiting away non-stop, as people from communities all over the region chatted to each other on the Jalyukurru frequency. The only sounds to be heard right now were the rattle of loose tin, the whisper of wind and the squawk of kite-hawks.

  Kite-hawks?

  There was a flock of them flapping around the campfire, picking at…Picking at what?

  I scattered them with a rock. They hopped into the air, pissed off, and settled a few metres away, scowling out from under their dark hoods as I came to check out their lunch.

  It was a goanna: three foot long, as fat as a fencer’s forearm and nearly as burnt. The sense of foreboding tightened its grip on my chest. What on earth would have made the Moonlight mob leave a prize like this for the scavengers?

  Cutting across to Hazel’s camp I went past the radio, and decided to put in a quick call to base, in case she’d left a message.

  I picked up the mike, but it came away in my hand, the dead leads flopping against my arm. I went to stick them back, but the back plate had been smashed in.

  Jesus, I thought, this is seriously weird. Where the fuck is everybody? Has there been an accident? I began to walk towards their shack, and as I drew closer I heard a noise—the creak of metal springs, then a grunt, then another grunt—from within.

  I stopped.

  Who was shagging who?

  Whoever it was and whatever they were up to, they’d made a bloody mess. The shack looked like it had been hit by a whirlwind. Canvases upended on the veranda, paint pots and bottles scattered about, lengths of string—the remains of a wind-chime—blew across the dirt.

  ‘Hello!’ I yelled.

  No answer.

  ‘Hazel?’

  Silence.

  I paused in the doorway, my shadow dancing on hessian. Then, with metaphorical kite-hawks tearing at my own heart, I stepped inside.

  A gloomy tableau slowly assembled itself in the semi-darkness: dirty cups and saucepans on the bench, a slab of grey meat on the table, an old spring bed. Huge flies crashed against the ceiling. I could smell the fear, and it wasn’t all my own.

  ‘Hello?’ I whispered, more in an effort to calm myself than in any hope of getting an answer.

  A flurry of wind blew the hessian a little further to one side, a beam of light cut across the murk. Landed squarely upon a pair of eyes, staring up from the bed. Bright, possum eyes. Dead eyes. And an open mouth, the teeth a row of riddled fence posts, the tongue blue.

  Jimmy Lively.

  A movement in the darkness on the far side of the bed caught my attention. Something black and shaggy arose from the upper body. What the fuck was that? For one horrible moment I thought it was a rat, chewing at Jangala’s neck.

  Another movement and it revealed itself as the shock of hair on top of a wild, hairy head. I would have preferred the rat.

  ‘Jesus!’ I exclaimed. But it wasn’t Jesus.

  It was Blakie.

  He took a hand away from Jangala’s neck and put it across his eyes, peering up into the dazzling light from the doorway. His knuckles were smeared with blood.

  He emitted a low, crackling growl and climbed to his feet, came towards me, his eyes full of squirrelly things I couldn’t read. And had no intention of staying around to spell out. It looked like he’d just finished throttling Jangala, exactly the same as he’d done to Lincoln, and was eyeing off his next victim.

  I threw the table at him and crashed out through the flimsy back wall.

  Which was a mistake, for two reasons. The first was that it led me to stumble over another body. Maggie’s, this one, looking even deader than her husband. The right side of her head was smashed in, a pool of blood coagulating in the dust. Blakie’s carved fighting-stick lay alongside the body. A picture of his blood-stained knuckles flashed before me. At least the poor old girl’s eyes were closed.

  The second reason was that it put Blakie between me and my car.

  Which could well be the fatal mistake, I realised as he came lurching out at me like a nesting crocodile.

  I set off running, into the scrub.

  Blakie lurched into a rambling pursuit.

  My misspent youth hadn’t given me much, but it had taught me how to run, and I felt pretty sure I could outpace the middle-aged maniac on my tail. I’d shake him off, circle back round to the car.

  Yet another mistake, I concluded soon afterwards, as my wild sprint withered to a canter and then collapsed into a desperate, lung-burning scramble.

  I thought about the last time I’d seen Blakie, loping up into the hills with a posse of fit young coppers eating his dust. No way was I going to outrun this bastard.

  He took it easy for a while, not in any apparent rush to get in there and wring my neck. But, as the years in which my main form of exercise had been rolling smokes and striking matches kicked in, he began to gain ground.

  My mouth felt like it had been mud-rendered, my lungs were raked by fire, my guts wanted to give up both the ghost and the goulash I’d had for breakfast. The crash of branches in my face mingled with the crash of blood through my veins. Strange pains began cutting through my ribcage. Thin red scrawls flicked across my forearms. My heart was all pumped up and going like a pub drummer on top-drawer speed.

  I lost him for a while in the thick scrub round the Purrapuru Waterhole. Lost myself too. But when I burst out onto th
e main track he was there waiting for me. Close enough for me to see the Jack Nicholson gleam in his eyes, close enough to smell his raw, predatory breath.

  I wheeled around and set off in the opposite direction, westwards. At least I was on what passed for a public road round these parts. An occasional station or mining vehicle passed this way. But I was flailing hopelessly and fading fast.

  Christ! I thought, if what was spiralling through my brain could be called thought, what have I done? What was it my father had told me about playing with black fire? What had McGillivray told me about interfering in police business? Okay, okay, I conceded, I’d let this be a lesson to me. All this time I’d been trying to pin the crime onto somebody else, when the real killer was the first and most obvious candidate.

  I lost my footing, skidded in the gravel. As I knelt in the dirt I heard something up ahead. Something miraculous, man-made, mechanical.

  A motor.

  Salvation? I staggered round a bend and there it was, in the middle of the road: a white Hino twin-cab. Just a few hundred metres away.

  But leaving me to my fate, I realised in despair as it took off. I yelled feebly, waved my arms. Yes! The vehicle stopped. They’d seen me. No, they hadn’t! A bloke on the back of the truck jumped down and began to examine the ground.

  Shit! He waved his mates forward and climbed aboard. They began to move off. The bastards! I gave a yell so pathetic I could hardly hear it myself. The truck crept slowly forward.

  Blakie didn’t look too happy at the prospect of my getting away. ‘Warlukunjumana!’ he yelled. Come here!

  Sure Blakie, no worries.

  His face gave new shades of meaning to the word ‘ugly’ as he leapt at me, but all he got was a handful of shirt. The adrenalin rush that followed gave me a velocity I didn’t know I had and carried me all the way to the tow bar.

  ‘Help…’ I gasped. The bloke on the back of the truck—skinny and dark, with five o’clock spikes and the eyes of a Byzantine Christ—turned round and stared at me in disbelief.

  Not that I could blame him, I figured, catching a glimpse of myself in the chrome: denim skirt ripped and ragged, scratches and blood all over the shop, streaks of sweat and dirt, shreds of clothing on muddy breasts.